Reporters must follow editorials rules. Generally, these rules make them use Via and Nvidia instead of VIA and NVIDIA. The use of ALL CAPS in a news story makes it look like a marketing piece.
There's a trend toward downcasing all acronyms which are actually pronounced as words (and not letter-by-letter); BBC has wholeheartedly embraced this, writing `Nasa' for NASA, `Nato' for NATO, and now `sars' for SARS.
Of course, AFAIK Via and Nvidia aren't acronyms at all, so there's really no justification for using all caps. PriceWaterhouse Cooper could decide to write their name in all caps, too, but they shouldn't expect Reuters to start writing PRICEWATERHOUSE COOPER...
Re:Yes, well, here is my experience...
on
Legacy-Free PCs
·
· Score: 1
scripsit Lord Ender:
No version of slackware will install if your usb keyboard and mouse are plugged into a usb hub. Actually, NO version of linux will install this way.
Strange... I could have sworn I'd installed Debian on an iMac...
environmentalism is really a path to world socialism and world government, in the same vein as the UN.
Really? No shit. I need to stop making fun of environmentalists. I mean, all this time I was thinking that we were going to need a serious revolution, with all the messy liquidation of the national bourgeoisies, having to organize a dictatorship of the proletariat, etc. I never realized that I could bring about world socialism by just recycling my beer cans!
(Oh, and for the record, anyone with an older machine that finds Gnome/KDE a tad slow, try windowmaker. Nope, it doesn't look like Windows, but boy, is it fast!).
Not to start a window manager religious war, but Icewm is a _lot_ more lightweight than Gnome/KDE, and also looks (if you want it to) quite a lot like Win95 et al. I know a lot of people want the full ``desktop experience,'' but for a lot of (browser, e-mail, and word processor only) ex-Win users, Icewm would probably do the job.
It has to be ported to compile on FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, SCO, Tru64, ANYTHING other than what they ported it to.
More than that, it apparently requires very significant work to compile on non-i386 arches. AFAIK it won't build on sparc, alpha, m68k, s390, mips, ia64, or any other Linux arches except powerpc. IANA OO.o developer, but it seems that portability was not a concern from the beginning -- and now it's making porting more difficult.
I wonder if this is a legacy of its Windows origins? It wouldn't surprise me if no one working on the original code ever imagined it would ever be running on linux-s390 or netbsd-m68k or whatever.
Though if you printed out the emails, wouldn't that be sufficient proof?
Clack, clack, clack...
Date: Fri, 04 Apr 2003 11:23:03 -0700 From: John Doe <v-jdoe@microsoft.com> To: tkinias@spamme.com Subject: RE: Licenses X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2653.19)
Sure, amigo, go ahead an install XP on as many boxes as you like. I talked to Bill and he says it's fine.
-jd
-----Original Message----- From: tkinias@spamme.com Sent: Friday, April 04, 2003 11:13 AM To: John Doe Subject: Licenses
Hey, I've got this copy of an XP install CD that says it's illegal without a license. Can I install it on my computer?
Only about as insightful as saying ``Sticking your hand in a running blender is bad''... It really shouldn't be necessary to point out why concentration of media ownership is a bad thing.
Ordinarily I try just to ignore trolls, but someone actually modded this up...
scripsit LibertineR:
I guess some of the socialists out there believe that corporations only want SOME of your money. They want money from all sides, no matter how many outlets they own. Therefore, you can expect all points of view to be expressed.
[...]
If one entity owns every station in a town; who is stupid enough to think that they will settle only for the advertising dollars of a single point of view. That is like believing a Right wing dollar is worth a dollar, while a left wing dollar is worth only 65 cents.
That is just horribly, horribly wrong. Let me give you some simple situations where this doesn't work:
One of my major advertisers is XYZ Semiconductors. My investigative journalists (do any of those still exist?) uncover that XYZ's employees, exposed to nasty stuff, are dying off from cancer or whatever. XYZ threatens to pull its advertising; story doesn't run. There isn't another station to run the story, so the truth never gets told.
XYZ Semi has a pet candidate for local office. They buy lots of advertising on WFOO and remind WFOO that the XYZ Semi ads will be pulled if WFOO runs another candidate's ads. The other candidate, lacking a major corporate sponsor, can't buy 1000 hours... His dollars aren't worth less, he just has less of them.
Or even more directly: Let's say WFOO is owned by BarBaz Holdings, which also owns XYZ Semi. WFOO is instructed by BarBaz not to report on the criminal investigation of XYZ Semi's executives.
Or maybe AAA Semi wants to run an ad in this market. They are a direct competitor to XYZ Semi, also owned by WFOO's parent BarBaz... Do you think they let them run ads?
I could go on ad nauseum. I think this is nauseating enough, though.
On the other hand, one may think of an app being perfect only if the app in its entirety works perfectly. In this case, since virtually every nontrivial app has at least one bug, virtually no apps are perfect.
Hmm. OTOH, if you conceive of the perfection of an application as the inverse of the number of bugs, then it is clear that zarro boogs equals infinite perfection. Now, we all know that a quantity cannot be fractionally infinite. Therefore, perfection is a binary quality.
An interesting by-product of this interpretation is that it supports certain unnamed proprietary software vendors' contentions that their products have no bugs, when we all know that such bugs exist. If, say, 25% of the application is bug-free, then it is 25% perfect, right? Well, 25% of infinity is still an infinite quantity. Since the number of bugs is the inverse of the perfection, the number of bugs is 1/infinity, or zero.
In fact, bugs do not exist at all. There are no bugs; there is only user error.
The plethora of Microsoft applications available today, none working perfectly, is NOT a problem which stands in the way of the stranglehold Bill and Steve maintain over the desktop.
I am an Indian studying Computer Science in the US, and I use OSS/FS products daily.
Out of curiosity, did you get into free software after starting your degree in the States, or in India?
there aren't that many East Asian OSS/FS programmers either, nor are there all that many Latin American ones
I disagree, actually. Of course, we could get into a pointless debate about how many is ``many''... but here are some examples: Connectiva Linux (BR) and Red Flag Linux (CN); Gnome (Miguel de Icaza, MX); Debian's glibc maintainer (GOTO Masanori, JP). To be sure, there are more Americans, and in particular Europeans, but the contribution of the Latinos and East Asians is not insignificant.
This is perhaps indicative of people from, say, India, not perceiving programming as a hobby.
I think you may have hit on something here. I can imagine a South Asian peasant being shocked at the idea of a suburban American woman maintaining a vegetable garden ``for fun''... What may be lacking is simply a hacker culture (in the canonical sense of the term).
Slashdot Mirror
scripsit Jungle guy:
There's a trend toward downcasing all acronyms which are actually pronounced as words (and not letter-by-letter); BBC has wholeheartedly embraced this, writing `Nasa' for NASA, `Nato' for NATO, and now `sars' for SARS.
Of course, AFAIK Via and Nvidia aren't acronyms at all, so there's really no justification for using all caps. PriceWaterhouse Cooper could decide to write their name in all caps, too, but they shouldn't expect Reuters to start writing PRICEWATERHOUSE COOPER...
scripsit Lord Ender:
Strange... I could have sworn I'd installed Debian on an iMac...
scripsit jcast:
I think you mean 8.36 kiB.
*duck*
scripsit Blue Stone:
Ouch. That cut deep.
scripsit Infinity Salad:
As much as I would like to see them fall into the sea, I don't believe that's happened yet.
AFAIK they are still in Pacific time, which during the summer is GMT-7.
scripsit b17bmbr:
Really? No shit. I need to stop making fun of environmentalists. I mean, all this time I was thinking that we were going to need a serious revolution, with all the messy liquidation of the national bourgeoisies, having to organize a dictatorship of the proletariat, etc. I never realized that I could bring about world socialism by just recycling my beer cans!
Workers of the world, recycle!
scripsit Joey7F:
Sorry? How do you mean?
scripsit cyber_rigger:
Star Division? Or Germany as a country?
scripsit freeweed:
Not to start a window manager religious war, but Icewm is a _lot_ more lightweight than Gnome/KDE, and also looks (if you want it to) quite a lot like Win95 et al. I know a lot of people want the full ``desktop experience,'' but for a lot of (browser, e-mail, and word processor only) ex-Win users, Icewm would probably do the job.
scripsit evilviper:
More than that, it apparently requires very significant work to compile on non-i386 arches. AFAIK it won't build on sparc, alpha, m68k, s390, mips, ia64, or any other Linux arches except powerpc. IANA OO.o developer, but it seems that portability was not a concern from the beginning -- and now it's making porting more difficult.
I wonder if this is a legacy of its Windows origins? It wouldn't surprise me if no one working on the original code ever imagined it would ever be running on linux-s390 or netbsd-m68k or whatever.
scripsit Joey7F:
Clack, clack, clack...
I'll just print that out and I'm fine, huh?
scripsit LibertineR:
You know, the Right needs more spokesmen like you.
Thank you for pointing out the irrational emotionality of the Left, in such lucid, dispassionate terms.
scripsit LibertineR:
I'm sorry, you're going to have to explain this is more detail. The poor have as much money as the rich? How does that work?
scripsit BlueStone:
Thanks, amigo. At first glance, he looks pretty sharp.
scripsit Gortbusters.org:
Only about as insightful as saying ``Sticking your hand in a running blender is bad''... It really shouldn't be necessary to point out why concentration of media ownership is a bad thing.
I'm not sure I follow what you mean here.
scripsit ajakk:
We don't have ClearChannel?
Ordinarily I try just to ignore trolls, but someone actually modded this up...
scripsit LibertineR:
That is just horribly, horribly wrong. Let me give you some simple situations where this doesn't work:
I could go on ad nauseum. I think this is nauseating enough, though.
scripsit Sylver Dragon:
You can do that IFF a != b, else you're dividing by zero. You already knew that, though, right?
Still cute, though... I wonder what proportion of people can find where that doesn't work.
scripsit BetterThanCaesar:
I just did a quick search, and I think the Supreme Being has prior art there. Sorry.
scripsit SecretAsianMan:
Hmm. OTOH, if you conceive of the perfection of an application as the inverse of the number of bugs, then it is clear that zarro boogs equals infinite perfection. Now, we all know that a quantity cannot be fractionally infinite. Therefore, perfection is a binary quality.
An interesting by-product of this interpretation is that it supports certain unnamed proprietary software vendors' contentions that their products have no bugs, when we all know that such bugs exist. If, say, 25% of the application is bug-free, then it is 25% perfect, right? Well, 25% of infinity is still an infinite quantity. Since the number of bugs is the inverse of the perfection, the number of bugs is 1/infinity, or zero.
In fact, bugs do not exist at all. There are no bugs; there is only user error.
scripsit SecretAsianMan:
Um, I'd like to know which desktop OS has a noninteger number of apps working perfectly...
scripsit buffy:
Steve? I thought his wife's name was Melinda.
scripsit TGK:
Dude, I don't know what you google for, but I can't think of many things worse for people to think I was searching for than ``Add more inches!''
``No, man, really! Ask my wife!''
scripsit dnaumov:
Um, I already boycott most new movies because they suck. Not much will change :/
scripsit deepestblue:
Out of curiosity, did you get into free software after starting your degree in the States, or in India?
I disagree, actually. Of course, we could get into a pointless debate about how many is ``many'' ... but here are some examples: Connectiva Linux (BR) and Red Flag Linux (CN); Gnome (Miguel de Icaza, MX); Debian's glibc maintainer (GOTO Masanori, JP). To be sure, there are more Americans, and in particular Europeans, but the contribution of the Latinos and East Asians is not insignificant.
I think you may have hit on something here. I can imagine a South Asian peasant being shocked at the idea of a suburban American woman maintaining a vegetable garden ``for fun''... What may be lacking is simply a hacker culture (in the canonical sense of the term).