I think it's not much a religion, but more a philosophy. At least for me, a "geek religion" is an oxymoron: if a geek is a cold-minded individual that wants everything to make sense, he/she would have no religion at all.
But maybe I'm being too much INTJ on this;-) Everyone should believe what he/she wants and finds meaningful, if that doesn't mean any harm to anyone.
I'm sure most computer users aren't savvy enough to tell that it was a fake ad, since it was designed to look just like a message box in windows.
That's so true. I teach Windows & general computer related stuff to two persons, and the two of them fell for the "windows-alike-ad" trick. And not that they are dumb or anything; it's just that they know very little about computers and the Internet.
The funny thing is that these ads are always in english, but the Windows version used in the classes is all in spanish (I'm in Spain). And anyway, they click the ad. I'm sure it's some kind of animal response to flashing things:-)
C'mon, I understand using it for web browsing, but email?
Most of the posts that I see in mailing-lists are written with Pine, gnus (emacs' mail thingy), Mutt, KMail or MS Outlook. Maybe there's some Mozilla too, but it's not near "99%", not by a extremely long shot.
Ob-"I use": I'm very happy with Mutt myself, and my friends use also Mutt or Pine. Maybe we're all oldschool guys:-)
Ob-"Kids these days": Kids these days! When I was your age, we didn't have email. We had to shout to each other from miles and miles of distance! Sore throats were quite usual, trust me:-)
The spanish radio you say is probably Radio3. It's part of RNE, Radio Nacional de España (Spanish National Radio), and so it's paid by the state. There are 5 of these radios, each having its own realm: Radio5 (or was it Radio1?) is "only news", and Radio2 is only classical music, IIRC. There're also TVE1 and TVE2 (national TV channel 1 and 2, respectively; though TVE2 is usually called "La 2", "The 2nd [channel]"). TVE1 is your typical mass-media TV channel, with news reports, films and TV shows of varying quality. TVE2 is more "alternative", with a lot of documentals and more limited audience shows. BTW, while radio usually hasn't got any ads, TV is full of them. TVE2 has a little less, but in the whole there are a shitload of them anyway.
There would be no standard commercial way for this radio to survive if it were a independent one. But being all of us (tax payers, I mean) the ones that pay a bit for it, it's still there. And it rocks:-) I don't like some of the music they play, but they are the ones to listen if you want to hear indie music (or not-so-indie). They also patronize concerts for indie bands, and some other musical events.
I've got the impression, and correct me if I'm wrong, that in the USA you won't like having a radio like this. Too many people will complain about having to pay taxes for a radio that they won't listen. Also, many people would complain that a "state radio" couldn't be truly independent (in the sense of being not biased to favour govt's issues); and I agree with this, but in real life the supposed "independent" press and radio are quite biased too, without the govt having anything to do with them:-)
Anyway, I'm quite happy that a little part of my taxes is not spent only paying the 99% of useless politicians that we have in Spain;-)
I found very funny the messages that start like this. It seems no one dares to complain about Debian, because they've somewhat accepted that it's "superior" (note the quotes; I'm not saying it is, just quoting). Anyway, the "I love Debian, but I use <distro> because <reason>" is quite standard. Usually <reason> has been it's hard to install, and it seems that it's still the number one complaint. I agree to a point with that: it's hard if you know nothing about computers. I wouldn't ask my fashion designer fellow to install Debian only by himself (though, thanks to his friends, he's quite computer savvy now, and he's the "computer expert" in his own department:-)), but I won't ask him to install Mandrake or RH either. If you don't know what a partition is, you won't understand that you need to partition a HDD even if it's said in big, red and blinking letters, with a nice dancing HDD that sings aloud.
But anyway, on to the trolling:
<standard_debian_zealot_rant>
As other have said, Debian is not just apt. One of the reasons given, and something that I think most people don't value enough, is the ability to upgrade fully the distribution with 0 downtime. Ever tried to upgrade a rpm-based distro? I did only a few times, so correct me if I'm wrong; but usually it means inserting the CD with the new distro and upgrading. I'm not sure if that means that you have to reboot, but I'd dare to say that you have. And that is what a corporate environment needs? My ass.
There's a trend that I've always seen in Linux, since I started: people start with "flashy" distros (RH, SuSE, Mandrake, etc.), because they're easier to install. As they know more about Linux, they gradually change to Debian. This may be not true anymore; there are always the wanna-try-coolest-distro types that will install anything that is perceived as new and cool; I think that they're mostly into Gentoo now. But it has been true in my experience.
I know people that sysadmin RH boxes, and they usually like Debian once they've worked a bit with it. Debian may be hard to install, but in the long run is the easiest to maintain; and that's not only because of apt, but because it's very well thought off, and not driven just because marketing.
My site has to be really good, because it appears first if you just search "xouba" on Google;-)
Now, the funny thing is that "Xouba" is just a nick I use, which I took from an old cartoon show named "Comic Strip"; in galician (spoken in Galicia, north-west Spain) it means "little sardine" (you know, the fish). And my site is nothing about fishery or anything alike, it's just my music; I suppose that the people that arrive there searching something about the fish get a bit disappointed:-D
IM, at first (remember ICQ?), was about being online only to people you wanted to be available. This was a big difference with the big, noisy IRC networks. But then, recently some IM protocols/programs have added support for "rooms"; and now, this program adds people you don't know to your buddy list, becoming very, very similar to a common IRC channel, where you meet people unknown to you.
Of course, this is still very different of IRC, but anyway the trend seems to be similar to other issues (IDE vs SCSI, linux "desktop environments" vs Windows, and even Windows vs MacOS:-)), where the newer technology advances and becomes very similar to the older one. This is not bad, don't misunderstand me; newer technologies add new solutions and new approaches to the old problems. It's just that I find it funny that things like this happen so often:-)
All this IMHO, of course. Maybe it's true that thing of "People that don't know history...";-)
How I did my own Open Source music
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Ok, this is both karma-whoring and shameless plugging. All in just one comment!:-)
I did some kind of "music CD" by myself too, which I called Random Stuff. It's me playing guitar (no, it's not shred) and using samples for the backings. And it's free (as in beer and as in speech) for everyone to download (mp3 format now, but ogg are in the works) and use. So you could say, to some extent, that it's "open source music". It has some limitations, anyway:
You can download my music and redistribute it freely, but you can't sell it.
If you use part of it in your music, you have to give me credit.
Those are really the only limitations. IANAL, so I may be forgetting something extremely important:-) I use samples from free sites (as Loopasonic or Acid Planet), so I guess there's no problem on that part.
But then, of course, that's not all. I also sell self-burnt CDs to my friends, or anyone that wants one:-) The CDs have a data track and several audio tracks (the songs). In the data part there are HTML pages explaining who I am and what I used (software, hardware, etc.) and mp3 of the songs in the CD plus some rarities that have so bad quality that I didn't dare to put them as audio tracks. I made a cover for it using Kover and The Gimp. As a finishing touch, I sign each CD (all 7 of them, by the moment O:-)). It's a pity, but the central part of it, the music, was made using Sonic Foundry's Acid Music. I'd like to use an OSs app for Linux (or Windows, but OSS), but I found none as simple and useful as Acid Music. Maybe Ardour, but I hadn't tried it yet.
It's quite an amateurish attempt, but the secret aim behind it is not money, nor fame, nor critical acclaim; it's chicks!:-P;-)
studying something like Klingon, instead of some useless subject, like Portugese or Japanese.
Why not?
There are people that like to learn languages to speak and express themselves in those languages with people from other places. That is the people that will learn portuguese, japanese, swedish or other languages with a few million speakers.
But then, there is also another bunch of people that just likes languages. I.e., knowing how they work, why they work like that... and of course, creating new languages. That's what Tolkien did, that's what Marc Okrand did (he's the creator of Klingon), and that's what many people is doing. It has even a name, and it's conlanging (from CONstructed LANGuages). A wonderful introductory piece is at Boheme Magazine.
The official meeting place for conlangers is
CONLANG, a mailing-list that has been going strong since 1991. And for links, you have conlanglinks, with many resources to know more about conlanging or about languages in general. The audience of CONLANG is very diverse, but I'd dare to say that most of them are either programmers or language-related people (teachers, linguists, etc.)
Conlanging is fun. Really:-) I'm no linguist, but conlanging is something very creative, and for me it's quite like a programming problem: you have some rules (that you create), and have to use them to express all the things that a language can express. And from the time that you express something in your own created tongue, you're hooked %-)
Anyway, I can understand that I'm quite weird and that many people consider this a loss of time. But hey, even Eric Raymond likes it. Basically, if you like RP games and science-fiction and have somewhat of a creative streak, you very well could like conlanging.
My own conlang is named Unahoban, and a quite incomplete and sometimes incoherent grammar is
here.
"I'm a proud homeowner" == "The bank owns my house and my car, the VISA company owns some of my furniture, and my employer owns me because I need the money very dearly":-)
In Debian, every binary must have a man page explaining its use. It's part of the Debian policy, and a package not honoring this rule is taken as broken (i.e., it's reported as an error when building the package) So, again, Debian rocks:-)
Re:About this concept car
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239 MPG Car
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Highways here in Spain are quite different. The minimum speed is 60km/h (35mph) too, but the maximum "nominal" speed is 120 km/h (75 mph). In reality, police has many times acknowledged that they won't fine you if you stay under 140 km/h; and I've been driving at 160 km/h sometimes and been passed by some BMW/Mercedes (they're always these!:-)) at more than 200 km/h.
I don't remember when I registered, but I think it was this same year, or the previous O:-) Anyway, I knew/. since a few years ago, because of a friend of mine. I remember him sticking a Hemos and Taco picture in our LUG's HQ, and it was something like:
- (me) Who's that?
+ (him) Rob Malda
- Who?
+ Rob Malda, the one from Slashdot
- Slashwhat?
And a couple years after, IIRC, there it came Barrapunto, the spanish/. cousin. And then everyone started to put "weblogs" online, and we all were going to do great things with Linux, and it was going to rule the world, and...
<depressive>
Sigh. I remember that those years I was hoping for the "good years" to come. And now I realize that those were the good years.
I use nothing but OS X on the beast (Up the RAM to at least 384Mb)
Ehm... you don't mean that it *needs* 384MB, right?
<rant>I'm beginning to think that everyone is thinking that OS X is great just because of the everyone-says-it syndrome: there are a few people that keep on repeating that "OS X is cool" again and again, and the feeble minded just swallow it. You know, brainwashing. Yeah, it may be cool, but all this switch fever is something that I barely understand.</rant>
In fact, the climate change is not totally man made. There has been a lot of climate changes along the history of Earth, and there will be yet a few more until the End of Time (tm).
I read some of this in a page about paleography, but I don't find the link now:-/ I'll try to explain, anyway. It made sense when I read it, so I guess it makes sense now too:-)
Earth has had warm and cool times. There were some times (like the ones the dinosaurs lived) of warm global temperature, reaching mid temperatures of 20. This means crocodiles (sp?) and palm trees near the poles, tropical humid weather all across the globe, etc.
And then there were the glacial periods, which we know a bit more: hairy rhinoceros, mammoths, snow a go-go, and that stuff. Man ("homo sapiens", I mean) appeared after one of these, IIRC.
The times of transition from one to another were usually marked by global extinctions and another funny events.
So, in my humble and not remotely knowledgeable opinion, global warming is caused by men *accelerating* a natural proccess, not *creating* it. It's bad anyway, but it's different:-)
Why do you have to put things like these when I've already closed the deal for a 2nd-hand Palm? 8-(
Kidding, of course;-) This looks cooooool. It's too expensive for me yet, but in a few years I'm sure it'll be way cheaper - or my salary way higher, so everything is peachy anyway:-)
Ok, don't get nasty. Let's say "naive", instead of "stupid":-)
Many people that get into Internet don't know *anything* about it, about its culture, its "traditions". So, when they receive a spam mail, first they wonder who is that "glkd23@hotmail.com" that sent them this mail. And after, when they read the mail (why shouldn't they do it?), maybe they think: "Hey, this could be true. If it wasn't, it wouldn't be on the Net!".
I know it's stupid, but I really believe that many people are simply not "in the know", and don't understand the many things that compose the Internet. As they usually say, "don't blame on stupidity what you can blame on ignorance";-) (yes, it's not like that exactly, but I just wanted to make a point:-))
... or people talking about "switching to a Mac" seem to have a *obscene* amount of money to spend in computers?
I don't know exactly what's the cost of a new Mac, but IIRC it's quite more expensive than a PC with the same features. And then, people buying Macs buy gorgeous LCD monitors, and all the latest-and-hippest hardware. That smells like big money to me, too much for a IT proleatrian:-)
Besides, there's the software. I know that now you can use many OSS apps with OSX, and I think it's great; but the case is that, if I'm going to use the same apps that I use in Linux, why switch?:-) And one of the reasons I use OSS is because it's free (like free beer). Call me anything you want, but it's just like that:-)
Anyway, I'm getting eager and eager to try a Mac someday. Hey, if everyone talks so good about them, at least it may be worth try it:-) And I'd like to try it with some "Mac geek" around, because if I tried it on my own I'm sure I'd be losing many of the features it has. But til that day, I'm a Mac-skeptic:-)
There's something I've always thought about these times: we're living in the "awakening" of future computing. This means that many of the people that made all of this (Internet, PCs, Linux, Windows...) possible, are still alive. Many of the founders of future computing are still alive, among us. I'm part of a LUG, and I said sometimes that it would be really cool to be able to bring some of this people, to speak with them. Imagine chatting about C with Kernighan or Ritchie? About Linux with Alan Cox, Linus or any of the kernel hackers?
To see this in context: it's like if we could speak live with Newton or Einstein. This people have done things that changed our world deeply, and we have the chance to ask them about what and why they did.
Oh well. I know what I want to tell, but I don't know how. Fsck it. Djystra was one of this people that I always heard about, and now he's gone. Makes you feel a bit older (specially with my birthday in a few days).
Re:Programming is music, not art.
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That's the slackjawed 'improvisation' method of composing music. You shouldn't characterize all music composition as being 'done' that way.
Why not? Isn't the 75% of modern music composed like that?
And BTW, I did quite a bit of "real" composing, without jamming, on my tracker years. Mostly because I didn't know how to play guitar yet:-) And I don't usually jam along and just "record what is worth playing back", but throw a bit of thinking into it.
Re:Programming is music, not art.
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Hacker Survey
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Firstly, I am a classical pianist, who dabbles in composition and studio production, and I was a computer science major.
Oh man. <self-compassive rant> I don't know if to hate you or to admire you:-) I'm trying to teach myself some piano, and it's friggin' hard. And I've tried to get a degree in computer science, and it's still "in the works", after too many years. Now tell me that you've got a nice wife and bring me that gun;-) </self-compassive rant>
I think it's very different coding from composing. Coding, though creative, is just putting the means to an end: you want that result, and you have "only" (I know it's the hard part, that's why I put the quotes) to find some means to reach it.
Composing isn't like that. While composing, you don't even know where you are going:-) I play guitar, and I played with trackers (Scream Tracker 3.2/3.21, anyone?) on my teens. I even burned a CD with a few songs (well, all instrumental) recently. Maybe I put them on the web eventually:-) But I'm digressing; what I wanted to say is that with music, there's always a surprise. Maybe you wanted to use that cool bass sample to do a drum'n'bass Chemical Brothers-alike song, and as you develop it, you finish by taking that sample out and doing a reggae thing:-) It can happen something similar with coding: maybe that function you did doesn't work in that program, but fits nicely in that other one you were stuck at. But you always have a clear idea of what you're doing. Or at least I have when I code:-)
So, I'm sorry boys, but coding is not an art to me. Forgive me for thinking different:-) It's undoubtly a creative proccess, and I like it as much as composing. But not an art. Sorry if I broke your bubble:-)
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's not much a religion, but more a philosophy. At least for me, a "geek religion" is an oxymoron: if a geek is a cold-minded individual that wants everything to make sense, he/she would have no religion at all.
But maybe I'm being too much INTJ on this ;-) Everyone should believe what he/she wants and finds meaningful, if that doesn't mean any harm to anyone.
That's so true. I teach Windows & general computer related stuff to two persons, and the two of them fell for the "windows-alike-ad" trick. And not that they are dumb or anything; it's just that they know very little about computers and the Internet.
The funny thing is that these ads are always in english, but the Windows version used in the classes is all in spanish (I'm in Spain). And anyway, they click the ad. I'm sure it's some kind of animal response to flashing things :-)
C'mon, I understand using it for web browsing, but email?
Most of the posts that I see in mailing-lists are written with Pine, gnus (emacs' mail thingy), Mutt, KMail or MS Outlook. Maybe there's some Mozilla too, but it's not near "99%", not by a extremely long shot.
Ob-"I use": I'm very happy with Mutt myself, and my friends use also Mutt or Pine. Maybe we're all oldschool guys :-)
Ob-"Kids these days": Kids these days! When I was your age, we didn't have email. We had to shout to each other from miles and miles of distance! Sore throats were quite usual, trust me :-)
The spanish radio you say is probably Radio3. It's part of RNE, Radio Nacional de España (Spanish National Radio), and so it's paid by the state. There are 5 of these radios, each having its own realm: Radio5 (or was it Radio1?) is "only news", and Radio2 is only classical music, IIRC. There're also TVE1 and TVE2 (national TV channel 1 and 2, respectively; though TVE2 is usually called "La 2", "The 2nd [channel]"). TVE1 is your typical mass-media TV channel, with news reports, films and TV shows of varying quality. TVE2 is more "alternative", with a lot of documentals and more limited audience shows. BTW, while radio usually hasn't got any ads, TV is full of them. TVE2 has a little less, but in the whole there are a shitload of them anyway.
There would be no standard commercial way for this radio to survive if it were a independent one. But being all of us (tax payers, I mean) the ones that pay a bit for it, it's still there. And it rocks :-) I don't like some of the music they play, but they are the ones to listen if you want to hear indie music (or not-so-indie). They also patronize concerts for indie bands, and some other musical events.
I've got the impression, and correct me if I'm wrong, that in the USA you won't like having a radio like this. Too many people will complain about having to pay taxes for a radio that they won't listen. Also, many people would complain that a "state radio" couldn't be truly independent (in the sense of being not biased to favour govt's issues); and I agree with this, but in real life the supposed "independent" press and radio are quite biased too, without the govt having anything to do with them :-)
Anyway, I'm quite happy that a little part of my taxes is not spent only paying the 99% of useless politicians that we have in Spain ;-)
I found very funny the messages that start like this. It seems no one dares to complain about Debian, because they've somewhat accepted that it's "superior" (note the quotes; I'm not saying it is, just quoting). Anyway, the "I love Debian, but I use <distro> because <reason>" is quite standard. Usually <reason> has been it's hard to install, and it seems that it's still the number one complaint. I agree to a point with that: it's hard if you know nothing about computers. I wouldn't ask my fashion designer fellow to install Debian only by himself (though, thanks to his friends, he's quite computer savvy now, and he's the "computer expert" in his own department :-)), but I won't ask him to install Mandrake or RH either. If you don't know what a partition is, you won't understand that you need to partition a HDD even if it's said in big, red and blinking letters, with a nice dancing HDD that sings aloud.
But anyway, on to the trolling:
<standard_debian_zealot_rant>As other have said, Debian is not just apt. One of the reasons given, and something that I think most people don't value enough, is the ability to upgrade fully the distribution with 0 downtime. Ever tried to upgrade a rpm-based distro? I did only a few times, so correct me if I'm wrong; but usually it means inserting the CD with the new distro and upgrading. I'm not sure if that means that you have to reboot, but I'd dare to say that you have. And that is what a corporate environment needs? My ass.
There's a trend that I've always seen in Linux, since I started: people start with "flashy" distros (RH, SuSE, Mandrake, etc.), because they're easier to install. As they know more about Linux, they gradually change to Debian. This may be not true anymore; there are always the wanna-try-coolest-distro types that will install anything that is perceived as new and cool; I think that they're mostly into Gentoo now. But it has been true in my experience.
I know people that sysadmin RH boxes, and they usually like Debian once they've worked a bit with it. Debian may be hard to install, but in the long run is the easiest to maintain; and that's not only because of apt, but because it's very well thought off, and not driven just because marketing.
</standard_debian_zealot_rant>C'mon, -1 Redundant or Troll. I've earned it :-)
Yep. That's why there is Debian/NetBSD.
My site has to be really good, because it appears first if you just search "xouba" on Google ;-)
Now, the funny thing is that "Xouba" is just a nick I use, which I took from an old cartoon show named "Comic Strip"; in galician (spoken in Galicia, north-west Spain) it means "little sardine" (you know, the fish). And my site is nothing about fishery or anything alike, it's just my music; I suppose that the people that arrive there searching something about the fish get a bit disappointed :-D
IM, at first (remember ICQ?), was about being online only to people you wanted to be available. This was a big difference with the big, noisy IRC networks. But then, recently some IM protocols/programs have added support for "rooms"; and now, this program adds people you don't know to your buddy list, becoming very, very similar to a common IRC channel, where you meet people unknown to you.
Of course, this is still very different of IRC, but anyway the trend seems to be similar to other issues (IDE vs SCSI, linux "desktop environments" vs Windows, and even Windows vs MacOS :-)), where the newer technology advances and becomes very similar to the older one. This is not bad, don't misunderstand me; newer technologies add new solutions and new approaches to the old problems. It's just that I find it funny that things like this happen so often :-)
All this IMHO, of course. Maybe it's true that thing of "People that don't know history ..." ;-)
Ok, this is both karma-whoring and shameless plugging. All in just one comment! :-)
I did some kind of "music CD" by myself too, which I called Random Stuff. It's me playing guitar (no, it's not shred) and using samples for the backings. And it's free (as in beer and as in speech) for everyone to download (mp3 format now, but ogg are in the works) and use. So you could say, to some extent, that it's "open source music". It has some limitations, anyway:
Those are really the only limitations. IANAL, so I may be forgetting something extremely important :-) I use samples from free sites (as Loopasonic or Acid Planet), so I guess there's no problem on that part.
But then, of course, that's not all. I also sell self-burnt CDs to my friends, or anyone that wants one :-) The CDs have a data track and several audio tracks (the songs). In the data part there are HTML pages explaining who I am and what I used (software, hardware, etc.) and mp3 of the songs in the CD plus some rarities that have so bad quality that I didn't dare to put them as audio tracks. I made a cover for it using Kover and The Gimp. As a finishing touch, I sign each CD (all 7 of them, by the moment O:-)). It's a pity, but the central part of it, the music, was made using Sonic Foundry's Acid Music. I'd like to use an OSs app for Linux (or Windows, but OSS), but I found none as simple and useful as Acid Music. Maybe Ardour, but I hadn't tried it yet.
It's quite an amateurish attempt, but the secret aim behind it is not money, nor fame, nor critical acclaim; it's chicks! :-P ;-)
Why not?
There are people that like to learn languages to speak and express themselves in those languages with people from other places. That is the people that will learn portuguese, japanese, swedish or other languages with a few million speakers.
But then, there is also another bunch of people that just likes languages. I.e., knowing how they work, why they work like that ... and of course, creating new languages. That's what Tolkien did, that's what Marc Okrand did (he's the creator of Klingon), and that's what many people is doing. It has even a name, and it's conlanging (from CONstructed LANGuages). A wonderful introductory piece is at Boheme Magazine.
The official meeting place for conlangers is CONLANG, a mailing-list that has been going strong since 1991. And for links, you have conlanglinks, with many resources to know more about conlanging or about languages in general. The audience of CONLANG is very diverse, but I'd dare to say that most of them are either programmers or language-related people (teachers, linguists, etc.)
Conlanging is fun. Really :-) I'm no linguist, but conlanging is something very creative, and for me it's quite like a programming problem: you have some rules (that you create), and have to use them to express all the things that a language can express. And from the time that you express something in your own created tongue, you're hooked %-)
Anyway, I can understand that I'm quite weird and that many people consider this a loss of time. But hey, even Eric Raymond likes it. Basically, if you like RP games and science-fiction and have somewhat of a creative streak, you very well could like conlanging.
My own conlang is named Unahoban, and a quite incomplete and sometimes incoherent grammar is here.
"I'm a proud homeowner" == "The bank owns my house and my car, the VISA company owns some of my furniture, and my employer owns me because I need the money very dearly" :-)
Those times when cell phones were useful, and not only trendy gadgets.
Hmmm.
Ok, I lied. Mod me down.
The guy from deadmedia.org, Tom Jennings ... is the same Tom Jennings of Fidonet fame? :-m
If so, I bow before you, master! ;-)
In Debian, every binary must have a man page explaining its use. It's part of the Debian policy, and a package not honoring this rule is taken as broken (i.e., it's reported as an error when building the package) So, again, Debian rocks :-)
Highways here in Spain are quite different. The minimum speed is 60km/h (35mph) too, but the maximum "nominal" speed is 120 km/h (75 mph). In reality, police has many times acknowledged that they won't fine you if you stay under 140 km/h; and I've been driving at 160 km/h sometimes and been passed by some BMW/Mercedes (they're always these! :-)) at more than 200 km/h.
So, there's no effective speed limit, I guess :-)
I don't remember when I registered, but I think it was this same year, or the previous O:-) Anyway, I knew /. since a few years ago, because of a friend of mine. I remember him sticking a Hemos and Taco picture in our LUG's HQ, and it was something like:
- (me) Who's that?+ (him) Rob Malda
- Who?
+ Rob Malda, the one from Slashdot
- Slashwhat?
And a couple years after, IIRC, there it came Barrapunto, the spanish /. cousin. And then everyone started to put "weblogs" online, and we all were going to do great things with Linux, and it was going to rule the world, and ...
<depressive>Sigh. I remember that those years I was hoping for the "good years" to come. And now I realize that those were the good years.
</depressive>Anyway, congrats /. Keep up the good work.
Ehm ... you don't mean that it *needs* 384MB, right?
<rant>I'm beginning to think that everyone is thinking that OS X is great just because of the everyone-says-it syndrome: there are a few people that keep on repeating that "OS X is cool" again and again, and the feeble minded just swallow it. You know, brainwashing. Yeah, it may be cool, but all this switch fever is something that I barely understand.</rant>
And why, you wonder?
Because we were GPUL before this.
(Kidding, of course, in case someone didn't notice :-))
In fact, the climate change is not totally man made. There has been a lot of climate changes along the history of Earth, and there will be yet a few more until the End of Time (tm).
:-/ I'll try to explain, anyway. It made sense when I read it, so I guess it makes sense now too :-)
:-)
I read some of this in a page about paleography, but I don't find the link now
Earth has had warm and cool times. There were some times (like the ones the dinosaurs lived) of warm global temperature, reaching mid temperatures of 20. This means crocodiles (sp?) and palm trees near the poles, tropical humid weather all across the globe, etc.
And then there were the glacial periods, which we know a bit more: hairy rhinoceros, mammoths, snow a go-go, and that stuff. Man ("homo sapiens", I mean) appeared after one of these, IIRC.
The times of transition from one to another were usually marked by global extinctions and another funny events.
So, in my humble and not remotely knowledgeable opinion, global warming is caused by men *accelerating* a natural proccess, not *creating* it. It's bad anyway, but it's different
Why do you have to put things like these when I've already closed the deal for a 2nd-hand Palm? 8-(
;-) This looks cooooool. It's too expensive for me yet, but in a few years I'm sure it'll be way cheaper - or my salary way higher, so everything is peachy anyway :-)
Kidding, of course
Ok, don't get nasty. Let's say "naive", instead of "stupid" :-)
;-) (yes, it's not like that exactly, but I just wanted to make a point :-))
Many people that get into Internet don't know *anything* about it, about its culture, its "traditions". So, when they receive a spam mail, first they wonder who is that "glkd23@hotmail.com" that sent them this mail. And after, when they read the mail (why shouldn't they do it?), maybe they think: "Hey, this could be true. If it wasn't, it wouldn't be on the Net!".
I know it's stupid, but I really believe that many people are simply not "in the know", and don't understand the many things that compose the Internet. As they usually say, "don't blame on stupidity what you can blame on ignorance"
... or people talking about "switching to a Mac" seem to have a *obscene* amount of money to spend in computers?
:-)
:-) And one of the reasons I use OSS is because it's free (like free beer). Call me anything you want, but it's just like that :-)
:-) And I'd like to try it with some "Mac geek" around, because if I tried it on my own I'm sure I'd be losing many of the features it has. But til that day, I'm a Mac-skeptic :-)
I don't know exactly what's the cost of a new Mac, but IIRC it's quite more expensive than a PC with the same features. And then, people buying Macs buy gorgeous LCD monitors, and all the latest-and-hippest hardware. That smells like big money to me, too much for a IT proleatrian
Besides, there's the software. I know that now you can use many OSS apps with OSX, and I think it's great; but the case is that, if I'm going to use the same apps that I use in Linux, why switch?
Anyway, I'm getting eager and eager to try a Mac someday. Hey, if everyone talks so good about them, at least it may be worth try it
There's something I've always thought about these times: we're living in the "awakening" of future computing. This means that many of the people that made all of this (Internet, PCs, Linux, Windows ...) possible, are still alive. Many of the founders of future computing are still alive, among us. I'm part of a LUG, and I said sometimes that it would be really cool to be able to bring some of this people, to speak with them. Imagine chatting about C with Kernighan or Ritchie? About Linux with Alan Cox, Linus or any of the kernel hackers?
To see this in context: it's like if we could speak live with Newton or Einstein. This people have done things that changed our world deeply, and we have the chance to ask them about what and why they did.
Oh well. I know what I want to tell, but I don't know how. Fsck it. Djystra was one of this people that I always heard about, and now he's gone. Makes you feel a bit older (specially with my birthday in a few days).
Why not? Isn't the 75% of modern music composed like that?
And BTW, I did quite a bit of "real" composing, without jamming, on my tracker years. Mostly because I didn't know how to play guitar yet :-) And I don't usually jam along and just "record what is worth playing back", but throw a bit of thinking into it.
Oh man. <self-compassive rant> I don't know if to hate you or to admire you :-) I'm trying to teach myself some piano, and it's friggin' hard. And I've tried to get a degree in computer science, and it's still "in the works", after too many years. Now tell me that you've got a nice wife and bring me that gun ;-) </self-compassive rant>
I think it's very different coding from composing. Coding, though creative, is just putting the means to an end: you want that result, and you have "only" (I know it's the hard part, that's why I put the quotes) to find some means to reach it.
Composing isn't like that. While composing, you don't even know where you are going :-) I play guitar, and I played with trackers (Scream Tracker 3.2/3.21, anyone?) on my teens. I even burned a CD with a few songs (well, all instrumental) recently. Maybe I put them on the web eventually :-) But I'm digressing; what I wanted to say is that with music, there's always a surprise. Maybe you wanted to use that cool bass sample to do a drum'n'bass Chemical Brothers-alike song, and as you develop it, you finish by taking that sample out and doing a reggae thing :-) It can happen something similar with coding: maybe that function you did doesn't work in that program, but fits nicely in that other one you were stuck at. But you always have a clear idea of what you're doing. Or at least I have when I code :-)
So, I'm sorry boys, but coding is not an art to me. Forgive me for thinking different :-) It's undoubtly a creative proccess, and I like it as much as composing. But not an art. Sorry if I broke your bubble :-)