it'll be a cold day in hell before you see me buying an Iomega product again
Yup! F'n crap products, and they don't give a shit if it fails because they never acknowledged the problems with their units (which obviously existed large scale if everyone has heard of "click of death"). No iomega, no syquest, and no other proprietary formats. DVD or CDROM all the way.
I'm not a Python person, but...I think the issue of 20 lines versus 3 has more to do with how efficient the code is
Less lines of code != more efficient
It boils down to what those lines of code are translated into. You can just as easily write a single line program which makes a library function call containing 50 machine instructions as you can write a 50 line assembly language program which gets converted to 50 machine instructions. Lines of code is not a good indicator of efficiency - not by a longshot.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
Nor would they need to, since interstellar distances could not be covered within a single human lifetime. Why bother thinking about what you'll do once you get there? You will never get there in all probability.
Interesting link. If we believe in modern wars, I theorize it is because of the human mind thinking in very a simplistic manner. We see things as tools, sex objects, things that can hurt another. No matter what humans invent, it comes down to the basics. Learning is about bringing complex concepts down to the basics. War is the same as beating the crap out of other chimpanzeees. Just the weaponry is different.
DRM is essential in these kinds of situations and it makes no difference whether the DRM is proprietary or not. People will always try and most likely succeed in cracking it.
Sure, till all you have is "trusted hardware". Then it will be much more difficult to crack, I imagine.
That's why there needs to be an even bigger push to have a viable, n00b-friendly Linux desktop. Even integration can wait, in my opinion, for better GUI apps and and sysconfig tools. If it sets up and runs right the first time with no manuals, users will come.
Believe it or not, most people don't have the configuration problems you are having. It just depends on what hardware you have (in my experience, anyway). Setting Linux up on laptops is more difficult than on desktop machines as well, but it is getting better. I'd guess it will take leaps forward in the next year now that more and more people are using laptops/notebooks and the prices have come down so much.
the Open Source process is highly decentralized. This has many advantages... But it also has several disadvantages. One of them is the chaos of multiple distributions. Another is terrible UI design.
Your first point, "the chaos of multiple distributions", is only chaos if you choose to see it that way. Go to linuxiso.org for example. There are the 15 most downloaded distros right on the front page. Forget about the rest for now. Maybe someday you can take a look at them. If 15 is too many, then the top choices are Red Hat, Mandrake, and SuSE. Each one seems to have a particular strength. So where is the chaos? The Internet could be seen as chaos, too, if you chose to look at it that way. 3 billion web pages, who has time!
About terrible UI design, can you elaborate? The top 3 distros look really great! I'm sure many of the other distros also look great. All are being polished more with each revision. About applications, many of the most popular applications have nice UI design as well and look polished (ie. the OpenOffice suite, Gimp 2.0).
"i mean, who cares about those lusers anyway, right? whiny babies, always wanting things to WORK, always wanting them to be in-tu-it-ive! wah wah, let them figure it out by digging through source code and learning to use 6-button hotkeys, just like i did! yeah, go back to windoze you pathetic worms, thats more your speed anyway!"
Whoa! Where are you trying to get help from, anyway? Maybe you can cite a few web locations, and someone on Slashdot can recommend better ones.
For example, I have totally given up on IRC and *any* chat interface for getting any useful information. Everywhere I've gone, it's just a bunch of idiots squawking amongst themselves. I know the world isn't completely overrun by idiots quite yet, so it must be a problem with the venue. Also, certain newsgroups are totally useless, but others are pretty good. I'm talking in general here, too, not technology specific topics or anything.
Anyway, I'm sure your points are legit but if you don't provide more information, that really cuts down on how much people can help you. Always provide details with your gripe.
First, what distro are you using? What brand/model of printer and brand/model of sound card?
If you're new to Linux, then getting everything configured at install time is probably your easiest way to go. That's what I did until I actually had a useful box that I didn't want to reformat and was forced to learn some more. But at that point I at least had the nic, sound and video all working. Also, it's sometimes easier just to purchase hardware that you know is picked up by Linux right away rather than trying to get the last $2 out of your old 1996 8 bit sound card. Just buy one you know will be auto-detected and forget about it. Time is money. I haven't had any hardware detection issues with reasonably recent hardware and recent distros, and I've set up quite a few boxes.
But this article doesn't end up as any sort of "here's how we improve Linux" essay (which at least ESR thought he was doing). It's just a commerical for commercial software. He fundamentally misunderstands a key difference between Free Software and proprietary software.
The article criticizing Raymond's writeup is mostly speculation. Note all the claims made, and how many are backed up with any fact or actual investigation. He's saying "Raymond's an idiot, OSS sucks" in a veiled attempt at disparaging OSS software - this is just a rant. No investigative work or research to prove it, not even a convincing argument to go along. Without any constructive points for improving "the situation", the article is worthless except maybe for some minimal entertainment value.
Consider a point I would like to make: some software projects aren't ready for an easy to use interface (CUPS aside obviously). OSS by nature is a public development effort, so you get to see it - warts and all - from its creation to its maturity. When the project matures and is stable at its core, then usability becomes the biggest issue. Look at the problems Microsoft is having with vulnerabilities in Windows because they did not spend enough time on the core of the OS before diving into major new UI features. It became a joke that you had to reboot every day and that crashes were something you had to live with. Not until the threat of open source did Microsoft start concentrating more on the core of Windows. Those who swear by Microsoft should appreciate at least that much.
That's what pisses me off so much about the linux community, most of the time when asking a question one will be derided for one's choice and then told that another distro is much better. ! news flash ! this doesn't help anyone! I asked some well writen, polite questions in a linux forum about fedora core and rather than getting the answers, was I derided and astounded by the 'don't even think about it on that, get mandrake instead' or some other distro. No-one seems to understand that a distro might be chosen for certain reasons and that changing is not an option, things have to be made made to work.
So what, you came across some rude people. They exist everywhere, including open source land.
I hear your point, but I think you are missing another one. What the parent was trying to say, I think, is that the technology exists in the open source community to do what you need to do. The fact that Distro X didn't pick up the technology and package it isn't the OSS community's fault - it's the distro packager's fault. So in other words, don't be so quick to judge the entire OSS community based on what specific people or companies have done (or said).
As a final note, excel should NEVER be used to calculate ANY statistics beyond a mean, since it uses patently WIERD formulas that DON'T always work (compare the answers against those gotten with SPSS or SAS for more complicated work and you'll be shocked).
Just curious - have you tried OpenOffice? I wonder if it suffers from the same problem.
I've scaled my Yahoo account back from a paid account to a plane old free account. I was a paid user for about 3 years. But the forced advertising was pissing me off too much (esp. with the flash advertising these days) so I said to heck with that. I'd like to just stick with a webhost email account, except for the one problem of spam control. I'm sure with some researching that could be easily solved, though. Mozilla's spam filtering is good, but you can't really run that on your ISP's Linux or Solaris box 24x7.
Jokes aside, I'm glad to read the page I linked to. If it's true, the problem reported awhile back about Segways stopped dead in their tracks when the battery runs low doesn't seem as bad as it was made out to be. However, it does still leave me with a question: what do you do with your Segway if the battery runs low and you're 3 miles from home? Can you carry a spare, or do you push it back home?
At first I was thinking: if we put life on Mars, then there goes basically the only chance we have of confirming that life exists beyond our planet, aside from locating and flying to distant planets (way out of the question for the foreseeable future -- too far!).
But then I thought: even if we did find life on Mars, what would it prove? Nothing. Life could easily have been carried from Earth to Mars on an asteroid. Since we can't rule that possibility out, we can't prove that the spark of life started independently on another planet.
I'm tired of people not taking pride in what they do. Spelling is just one example where people seem to not care about improving themselves.
You should realize that these people who misspell often have higher priorities than to spell correctly on Slashdot. Many of these people *do* take pride in these higher priorities. But life is short, so we all have to choose what we want to do really well in and what things we will let slide a little. Spelling on Slashdot, for many, will slide.
Priorities have a great influence on the amount of effort we put into things. Keep that in mind.
spelling errors distract the reader from the message and make one look uneducated
Sure, but comments on slashdot are NOT formal writing. If the OP was writing a resume or an important paper, I am sure he would have used a spelling/grammar checker and proofread more closely. But this is slashdot, where people bang comments off to get their *thoughts* in, not show off their proper spelling.
People like you who dismiss a person's argument out of hand just because they've made one spelling mistake are really missing the point. Did their IDEA make you think? Was it insightful? That's the important thing.
If you think spelling on/. is bad, try an instant messaging client or IRC chat.
If it isn't in writing, codified as law, it's meaningless.
I believe that codifying restrictions into law is only part of a solution. The technology itself needs to be produced so that breaking the law is very difficult. Otherwise, read up on "how to boil a frog".
Examples:
- make RFID tags biodegradable
- make RFID tags readable only a certain number of times before they stop working
On the law side, prohibit the correlation of RFID and any of a person's personal information. The tag should only be used for inventory purposes.
Still, with such a powerful technology, accepting it at all makes me nervous. Accepting RFID with limitations is still the first step towards acceptance without limitations. Perhaps this the stage of "pacifying the public".
Fish live in water, but they don't like to build nests in trees.
Of course this depends on how deep you go. For more shallow water, certain freshwater fish love to lurk in areas with weeds and fallen trees. Granted, the preservation of the underwater trees appears to be dependent upon being at a pretty good depth.
1000000 * 5 / (24 * 60) ~= 3472 Days or 3472 computer to send 1 millions emails. Doable, but much more difficult than the 138 you state
You're absolutely right - good of you to double check. But like you say, it is definitely still doable:
Federal officials reportedly have closed in on an 18-year-old man believed to be the author of a variant of the Blaster worm, which affected nearly half a million computers earlier this month.
Maybe you develop some whiz-bang image recog program that can take amazingly distorted text and figure it out. If it takes 5 minutes to process a box, it does you no good anyways, too much time to be worth it for this use.
Not really. Since spammers are now into the illegal business of commandeering people's computers using viruses and trojans, it would be an easy step to have them process distorted images and feed the results back to some web site.
It wouldn't even take that many computers to send a lot of spam out even at 5 minutes per. Say you want to send 1 million emails. 1,000,000 / 5 minutes = 138 days. If you have 138 computers, you can send out 1 million spams per day.
It's bad enough we have to put up with power lines and tall skyscrapers obscuring our view of the beautiful skies. The dude beaming ads in the sky should be kicked right in the ass and hard. If this technology becomes deployed, consumers should boycott anybody who advertises on it. This is slimy and right up there with ripping off old ladies.
Somebody's smokin' some goooood crack over there! I can't hardly wait till Europe passes the crack pipe over to US lawmakers after this doozie passes... maybe Canada will take a puff, too.
Slashdot Mirror
it'll be a cold day in hell before you see me buying an Iomega product again
Yup! F'n crap products, and they don't give a shit if it fails because they never acknowledged the problems with their units (which obviously existed large scale if everyone has heard of "click of death").
No iomega, no syquest, and no other proprietary formats. DVD or CDROM all the way.
I'm not a Python person, but...I think the issue of 20 lines versus 3 has more to do with how efficient the code is
Less lines of code != more efficient
It boils down to what those lines of code are translated into. You can just as easily write a single line program which makes a library function call containing 50 machine instructions as you can write a 50 line assembly language program which gets converted to 50 machine instructions. Lines of code is not a good indicator of efficiency - not by a longshot.
Replying to your sig:
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
Nor would they need to, since interstellar distances could not be covered within a single human lifetime. Why bother thinking about what you'll do once you get there? You will never get there in all probability.
Interesting link. If we believe in modern wars, I theorize it is because of the human mind thinking in very a simplistic manner. We see things as tools, sex objects, things that can hurt another. No matter what humans invent, it comes down to the basics. Learning is about bringing complex concepts down to the basics. War is the same as beating the crap out of other chimpanzeees. Just the weaponry is different.
Developers! Developers! Developers
Woooooh! WOOOOOOOOH!
I have four words for you.
I
LOVE
THIS
CHIMPANY
wooooooooooh!!
DRM is essential in these kinds of situations and it makes no difference whether the DRM is proprietary or not. People will always try and most likely succeed in cracking it.
Sure, till all you have is "trusted hardware". Then it will be much more difficult to crack, I imagine.
That's why there needs to be an even bigger push to have a viable, n00b-friendly Linux desktop. Even integration can wait, in my opinion, for better GUI apps and and sysconfig tools. If it sets up and runs right the first time with no manuals, users will come.
Believe it or not, most people don't have the configuration problems you are having. It just depends on what hardware you have (in my experience, anyway). Setting Linux up on laptops is more difficult than on desktop machines as well, but it is getting better. I'd guess it will take leaps forward in the next year now that more and more people are using laptops/notebooks and the prices have come down so much.
the Open Source process is highly decentralized. This has many advantages ... But it also has several disadvantages. One of them is the chaos of multiple distributions. Another is terrible UI design.
Your first point, "the chaos of multiple distributions", is only chaos if you choose to see it that way. Go to linuxiso.org for example. There are the 15 most downloaded distros right on the front page. Forget about the rest for now. Maybe someday you can take a look at them. If 15 is too many, then the top choices are Red Hat, Mandrake, and SuSE. Each one seems to have a particular strength. So where is the chaos? The Internet could be seen as chaos, too, if you chose to look at it that way. 3 billion web pages, who has time!
About terrible UI design, can you elaborate? The top 3 distros look really great! I'm sure many of the other distros also look great. All are being polished more with each revision. About applications, many of the most popular applications have nice UI design as well and look polished (ie. the OpenOffice suite, Gimp 2.0).
"i mean, who cares about those lusers anyway, right? whiny babies, always wanting things to WORK, always wanting them to be in-tu-it-ive! wah wah, let them figure it out by digging through source code and learning to use 6-button hotkeys, just like i did! yeah, go back to windoze you pathetic worms, thats more your speed anyway!"
Whoa! Where are you trying to get help from, anyway? Maybe you can cite a few web locations, and someone on Slashdot can recommend better ones.
For example, I have totally given up on IRC and *any* chat interface for getting any useful information. Everywhere I've gone, it's just a bunch of idiots squawking amongst themselves. I know the world isn't completely overrun by idiots quite yet, so it must be a problem with the venue. Also, certain newsgroups are totally useless, but others are pretty good. I'm talking in general here, too, not technology specific topics or anything.
Anyway, I'm sure your points are legit but if you don't provide more information, that really cuts down on how much people can help you. Always provide details with your gripe.
First, what distro are you using? What brand/model of printer and brand/model of sound card?
If you're new to Linux, then getting everything configured at install time is probably your easiest way to go. That's what I did until I actually had a useful box that I didn't want to reformat and was forced to learn some more. But at that point I at least had the nic, sound and video all working. Also, it's sometimes easier just to purchase hardware that you know is picked up by Linux right away rather than trying to get the last $2 out of your old 1996 8 bit sound card. Just buy one you know will be auto-detected and forget about it. Time is money. I haven't had any hardware detection issues with reasonably recent hardware and recent distros, and I've set up quite a few boxes.
But this article doesn't end up as any sort of "here's how we improve Linux" essay (which at least ESR thought he was doing). It's just a commerical for commercial software. He fundamentally misunderstands a key difference between Free Software and proprietary software.
The article criticizing Raymond's writeup is mostly speculation. Note all the claims made, and how many are backed up with any fact or actual investigation. He's saying "Raymond's an idiot, OSS sucks" in a veiled attempt at disparaging OSS software - this is just a rant. No investigative work or research to prove it, not even a convincing argument to go along. Without any constructive points for improving "the situation", the article is worthless except maybe for some minimal entertainment value.
Consider a point I would like to make: some software projects aren't ready for an easy to use interface (CUPS aside obviously). OSS by nature is a public development effort, so you get to see it - warts and all - from its creation to its maturity. When the project matures and is stable at its core, then usability becomes the biggest issue. Look at the problems Microsoft is having with vulnerabilities in Windows because they did not spend enough time on the core of the OS before diving into major new UI features. It became a joke that you had to reboot every day and that crashes were something you had to live with. Not until the threat of open source did Microsoft start concentrating more on the core of Windows. Those who swear by Microsoft should appreciate at least that much.
That's what pisses me off so much about the linux community, most of the time when asking a question one will be derided for one's choice and then told that another distro is much better.
! news flash ! this doesn't help anyone!
I asked some well writen, polite questions in a linux forum about fedora core and rather than getting the answers, was I derided and astounded by the 'don't even think about it on that, get mandrake instead' or some other distro.
No-one seems to understand that a distro might be chosen for certain reasons and that changing is not an option, things have to be made made to work.
So what, you came across some rude people. They exist everywhere, including open source land.
I hear your point, but I think you are missing another one. What the parent was trying to say, I think, is that the technology exists in the open source community to do what you need to do. The fact that Distro X didn't pick up the technology and package it isn't the OSS community's fault - it's the distro packager's fault. So in other words, don't be so quick to judge the entire OSS community based on what specific people or companies have done (or said).
As a final note, excel should NEVER be used to calculate ANY statistics beyond a mean, since it uses patently WIERD formulas that DON'T always work (compare the answers against those gotten with SPSS or SAS for more complicated work and you'll be shocked).
Just curious - have you tried OpenOffice? I wonder if it suffers from the same problem.
I've scaled my Yahoo account back from a paid account to a plane old free account. I was a paid user for about 3 years. But the forced advertising was pissing me off too much (esp. with the flash advertising these days) so I said to heck with that. I'd like to just stick with a webhost email account, except for the one problem of spam control. I'm sure with some researching that could be easily solved, though. Mozilla's spam filtering is good, but you can't really run that on your ISP's Linux or Solaris box 24x7.
What if you put a scram jet ON a segway!? That's fun for the whole family!
Sure, till the battery runs out!
Jokes aside, I'm glad to read the page I linked to. If it's true, the problem reported awhile back about Segways stopped dead in their tracks when the battery runs low doesn't seem as bad as it was made out to be. However, it does still leave me with a question: what do you do with your Segway if the battery runs low and you're 3 miles from home? Can you carry a spare, or do you push it back home?
On an asteroid? WTF? How exactly are these examples of life you speak of hopping a ride on an asteroid?
The idea is called panspermia.
At first I was thinking: if we put life on Mars, then there goes basically the only chance we have of confirming that life exists beyond our planet, aside from locating and flying to distant planets (way out of the question for the foreseeable future -- too far!).
But then I thought: even if we did find life on Mars, what would it prove? Nothing. Life could easily have been carried from Earth to Mars on an asteroid. Since we can't rule that possibility out, we can't prove that the spark of life started independently on another planet.
I'm tired of people not taking pride in what they do. Spelling is just one example where people seem to not care about improving themselves.
You should realize that these people who misspell often have higher priorities than to spell correctly on Slashdot. Many of these people *do* take pride in these higher priorities. But life is short, so we all have to choose what we want to do really well in and what things we will let slide a little. Spelling on Slashdot, for many, will slide.
Priorities have a great influence on the amount of effort we put into things. Keep that in mind.
spelling errors distract the reader from the message and make one look uneducated
/. is bad, try an instant messaging client or IRC chat.
Sure, but comments on slashdot are NOT formal writing. If the OP was writing a resume or an important paper, I am sure he would have used a spelling/grammar checker and proofread more closely. But this is slashdot, where people bang comments off to get their *thoughts* in, not show off their proper spelling.
People like you who dismiss a person's argument out of hand just because they've made one spelling mistake are really missing the point. Did their IDEA make you think? Was it insightful? That's the important thing.
If you think spelling on
If it isn't in writing, codified as law, it's meaningless.
I believe that codifying restrictions into law is only part of a solution. The technology itself needs to be produced so that breaking the law is very difficult. Otherwise, read up on "how to boil a frog".
Examples:
- make RFID tags biodegradable
- make RFID tags readable only a certain number of times before they stop working
On the law side, prohibit the correlation of RFID and any of a person's personal information. The tag should only be used for inventory purposes.
Still, with such a powerful technology, accepting it at all makes me nervous. Accepting RFID with limitations is still the first step towards acceptance without limitations. Perhaps this the stage of "pacifying the public".
Fish live in water, but they don't like to build nests in trees.
Of course this depends on how deep you go. For more shallow water, certain freshwater fish love to lurk in areas with weeds and fallen trees. Granted, the preservation of the underwater trees appears to be dependent upon being at a pretty good depth.
1000000 * 5 / (24 * 60) ~= 3472 Days or 3472 computer to send 1 millions emails. Doable, but much more difficult than the 138 you state
You're absolutely right - good of you to double check.
But like you say, it is definitely still doable:
Federal officials reportedly have closed in on an 18-year-old man believed to be the author of a variant of the Blaster worm, which affected nearly half a million computers earlier this month.
Maybe you develop some whiz-bang image recog program that can take amazingly distorted text and figure it out. If it takes 5 minutes to process a box, it does you no good anyways, too much time to be worth it for this use.
Not really. Since spammers are now into the illegal business of commandeering people's computers using viruses and trojans, it would be an easy step to have them process distorted images and feed the results back to some web site.
It wouldn't even take that many computers to send a lot of spam out even at 5 minutes per. Say you want to send 1 million emails. 1,000,000 / 5 minutes = 138 days. If you have 138 computers, you can send out 1 million spams per day.
It's bad enough we have to put up with power lines and tall skyscrapers obscuring our view of the beautiful skies. The dude beaming ads in the sky should be kicked right in the ass and hard. If this technology becomes deployed, consumers should boycott anybody who advertises on it. This is slimy and right up there with ripping off old ladies.
Somebody's smokin' some goooood crack over there! I can't hardly wait till Europe passes the crack pipe over to US lawmakers after this doozie passes... maybe Canada will take a puff, too.