All well and good to follow your dream, but you shouldn't have to give that up to make money. Money is important. To realize this just wait until someone you love gets very ill and you realize that all it would take is $20-30K to make them well and see how desperate you are to do anything to earn that money.
People should be paid what they're worth. This means that scientists should get more than $40K a year, and actors and sports stars should earn less than the obscene amounts they do. But hey its not a perfect world and you make your trade-offs and live with the consequences.
So hang on giving something away is wrong because good will donations of time and effort stop paid work from happening?
Bill Gates and Microsoft are involved with a lot of charities. Should they stop contributing to them because the good will prevents people from going out and earning the money for themselves? By Bill's argument, Microsoft should never give away an educational copy of Windows or Office to a school or university - after all that's a copy of software a competitor could sell to that institution.
But wait it must be okay, because they can write off their contributions for tax breaks. That's good for the economy.
As far as I'm concerned, if someone wants to give away their time and effort they can do so and you just have to deal with it. You can't have it both ways.
I tried to say sort of thing on slashdot the other day and got modded troll.
Its refreshing to see that people who get it can be modded up.
Linux is clever, Linux is powerful. Linux is not user friendly on a desktop. Users should not need to know the locations and contents of config files, and be familiar with dozens of command line commands just to do something simple.
Get yourself a USB 2/SATA RAID drive enclosure for about USD60. You can buy hard disks to your heart's content - 80 Gig is about USD60. Shows up as a drive letter.
I have a couple of Metal Gear Box (one USB2, one SATA/USB2). Don't screw the drive to the base plate on the unit and you can swap disks in the thing without tools.
Yeah its not quite _as_ cheap if you need more than about 5 disks, but Backup is quicker. Retrieval is almost instant.
Besides its been years since I did it but I bought and returned a tape drive once - slow and unreliable. I don't know what its like now but you use to have to pay good money for RELIABLE tape units.
Walk into any random home in any part of the world where a computer exists. What are the odds if you switch it on you'll see a Linux desktop (or command line).
Linux has not taken off on the desktop.
I like open source software, open collaboration, and the ability for anyone with knowledge and skill to fix or improve software. Linux is great for that, but for an end user who just wants things to work - wants to write a letter and print it out, or calculate some figures on a spreadsheet WITHOUT having to worry about things not working correctly or having specialist computer knowledge - Linux is just not where it needs to be! Linux continues to be the desktop solution for the intellectual elitist.
This is slashdot. Of course its not going to be popular to criticize Linux. I don't feel persecuted in the least, but I'm VERY frustrated the Linux advocates don't listen when people tell them that the RTFM approach to user support is THE underlying cause for desktops not taking off. You're the one making personal attacks and telling me to seek help. Get a clue.
This is already available, only you own the kiosk - its called napster;-)
But seriously why in a kiosk based model would you need to insert anything but your credit card to get the end product.
For that matter why CD - its cheap but its not reliable media. I'd rather see an improved verison of the IPOD. The consumer buys the player and downloads directly onto it what they want to be able to listen to.
The only problem with that approach is that the music industry (or rather than large record companies) have become very greedy and won't even let you back up your own music in the hope that they'll be able to sell the same music to you again in a different format 3 years down the track.
Clearly there is a desperate need to tighten up copyright laws in the face of this huge mountain of cash that is literally being metaphorically syphoned into the studios' pockets.
How can something be both literal and metaphoric?
I think someone's let their passion get ahead of their English speaking abilities.
Man this "it's slashdot how dare you say anything bad about Linux - quick - mod him down" crap is driving me nuts.
If by "the majority of users" you mean Linux users you're right. People who have already chosen to use Linux are fine with its quirks and shortcomings. If you're talking about the granny that likes to play solitaire on a windows box you're dead wrong.
Linux/Unix software traditionally does not hold your hand and does not configure easily. Have you ever had to hand edit a config file XWindows, Samba, or Sendmail?
DOS was crap. Windows was more suited to GUI work like creating word processing windows but the real reason it took off is that you could stumble your way around the system, launch applications, multitask etc. by stumbling around and clicking on very obvious graphical controls. For most software, and certainly for the desktop, you did not need to know much about config files or learn lots of DOS or Linux commands. You didn't need to know about man and info commands to get help. If there was help to be had you saw it on a menu - right there in your face.
Mod me down all you damn well like. Call me a troll if you prefer. It doesn't change reality, and I don't post here for the mod points. Linux developers and hard core advocates need to take their hands off their ears and stop singing "La la la" at the top of their lungs and listen to what the rest of the world wants. What they don't want is weeks, months or years of experience or learning to do something they can stumble their way through in a few clicks in windows. They have better things to do with their time than learn about computers. They just want the damned thing to work.
On the other hand in Windows there is not a good reason to get rid of the graphical boot. There are plenty of good reasons under Linux. eg. If something goes wrong detecting the video card, or you can't find an accelerated X server. You don't need to know any of that kind of information in Windows. If you bought it, it'll run the version of Windows that was current at the time. There are other good reasons not to boot graphically which I won't go into.
Furthermore its not so long ago that to get an internet connection working you'd have to jump through different hoops on every distro.
Did you read the articles? Each distro had problems with different bits of hardware.
Non-computer types who have trouble remembering where they put their car keys and "just want the blasted computer to work" are not interested in learning 100 Unix commands, and the location and structure of 100 other config files.
I didn't say Linux was doomed. I said if you want the average end user to use it as their desktop instead of windows you need to do better. Ignore or minimize this reality at your peril. A simple interface consistent between distros would be a good start.
Even though I'm an experienced Linux user, if I install a new version of the OS I expect headaches I wouldn't expect with windows. e.g. When redhat introduced PAM and stronger password rules, it wasn't a good time to change my passwords everywhere so I spent a while learning how to change the scheme to what I was use to until I had time to choose better passwords. That was a pain and should never have happened. When windows went the same way with 2003 server at work it was an easy matter to change that policy.
You should not need specialist knowledge to do basic things with your computer. You usually don't with Windows (and often you can stumble your way through menus to work it out). You often do with Linux, and if you do its probably buried in an obscure config file and not terribly well document.
That is the key reason Linux hasn't taken off. Not everyone wants to be a computer programmer/admin. RTFM is fine for someone that makes their living from their computer knowledgem but just doesn't cut it when you're talking about a general computer user. Its the equivalent to telling a car owner to RTFM and fix it themselves when their head gasket is blown. The sooner EACH AND EVERY Linux developer comes to that realization the better.
You need more funding AND correct use of that funding.
No point spending big on a car if you don't have the expertise to drive it. A car will make you go faster and further than you can on foot but not if you push it all the way or climb into the boot and hope really really hard that you'll get there.
...and extreme things have trouble fitting into a real world.
What they're doing here with this social contract and slowing down development to maintain principles is not just an inconvenience - it may lead to this distro becoming less and less relevant if not dying outright.
Its kinda like holding your breath because you're gainst air pollution and want to stick to your principles. If you do it efficiently you'll pass out a lot and get very ill. If you do it with absolute efficiency you'll put your head in a bucket of water and die. I think the former is a better anology to what's happening here because there will always be Free software extremists about to keep a distro like Debian alive if not well.
Somehow a mouse managed to crawl into my old Apple IIe disk drive when I was a child of about 7 or 8. I was trying to write a game in BASIC using ProDOS and even had the sense to have a backup of the game.
It was a simple 3 player ship on the water firing up and down at a flying saucer and submarine. It was slow and I'd just gotten the graphics for the ship to fire working and had started on some collision detection. I was very proud of my efforts which at that age and with no outside guidance had taken me a very long time to get working properly.
Unfortunately the result of having mouse droppings in the disk drive was that it wiped every disk put in it (including my backup) and wouldn't read back from it. I lost the game, and it put me off programming for a few years seeing my effort wasted even though I'd done the right things. I did eventually get the mouse droppings out of the drive and get it working properly again.
I've been working as a consultant and developer for a good 10 years now and no other loss has been as personally devastating to me as that one. I now have multiple "paranoia" backups of most of my work or important documents. So that's one GOOD thing that came out of it all.
So yeah that's my story of how a little mouse shit stunted my growth as a developer;-)
I HATE that saying. A good workman never attempts the job with tools he knows can't get the job done. If you give any workman inappropriate tools and force them to do work with those tools you're asking for trouble.
Examples: "Here's a hammer and a toilet brush. Please clean my camera CCD."
"Here's a tooth pick and a cigar. Please make me a boat."
Likewise: "Here's an archaic programming language without automatic memory management, bounds checking etc. Please build me a business app".
...who wouldn't take any of the following from one of their employees as an excuse for missing a deadline:
a) An immediate family member being seriously injured or dying. b) A serious injury. c) Holidays scheduled a year in advance.
I bet you'd immediately fire an employee for stealing if you found out they'd taken a company bought pen home.
I know people like you. I think you belong in a dickens novel somewhere, not in the real world. You'd bring back slavery if you couldn't wouldn't you. (And in fact if everyone took your advice you'd virtually have it - a society of people who ONLY care about working their asses off just as the bare minimum).
Learn to be less harsh and more of a human being. You'll be happier and have more friends. It doesn't matter what you earn - if this attitude translates into your personal life I can guarantee you're not a happy person.
Oh in all honesty I don't understand how intelligent people can make such sweeping statements. It depends ENTIRELY on what you're building on. (A little bit of common sense and a lot less hype would go a long way in IT).
If you have a nice workable product that has some shortcomings or needs some things fixed, yes by all means don't throw out what you have. That would be like buying a new car or boat and throwing it out the first time its scratched, or one part got broken.
If on the other hand you bought a $200 rust bucket with an engine that barely starts where every piece is going to need to be replaced then yes it may take more effort than if you were to build from scratch. At this point ditching it and making an attempt to learn from your mistakes is a good thing.
Now if anyone tells me you can say for certain just how broken IE is without seeing a detailed review of the source - which bits are or aren't worth saving, then I think they are rather naive.
The "Don't trash it, fix what you have" paradigm is no more of a silver bullet than any other paradigm.
I have just had to uninstall 0.9. I tried reinstalling, but for some reason, after a day of browsing just fine, I'd continually have to reload pages for them to appear at all. Then after about half an hour of frustrating me that way, I decided to close it down, reboot. All I got was a crash each time I started before the browser window even came up. Fortunately uninstalling 0.9 then reinstalling 0.8 worked. I think I'll wait for 1.0 and hope its not as unstable.
...taking out screws, carefully making coasters.....blah blah bleh!
I had a 40GB hard disk that I'd paid a bit more for at the time because it was from a large reliable company (which I won't name) and had decent performance. It had a short life - maybe 2 years before it started playing up. Within 3 or 4 it was unusable even as a backup disk.
I took a great deal of pleasure in "opening it up" with a hammer. The screws were star shaped (torque screws??). The platter actually shatterred into dust and some larger shards. Don't know how safe it was doing this in my backyard, but it was a lot of fun. (Remember the scene from Office Space where they smashed the printer into tiny bits). Good therapy.
You'll need Linux. Some of the free astro software in use has been ported to Windows but not all, and versions ported are usually older.
Here's a starting point: http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-HOWTO/Astro nomy-HOW TO.html
I'd avoid actually buying Linux for Astronomy. Its expensive, distribution specific and hard to set up, and most of the programs are repackaged freeware that you can download more recent versions of. However the list of software included is useful: http://www.randomfactory.com/lfa.html ht tp://www.randomfactory.com/lfa/v789info.html
I remember Heasoft (and the older FTOOLS for windows) were heavily used: http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/software/ lheasof t/
For every instrument who's data you want to analyse, there will typically be a defacto standard.
There are others but that's a good starting point.
...and free software to do data reduction and analysis. Most of it is esoteric and somewhat unintuitive to use, but if you want you can get access to year old observations from
That's exactly what some students chose to do in the internet-taught (distance education) astronomy masters I did a few years ago at the University of Wester Sydney (UWS) in Australia. Unfortunately they've killed off that course but there are courses - online masters degrees and doctorate courses being run out of James Cook University (JCU - http://www.jcu.edu.au) now in QLD Australia. This degree is taught by some of the same staff that created and ran the course at UWS, who left when support for Astronomy by upper management at UWS died in what I consider a disgusting way. They are a good bunch of people, very passionate and highly skilled.
Of course you don't have to do a degree to get hold of the software, and books and try out some reduction yourself. The learning curve is high, but the resources out there on the net for astronomy are amazing.
I just got a D70 myself. I'm moving up from a point and shoot Olympus c-750. A day at the zoo would usually see me take around 1000 pictures. That's when I had a slow autofocus and could only shoot two frames then wait for about 4-5 seconds for the next two. I had a 512Mb card, and a 128mb card, and a cheap old laptop with a small hard drive.
Now with the D70, I'm guessing I'll typically shoot more like 3000-5000 shots on a day trip. Only a handful of shots will turn out well. I'll keep some of the rest but I'd expect to get about 100 good shots, and I'll probably print a quarter of those. This is certainly a shooting style some of the pros use. I can't remember the article but a National Geographic photographer taking 3000 pictures (using film) comes to mind.
Note: I'm not claiming I'm a pro but I'll be damned if I show friends, family and colleagues terrible photos. If you're going to go to some expense doing something do it well or do it in secret. Otherwise you just come across as incompetent and immature.
Because, in addition to being legal experts and marketing geniuses, we're all also highly qualified psychologists and medical doctors.
If he takes slashdot anecdotes and advice as final medical advice he's a fool. I'm sure he's not.
Have you seen what some of the supposed "highly qualified psychologists and medical doctors" advise though? You absolutely can't rely on this without multiple opinions. I've had almost uniformly bad experiences with doctors (and no I'm not in a true 3rd world country though it feels like one sometimes. I live in Sydney, Australia).
I've seen a specialist advise my girlfriend to keep taking a medication that was treating some drowsiness/and very mild cataplexy and some headache, but causing seizures twice a day. He's obviously never experienced a seizure himself. (She's off the medication now. It was quite literally killing her, not to mention completely saping her personality and turning her into a bed-ridden zombie). Mind you the specialists didn't work out that it was the meds causing the seizures. No I had to research it and work it out. They hadn't even mentioned it could be the cause despite contraindications (this is anafranil/clompriamine and she had had a brain tumour removed - she should never have been on the stuff and alarm bells should have been ringing)
She's also repeatedly had operations to fix a shoulder that dislocates at the drop of a hat - trouble is its an posterior dislocation and they keep fucking doing operations to fix a (more usual) anterior one. She's also been turned away from an emergency room after waiting over 24 hours with a dislocated shoulder. She was told that it simply wasn't dislocated and treated like a basket case. Funny that the next hospital she went to was able to relocate the shoulder.
Make no mistake, medicine as it is practiced these days is no science. Multiple opinions and lots of research are your best options. Never do anything without a qualified opinion, but always be wary against poor medical advice. Sadly some of the most respected "experts" are nothing but educated money grubbing idiots.
As for whether slashdot is the right forum I agree this is a strange post to put here. Usenet would be a better place. Lots of support groups operate there. I commend this guy on caring about his sister as much as he obviously does.
Nymphomania/Frigidity: Without medication, she might either become a roaring slut, or a frigid ice queen. Or neither, but most likely, expect some sexual tendancies that are deviant from the norm.
Dude you're talking about this guy's sister! You could be a little more sensitive in how you put that couldn't you?
Then again the doctors these days have the beside manner of an enraged bull.
Slashdot Mirror
All well and good to follow your dream, but you shouldn't have to give that up to make money. Money is important. To realize this just wait until someone you love gets very ill and you realize that all it would take is $20-30K to make them well and see how desperate you are to do anything to earn that money.
People should be paid what they're worth. This means that scientists should get more than $40K a year, and actors and sports stars should earn less than the obscene amounts they do. But hey its not a perfect world and you make your trade-offs and live with the consequences.
So hang on giving something away is wrong because good will donations of time and effort stop paid work from happening?
Bill Gates and Microsoft are involved with a lot of charities. Should they stop contributing to them because the good will prevents people from going out and earning the money for themselves? By Bill's argument, Microsoft should never give away an educational copy of Windows or Office to a school or university - after all that's a copy of software a competitor could sell to that institution.
But wait it must be okay, because they can write off their contributions for tax breaks. That's good for the economy.
As far as I'm concerned, if someone wants to give away their time and effort they can do so and you just have to deal with it. You can't have it both ways.
I tried to say sort of thing on slashdot the other day and got modded troll.
Its refreshing to see that people who get it can be modded up.
Linux is clever, Linux is powerful. Linux is not user friendly on a desktop. Users should not need to know the locations and contents of config files, and be familiar with dozens of command line commands just to do something simple.
Get yourself a USB 2/SATA RAID drive enclosure for about USD60. You can buy hard disks to your heart's content - 80 Gig is about USD60. Shows up as a drive letter.
I have a couple of Metal Gear Box (one USB2, one SATA/USB2). Don't screw the drive to the base plate on the unit and you can swap disks in the thing without tools.
Yeah its not quite _as_ cheap if you need more than about 5 disks, but Backup is quicker. Retrieval is almost instant.
Besides its been years since I did it but I bought and returned a tape drive once - slow and unreliable. I don't know what its like now but you use to have to pay good money for RELIABLE tape units.
Walk into any random home in any part of the world where a computer exists. What are the odds if you switch it on you'll see a Linux desktop (or command line).
Linux has not taken off on the desktop.
I like open source software, open collaboration, and the ability for anyone with knowledge and skill to fix or improve software. Linux is great for that, but for an end user who just wants things to work - wants to write a letter and print it out, or calculate some figures on a spreadsheet WITHOUT having to worry about things not working correctly or having specialist computer knowledge - Linux is just not where it needs to be! Linux continues to be the desktop solution for the intellectual elitist.
This is slashdot. Of course its not going to be popular to criticize Linux. I don't feel persecuted in the least, but I'm VERY frustrated the Linux advocates don't listen when people tell them that the RTFM approach to user support is THE underlying cause for desktops not taking off. You're the one making personal attacks and telling me to seek help. Get a clue.
This is already available, only you own the kiosk - its called napster ;-)
But seriously why in a kiosk based model would you need to insert anything but your credit card to get the end product.
For that matter why CD - its cheap but its not reliable media. I'd rather see an improved verison of the IPOD. The consumer buys the player and downloads directly onto it what they want to be able to listen to.
The only problem with that approach is that the music industry (or rather than large record companies) have become very greedy and won't even let you back up your own music in the hope that they'll be able to sell the same music to you again in a different format 3 years down the track.
Clearly there is a desperate need to tighten up copyright laws in the face of this huge mountain of cash that is literally being metaphorically syphoned into the studios' pockets.
How can something be both literal and metaphoric?
I think someone's let their passion get ahead of their English speaking abilities.
Man this "it's slashdot how dare you say anything bad about Linux - quick - mod him down" crap is driving me nuts.
If by "the majority of users" you mean Linux users you're right. People who have already chosen to use Linux are fine with its quirks and shortcomings. If you're talking about the granny that likes to play solitaire on a windows box you're dead wrong.
Linux/Unix software traditionally does not hold your hand and does not configure easily. Have you ever had to hand edit a config file XWindows, Samba, or Sendmail?
DOS was crap. Windows was more suited to GUI work like creating word processing windows but the real reason it took off is that you could stumble your way around the system, launch applications, multitask etc. by stumbling around and clicking on very obvious graphical controls. For most software, and certainly for the desktop, you did not need to know much about config files or learn lots of DOS or Linux commands. You didn't need to know about man and info commands to get help. If there was help to be had you saw it on a menu - right there in your face.
Mod me down all you damn well like. Call me a troll if you prefer. It doesn't change reality, and I don't post here for the mod points. Linux developers and hard core advocates need to take their hands off their ears and stop singing "La la la" at the top of their lungs and listen to what the rest of the world wants. What they don't want is weeks, months or years of experience or learning to do something they can stumble their way through in a few clicks in windows. They have better things to do with their time than learn about computers. They just want the damned thing to work.
Oh wait a second we already have...
On the other hand in Windows there is not a good reason to get rid of the graphical boot. There are plenty of good reasons under Linux. eg. If something goes wrong detecting the video card, or you can't find an accelerated X server. You don't need to know any of that kind of information in Windows. If you bought it, it'll run the version of Windows that was current at the time. There are other good reasons not to boot graphically which I won't go into.
Furthermore its not so long ago that to get an internet connection working you'd have to jump through different hoops on every distro.
Did you read the articles? Each distro had problems with different bits of hardware.
Non-computer types who have trouble remembering where they put their car keys and "just want the blasted computer to work" are not interested in learning 100 Unix commands, and the location and structure of 100 other config files.
I didn't say Linux was doomed. I said if you want the average end user to use it as their desktop instead of windows you need to do better. Ignore or minimize this reality at your peril. A simple interface consistent between distros would be a good start.
Even though I'm an experienced Linux user, if I install a new version of the OS I expect headaches I wouldn't expect with windows. e.g. When redhat introduced PAM and stronger password rules, it wasn't a good time to change my passwords everywhere so I spent a while learning how to change the scheme to what I was use to until I had time to choose better passwords. That was a pain and should never have happened. When windows went the same way with 2003 server at work it was an easy matter to change that policy.
You should not need specialist knowledge to do basic things with your computer. You usually don't with Windows (and often you can stumble your way through menus to work it out). You often do with Linux, and if you do its probably buried in an obscure config file and not terribly well document.
That is the key reason Linux hasn't taken off. Not everyone wants to be a computer programmer/admin. RTFM is fine for someone that makes their living from their computer knowledgem but just doesn't cut it when you're talking about a general computer user. Its the equivalent to telling a car owner to RTFM and fix it themselves when their head gasket is blown. The sooner EACH AND EVERY Linux developer comes to that realization the better.
You need more funding AND correct use of that funding.
No point spending big on a car if you don't have the expertise to drive it. A car will make you go faster and further than you can on foot but not if you push it all the way or climb into the boot and hope really really hard that you'll get there.
...and extreme things have trouble fitting into a real world.
What they're doing here with this social contract and slowing down development to maintain principles is not just an inconvenience - it may lead to this distro becoming less and less relevant if not dying outright.
Its kinda like holding your breath because you're gainst air pollution and want to stick to your principles. If you do it efficiently you'll pass out a lot and get very ill. If you do it with absolute efficiency you'll put your head in a bucket of water and die. I think the former is a better anology to what's happening here because there will always be Free software extremists about to keep a distro like Debian alive if not well.
Somehow a mouse managed to crawl into my old Apple IIe disk drive when I was a child of about 7 or 8. I was trying to write a game in BASIC using ProDOS and even had the sense to have a backup of the game.
;-)
It was a simple 3 player ship on the water firing up and down at a flying saucer and submarine. It was slow and I'd just gotten the graphics for the ship to fire working and had started on some collision detection. I was very proud of my efforts which at that age and with no outside guidance had taken me a very long time to get working properly.
Unfortunately the result of having mouse droppings in the disk drive was that it wiped every disk put in it (including my backup) and wouldn't read back from it. I lost the game, and it put me off programming for a few years seeing my effort wasted even though I'd done the right things. I did eventually get the mouse droppings out of the drive and get it working properly again.
I've been working as a consultant and developer for a good 10 years now and no other loss has been as personally devastating to me as that one. I now have multiple "paranoia" backups of most of my work or important documents. So that's one GOOD thing that came out of it all.
So yeah that's my story of how a little mouse shit stunted my growth as a developer
a bad workman always blames his tools.
I HATE that saying. A good workman never attempts the job with tools he knows can't get the job done. If you give any workman inappropriate tools and force them to do work with those tools you're asking for trouble.
Examples:
"Here's a hammer and a toilet brush. Please clean my camera CCD."
"Here's a tooth pick and a cigar. Please make me a boat."
Likewise:
"Here's an archaic programming language without automatic memory management, bounds checking etc. Please build me a business app".
...who wouldn't take any of the following from one of their employees as an excuse for missing a deadline:
a) An immediate family member being seriously injured or dying.
b) A serious injury.
c) Holidays scheduled a year in advance.
I bet you'd immediately fire an employee for stealing if you found out they'd taken a company bought pen home.
I know people like you. I think you belong in a dickens novel somewhere, not in the real world. You'd bring back slavery if you couldn't wouldn't you. (And in fact if everyone took your advice you'd virtually have it - a society of people who ONLY care about working their asses off just as the bare minimum).
Learn to be less harsh and more of a human being. You'll be happier and have more friends. It doesn't matter what you earn - if this attitude translates into your personal life I can guarantee you're not a happy person.
Oh in all honesty I don't understand how intelligent people can make such sweeping statements. It depends ENTIRELY on what you're building on. (A little bit of common sense and a lot less hype would go a long way in IT).
If you have a nice workable product that has some shortcomings or needs some things fixed, yes by all means don't throw out what you have. That would be like buying a new car or boat and throwing it out the first time its scratched, or one part got broken.
If on the other hand you bought a $200 rust bucket with an engine that barely starts where every piece is going to need to be replaced then yes it may take more effort than if you were to build from scratch. At this point ditching it and making an attempt to learn from your mistakes is a good thing.
Now if anyone tells me you can say for certain just how broken IE is without seeing a detailed review of the source - which bits are or aren't worth saving, then I think they are rather naive.
The "Don't trash it, fix what you have" paradigm is no more of a silver bullet than any other paradigm.
I have just had to uninstall 0.9. I tried reinstalling, but for some reason, after a day of browsing just fine, I'd continually have to reload pages for them to appear at all. Then after about half an hour of frustrating me that way, I decided to close it down, reboot. All I got was a crash each time I started before the browser window even came up. Fortunately uninstalling 0.9 then reinstalling 0.8 worked. I think I'll wait for 1.0 and hope its not as unstable.
...taking out screws, carefully making coasters.....blah blah bleh!
I had a 40GB hard disk that I'd paid a bit more for at the time because it was from a large reliable company (which I won't name) and had decent performance. It had a short life - maybe 2 years before it started playing up. Within 3 or 4 it was unusable even as a backup disk.
I took a great deal of pleasure in "opening it up" with a hammer. The screws were star shaped (torque screws??). The platter actually shatterred into dust and some larger shards. Don't know how safe it was doing this in my backyard, but it was a lot of fun. (Remember the scene from Office Space where they smashed the printer into tiny bits). Good therapy.
...there are easier ways of finding Pr0n aren't there? Like opening up your spam folder :-)
Sure,
o nomy-HOW TO.html
t tp://www.randomfactory.com/lfa/v789info.html
/ lheasof t/
You'll need Linux. Some of the free astro software in use has been ported to Windows but not all, and versions ported are usually older.
Here's a starting point:
http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-HOWTO/Astr
I'd avoid actually buying Linux for Astronomy. Its expensive, distribution specific and hard to set up, and most of the programs are repackaged freeware that you can download more recent versions of. However the list of software included is useful:
http://www.randomfactory.com/lfa.html
h
I remember Heasoft (and the older FTOOLS for windows) were heavily used:
http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/software
For every instrument who's data you want to analyse, there will typically be a defacto standard.
There are others but that's a good starting point.
...and free software to do data reduction and analysis. Most of it is esoteric and somewhat unintuitive to use, but if you want you can get access to year old observations from
That's exactly what some students chose to do in the internet-taught (distance education) astronomy masters I did a few years ago at the University of Wester Sydney (UWS) in Australia. Unfortunately they've killed off that course but there are courses - online masters degrees and doctorate courses being run out of James Cook University (JCU - http://www.jcu.edu.au) now in QLD Australia. This degree is taught by some of the same staff that created and ran the course at UWS, who left when support for Astronomy by upper management at UWS died in what I consider a disgusting way. They are a good bunch of people, very passionate and highly skilled.
Of course you don't have to do a degree to get hold of the software, and books and try out some reduction yourself. The learning curve is high, but the resources out there on the net for astronomy are amazing.
Depends on what kind of photography you do.
I just got a D70 myself. I'm moving up from a point and shoot Olympus c-750. A day at the zoo would usually see me take around 1000 pictures. That's when I had a slow autofocus and could only shoot two frames then wait for about 4-5 seconds for the next two. I had a 512Mb card, and a 128mb card, and a cheap old laptop with a small hard drive.
Now with the D70, I'm guessing I'll typically shoot more like 3000-5000 shots on a day trip. Only a handful of shots will turn out well. I'll keep some of the rest but I'd expect to get about 100 good shots, and I'll probably print a quarter of those. This is certainly a shooting style some of the pros use. I can't remember the article but a National Geographic photographer taking 3000 pictures (using film) comes to mind.
Note: I'm not claiming I'm a pro but I'll be damned if I show friends, family and colleagues terrible photos. If you're going to go to some expense doing something do it well or do it in secret. Otherwise you just come across as incompetent and immature.
Sammy
Because, in addition to being legal experts and marketing geniuses, we're all also highly qualified psychologists and medical doctors.
If he takes slashdot anecdotes and advice as final medical advice he's a fool. I'm sure he's not.
Have you seen what some of the supposed "highly qualified psychologists and medical doctors" advise though? You absolutely can't rely on this without multiple opinions. I've had almost uniformly bad experiences with doctors (and no I'm not in a true 3rd world country though it feels like one sometimes. I live in Sydney, Australia).
I've seen a specialist advise my girlfriend to keep taking a medication that was treating some drowsiness/and very mild cataplexy and some headache, but causing seizures twice a day. He's obviously never experienced a seizure himself. (She's off the medication now. It was quite literally killing her, not to mention completely saping her personality and turning her into a bed-ridden zombie). Mind you the specialists didn't work out that it was the meds causing the seizures. No I had to research it and work it out. They hadn't even mentioned it could be the cause despite contraindications (this is anafranil/clompriamine and she had had a brain tumour removed - she should never have been on the stuff and alarm bells should have been ringing)
She's also repeatedly had operations to fix a shoulder that dislocates at the drop of a hat - trouble is its an posterior dislocation and they keep fucking doing operations to fix a (more usual) anterior one. She's also been turned away from an emergency room after waiting over 24 hours with a dislocated shoulder. She was told that it simply wasn't dislocated and treated like a basket case. Funny that the next hospital she went to was able to relocate the shoulder.
Make no mistake, medicine as it is practiced these days is no science. Multiple opinions and lots of research are your best options. Never do anything without a qualified opinion, but always be wary against poor medical advice. Sadly some of the most respected "experts" are nothing but educated money grubbing idiots.
As for whether slashdot is the right forum I agree this is a strange post to put here. Usenet would be a better place. Lots of support groups operate there. I commend this guy on caring about his sister as much as he obviously does.
Nymphomania/Frigidity: Without medication, she might either become a roaring slut, or a frigid ice queen. Or neither, but most likely, expect some sexual tendancies that are deviant from the norm.
Dude you're talking about this guy's sister! You could be a little more sensitive in how you put that couldn't you?
Then again the doctors these days have the beside manner of an enraged bull.
*sigh*