So I can assume then that you've know about initialisms since grade school, and you were born before 1975? Otherwise I'm not paying attention to you. On a side note to all the ACs who responded... At least Rotund Prickpull has the decency to decloak before being an indignant asshole. AC trolling is like screwing with a rubber on.
I'd never heard of an initialism until earlier this year when someone attacked me the same way. Of course, they attacked with truth which is what really hurts. But I have to say that neither I, nor my wife (a woman with a Masters in Library Science) have EVER heard of initialisms. I suspect this is some relatively new concept that no english majors born before 1975 would know. It's good to have knowledge and know things that other people don't. But it's somewhat irritating that people like you assume the everyone knows what an intialism is. I know now, but I'm 36 and never heard of them in high school or college or even in the workplace. I highly doubt anyone over 20 learned about them in school. So... in short, you're just being a nit-pick. Even if you are telling the truth. Once initialisms have been commonly taught in high schools for more then 40 years, then you can start picking at people about not knowing the difference.
Sorry but the parent post is not a troll. Some moderator who is either lacking in knowledge or is genuinely an idiot either equated "fuck redhat" with "fuck linux" or just doesn't understand what Xen does. Xen is an amazing tool and I've been using it both at home and here at work in production using both Fedora Core and Gentoo as "host" and "guest" OSes. The main poing is that saying "fuck redhat" doesn't mean that the poster dislikes Linux. It means that one particular Linux vendor is not in his good graces right now. And this is undertandable since Xen has been doing something really well for quite some time that no one else (with the exception of the commercial VMWare high-end server products) has done. There is no alternative to Xen that uses a hypervisor in the FOSS community other than Xen. And trust me, hypervisor blows everything else out of the water. Couple that Xen with the new hardware support for virutalization in upcoming Intel and AMD processors and you have an incredible amount of power and flexibility for free on the OS front. Please correct the unfair moderation above. And to the moderator, "fuck you".
Is this what I first thought computers were when I was ten? I recall building my Sinclair 1000 from a kit, plugging it into the telly and the mains and seeing that black prompt. I typed in, "What is the capital of the United States?" It said, "SYNTAX ERROR LINE 10" or something to that effect. So, after over 20 years will I finally be able to type that into my own computer and be able to have it actually give me an answer even if it's not on the net?
...it was a pimp piece. Not to knock anyone, but it ends with the guy basically saying "I guess we'll have to wait and see how this affect Linux adoption". My question is, who was this piece written for? Certainly not Linux users as we're all well aware of why those codecs are not included in pure distros and the difficulty in trying to ethically support them without getting into legal issues. It also couldn't have been written for the Linux "toe-dipper" as the article puts it, since it refers to them in the third person. PHBs? I doubt it. They don't care if you can't hit Youtube or iFilm at work. So just what this piece all about?
Since anyone who reads Slashdot who matters works in IT, we all have stress to relieve. What better way to do it than to be horrifically abusive when they call. It needn't be obscene (although that's more fun) and can still be quite effective. My first method is to let them roll through their spiel and then at the end when they ask the first question I ask if they can repeat everything they just said because I didn't get it. Repeat this as many times as neccessary. Who needs a "Do Not Call" list when you can get on their "Mental Issues" list which is far more effective?
Another method if the caller is of the opposite sex (or the same sex if you think it will freak them out even worse) is to say in the wormiest or slimiest voice possible... "Are you single???" A lot of people get flustered by this. You could also ask what the person is wearing and try to be suggestive the whole time. Who knows you might even score!
If you've got friends over you can always have them play out some really frightening scene in the background while you chat non-plussed. Have them pretend to be a couple having a fight that quickly escalates to violence. If the caller says, "Is everything OK" you just say, "Oh yeah, at least this time the bleeding is happening in the kitchen where it's easier to clean up".
Just a few ideas off the top of my head... Be creative! Have fun! And most of all be careful out there.
...we'll have wireless circuit boards where all the components talk to each other using low power, short range wireless and the circuit board is merely a legacy component so they will fit in today's cases properly. Yeah. Like THAT will ever happen.
...the spammers just want people to read more of the classics. Plain and simple. It's an educational campaign. See here and here for what I did to try and help my poor Barracuda work with these things and how even that's not effective. As it stands my organization has 93% of our mail stream used up by spam that gets filtered out by the Barracuda. The other 7% is mostly legit mail. But analyzing just one day of mail I found that the tremendous amount of spam my users are seeing is really only.013% of the mail stream. Looks like the average amount of spam our users are seeing is four to five messages per day during the week. Insane. So... has the percentage crawled up from the previous 80% to 93% for anyone else or are we just being hit harder because I told a pushy anti-spam salesperson to take a hike or I'd block her domain?
My experience was back in 1997 at an old job. We used Symantec NAV. I set all the systems to scan all file access all the time. The systems would just go nuts because there were tons of viruses being brought in all the time so lots of scanning, quarantining, deleting, etc... (This was in a public computing center) After having enough legit data chewed up by Norton, we tried FProt. That sucked even worse. The admin who took over when I left for bigger and better things moved the whole organization to McAffee and they've supposedly been OK. But, I personally don't trust McAfee at all. Of course it's of no consequence to me since I don't use Windows or Mac OS X. If I need to scan something I use ClamAV. Either way, "real time" protection has been a bad thing in every instance I've run into it with using Norton. Even friends PCs. They do everything right as I told them. Nothing is disabled or unchecked. Just huge amounts of CPU tracking any activity on their PCs. It makes a PC considerably slower than if it had no AV software at all. I'm not saying to not run it. I'm just saying it will slow a system down noticeably. Trust me, I do this for a living.
Well dammit boy!! If you know about that then why aren't you designing the next wave in display devices. That bit of knowledge has to be worth SOMETHING!!!
This is very likely going to cause even more problems for the environment. Anyone care to comment on the recent heatwave that has swept the planet within the past month? Record temperatures on every part of the globe. With the worldwide deployment of WiMax, we'll be dumping even more energies into the environment that don't belong there. This isn't just AM or FM radio we're talking here. We're talking microwaves. The VERY SAME energy that's used to cook your food in a microwave oven! All we're doing is turning the planet into one big Amana Radar Range and global temps will skyrocket to new extremes of both hi and lo temps.
We've already done tremendous and very ironic damage with air conditioning. In our interest of keeping our working and living spaces comfortably climate controlled we forgot one thing: thermal energy is like water. If you take heat from one space and pump it out, it has to go somewhere. We've been using ACs in our houses, our cars, and businesses, and god knows where else to pump the heat out. Well, where does all that heat go? Into the outside air. And what happens when you pump water into the outdoors? You make ponds, lakes and oceans. Same thing with heat, only worse. All that heat is now coming back to get us. But, even more irony... because it's getting hotter out there, we're using our ACs more than ever before and pumping MORE heat out! I predict that by 2015, the typical summer temps on the equator will be 180F. They're already averaging about 140F and that's up from the relatively cool 95F they used to be back in the 70s. We've got a huge problem folks and WiMax is only going to make it worse. Stop them before it's too late.
True, but we're also talking about software to manage the system, not actually do the heavy lifting (no pun intended). Essentially, it's just an administration interface for the city workers to operate the system. The rest of the stuff is external to that. However, as I also said in my original post, I'm guessing that the specs aren't actually open.
I know I don't have the desk space for it here at work. But at home it becomes a matter of wallspace. You press the monitor into double duty as both your "TV" and your computer display. That's what I've got in the living room right now. It works great for my audio/video editing sessions. Nice large desktop with very readable 14 point fonts in X window. But it's also used by my wife for watching TV, listening to music, etc... At work, I think the best I could do is a dual screen set up.
You're mostly correct until the industry cooks up a "must have" reason that makes a user *THINK* they need a new PC/OS/Gadget/what have you. The auto industry went through this with tail fins back in the 50s. Software is going through it with more and more eye-candy that requires a hefty investment, but doesn't actually produce much of value in the end. (Don't get me wrong, I'm usually the first on the block to get new eye candy as long as it's something that is worth it to me) But, think about the number of average people who go out and buy a new PC just because their old one (that's only a year and a half old) is "slow". They are convinced by sleazy salesholes that their PC is slow because it's "old". They don't realize that maybe they have a virus, or some kind of software problem. Run an anti-virus program on your system that monitors everything around the clock and you'll have a slow PC, for example. Or some new software comes out that the user MUST HAVE but it only runs on the latest OS which only runs on boxes no older than two years. There's the artificial drive to buy new crap even if they don't need it.
As far as the complexity, well... sadly it really is a case of "your brain is too small for this century" when it comes to most users. There is no way to provide the flexible and advanced functionality that a user may want and not add complexity. Take for example the concept of de-interlacing. It's a complex issue with video. I use Xine on Linux and the TV Time filter to take care of my DirecTV signal and make it look as nice as possible on my LCD HD monitor. (Heh... it actually looks better than connecting the DirecTV box right to the monitor's composite in) But, in order to actually take advantage of this with a simple click of an icon for my wife to use, I had to write a script that calls 'xine' with the appropriate options, and tunes the GeForce driver for optimal color overlay. It's once click for her and hours of work at the outset for me. Joe User will NEVER do this. The only way to offer it to him is to have the application make automatic (and stupid) assumptions about how things should work and then give him the lowest common denominator result. If Windows Media Player took care of this, you know it would make lame assumptions about how the de-interlacing should work and he'd wind up with a crap signal unless he had all his ducks in a row hardware-wise. And then you're back to complexity that he shouldn't have to deal with...
"But a 1920x1200 resolution often creates legibility problems for some users resulting from the tiny size of the default Windows font".
Then the end-user does something stupid and makes the font legible and you lose desktop real estate again making 1920x1200 pretty small. While high resolution is nice and all, what we really need are 37" wide screen desktop monitors to come down in price. Or better yet, something that paints the image directly onto the rods and cones in our eyes. Of course at that point a screensaver will be mandatory if you don't want to be walking around with a Start button floating in view even when you're not on the system.
$5500 a month? For software to manage the garage? That's roberry, plain and simple. And not only that, but robbery of a public organization that is likely not too well funded. When it somes down to brass tacks, this $5500 fee was cooked up arbitrarily by the Robotic. That works out to $66,000 a year. They could pay their own devel to make software to keep that place running AND add new functionality as needed as long as the hardware specs are available (which you know they aren't). Considering that a standard parking lot to house as many cars would require more land and probably some staffing that get paid minimum wage, I don't think it's not cost effective to have in-house development in this case.
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So I can assume then that you've know about initialisms since grade school, and you were born before 1975? Otherwise I'm not paying attention to you. On a side note to all the ACs who responded... At least Rotund Prickpull has the decency to decloak before being an indignant asshole. AC trolling is like screwing with a rubber on.
I'm glad you're a fan! Keep those letters comin'!
I'd never heard of an initialism until earlier this year when someone attacked me the same way. Of course, they attacked with truth which is what really hurts. But I have to say that neither I, nor my wife (a woman with a Masters in Library Science) have EVER heard of initialisms. I suspect this is some relatively new concept that no english majors born before 1975 would know. It's good to have knowledge and know things that other people don't. But it's somewhat irritating that people like you assume the everyone knows what an intialism is. I know now, but I'm 36 and never heard of them in high school or college or even in the workplace. I highly doubt anyone over 20 learned about them in school. So... in short, you're just being a nit-pick. Even if you are telling the truth. Once initialisms have been commonly taught in high schools for more then 40 years, then you can start picking at people about not knowing the difference.
Sorry but the parent post is not a troll. Some moderator who is either lacking in knowledge or is genuinely an idiot either equated "fuck redhat" with "fuck linux" or just doesn't understand what Xen does. Xen is an amazing tool and I've been using it both at home and here at work in production using both Fedora Core and Gentoo as "host" and "guest" OSes. The main poing is that saying "fuck redhat" doesn't mean that the poster dislikes Linux. It means that one particular Linux vendor is not in his good graces right now. And this is undertandable since Xen has been doing something really well for quite some time that no one else (with the exception of the commercial VMWare high-end server products) has done. There is no alternative to Xen that uses a hypervisor in the FOSS community other than Xen. And trust me, hypervisor blows everything else out of the water. Couple that Xen with the new hardware support for virutalization in upcoming Intel and AMD processors and you have an incredible amount of power and flexibility for free on the OS front. Please correct the unfair moderation above. And to the moderator, "fuck you".
I discovered a Windows virus before anyone else knew about it, but that didn't get named after me. I guess not being a stripper has its drawbacks.
Is this what I first thought computers were when I was ten? I recall building my Sinclair 1000 from a kit, plugging it into the telly and the mains and seeing that black prompt. I typed in, "What is the capital of the United States?" It said, "SYNTAX ERROR LINE 10" or something to that effect. So, after over 20 years will I finally be able to type that into my own computer and be able to have it actually give me an answer even if it's not on the net?
First Impressions = Review. Learn to read between the lines. If Pudgy can redefine the language to annoy people, so can I.
...it was a pimp piece. Not to knock anyone, but it ends with the guy basically saying "I guess we'll have to wait and see how this affect Linux adoption". My question is, who was this piece written for? Certainly not Linux users as we're all well aware of why those codecs are not included in pure distros and the difficulty in trying to ethically support them without getting into legal issues. It also couldn't have been written for the Linux "toe-dipper" as the article puts it, since it refers to them in the third person. PHBs? I doubt it. They don't care if you can't hit Youtube or iFilm at work. So just what this piece all about?
Since anyone who reads Slashdot who matters works in IT, we all have stress to relieve. What better way to do it than to be horrifically abusive when they call. It needn't be obscene (although that's more fun) and can still be quite effective. My first method is to let them roll through their spiel and then at the end when they ask the first question I ask if they can repeat everything they just said because I didn't get it. Repeat this as many times as neccessary. Who needs a "Do Not Call" list when you can get on their "Mental Issues" list which is far more effective?
Another method if the caller is of the opposite sex (or the same sex if you think it will freak them out even worse) is to say in the wormiest or slimiest voice possible... "Are you single???" A lot of people get flustered by this. You could also ask what the person is wearing and try to be suggestive the whole time. Who knows you might even score!
If you've got friends over you can always have them play out some really frightening scene in the background while you chat non-plussed. Have them pretend to be a couple having a fight that quickly escalates to violence. If the caller says, "Is everything OK" you just say, "Oh yeah, at least this time the bleeding is happening in the kitchen where it's easier to clean up".
Just a few ideas off the top of my head... Be creative! Have fun! And most of all be careful out there.
...we'll have wireless circuit boards where all the components talk to each other using low power, short range wireless and the circuit board is merely a legacy component so they will fit in today's cases properly. Yeah. Like THAT will ever happen.
Shouldn't that be PIMP, not John? Last I checked, sales folks were pimps.
...the spammers just want people to read more of the classics. Plain and simple. It's an educational campaign. See here and here for what I did to try and help my poor Barracuda work with these things and how even that's not effective. As it stands my organization has 93% of our mail stream used up by spam that gets filtered out by the Barracuda. The other 7% is mostly legit mail. But analyzing just one day of mail I found that the tremendous amount of spam my users are seeing is really only .013% of the mail stream. Looks like the average amount of spam our users are seeing is four to five messages per day during the week. Insane. So... has the percentage crawled up from the previous 80% to 93% for anyone else or are we just being hit harder because I told a pushy anti-spam salesperson to take a hike or I'd block her domain?
My experience was back in 1997 at an old job. We used Symantec NAV. I set all the systems to scan all file access all the time. The systems would just go nuts because there were tons of viruses being brought in all the time so lots of scanning, quarantining, deleting, etc... (This was in a public computing center) After having enough legit data chewed up by Norton, we tried FProt. That sucked even worse. The admin who took over when I left for bigger and better things moved the whole organization to McAffee and they've supposedly been OK. But, I personally don't trust McAfee at all. Of course it's of no consequence to me since I don't use Windows or Mac OS X. If I need to scan something I use ClamAV. Either way, "real time" protection has been a bad thing in every instance I've run into it with using Norton. Even friends PCs. They do everything right as I told them. Nothing is disabled or unchecked. Just huge amounts of CPU tracking any activity on their PCs. It makes a PC considerably slower than if it had no AV software at all. I'm not saying to not run it. I'm just saying it will slow a system down noticeably. Trust me, I do this for a living.
Well dammit boy!! If you know about that then why aren't you designing the next wave in display devices. That bit of knowledge has to be worth SOMETHING!!!
Methinks thou dost taketh me too seriously folks.
This is very likely going to cause even more problems for the environment. Anyone care to comment on the recent heatwave that has swept the planet within the past month? Record temperatures on every part of the globe. With the worldwide deployment of WiMax, we'll be dumping even more energies into the environment that don't belong there. This isn't just AM or FM radio we're talking here. We're talking microwaves. The VERY SAME energy that's used to cook your food in a microwave oven! All we're doing is turning the planet into one big Amana Radar Range and global temps will skyrocket to new extremes of both hi and lo temps.
We've already done tremendous and very ironic damage with air conditioning. In our interest of keeping our working and living spaces comfortably climate controlled we forgot one thing: thermal energy is like water. If you take heat from one space and pump it out, it has to go somewhere. We've been using ACs in our houses, our cars, and businesses, and god knows where else to pump the heat out. Well, where does all that heat go? Into the outside air. And what happens when you pump water into the outdoors? You make ponds, lakes and oceans. Same thing with heat, only worse. All that heat is now coming back to get us. But, even more irony... because it's getting hotter out there, we're using our ACs more than ever before and pumping MORE heat out! I predict that by 2015, the typical summer temps on the equator will be 180F. They're already averaging about 140F and that's up from the relatively cool 95F they used to be back in the 70s. We've got a huge problem folks and WiMax is only going to make it worse. Stop them before it's too late.
Oh... and the internet is a series of tubes.
Welcome to the world of Microsoft. :P
True, but we're also talking about software to manage the system, not actually do the heavy lifting (no pun intended). Essentially, it's just an administration interface for the city workers to operate the system. The rest of the stuff is external to that. However, as I also said in my original post, I'm guessing that the specs aren't actually open.
I know I don't have the desk space for it here at work. But at home it becomes a matter of wallspace. You press the monitor into double duty as both your "TV" and your computer display. That's what I've got in the living room right now. It works great for my audio/video editing sessions. Nice large desktop with very readable 14 point fonts in X window. But it's also used by my wife for watching TV, listening to music, etc... At work, I think the best I could do is a dual screen set up.
You're mostly correct until the industry cooks up a "must have" reason that makes a user *THINK* they need a new PC/OS/Gadget/what have you. The auto industry went through this with tail fins back in the 50s. Software is going through it with more and more eye-candy that requires a hefty investment, but doesn't actually produce much of value in the end. (Don't get me wrong, I'm usually the first on the block to get new eye candy as long as it's something that is worth it to me) But, think about the number of average people who go out and buy a new PC just because their old one (that's only a year and a half old) is "slow". They are convinced by sleazy salesholes that their PC is slow because it's "old". They don't realize that maybe they have a virus, or some kind of software problem. Run an anti-virus program on your system that monitors everything around the clock and you'll have a slow PC, for example. Or some new software comes out that the user MUST HAVE but it only runs on the latest OS which only runs on boxes no older than two years. There's the artificial drive to buy new crap even if they don't need it.
As far as the complexity, well... sadly it really is a case of "your brain is too small for this century" when it comes to most users. There is no way to provide the flexible and advanced functionality that a user may want and not add complexity. Take for example the concept of de-interlacing. It's a complex issue with video. I use Xine on Linux and the TV Time filter to take care of my DirecTV signal and make it look as nice as possible on my LCD HD monitor. (Heh... it actually looks better than connecting the DirecTV box right to the monitor's composite in) But, in order to actually take advantage of this with a simple click of an icon for my wife to use, I had to write a script that calls 'xine' with the appropriate options, and tunes the GeForce driver for optimal color overlay. It's once click for her and hours of work at the outset for me. Joe User will NEVER do this. The only way to offer it to him is to have the application make automatic (and stupid) assumptions about how things should work and then give him the lowest common denominator result. If Windows Media Player took care of this, you know it would make lame assumptions about how the de-interlacing should work and he'd wind up with a crap signal unless he had all his ducks in a row hardware-wise. And then you're back to complexity that he shouldn't have to deal with...
Very likely they've got an Intel box and it's running some form of Unix or Windows embedded. So yes...
Then the end-user does something stupid and makes the font legible and you lose desktop real estate again making 1920x1200 pretty small. While high resolution is nice and all, what we really need are 37" wide screen desktop monitors to come down in price. Or better yet, something that paints the image directly onto the rods and cones in our eyes. Of course at that point a screensaver will be mandatory if you don't want to be walking around with a Start button floating in view even when you're not on the system.
$5500 a month? For software to manage the garage? That's roberry, plain and simple. And not only that, but robbery of a public organization that is likely not too well funded. When it somes down to brass tacks, this $5500 fee was cooked up arbitrarily by the Robotic. That works out to $66,000 a year. They could pay their own devel to make software to keep that place running AND add new functionality as needed as long as the hardware specs are available (which you know they aren't). Considering that a standard parking lot to house as many cars would require more land and probably some staffing that get paid minimum wage, I don't think it's not cost effective to have in-house development in this case.
Hear hear! I say mod the grandparent up too! Most insightful post evar.
Thanks. I try my best. Good to hear some kudos every once in a while.