i have figured this out.
the perfect solution is:
-leave any icons on there, MSN, AOL, AIM, whatever.
-make them all links to different linux sites, so that MSN becomes RedHat (SuSE for European MS users), AIM becomes a link to Jabber, etc.
who's going to complain?
"microsoft technical support, how can i help you?"
"hi, this version of windows took forever to download, but it never crashes and i haven't had a virus delete anything yet! by the way, why has the start button changed to a big K in a cog?" -- Slashdot: When News Breaks, We Give You The Pieces
just wait until the current whitehouse passes those non-resident-workers immigration laws that the pro-globalization-business lobby's trying to get through... you'll dozens of american programmers on streets, begging. just like CmdrTaco in this alternate universe.
-- Slashdot: When News Breaks, We Give You The Pieces
You don't have the right to search my wallet (or purse, for those so inclined) when I come to work or go home through the door, so why can you search my personal email just because it goes through the server?
because the computer, electricity to run it and associated network are not paid by you.
if you work someplace where security is an issue, like e.g. the whitehouse (or fbi, cia, nsa, etc), you WILL be asked to pass through some sort of security checkpoint. they may not go through your purse or wallet, but they'll know that it went through a metal detector or was tested for chemical residues.
if you worked at a McDonald's, would you demand your boss give you a computer and a fat pipe to the net for your own use? your boss would laugh at you. the point of the equipment in an office is to use it for work. if people are getting fired for trivial shit, like sending a note or IM to their spouse or whatever, that's just an asshole employer (not illegal, but hey, you needed a better job anyway, right?).
your employer may have serious reasons for not allowing you free reign with the computers -- a) it's their stuff b) if you put your data on their hardware (inc. network), you may be putting them in a situation where they are liable ("did you hear, bob's been putting encrypted kiddie porn on the workstations! now someone called the cops and it's a big headache; charlie the tech guy is getting fired for not keeping an eye on everything!")
if you want privacy, do whatever you want in private. if your work isn't private enough for you, find someplace else.
-- Slashdot: When News Breaks, We Give You The Pieces
this sounds great (if a bit paranoid) right up to the part where you mentioned floppy disks. floppies are disposable, unreliable media. which means you're going to have one of two problems: 1) short, easy to remember keys or 2) keys written down right by the computer on a post-it.
which isn't to say that this stuff isn't happening now already, but that it's going to get worse with a setup like that.
-- Slashdot: When News Breaks, We Give You The Pieces
Of course, reading all of that has ruined me in that I now tend to write really long sentences, though I haven't yet achieved the one feat that I have only seen from Machiavelli and Dave Barry, which is, of course, the 1.5 page sentence, in which the author creates an extraordinarily long sentence, containing much information, all the while being grammatically correct, and conveying one basic idea in a surprisingly clear manner, such that the reader, after having read it, actually goes back to see where said sentence began, and reads it again, just to make sure that the sentence is, indeed, that long.
the master at this was this guy, who wrote one sentence (either in "the sound and the fury" or "light in august" or maybe "absalom, absalom!", i forget) that spans ~3 pages or so. Every lit. major tries to do this at least once, but all of them fail in the one pre-requisite, i.e., being William Faulkner. (Although David Foster Wallace has come close.)
anyway, after reading the article, wouldn't it make more sense to assume that the smart kids (e.g. ones who would find "news for nerds" insteresting) would be indoors playing games and not outdoors? all games give different types of education, i'm pretty sure that if you spent 60 hours playing Mario Bros. or something you would probably get dumber instead.
-d. -- Slashdot: When News Breaks, We Give You The Pieces
Re:Umm... Do you EVEN know what you're talking abo
on
Linux 2.4.7 Released
·
· Score: 1
just like we consider anyone running DOS 5.2 or linux kernel 2.0.x really 1337 today, right?
-- Slashdot: When News Breaks, We Give You The Pieces
this is exactly what the desktop in linux needs. i was recently flipping through O'Reilly's "Windows 98 Annoyances" (you'd expect the book to be thicker, but they used small typeface) and was reminded of Win9x's Reskit and TweakUI. these apps are abso-fucking-lutely essential for anyone who has to spend more than an hour per week in Win9x. tweakui is the more usefull one, but to get it in, you have to drop reskit onto HD first: Add/Remove Progs->Win Setup->have disk->win9x-cdrom\tools\reskit\ until you find reskit.inf and install that.
tweakui you can gank from http://www.annoyances.org/win98/features/tweakui.h tml ummm....get rid of that space in the html part of the address...
this isn't perfect (not nearly as tweakable as *nix,) but it's a hell of an improvement. essentially, it helps you tweak the reg w/o having to actually go into the reg, and helps make stuff that would be a lot harder done in regedit a basically point-and-click affair.
THAT SAID, there's a reason why gnome (and linux in general) isn't all peaches and cream! you're not supposed to be able to do everything via GUI! messing about with pictures isn't nearly as succint as giving specific arguments via command line/text editing. a picture can mean a thousand words, but a series of strictly defined words can only mean one thing when used in conjunction with each other.
linux on the desktop wont happen for a while, if ever, but a simpler desktop and setup can't be a bad idea.
-d. -- Slashdot: When News Breaks, We Give You The Pieces
if you read the article, SG clearly states that some of their stuff is all free (beer and speech) and some is a little free (just beer) and some is not free at all (they make it, you buy it if you want, that's it).
by the mere fact that the last case is true (w/r/t this company (no pun intended)) the answers to your first question is (apparently, and from what i can tell): yes, sometimes.
for your 2nd question: this is probably a minority stance. caveat: i am not a developer, and i have little or nothing to do with KDE (i barely use it).
BUT...from seeing that theKompany is one of the few companies doing this, i'd call that a minority.
i really liked SG's comments (and apparent attitude,) it's nice to hear from someone involved in Linux without their head up their asses with regard to licensing issues.
-d. -- Slashdot: When News Breaks, We Give You The Pieces
Reaktor and SoundForge
on
DeMuDi Linux
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· Score: 1
i'd much rather see Reaktor or SoundForge ported over to Linux, but ask for it, or suggest it to either company and Native Instruments (Reaktor's makers,) give you hearty gales of germanic laughter and SoundForge basically ask you to fuck off (pretty rudely too).
really, any kind of high quality gui music util that would really benefit from the power that linux offers would be super nice on linux. reaktor(as well as other NI products), cubase, soundforge, logic, ACID all come to mind.
-d. -- Slashdot: When News Breaks, We Give You The Pieces
>BeOs is a single user, extremely GUI-oriented OS that was supposed to be so friendly that it would be the perfect choice for novice users.
except for that whole "no software for it whatsoever" thing, and the "oops, no drivers either," thing, and the "extremely limited hardware support" thing. BeOS is beutiful, and if it had half the support behind it that linux has (w/r/t developers volunteering their efforts,) it would kick every other OS's ass. The fact that it's single user might be an impediment to some, but for the average user (i.e., not most readers of slashdot,) it's not a big deal. they already treat their machines as single user. (the fact that they're running Win9x helps.)
As soon as BeOS releases whatever source it can (i know they can't release parts because of NDAs for proprietary code,) and gets whatever little open source movement behind it that will go, the better off BeOS will be. Doesn't look like that's going to happen, though.
-d. -- Slashdot: When News Breaks, We Give You The Pieces
Re:Special purpose linux distrobutions
on
DeMuDi Linux
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· Score: 1
of course, what we really need now is a linux distro specifically for downloading porn off the net; something that'll search google and the newsgroups and sit on IRC and just d/l the porn for you.
it'll need some multimedia, and it's own plastic cover.
-d. -- Slashdot: When News Breaks, We Give You The Pieces
Although people do have the taste of free music in their mouths now, it doesn't follow to say that this will revolutionise the music industry/business or how people interact w/ music (cd or mp3.
since napster's death, it's been pretty hard to get easy access to mp3s of non-famous bands.[1] gnutella, limewire, imesh, etc, are all great and stuff, but they're missing the one factor that made napster stand head and shoulders above the others: they're not massively popular.
napster's popularity was both it's blessing and it's demise: users knew of it and joined up, making lots of diverse music available. then again, companies (and metallica[2], and dr. dre, etc.) also knew of it, making it a great target.
napster is(was) probably the main reason that broadband was making as good headway into homes as it was. now that there's no large centralised version of it (or similar) there's not going to be a whole lot of reason to switch over from dial-up to cable/dsl (for most consumers in the U.S., anyway.) i'm pretty sure that this is the result of apathy and nothing else; if you're shopping for something on the web, do you really care if amazon.com loads a little slower on your dial-up? do you feel the need to look through cdnow at cable/DSL speeds?
mp3.com's songs as advertising model isn't working very well for most people simply because you (the artist whose sonsg are on the mp3.com site) have to pay to use it (afaik, i haven't been to mp3.com in quite a while). basically it only really works for already established acts, like whitehouse. other acts who don't have a lot going for them (advertising or underground following-wise,) aren't really going to make money doing that.
[1] real world example: i'm a big fan of a recording project of bryn jones, who recorded under the name muslimgauze or http://pretentious.net/muslimgauze for the goatse.cx paranoid. there's a lot of records of his out there. (to give you an idea: he died in january of 1999; since then, there have been roughly 37 releases of his music, most of them NOT re-issues). so anyway, trying to sample the records is a bit of a pain, cos some are GREAT and others are absolute shit. napster helped me decide to get a few discs i would otherwise have skipped over.
[2] who have sucked ever since '91's "the black album". i know it's cheap to make a dig based on personal opinions of art, but hey: if you suck, expect to get called on it.
-d. -- Slashdot: When News Breaks, We Give You The Pieces
it's actually a mixed bag; there's no way to know which way they'd fall on the RIAA/MPAA.
one the one hand, they'd obviously hate both RIAA/MPAA for disseminating "obscene/immoral" stuff but on the other hand, they could obviously learn a lot from each other's oppressive tactics.
MPAA/RIAA: "So, you guys stone your dissidents, huh?" Taliban: "You're saying that we can use media to control the population, huh?"
-d. -- Slashdot: When News Breaks, We Give You The Pieces
Coming soon to Amazon.com: Just for Karma, the true story of CmdrTaco and Slashdot.org by CowboyNeal...and of course, it'll have ten blank pages at the end, so you can add your own comments. -- Slashdot: When News Breaks, We Give You The Pieces
And when our oceans get seeded with alien life that migrates onto land and reproduces by shooting little hatchlings into us which can't be removed and we aren't able to move into space chandeliers because we don't have the expertise to build them because building space stations were a complete waste of money....what'll that guy be saying then?!
"Aaaaargh! Get it off me! Get if off me! Aaaar--"
or something like that.
-d. -- Slashdot: When News Breaks, We Give You The Pieces
the sad fact is that if he'd raped someone on campus, or stolen university property (like a computer) it would either get hushed up or he would have gotten a slap on the wrist.
-d. -- Slashdot: When News Breaks, We Give You The Pieces
KDE is certainly nice, but for your average Joe Sixpack, it still isn't quite there, and corporations already have a huge installed workforce already trained and familiar with Windows.
To Joe Sixpack, windows is pretty much the only option right now. J. Sixpack just doesn't know Linux exists, and he definately doesn't know how good it is. Mr.6-pack uses a computer at work -- it's either got propriatary software (for the company he works at) or windows. He knows Windows (at least on a superficial level, but as support calls clearly manifest, he does not know Windows. MS's biggest win was getting mindshare in the corporate workspace -- getting people using it at work made people associate MS (in general) and Windows (specifically) as "that thing that my computer runs on" [sic]. This became pervasive enought that when those same people got their own computers, they wanted the same thing they had at work. At my mind-numbing job, we've got NT4, redhat5.2 and FreeBSD (all wintel machines) -- but the majority of the work done by people daily is on the NT machines (word, excel, progs specifically for the job,) and i'm quite sure that i'm the only one there who's noticed what we're running (we get support for all the machines from a central company).
What linux really really needs is imo, 3 things: 1)Advertising. REAL advertising, like on TV and slick national mags, like Time and Newsweek -- spraypainting sidewalks in a few cities is ok, a few ads in industry-specific magazines is good too, but mainstream advertising is a must. IBM and RH are probably the two best contenders here, for monetary reasons.
2)Easier install. At least as easy as Windows. This has gotten a lot better, but setting up X can be a bitch for a newbie.
3)Standards that rival or exceed Windows' capabilities in user applications. yes, linux is a great developers' platform. developers are a relatively small minority. the majority of users want to do relatively few things with their computers: online shopping/reading mail/reading www, writing a few letters in a word processing prog. and maybe spreadsheet progs.
let them know it exists, make a nice UI, make it easy and the users will come.
-d.
(lots of good games would be nice, too.) -- Slashdot: When News Breaks, We Give You The Pieces
Somebody will have to draw me a diagram here as to how adopting a foreign language word somehow diminish the parent language. Must be something like software "piracy".
this is actually kind of common with some older langagues; i know the french and the spanish currently have programs to help keep their languages "pure" (the french with more..uh..zeal than anyone else, afaik--to the extent that certain contractions and bastardizations of phrases are considered a Bad Thing, e.g. the ubiquitous "cool" and the short form "mel" (for mail-electronique, i believe, but i'm not 100% on that). afaik, the spanish are more concerned with keeping their language from dying out.) priests did this with latin as well, and until the lutheran split, reading and interpreting the bible by anyone other than a trained cleric/priest was Frowned Upon.
it is tempting to draw parallels between "closed" languages like this and closed/open source software. mutt languages, that draw from various sources, seem to last the longest and seem to be more pervasive than their counterparts. draw your own conclusions.
it was, in fact, the french who got the UN to fuxor the "universal language" of esperanto, which sucks, since it is a totally neutral* and easy-to-learn-beyond-belief language. their reason? french was the language of science, and therefor would never fall out of vogue.
*totally neutral in the sense that there are no Esperanto speaking nations and the largest majority of people who learn/speak it do not do so as their first language.
-d. -- Slashdot: When News Breaks, We Give You The Pieces
Let me see, if they want the licneses for every copy of my software, I will have top send them several hundred copies of the GPL... That ought to make their day...
if there was a mass e-mailing of these licenses --seeing as they're mostly not on paper-- would that be considered a DoS attack?
"they brought our server down!" "well, we're running IIS, what did you expect?"
-d. -- Slashdot: When News Breaks, We Give You The Pieces
My patience for technical writing has more than doubled since I eliminated the droning noises. I used to play Quake just to drown out the background noise.
boss: what are you doing? employee: WHAT? boss: what are you doing? employee: I CAN'T HEAR YOU! THE COMPUTER FANS WERE SO LOUD I HAVE TO CRANK THE QUAKE GAME SOUNDTRACK AS LOUD AS I CAN TO THINK!
what a great excuse! i'm going to use this one at work.
-d. -- Slashdot: When News Breaks, We Give You The Pieces
Slashdot Mirror
i have figured this out.
the perfect solution is:
-leave any icons on there, MSN, AOL, AIM, whatever.
-make them all links to different linux sites, so that MSN becomes RedHat (SuSE for European MS users), AIM becomes a link to Jabber, etc.
who's going to complain?
"microsoft technical support, how can i help you?"
"hi, this version of windows took forever to download, but it never crashes and i haven't had a virus delete anything yet! by the way, why has the start button changed to a big K in a cog?"
--
Slashdot: When News Breaks, We Give You The Pieces
just wait until the current whitehouse passes those non-resident-workers immigration laws that the pro-globalization-business lobby's trying to get through... you'll dozens of american programmers on streets, begging. just like CmdrTaco in this alternate universe.
--
Slashdot: When News Breaks, We Give You The Pieces
actually, i got into linux because of this webpage right here.
link for the goatse.cx ware is http://www.stileproject.com/lls.html
--
Slashdot: When News Breaks, We Give You The Pieces
You don't have the right to search my wallet (or purse, for those so inclined) when I come to work or go home through the door, so why can you search my personal email just because it goes through the server?
because the computer, electricity to run it and associated network are not paid by you.
if you work someplace where security is an issue, like e.g. the whitehouse (or fbi, cia, nsa, etc), you WILL be asked to pass through some sort of security checkpoint. they may not go through your purse or wallet, but they'll know that it went through a metal detector or was tested for chemical residues.
if you worked at a McDonald's, would you demand your boss give you a computer and a fat pipe to the net for your own use? your boss would laugh at you. the point of the equipment in an office is to use it for work. if people are getting fired for trivial shit, like sending a note or IM to their spouse or whatever, that's just an asshole employer (not illegal, but hey, you needed a better job anyway, right?).
your employer may have serious reasons for not allowing you free reign with the computers -- a) it's their stuff b) if you put your data on their hardware (inc. network), you may be putting them in a situation where they are liable ("did you hear, bob's been putting encrypted kiddie porn on the workstations! now someone called the cops and it's a big headache; charlie the tech guy is getting fired for not keeping an eye on everything!")
if you want privacy, do whatever you want in private. if your work isn't private enough for you, find someplace else.
--
Slashdot: When News Breaks, We Give You The Pieces
this sounds great (if a bit paranoid) right up to the part where you mentioned floppy disks. floppies are disposable, unreliable media. which means you're going to have one of two problems: 1) short, easy to remember keys or 2) keys written down right by the computer on a post-it.
which isn't to say that this stuff isn't happening now already, but that it's going to get worse with a setup like that.
--
Slashdot: When News Breaks, We Give You The Pieces
if it actually gets to a trial, someone should testify by speaking in rot-13.
"Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?"
"V qb."
--
Slashdot: When News Breaks, We Give You The Pieces
Of course, reading all of that has ruined me in that I now tend to write really long sentences, though I haven't yet achieved the one feat that I have only seen from Machiavelli and Dave Barry, which is, of course, the 1.5 page sentence, in which the author creates an extraordinarily long sentence, containing much information, all the while being grammatically correct, and conveying one basic idea in a surprisingly clear manner, such that the reader, after having read it, actually goes back to see where said sentence began, and reads it again, just to make sure that the sentence is, indeed, that long.
the master at this was this guy, who wrote one sentence (either in "the sound and the fury" or "light in august" or maybe "absalom, absalom!", i forget) that spans ~3 pages or so. Every lit. major tries to do this at least once, but all of them fail in the one pre-requisite, i.e., being William Faulkner. (Although David Foster Wallace has come close.)
anyway, after reading the article, wouldn't it make more sense to assume that the smart kids (e.g. ones who would find "news for nerds" insteresting) would be indoors playing games and not outdoors? all games give different types of education, i'm pretty sure that if you spent 60 hours playing Mario Bros. or something you would probably get dumber instead.
-d.
--
Slashdot: When News Breaks, We Give You The Pieces
just like we consider anyone running DOS 5.2 or linux kernel 2.0.x really 1337 today, right?
--
Slashdot: When News Breaks, We Give You The Pieces
>they have once again damaged their reputation
they had a reputation to speak of?
when did that happen?
--
Slashdot: When News Breaks, We Give You The Pieces
this is exactly what the desktop in linux needs. i was recently flipping through O'Reilly's "Windows 98 Annoyances" (you'd expect the book to be thicker, but they used small typeface) and was reminded of Win9x's Reskit and TweakUI. these apps are abso-fucking-lutely essential for anyone who has to spend more than an hour per week in Win9x. tweakui is the more usefull one, but to get it in, you have to drop reskit onto HD first: Add/Remove Progs->Win Setup->have disk->win9x-cdrom\tools\reskit\ until you find reskit.inf and install that.
h tml
tweakui you can gank from http://www.annoyances.org/win98/features/tweakui.
ummm....get rid of that space in the html part of the address...
this isn't perfect (not nearly as tweakable as *nix,) but it's a hell of an improvement. essentially, it helps you tweak the reg w/o having to actually go into the reg, and helps make stuff that would be a lot harder done in regedit a basically point-and-click affair.
THAT SAID, there's a reason why gnome (and linux in general) isn't all peaches and cream! you're not supposed to be able to do everything via GUI! messing about with pictures isn't nearly as succint as giving specific arguments via command line/text editing. a picture can mean a thousand words, but a series of strictly defined words can only mean one thing when used in conjunction with each other.
linux on the desktop wont happen for a while, if ever, but a simpler desktop and setup can't be a bad idea.
-d.
--
Slashdot: When News Breaks, We Give You The Pieces
if you read the article, SG clearly states that some of their stuff is all free (beer and speech) and some is a little free (just beer) and some is not free at all (they make it, you buy it if you want, that's it).
by the mere fact that the last case is true (w/r/t this company (no pun intended)) the answers to your first question is (apparently, and from what i can tell): yes, sometimes.
for your 2nd question: this is probably a minority stance. caveat: i am not a developer, and i have little or nothing to do with KDE (i barely use it).
BUT...from seeing that theKompany is one of the few companies doing this, i'd call that a minority.
i really liked SG's comments (and apparent attitude,) it's nice to hear from someone involved in Linux without their head up their asses with regard to licensing issues.
-d.
--
Slashdot: When News Breaks, We Give You The Pieces
i'd much rather see Reaktor or SoundForge ported over to Linux, but ask for it, or suggest it to either company and Native Instruments (Reaktor's makers,) give you hearty gales of germanic laughter and SoundForge basically ask you to fuck off (pretty rudely too).
really, any kind of high quality gui music util that would really benefit from the power that linux offers would be super nice on linux. reaktor(as well as other NI products), cubase, soundforge, logic, ACID all come to mind.
-d.
--
Slashdot: When News Breaks, We Give You The Pieces
>BeOs is a single user, extremely GUI-oriented OS that was supposed to be so friendly that it would be the perfect choice for novice users.
except for that whole "no software for it whatsoever" thing, and the "oops, no drivers either," thing, and the "extremely limited hardware support" thing. BeOS is beutiful, and if it had half the support behind it that linux has (w/r/t developers volunteering their efforts,) it would kick every other OS's ass. The fact that it's single user might be an impediment to some, but for the average user (i.e., not most readers of slashdot,) it's not a big deal. they already treat their machines as single user. (the fact that they're running Win9x helps.)
As soon as BeOS releases whatever source it can (i know they can't release parts because of NDAs for proprietary code,) and gets whatever little open source movement behind it that will go, the better off BeOS will be. Doesn't look like that's going to happen, though.
-d.
--
Slashdot: When News Breaks, We Give You The Pieces
of course, what we really need now is a linux distro specifically for downloading porn off the net; something that'll search google and the newsgroups and sit on IRC and just d/l the porn for you.
it'll need some multimedia, and it's own plastic cover.
-d.
--
Slashdot: When News Breaks, We Give You The Pieces
Although people do have the taste of free music in their mouths now, it doesn't follow to say that this will revolutionise the music industry/business or how people interact w/ music (cd or mp3.
since napster's death, it's been pretty hard to get easy access to mp3s of non-famous bands.[1] gnutella, limewire, imesh, etc, are all great and stuff, but they're missing the one factor that made napster stand head and shoulders above the others: they're not massively popular.
napster's popularity was both it's blessing and it's demise: users knew of it and joined up, making lots of diverse music available. then again, companies (and metallica[2], and dr. dre, etc.) also knew of it, making it a great target.
napster is(was) probably the main reason that broadband was making as good headway into homes as it was. now that there's no large centralised version of it (or similar) there's not going to be a whole lot of reason to switch over from dial-up to cable/dsl (for most consumers in the U.S., anyway.) i'm pretty sure that this is the result of apathy and nothing else; if you're shopping for something on the web, do you really care if amazon.com loads a little slower on your dial-up? do you feel the need to look through cdnow at cable/DSL speeds?
mp3.com's songs as advertising model isn't working very well for most people simply because you (the artist whose sonsg are on the mp3.com site) have to pay to use it (afaik, i haven't been to mp3.com in quite a while). basically it only really works for already established acts, like whitehouse. other acts who don't have a lot going for them (advertising or underground following-wise,) aren't really going to make money doing that.
[1] real world example: i'm a big fan of a recording project of bryn jones, who recorded under the name muslimgauze or http://pretentious.net/muslimgauze for the goatse.cx paranoid. there's a lot of records of his out there. (to give you an idea: he died in january of 1999; since then, there have been roughly 37 releases of his music, most of them NOT re-issues). so anyway, trying to sample the records is a bit of a pain, cos some are GREAT and others are absolute shit. napster helped me decide to get a few discs i would otherwise have skipped over.
[2] who have sucked ever since '91's "the black album". i know it's cheap to make a dig based on personal opinions of art, but hey: if you suck, expect to get called on it.
-d.
--
Slashdot: When News Breaks, We Give You The Pieces
it's actually a mixed bag; there's no way to know which way they'd fall on the RIAA/MPAA.
one the one hand, they'd obviously hate both RIAA/MPAA for disseminating "obscene/immoral" stuff but on the other hand, they could obviously learn a lot from each other's oppressive tactics.
MPAA/RIAA: "So, you guys stone your dissidents, huh?"
Taliban: "You're saying that we can use media to control the population, huh?"
-d.
--
Slashdot: When News Breaks, We Give You The Pieces
is a remix by MC Stephen Hawking.
-d.
--
Slashdot: When News Breaks, We Give You The Pieces
Coming soon to Amazon.com: Just for Karma, the true story of CmdrTaco and Slashdot.org by CowboyNeal...and of course, it'll have ten blank pages at the end, so you can add your own comments.
--
Slashdot: When News Breaks, We Give You The Pieces
And when our oceans get seeded with alien life that migrates onto land and reproduces by shooting little hatchlings into us which can't be removed and we aren't able to move into space chandeliers because we don't have the expertise to build them because building space stations were a complete waste of money....what'll that guy be saying then?!
"Aaaaargh! Get it off me! Get if off me! Aaaar--"
or something like that.
-d.
--
Slashdot: When News Breaks, We Give You The Pieces
the sad fact is that if he'd raped someone on campus, or stolen university property (like a computer) it would either get hushed up or he would have gotten a slap on the wrist.
-d.
--
Slashdot: When News Breaks, We Give You The Pieces
KDE is certainly nice, but for your average Joe Sixpack, it still isn't quite there, and corporations already have a huge installed workforce already trained and familiar with Windows.
To Joe Sixpack, windows is pretty much the only option right now. J. Sixpack just doesn't know Linux exists, and he definately doesn't know how good it is. Mr.6-pack uses a computer at work -- it's either got propriatary software (for the company he works at) or windows. He knows Windows (at least on a superficial level, but as support calls clearly manifest, he does not know Windows. MS's biggest win was getting mindshare in the corporate workspace -- getting people using it at work made people associate MS (in general) and Windows (specifically) as "that thing that my computer runs on" [sic]. This became pervasive enought that when those same people got their own computers, they wanted the same thing they had at work. At my mind-numbing job, we've got NT4, redhat5.2 and FreeBSD (all wintel machines) -- but the majority of the work done by people daily is on the NT machines (word, excel, progs specifically for the job,) and i'm quite sure that i'm the only one there who's noticed what we're running (we get support for all the machines from a central company).
What linux really really needs is imo, 3 things:
1)Advertising. REAL advertising, like on TV and slick national mags, like Time and Newsweek -- spraypainting sidewalks in a few cities is ok, a few ads in industry-specific magazines is good too, but mainstream advertising is a must. IBM and RH are probably the two best contenders here, for monetary reasons.
2)Easier install. At least as easy as Windows. This has gotten a lot better, but setting up X can be a bitch for a newbie.
3)Standards that rival or exceed Windows' capabilities in user applications. yes, linux is a great developers' platform. developers are a relatively small minority. the majority of users want to do relatively few things with their computers: online shopping/reading mail/reading www, writing a few letters in a word processing prog. and maybe spreadsheet progs.
let them know it exists, make a nice UI, make it easy and the users will come.
-d.
(lots of good games would be nice, too.)
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Slashdot: When News Breaks, We Give You The Pieces
Somebody will have to draw me a diagram here as to how adopting a foreign language word somehow diminish the parent language. Must be something like software "piracy".
this is actually kind of common with some older langagues; i know the french and the spanish currently have programs to help keep their languages "pure" (the french with more..uh..zeal than anyone else, afaik--to the extent that certain contractions and bastardizations of phrases are considered a Bad Thing, e.g. the ubiquitous "cool" and the short form "mel" (for mail-electronique, i believe, but i'm not 100% on that). afaik, the spanish are more concerned with keeping their language from dying out.) priests did this with latin as well, and until the lutheran split, reading and interpreting the bible by anyone other than a trained cleric/priest was Frowned Upon.
it is tempting to draw parallels between "closed" languages like this and closed/open source software. mutt languages, that draw from various sources, seem to last the longest and seem to be more pervasive than their counterparts. draw your own conclusions.
it was, in fact, the french who got the UN to fuxor the "universal language" of esperanto, which sucks, since it is a totally neutral* and easy-to-learn-beyond-belief language. their reason? french was the language of science, and therefor would never fall out of vogue.
http://www.esperanto.net for those interested.
*totally neutral in the sense that there are no Esperanto speaking nations and the largest majority of people who learn/speak it do not do so as their first language.
-d.
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Slashdot: When News Breaks, We Give You The Pieces
Let me see, if they want the licneses for every copy of my software, I will have top send them several hundred copies of the GPL... That ought to make their day...
if there was a mass e-mailing of these licenses --seeing as they're mostly not on paper-- would that be considered a DoS attack?
"they brought our server down!"
"well, we're running IIS, what did you expect?"
-d.
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Slashdot: When News Breaks, We Give You The Pieces
Good, because "GIMP" doesn't sound anythink like "Photoshop".
although i'd personally love a combination of the common G/K prefixes, and call it GKPhotofficeIllustraitor.
yes, it would be a bitch to say, but really, that's why it'd be Kcool.
-d.
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Slashdot: When News Breaks, We Give You The Pieces
My patience for technical writing has more than doubled since I eliminated the droning noises. I used to play Quake just to drown out the background noise.
boss: what are you doing?
employee: WHAT?
boss: what are you doing?
employee: I CAN'T HEAR YOU! THE COMPUTER FANS WERE SO LOUD I HAVE TO CRANK THE QUAKE GAME SOUNDTRACK AS LOUD AS I CAN TO THINK!
what a great excuse! i'm going to use this one at work.
-d.
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Slashdot: When News Breaks, We Give You The Pieces