If anything, us Unix users should be trying to convert as many people as we can to our OS
Why?
To what end? As a *BSD person, what do you really care how many people run NetBSD instead of Windows 2000? Does it matter? Does it affect your life somehow? What, in the proverbial nutshell, do you bloody care? If I was a windows user and you came along with your attitude that you "should be trying to convert" me, I'd want to smack you.
In many cases the response "Slackware isn't for you" may be perfectly true. Maybe that person should cut his teeth on Fedora or Gentoo or one of the other easy distros where things are done for you rather than one where you have to already be a genius to get it working. That's fine. If starting out at moderate complexity is too overwhelming, then maybe that user should start out with something easier.
A lot of times, however, the situation is even more simple than that. As someone who spent 4 good years of my life on a #linux helping people get off the ground with all variations of that particular OS, I can tell you there are some people who just simply should stay with the Redmond distribution. Some people want you do actually do it for them. I'm not exagerating. Some people literally ask if they can give you a root shell to configure X for them. Look... Learning to use a new OS and being stumped by the new paradigm is one thing. Being a lazy (l)user is another altogether.
Based on my personal experience, 2 out of 10 times the "X just isn't for you." means "pick something a little less complicated to cut your teeth on. The other 8/10 it means "No... I'm not going to spoon feed you your applesauce. When you're willing to actually _LEARN_ something, then you can try something other than that which you know by heart, but until then, go away."
If all you want is to "USE THE COMPUTER", then perhaps you should put down the SuSE box you got from Best Buy and stick with what you've got. If I just wanted to "GO TO THE STORE", then I wouldn't drive a muscle car because I wouldn't want to be bothered tinkering with it. But I do drive a muscle car because the tinkering is half the fun. Same thing applies to computers. You will never get the linux people to accomodate the windows people because they just don't give a damn if linux becomes mainstream. That's not the point. The point is the fun of tinkering. I'm sure the same could be said of the *BSD guys as well, but I only know one of them and he's an elitist prick.;)
Okay... If you don't like that analogy, here's a better one. Chip making requires fab plants that you don't have access to as a dork in his basement, therefore a dork in his basement can't teach himself to be a chip designer. That is your basic argument. I will counter it with this analogy: You need lots of heavy equipment, materials and teams of laborers to build a skyscraper that you don't have access to as a dork in his basement, therefore a dork in his basement can't teach himself to be a skyscraper designer.
Your argument is flawed in that you don't have to "produce" something in order to "design" it. You can design all the chips you want without ever building a single one. You can design skyscrapers, airplanes, nano-bots, rocketships, and toothpaste tubes all while sitting comfortably in your basement. You can teach yourself to build any of these things by reading the appropriate books, trade journals, etc... You might not be great at it, and your designs may suck, but you can teach yourself to make the designs and that's really all "self-taught chip designer" means.
Fsck that! Printers are expensive! Send in the warranty card, just fudge the serial number on it. Send them back the lump of molten goo and demand your money back (which you then use to buy the next printer). With the printer duly melted, they won't know that the warranty card was a fake!
I don't know about the rest of the/. crowd, but when I think of someone trying to create a large quantity of documents for distribution, and trying to remain anonymous in doing so, I don't picture that person doing so at a public kiosk with pimple-faced employees and lots of security cameras.
Who care what they feel? When you take 60-70% of their incomes it REDUCES THEIR POWER. They still have enough money to buy mansions and fancy cars, but they do not then after taxes have enough to manipulate the voters and the govt through media propaganda.
Then why, sir, would they work so hard to become rich? Why would you bust your nuts to make a bunch of coin if somebody was always going to adjust your tax rate such that you never had any left over? Why not make "just enough" so that you can be comfortable? In addition to the other horrible side effects pointed out by other posters, your lopsided "vision" also encourages marginal performance. Whee! What a gem of a country we would live in then, eh?
It's embarrasing that you got modded insightful with a statement like "Then there would be no roads or schools, and no forms of finacial support". (note, I assume you meant financial, not finacial)
There was a time in the not too distant past, relatively speaking, when the United States got along just fine without the government providing the things you mention. Farmers formed Co-Ops to build grain elevators and railway extensions to them. Co-Ops could easily take over road maintenance for most of the country. People supported each other in hard financial times through charitable giving. Charitable giving, by the way, is way up in most red states (read, rural areas) relative to blue states. People educated their children in schools without the government paying for it. The community built a school house and local residents taught the students. This could easily become commonplace again if the governemnt backed out of public education. Your notion that without the government the world would fall apart just isn't supported by history. The world hasn't always turned by the power of government spending and there are plenty of viable alternatives.
Please, tell me where your sig is from! Every time I see it I hear the disembodied voice of some comedian or actor shouting it, but I just can't figure out where I heard it.
What, make people who use rural roads that are far less efficient, getting two or three cars per day, pay more than city drivers who densely share the same roads far more efficiently?
I'm not sure about wherever you might live, but where I'm from, even the most desolate rural road gets more traffic than that. Roads that are as infrequently used as you describe are typically covered with a thin layer of gravel and are not really maintained at all, so there is not all that much money being spent to keep them up. Most roads in rural areas see way more traffic than you describe and are maintained in the following manner:
Once every five years or so send one guy and one truck out to drop cold patch in the worst of the potholes
Once every twenty years or so, resurface with a thin layer of asphalt if the road goes by something important like a school. Otherwise, substitute gravel glued down with a layer of tar for real asphalt
When it snows more than a foot at a time, maybe eventually send a plow down them a day or two later
That's it. That's the entire maintenance schedule. Now, compare that with, say, Lake Shore Drive in Chicago.
Resurface every two years or so with thin layer of asphalt
Rebuild the entire road every 20 years or so with all new substrate, concrete, new bridges, etc...
Fix problems caused by substandard rebuilding job when the guy who is buddies with the mayor's brother pocketed half the money instead of doing it right.
Install massive concrete planters
send platoon of landscapers out 4 times a year to put new seasonal plants in planters and along median and shoulders
send mowing crews out every weekend 30 weeks a year to mow median and shoulders
send lightbulb replacement crews out to install fancy decorative lighting fixtures along the entire length of the road
send crews of light bulb changers out every couple weeks to maintain lights
every time a sixteenth of an inch of snow falls send an entire division of plows and salt trucks to scour the road two or three times an hour
send crews out every weekend to pick up the trash that enlightened, sophisticated, high-tax-paying city dwellers throw out their windows as they drive down the road at 3x the posted speed limit doing more damage to the road than it was designed to take
I'm sure I'm forgetting some of the more subtle points of maintaining an urban road like stripes (rural roads typically aren't afforded the luxury of actual stripes...) and traffic controls (...or traffic controls), but the point is, take any one component of the budget used to maintain a single Chicago street like LSD, Michigan, Clark, State, Wacker, Roosevelt, etc... and spend that money where I live. You could repave, light, and paint stripes on every road in my town for what Chicago spends on landscaping alone for one of their roads in a single year.
This entire thread is a fabulous illustration of just how little grasp city dwellers have of what goes on in the land of well water. Lots of "brilliant insight" based on "facts" I can only describe as "delusional"
We can _import_ more food from _third_world_countries_??? Where, by God, do you think much of the food we produce goes? And do you honestly think that the American agricultural system makes food _more_ expensive? American farms are not simply a man and his family out cultivating the earth with hand tools. American farms are massive highly efficient crop growing mechanisms. American farms grow so much food so cheaply that we practically give it away to many third-world countries that can't grow sufficient food for themselves. While there are a few specialized subsidies that I don't fully grok, like tobacco farm subsidies, many of the subsidies paid to farmers (in the midwest, at least) are in the form of "We'll pay you _not_ to grow crops on this plot of ground". These are in place usually for things like erosion management, not welfare or crop price management.
The other part of your post, that rural areas consume more in tax dollars than they contribute, seems rather suspect. Could you please post a source for that information? I live in the sticks and I work in Chicago. I see both sides every day. Taxpayers payed for millenium park. Tax payers paid for the skyway. Tax payers paid for soldier field, the destruction of meigs field and its subsequent conversion into a park. Tax payers paid for the renovation of lake shore drive, expansion of McCormick place, hired trucks that sit idle, and the destruction and rebuilding of every major route into and out of this city for the last couple of years. Taxpayers carry the burden for Cows on Parade, Bobblehead baseball player statues, wrought iron railings on just about every damned thing, new planters around every city administration building, and a towing program that steals people's cars and sells them to the towing company at scrap prices. Tax payers pony up to dye the river green, host the Taste of Chicago, and put on the air and water show. When massive amounts of rain or snow fall, the farmers smile and welcome it. A city sends out hundreds of taxpayer-sponsored workers to clear the snow or put up signs and block traffic on flooded streets that the taxpayer-sponsored storm sewers aren't maintained properly to drain. That's only a small percentage of the money-sink that each major modern city has become and doesn't even include the welfare state (government assisted or provided housing), the salaries of the thousands employed in the bloated beurocracies, or the added law enforcement/fire protection required in a major city. If you have information indicating that rural areas are consuming more than their fair share of tax dollars, I'd like very much to see it, because I just don't know where the equivalent amount of money could possibly go.
I may be mistaken as well, but we use a similar kind of ballot and voting machine in my state. And metal bars on either side of the ballot would prevent you being able to turn the page to vote for other races such as congressmen, judges, refferendums. Each race is one page and you flip the pages to vote in each race. The binding is offset so that each page uncovers its unique set of punch holes as it is turned. It's a fairly intuitive and simple system once you get the opportunity to take two seconds to stand in front of it and use it.
Sorry, but you've got it backward. The "Punch the hole on the next line down from the one I want to vote for" folks are the ones who didn't seem to notice the big black arrows linking the candidates' names to the holes. The ballot is not confusing at all. Each candidate has his name in a box. Each box has an arrow that points to a specific hole. If you can't figure that out, you probably shouldn't be involved in a process that decides the fate of the world.
Well, it wasn't Gore who directed the show, it was the lawyers and Democratic party being desperate.
Gore was the _candidate._ He could have done what Kerry did at any time and the whole embarassing escapade would have come to a halt. If the candidate quits, all the lawers in the world can't make him unquit.
As for your point regarding a full state recount, allow me to quote from a CNN article:
While it's good for your karma to be condescending to the military on/., may I suggest that when you run into an ex-marine or ex army on the street you refrain from calling him "Boy". It might be bad for your dentistry.
Referring to trained soldiers as "boys and girls" as though they've been plucked from their day care centers and dropped into Iraq with naught but the clothes on their backs and an M16 might be considered a teeeney bit insulting to some of them.
Okay... I defended US soldiers and identified myself as not being a left wing pacifist. Make with the -1 flamebait mods.
Welcome to clue 101. Even if you didn't elect Kerry, you still did a good thing by voting for him (if you don't like bush) by helping to erode his mandate to pursue his agenda. We had roughly 52/48 in the popular vote with third parties turning out damned near invisible margins. If all the people who voted Nader last cycle did so this time around it would have been 52/45 and Bush's mandate would have been wholly undeniable. Had the youth/Mtv vote actually put down their bongs and shown up at the polls, Bush would have a very hard time justifying the pursuit of his agenda because his mandate from the masses would have been but the most razor thin of margins.
So perhaps you ought to take a course or two in how the world of presidential politics works before you shoot your mouth off about wasted votes.
Oh, and by the way... The country has been taken over by a MAJORITY of terrified conservatives
"the war in Iraq is breeding more terrorism than we would have had otherwise" "Vote for Kerry or there will be a draft" "There is a backdoor draft" "Bush is going to kill social security and your grandma is going to have to eat dog food." "The whole world will hate us and we'll be ostracised from the global stage" "Bush is allowing the dollar to weaken in international markets and our entire economy is on the verge of collapse" Had Kerry won, would be be talking about terrified liberals?
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If anything, us Unix users should be trying to convert as many people as we can to our OS
Why?
To what end? As a *BSD person, what do you really care how many people run NetBSD instead of Windows 2000? Does it matter? Does it affect your life somehow? What, in the proverbial nutshell, do you bloody care? If I was a windows user and you came along with your attitude that you "should be trying to convert" me, I'd want to smack you.
In many cases the response "Slackware isn't for you" may be perfectly true. Maybe that person should cut his teeth on Fedora or Gentoo or one of the other easy distros where things are done for you rather than one where you have to already be a genius to get it working. That's fine. If starting out at moderate complexity is too overwhelming, then maybe that user should start out with something easier.
A lot of times, however, the situation is even more simple than that. As someone who spent 4 good years of my life on a #linux helping people get off the ground with all variations of that particular OS, I can tell you there are some people who just simply should stay with the Redmond distribution. Some people want you do actually do it for them. I'm not exagerating. Some people literally ask if they can give you a root shell to configure X for them. Look... Learning to use a new OS and being stumped by the new paradigm is one thing. Being a lazy (l)user is another altogether.
Based on my personal experience, 2 out of 10 times the "X just isn't for you." means "pick something a little less complicated to cut your teeth on. The other 8/10 it means "No... I'm not going to spoon feed you your applesauce. When you're willing to actually _LEARN_ something, then you can try something other than that which you know by heart, but until then, go away."
If all you want is to "USE THE COMPUTER", then perhaps you should put down the SuSE box you got from Best Buy and stick with what you've got. If I just wanted to "GO TO THE STORE", then I wouldn't drive a muscle car because I wouldn't want to be bothered tinkering with it. But I do drive a muscle car because the tinkering is half the fun. Same thing applies to computers. You will never get the linux people to accomodate the windows people because they just don't give a damn if linux becomes mainstream. That's not the point. The point is the fun of tinkering. I'm sure the same could be said of the *BSD guys as well, but I only know one of them and he's an elitist prick. ;)
Sheesh. I bet you split hairs with Sam when he yelled "Move to where the food is! Oh! OOOHHH!"
Abandon earth? Don't we have sufficeint computing power to figure out where on earth it will land? Can't we just abandon that one spot?
Okay... If you don't like that analogy, here's a better one. Chip making requires fab plants that you don't have access to as a dork in his basement, therefore a dork in his basement can't teach himself to be a chip designer. That is your basic argument. I will counter it with this analogy: You need lots of heavy equipment, materials and teams of laborers to build a skyscraper that you don't have access to as a dork in his basement, therefore a dork in his basement can't teach himself to be a skyscraper designer.
Your argument is flawed in that you don't have to "produce" something in order to "design" it. You can design all the chips you want without ever building a single one. You can design skyscrapers, airplanes, nano-bots, rocketships, and toothpaste tubes all while sitting comfortably in your basement. You can teach yourself to build any of these things by reading the appropriate books, trade journals, etc... You might not be great at it, and your designs may suck, but you can teach yourself to make the designs and that's really all "self-taught chip designer" means.
and skip everything that was marked with the universal "this is not a bug" notation:
Maybe they should go back and count again.
I think a better idea would be to tarpit the sender if the message is SPAM for as long as possible before ultimately rejecting the message.
Fsck that! Printers are expensive! Send in the warranty card, just fudge the serial number on it. Send them back the lump of molten goo and demand your money back (which you then use to buy the next printer). With the printer duly melted, they won't know that the warranty card was a fake!
Now... Where did I put my ion cannon?
I don't know about the rest of the /. crowd, but when I think of someone trying to create a large quantity of documents for distribution, and trying to remain anonymous in doing so, I don't picture that person doing so at a public kiosk with pimple-faced employees and lots of security cameras.
:P
Call me crazy.
2. India should put in money into infrastructure,starving people,poverty..
India has enough starving people as it is. They don't need to be spending money on more.
Who care what they feel? When you take 60-70% of their incomes it REDUCES THEIR POWER. They still have enough money to buy mansions and fancy cars, but they do not then after taxes have enough to manipulate the voters and the govt through media propaganda.
Then why, sir, would they work so hard to become rich? Why would you bust your nuts to make a bunch of coin if somebody was always going to adjust your tax rate such that you never had any left over? Why not make "just enough" so that you can be comfortable? In addition to the other horrible side effects pointed out by other posters, your lopsided "vision" also encourages marginal performance. Whee! What a gem of a country we would live in then, eh?
It's embarrasing that you got modded insightful with a statement like "Then there would be no roads or schools, and no forms of finacial support". (note, I assume you meant financial, not finacial)
There was a time in the not too distant past, relatively speaking, when the United States got along just fine without the government providing the things you mention. Farmers formed Co-Ops to build grain elevators and railway extensions to them. Co-Ops could easily take over road maintenance for most of the country. People supported each other in hard financial times through charitable giving. Charitable giving, by the way, is way up in most red states (read, rural areas) relative to blue states. People educated their children in schools without the government paying for it. The community built a school house and local residents taught the students. This could easily become commonplace again if the governemnt backed out of public education. Your notion that without the government the world would fall apart just isn't supported by history. The world hasn't always turned by the power of government spending and there are plenty of viable alternatives.
Please, tell me where your sig is from! Every time I see it I hear the disembodied voice of some comedian or actor shouting it, but I just can't figure out where I heard it.
I'm not sure about wherever you might live, but where I'm from, even the most desolate rural road gets more traffic than that. Roads that are as infrequently used as you describe are typically covered with a thin layer of gravel and are not really maintained at all, so there is not all that much money being spent to keep them up. Most roads in rural areas see way more traffic than you describe and are maintained in the following manner:
That's it. That's the entire maintenance schedule. Now, compare that with, say, Lake Shore Drive in Chicago.
I'm sure I'm forgetting some of the more subtle points of maintaining an urban road like stripes (rural roads typically aren't afforded the luxury of actual stripes...) and traffic controls (...or traffic controls), but the point is, take any one component of the budget used to maintain a single Chicago street like LSD, Michigan, Clark, State, Wacker, Roosevelt, etc... and spend that money where I live. You could repave, light, and paint stripes on every road in my town for what Chicago spends on landscaping alone for one of their roads in a single year.
This entire thread is a fabulous illustration of just how little grasp city dwellers have of what goes on in the land of well water. Lots of "brilliant insight" based on "facts" I can only describe as "delusional"
We can _import_ more food from _third_world_countries_??? Where, by God, do you think much of the food we produce goes? And do you honestly think that the American agricultural system makes food _more_ expensive? American farms are not simply a man and his family out cultivating the earth with hand tools. American farms are massive highly efficient crop growing mechanisms. American farms grow so much food so cheaply that we practically give it away to many third-world countries that can't grow sufficient food for themselves. While there are a few specialized subsidies that I don't fully grok, like tobacco farm subsidies, many of the subsidies paid to farmers (in the midwest, at least) are in the form of "We'll pay you _not_ to grow crops on this plot of ground". These are in place usually for things like erosion management, not welfare or crop price management.
The other part of your post, that rural areas consume more in tax dollars than they contribute, seems rather suspect. Could you please post a source for that information? I live in the sticks and I work in Chicago. I see both sides every day. Taxpayers payed for millenium park. Tax payers paid for the skyway. Tax payers paid for soldier field, the destruction of meigs field and its subsequent conversion into a park. Tax payers paid for the renovation of lake shore drive, expansion of McCormick place, hired trucks that sit idle, and the destruction and rebuilding of every major route into and out of this city for the last couple of years. Taxpayers carry the burden for Cows on Parade, Bobblehead baseball player statues, wrought iron railings on just about every damned thing, new planters around every city administration building, and a towing program that steals people's cars and sells them to the towing company at scrap prices. Tax payers pony up to dye the river green, host the Taste of Chicago, and put on the air and water show. When massive amounts of rain or snow fall, the farmers smile and welcome it. A city sends out hundreds of taxpayer-sponsored workers to clear the snow or put up signs and block traffic on flooded streets that the taxpayer-sponsored storm sewers aren't maintained properly to drain. That's only a small percentage of the money-sink that each major modern city has become and doesn't even include the welfare state (government assisted or provided housing), the salaries of the thousands employed in the bloated beurocracies, or the added law enforcement/fire protection required in a major city. If you have information indicating that rural areas are consuming more than their fair share of tax dollars, I'd like very much to see it, because I just don't know where the equivalent amount of money could possibly go.
For those of us who don't care to reverse engineer just to figure out what you're describing, is that .1m diameter, radius, width, or circumference?
s/weight/mass/g
We _are_ talking about space here, afterall.
What about ludicrous speed? Is that possible with an ion drive?
I may be mistaken as well, but we use a similar kind of ballot and voting machine in my state. And metal bars on either side of the ballot would prevent you being able to turn the page to vote for other races such as congressmen, judges, refferendums. Each race is one page and you flip the pages to vote in each race. The binding is offset so that each page uncovers its unique set of punch holes as it is turned. It's a fairly intuitive and simple system once you get the opportunity to take two seconds to stand in front of it and use it.
Sorry, but you've got it backward. The "Punch the hole on the next line down from the one I want to vote for" folks are the ones who didn't seem to notice the big black arrows linking the candidates' names to the holes. The ballot is not confusing at all. Each candidate has his name in a box. Each box has an arrow that points to a specific hole. If you can't figure that out, you probably shouldn't be involved in a process that decides the fate of the world.
DC is not a state. Sorry, just had to pick that nit. 40+11=50? Hrm.
Well, it wasn't Gore who directed the show, it was the lawyers and Democratic party being desperate.
Gore was the _candidate._ He could have done what Kerry did at any time and the whole embarassing escapade would have come to a halt. If the candidate quits, all the lawers in the world can't make him unquit.
As for your point regarding a full state recount, allow me to quote from a CNN article:
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A comprehensive study of the 2000 presidential election in Florida suggests that if the U.S. Supreme Court had allowed a statewide vote recount to proceed, Republican candidate George W. Bush would still have been elected president.
The National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago conducted the six-month study for a consortium of eight news media companies, including CNN.
I do agree with you on one thing, though. Your parent post was a very good one and deserved higher moderation than it got.
While it's good for your karma to be condescending to the military on /., may I suggest that when you run into an ex-marine or ex army on the street you refrain from calling him "Boy". It might be bad for your dentistry.
Referring to trained soldiers as "boys and girls" as though they've been plucked from their day care centers and dropped into Iraq with naught but the clothes on their backs and an M16 might be considered a teeeney bit insulting to some of them.
Okay... I defended US soldiers and identified myself as not being a left wing pacifist. Make with the -1 flamebait mods.
Welcome to clue 101. Even if you didn't elect Kerry, you still did a good thing by voting for him (if you don't like bush) by helping to erode his mandate to pursue his agenda. We had roughly 52/48 in the popular vote with third parties turning out damned near invisible margins. If all the people who voted Nader last cycle did so this time around it would have been 52/45 and Bush's mandate would have been wholly undeniable. Had the youth/Mtv vote actually put down their bongs and shown up at the polls, Bush would have a very hard time justifying the pursuit of his agenda because his mandate from the masses would have been but the most razor thin of margins.
So perhaps you ought to take a course or two in how the world of presidential politics works before you shoot your mouth off about wasted votes.
Oh, and by the way... The country has been taken over by a MAJORITY of terrified conservatives
"the war in Iraq is breeding more terrorism than we would have had otherwise" "Vote for Kerry or there will be a draft" "There is a backdoor draft" "Bush is going to kill social security and your grandma is going to have to eat dog food." "The whole world will hate us and we'll be ostracised from the global stage" "Bush is allowing the dollar to weaken in international markets and our entire economy is on the verge of collapse" Had Kerry won, would be be talking about terrified liberals?
Hrm. I hope you're right. I'd love to be retired by age 35. :D