but the point is that the public beating they took was way out of line with what they are. I mean, the public tore into them with a wrath usually reserved for child molesters and genocidal dictators
I can't tell you how disappointed I was when I found out I couldn't put a GeForce2 in my apple//c...
(Although I do think you have a valid point.)
I really think that Apple's hardware monopoly has completely screwed them -- MS would be in the same boat, but since they (up 'til recently,) have been lenient w/r/t pirating (from DOS up 'til recently,) and since the cost of their software (to the consumer) is 100$~ to 300~, versus Apple's much higher prices. I'd love to have an Apple machine of my own, but since there's nothing I can run on Apple that I can't run on Wintel/Lintel machines for 1/3 of the price, there's no point in throwing my money away.
The sad, sad part of this is I first installed linux when it was at kernel.4 (i think)... and things haven't gotten that much better since then.
What?! I don't know what system you're installing on, or what distro you're using, but I have installed SuSE twice (on two different machines) by doing nothing more than booting from CD and hitting the 'enter' key repeatedly. If the only improvements between the early releases and current distros was the cd booting and gui installs, there's been an exponential increase in ease-of-installation. (easier installs are possible, of course, and some Unix-alike distros are traditionaly Not Fun To Install -- e.g. Debian and FreeBSD, but that doesn't mean they're impossible, just harder-than-average for newbies.
The hardest part about installs these days are generally
-new bleeding edge hardware
-partitioning
the first isn't a problem for newbies (usually,) and the second isn't a problem for those who dedicate their whole HDD for linux/BSD (at least SuSE and FreeBSD do automatic repartitioning for you if you give them the whole HDD, i'm pretty sure other linux distros too.)
when installing cs_degree you have to be sure you've removed the free_time modules or the cs_degree will not finish installing for years.
alternately, you can remove the sleep module from the kernel and keep some free time, but this has been known to cause unstable operation if sleep is completely and permanently removed (you might get away with using almost_no_sleep instead of the full sleep module.)
QUOTE:
-Gandalf learns of the Palantir early, for no reason, instead of discovering it at the end of The Two Towers
-Galadriel simply tells (or pretty darn strongly implies) to everyone that Boromir will try to take the Ring /QUOTE
in TT (and later in ROTK,) Gandalf (when telling everyone about the palatir, esp merry and pippin, says he 'long suspected' that they were around. I saw this more as a good time to foreshadow the palantir's role in ROTK w/ Denethor -- when Gandalf and Saruman start talking about them in FOTR (movie) Gandalf plainly says "they're not all accounted for and can't be trusted"; this is more of a setup for Denethor's scene and Gandalf's expository there.
Galadriel (in the movie,) only tells Frodo outright. The movie can't give that third-person-omniscient point of view ("Boromir thought...") that the book can without doing cheesy voice-overs, so by necessity, I think they felt they had to hammer the point home that Boromir was not to be trusted.
The only things about the movie that i was annoyed by were the total omission of Bombadil (although, what else could Jackson have done?) and the complete fucking of Arwen and Aragorn's roles.
I would have enjoyed more of the incidental dialogue (although they did a fantastic job with it) like Gandalf's "A Balrog! what cursed luck! and I am already tired..." and the whole Bill Ferny thing in Bree...
The sound sucked (someone tell the music guy he's not the fucking star,) and Galadriel's voice during her test ("...set up an EVIL QUEEN!") was just too fucking stupid. But these are minor quibbles and the movie is GREAT.
As long as the cthulhu-children don't come on land and demand the production of live-action tentacle rape movies, I'll be happy. The last thing we need is a race of Cthulhu-beings involved with the RIAA or marketing companies.
Solution: instead of reviews that tell you things, there should be totally unambiguous yea/nay or thumbs up/thumbs down graphic. something totally useless but that would incite you to watch (or not) the movie.
However, unlike Prof. Zamenhof (the creator of Esperanto), Tolkien did not intend or even imagine that his languages or scripts might be adopted by real-world populations. He invented them as an intellectual or linguistic game, and later as historical and cultural background to his stories. It is in that sense, not in the evangelical Esperantist's sense, that Tolkien fans pursue them.
that said, it's a sad comment on society (especially geek society here on/.,) that you're more likely to find someone fluent in klingon and tengwar than esperanto. it's a beautiful language with good ideals behind it, and it's dead easy to learn.
Show me a student with $200 to fork over for support. On the other hand, show me a student who could use learning about databases by setting one up.
I'll show you an assload of students who don't have the time to dick around with that or alternately, a completely different set of students who couldn't care less -- they just want stuff to work right the first time, i.e. out of the box. (which you won't get out of MS or linux, for different reasons.)
QUOTE: I want the market for that to dry up, because the whole concept of a manufactured youth-culture is destructive to society as a whole and it deserves to be destroyed.
Amen brother.
It's degraded to the point that our corporate-centric society is practically breeding American youth like cattle, both in the market of culture and the market of ideas. /QUOTE
you guys wouldn't be saying all that if you drank Pepsi like me & Britney.
not all computers have a CD drive, and it's a bit of a pain in the ass to carry a burner around with you to burn stuff, while USB is pretty ubiquitous.
although in general, i'd have to agree that for computer that all have CD drives, though, a CDR/RW is probably a better idea.
these things would be a zillion times cooler if they could be made bootable -- you'd have a small linux distro that wouldn't necessitate installing anything on the system HD and it'd be with you wherever you went.
These guys at alienware do linux stuff and they're offering it on some systems (they do high priced systems but they're p1mp-455 n!c3). note that they also do windows systems, so just cos they've got the audigy and they'll put linux on your box doesn't mean that the audigy will work with linux.
I'm pretty annoyed that the breakout box only comes with the super-extra-deluxo-hyper-expensive version of the audigy. The really really really good thing about the audigy is that it'll probably help bring the Live's price down to stupid cheap prices.
I know that Live! had some problems w/ 2000 and XP -- have those been worked out? does the Audigy have the same probs?
build a simple wooden shack adjecent to the house, with no insulation of any kind. put everything there. run wires from that shack to inside the house (maybe through a window that's been packed with some insulation).
ideally, you'd want everything outside for temperature reasons during the winter, but you'd probably have to cool them in the summer and you would still have to shield them from the elements during harsh winters -- hence, a shack.
Although I don't use abiword (a text editor is a text editor is a text editor, imo,) there's a real simple way to evaluate this: When was the last time you posted to a Windows Word(tm) list and got your ideas considered? Do you know (or at least know how to contact) those responsible for Word's code? feature set? bugs?
The dictionary easter eggs in Word show that there's humans working the product (check out "Bill Gates should die." or "I hate Bill Gates." in the thesaurus -- it brings up "I'll drink to that!" and "I should certainly think so!" as valid synonyms,) but Word is far removed from the consumer and it's target audience. This doesn't necessarily make it a bad product but it's not the way I deal with people I do business with; this is one of the reasons I like the open source model.
If this bug in IE has really been around for two and a half years, how is it that no one has stumbled on to it until now? Could it be that (GASP!) security through obscurity actually worked in this case?
The nimda virus used a variation of this "Content-type/TLE" switcheroo.
this is plain BS. you have plenty of choices; you can build your own computer (that you didn't want to is not Dell's fault) or buy one of those white-box deals -- I picked a whitebox up from ebay for 400$ (p3@733hz) for a relative and the first thing i did was install Win98SE (cos that's what he wanted) and may eventually put XP on it (again, if he wants it.) Most people want Windows and will only be too happy if the copy they get with their new computer is XP ("ooh that's the one with all the commercials about it!" they'll say). Is it inferior to linux? in most technical ways, yes. As a practical matter, though, windows has won the desktop irrevocably. But that's not the point, the point is that you can get whiteboxes with no OS installed from resellers -- if you insist you want support and warranty and complete service, including a tech to come to you house and hit the "any" key for you, you'll have to pay and you'll probably have to buy from a company that sells windows pre-installed. The reason for this is simple: for a high level of support, you have to have lots of money, to make lots of money, you need to sell lots of computers; linux is a niche market and while nice, it isn't going to upset the MS monopoly anytime soon.
Of course you can remove the stickers and crack open the case; it'll invalidate the warranty, but you can do it. Dell lists that because they don't want to have to cover a box (on warranty) that's been cracked open and had cards pried off or fried by some Clueless Consumer(tm) in some way.
As for non-Windows laptops, check out these guys. They'll put redhat, slackware, mandrake or suse and are promising debian RSN pre-installed. They're not cheap, but then good laptops never are.
this is not a valid (or compelling) reason not to switch; if it were, no one would use any OS other than Windows on their PCs (non-PCs such as mainframes don't count.)
1) the internet is not like a library. when you're done with a library book, you have to return it to the library or pay for it. libraries do not make copies of each book for their patrons to check-out; they'll have 1 copy which they buy.
2) while authors generally want their books read, that doesn't mean you can appropriate their desire to publish things for them.
3) i will tell you about lost profits: if you don't want to "compensate authors for their time" (or their effort which is the part people forget,) you shouldn't read the book. It's directly analogue to a temporary product, like food: if you didn't pay for the pizza, you shouldn't eat it; due to the way this particular food is made (i.e. e-books) it's really fucking easy to make copies and put them on the 'net.
people look at writing or music (art in general, really,) as if it were a simple skill anyone could do given the chance. while this is true, most people forget that it takes time and effort and lots of fucking practice to get good at some skill; you can't fucking learn to write anything (even code) very well overnight. when you buy a book or a piece of music, you're paying for the author's time, effort, skill and unique viewpoint.
have I downloaded e-books? you bet! I downloaded all 4 harry potter books; and although I didn't particularly feel bad about not giving J.K Rowling (or her publishers) my money, after I read them, I went out and bought copies of my own, because it was the fucking right thing to do.
It's a real simple equation: if you're going to steal, don't pretend that it's not. It's all well to read or listen to something and not buy it; but only if you don't keep it in a physical manner -- i'm including mp3 files in that.
I don't believe that it's the responsibility of any company or government to make people honest, but it would be nice if people didn't exempt themselves from honesty. A lot of publishing companies are trying to get 'digital rights management' (whatever the fuck that means,) because they think that people aren't trustworthy...can you blame them?
Slashdot Mirror
but the point is that the public beating they took was way out of line with what they are. I mean, the public tore into them with a wrath usually reserved for child molesters and genocidal dictators
Dude, have you played Daikatana?
I can't tell you how disappointed I was when I found out I couldn't put a GeForce2 in my apple //c ...
(Although I do think you have a valid point.)
I really think that Apple's hardware monopoly has completely screwed them -- MS would be in the same boat, but since they (up 'til recently,) have been lenient w/r/t pirating (from DOS up 'til recently,) and since the cost of their software (to the consumer) is 100$~ to 300~, versus Apple's much higher prices. I'd love to have an Apple machine of my own, but since there's nothing I can run on Apple that I can't run on Wintel/Lintel machines for 1/3 of the price, there's no point in throwing my money away.
apparently you shouldn't become a biologist because the first thing you post will get slashdotted beyond belief.
The sad, sad part of this is I first installed linux when it was at kernel .4 (i think)... and things haven't gotten that much better since then.
What?! I don't know what system you're installing on, or what distro you're using, but I have installed SuSE twice (on two different machines) by doing nothing more than booting from CD and hitting the 'enter' key repeatedly. If the only improvements between the early releases and current distros was the cd booting and gui installs, there's been an exponential increase in ease-of-installation. (easier installs are possible, of course, and some Unix-alike distros are traditionaly Not Fun To Install -- e.g. Debian and FreeBSD, but that doesn't mean they're impossible, just harder-than-average for newbies.
The hardest part about installs these days are generally
-new bleeding edge hardware
-partitioning
the first isn't a problem for newbies (usually,) and the second isn't a problem for those who dedicate their whole HDD for linux/BSD (at least SuSE and FreeBSD do automatic repartitioning for you if you give them the whole HDD, i'm pretty sure other linux distros too.)
when installing cs_degree you have to be sure you've removed the free_time modules or the cs_degree will not finish installing for years.
alternately, you can remove the sleep module from the kernel and keep some free time, but this has been known to cause unstable operation if sleep is completely and permanently removed (you might get away with using almost_no_sleep instead of the full sleep module.)
are they going to hang out a Be For Sale sign? is that some fighting-terrorism-with-zen thing?
maybe now there'll be some more BeBoxes for sale...
QUOTE:
-Gandalf learns of the Palantir early, for no reason, instead of discovering it at the end of The Two Towers
-Galadriel simply tells (or pretty darn strongly implies) to everyone that Boromir will try to take the Ring
/QUOTE
in TT (and later in ROTK,) Gandalf (when telling everyone about the palatir, esp merry and pippin, says he 'long suspected' that they were around. I saw this more as a good time to foreshadow the palantir's role in ROTK w/ Denethor -- when Gandalf and Saruman start talking about them in FOTR (movie) Gandalf plainly says "they're not all accounted for and can't be trusted"; this is more of a setup for Denethor's scene and Gandalf's expository there.
Galadriel (in the movie,) only tells Frodo outright. The movie can't give that third-person-omniscient point of view ("Boromir thought...") that the book can without doing cheesy voice-overs, so by necessity, I think they felt they had to hammer the point home that Boromir was not to be trusted.
The only things about the movie that i was annoyed by were the total omission of Bombadil (although, what else could Jackson have done?) and the complete fucking of Arwen and Aragorn's roles.
I would have enjoyed more of the incidental dialogue (although they did a fantastic job with it) like Gandalf's "A Balrog! what cursed luck! and I am already tired..." and the whole Bill Ferny thing in Bree...
The sound sucked (someone tell the music guy he's not the fucking star,) and Galadriel's voice during her test ("...set up an EVIL QUEEN!") was just too fucking stupid. But these are minor quibbles and the movie is GREAT.
As long as the cthulhu-children don't come on land and demand the production of live-action tentacle rape movies, I'll be happy. The last thing we need is a race of Cthulhu-beings involved with the RIAA or marketing companies.
relevant link: Cthulu for president, why vote for a lesser evil?
Solution: instead of reviews that tell you things, there should be totally unambiguous yea/nay or thumbs up/thumbs down graphic. something totally useless but that would incite you to watch (or not) the movie.
just like this review...wait...
However, unlike Prof. Zamenhof (the creator of Esperanto), Tolkien did not intend or even imagine that his languages or scripts might be adopted by real-world populations. He invented them as an intellectual or linguistic game, and later as historical and cultural background to his stories. It is in that sense, not in the evangelical Esperantist's sense, that Tolkien fans pursue them.
/.,) that you're more likely to find someone fluent in klingon and tengwar than esperanto. it's a beautiful language with good ideals behind it, and it's dead easy to learn.
that said, it's a sad comment on society (especially geek society here on
there's even some online courses;
check it out: http://www.esperanto-usa.org/
Show me a student with $200 to fork over for support. On the other hand, show me a student who could use learning about databases by setting one up.
I'll show you an assload of students who don't have the time to dick around with that or alternately, a completely different set of students who couldn't care less -- they just want stuff to work right the first time, i.e. out of the box. (which you won't get out of MS or linux, for different reasons.)
QUOTE:
/QUOTE
I want the market for that to dry up, because the whole concept of a manufactured youth-culture is destructive to society as a whole and it deserves to be destroyed.
Amen brother.
It's degraded to the point that our corporate-centric society is practically breeding American youth like cattle, both in the market of culture and the market of ideas.
you guys wouldn't be saying all that if you drank Pepsi like me & Britney.
not all computers have a CD drive, and it's a bit of a pain in the ass to carry a burner around with you to burn stuff, while USB is pretty ubiquitous.
although in general, i'd have to agree that for computer that all have CD drives, though, a CDR/RW is probably a better idea.
these things would be a zillion times cooler if they could be made bootable -- you'd have a small linux distro that wouldn't necessitate installing anything on the system HD and it'd be with you wherever you went.
These guys at alienware do linux stuff and they're offering it on some systems (they do high priced systems but they're p1mp-455 n!c3). note that they also do windows systems, so just cos they've got the audigy and they'll put linux on your box doesn't mean that the audigy will work with linux.
I'm pretty annoyed that the breakout box only comes with the super-extra-deluxo-hyper-expensive version of the audigy. The really really really good thing about the audigy is that it'll probably help bring the Live's price down to stupid cheap prices.
I know that Live! had some problems w/ 2000 and XP -- have those been worked out? does the Audigy have the same probs?
build a simple wooden shack adjecent to the house, with no insulation of any kind. put everything there. run wires from that shack to inside the house (maybe through a window that's been packed with some insulation).
ideally, you'd want everything outside for temperature reasons during the winter, but you'd probably have to cool them in the summer and you would still have to shield them from the elements during harsh winters -- hence, a shack.
you know what they say: history is written by those not hacked to tiny bits by
vicious in-fighting^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H winners.
or slashdot has an unusually large Mac-user readership.
i really feel my
Although I don't use abiword (a text editor is a text editor is a text editor, imo,) there's a real simple way to evaluate this: When was the last time you posted to a Windows Word(tm) list and got your ideas considered? Do you know (or at least know how to contact) those responsible for Word's code? feature set? bugs?
The dictionary easter eggs in Word show that there's humans working the product (check out "Bill Gates should die." or "I hate Bill Gates." in the thesaurus -- it brings up "I'll drink to that!" and "I should certainly think so!" as valid synonyms,) but Word is far removed from the consumer and it's target audience. This doesn't necessarily make it a bad product but it's not the way I deal with people I do business with; this is one of the reasons I like the open source model.
If this bug in IE has really been around for two and a half years, how is it that no one has stumbled on to it until now? Could it be that (GASP!) security through obscurity actually worked in this case?
The nimda virus used a variation of this "Content-type/TLE" switcheroo.
...they'll add an annoying amphibian that speaks in dialect, thereby ruining the whole elan of the entire series.
just a guess, though.
this is plain BS. you have plenty of choices; you can build your own computer (that you didn't want to is not Dell's fault) or buy one of those white-box deals -- I picked a whitebox up from ebay for 400$ (p3@733hz) for a relative and the first thing i did was install Win98SE (cos that's what he wanted) and may eventually put XP on it (again, if he wants it.) Most people want Windows and will only be too happy if the copy they get with their new computer is XP ("ooh that's the one with all the commercials about it!" they'll say). Is it inferior to linux? in most technical ways, yes. As a practical matter, though, windows has won the desktop irrevocably. But that's not the point, the point is that you can get whiteboxes with no OS installed from resellers -- if you insist you want support and warranty and complete service, including a tech to come to you house and hit the "any" key for you, you'll have to pay and you'll probably have to buy from a company that sells windows pre-installed. The reason for this is simple: for a high level of support, you have to have lots of money, to make lots of money, you need to sell lots of computers; linux is a niche market and while nice, it isn't going to upset the MS monopoly anytime soon.
Of course you can remove the stickers and crack open the case; it'll invalidate the warranty, but you can do it. Dell lists that because they don't want to have to cover a box (on warranty) that's been cracked open and had cards pried off or fried by some Clueless Consumer(tm) in some way.
As for non-Windows laptops, check out these guys. They'll put redhat, slackware, mandrake or suse and are promising debian RSN pre-installed. They're not cheap, but then good laptops never are.
this is not a valid (or compelling) reason not to switch; if it were, no one would use any OS other than Windows on their PCs (non-PCs such as mainframes don't count.)
homepage of evil: http://www.cthulhu.org/
1) the internet is not like a library. when you're done with a library book, you have to return it to the library or pay for it. libraries do not make copies of each book for their patrons to check-out; they'll have 1 copy which they buy.
2) while authors generally want their books read, that doesn't mean you can appropriate their desire to publish things for them.
3) i will tell you about lost profits: if you don't want to "compensate authors for their time" (or their effort which is the part people forget,) you shouldn't read the book. It's directly analogue to a temporary product, like food: if you didn't pay for the pizza, you shouldn't eat it; due to the way this particular food is made (i.e. e-books) it's really fucking easy to make copies and put them on the 'net.
people look at writing or music (art in general, really,) as if it were a simple skill anyone could do given the chance. while this is true, most people forget that it takes time and effort and lots of fucking practice to get good at some skill; you can't fucking learn to write anything (even code) very well overnight. when you buy a book or a piece of music, you're paying for the author's time, effort, skill and unique viewpoint.
have I downloaded e-books? you bet! I downloaded all 4 harry potter books; and although I didn't particularly feel bad about not giving J.K Rowling (or her publishers) my money, after I read them, I went out and bought copies of my own, because it was the fucking right thing to do.
It's a real simple equation: if you're going to steal, don't pretend that it's not. It's all well to read or listen to something and not buy it; but only if you don't keep it in a physical manner -- i'm including mp3 files in that.
I don't believe that it's the responsibility of any company or government to make people honest, but it would be nice if people didn't exempt themselves from honesty. A lot of publishing companies are trying to get 'digital rights management' (whatever the fuck that means,) because they think that people aren't trustworthy...can you blame them?