This kind of a guide is extra sweet for folks like me, who Aren't hardcore Linux users/coders. (To Many 'advanced users' the occasional function string or what-have-you is expected, but having to open up your source code every time you make a change--e.g.: replacing your $10 keyboard with a new, slightly different $10 keyboard--is too much of a bloody hassle)
What kind of keyboard you have that you need to look at the source code to switch them around?
Now that lots of Linux distros are fairly easy to install, what's the motivation to go with a commercial RPM-based distro?
Well, for one, the for-pay distribution target mostly businesses so a loss at the individual level (home user) is not so important - and Businesses want peace of mind that comes with support.
Also, there are licenses that for-pay distributions have to pay to be allowed to distribute. This isn't in the base linux system but stuff like various non-free multimedia codecs or the nonfree mp3 format IIRC. It's too much hassle for businesses to track these down but they don't want to be caught with their pants down if a software audit ever comes in. Enter Redhat/whover, they took care of this already.
Notice that distros like Ubuntu have you download this stuff from other repositories and not their own, meaning that you are responsible for having the correct licenses. For a home user, this is not likely going to be a risk, but the business owner is well to cover is ass.
To me, the hard part about Linux now is not the install, it's stuff like getting sound and printing to work. Is that any easier on Mandriva than on Ubuntu, or vanilla Debian?
In my experience, (current Ubuntu user), the distro that autodetects the most stuff for you is the easiest^_^ And all package based major distros are all about the same amount of work getting something to work if it's not autodetected. Source based distros like Gentoo can be another can of worms, I'm not sure.
If the article is all there to go on, it is sensationalist.
I see nothing over coercion:
"Dr. Schatten, who was to have led the organization's board of directors, says he is now severing collaboration with Dr. Hwang, due to questions over the source of human eggs used in a 2004 cloning project, and errors in a 2005 paper coauthored by the scientists.
A 2004 news report in the journal Nature said at least one female laboratory worker had provided eggs for the project, an allegation that Dr. Hwang has denied on several occasions. Under U.S. rules, collecting eggs from women working on a cloning project would be considered unethical. In the original paper, published by the journal Science last year, the scientists said the eggs all came from anonymous donors."
I know it's popular to hate lawyers, so what I'm about to say will probably burn my karma to cinders. But, the simple truth is, it's not the fault of lawyers. They're working within the system, getting paid by clients to do what they do. You want less patent lawsuits? Reform the patent system. Don't burn lawyers at the stake.
But they are designing the system. Working within the system should be no problem for them.
Sorry if I don't feel enough sympathy for lawyers. For that, I'd have to get my stopwatch and start billing you time which is coincidentally only at $500 per hour + expenses:P
When you lead, there are no guidelines and the outcome is based on your best effort.
The problems is, there seems to be very little leadership in the US goverment. We have a congress full of bought senators and representatives making the law based on how their corporate donors want it.
It's not a best effort. Except a best effort to stay in office.
When something goes wrong, there's also no leadership. The buck gets passed.
Things might be different if we had citizen politicians who served a term or two because they have vision and can get back to another job if things don't pan out. But our country has changed since the constitution came into being and now it's almost all career politicians. Check statistics, 95% of congress critters are lawyers. That alone nearly accounts for all the fucked up shit that gets passed.
Umm... It didn't really seem to me like an attack on Linux, per se, but more of a defense of shared source. Microsoft fears Linux (and rightly so) as it's up-and-coming competitor - but there haven't exactly been horse's heads in beds, have there?
I think spreading FUD or misinformation about something is always an attack on that front.
And besides, if Linux is now Microsoft's greatest competitor, how the heck is it not Microsoft's business? (Here, "business" can be taken more or less literally.)
It's like the attack ads on TVs by politicians (or by lobbyists) attacking the other guy. It's getting so bad in New Jersey campaigns, I don't even know who's running against who, all I'm being told is who NOT to vote for.
Perhaps it's utopian, but I hate negative advertising in most cases because it attempts to circumvent the audience's ability to choose and go straight to spoonfeeding you the "right" choice instead of having a platform to stand on (Here, this is what I'm about, if you this a good direction to go in, please choose me) and letting people decide to choose based on the candidate's own merits instead of manipulating base emotions.
If you watch Linus, he almost never resorts to 'negative' advertising. He lets his work and ideas speak for themselves, and so he attracted a following which helped him make what we know today as Linux. The people who boo out MS, aren't paid by him (though sometimes some individuals go overboard and become idiotic in their blind fanaticism, and yes I'm guilty of acting idiotic towards MS too sometimes).
However, many, but not all, of the people praising MS and booing Linux are being paid by MS. They wouldn't even care otherwise. So it is up to MS to control much of it.
I feel MS uses this negative advertising to such a laughable extreme (TCO studies, etc) that nearly no informed person in the Technical sector believes them outright anymore - and that will hurt them as a business when some of those people graduate from the purely Technical side to the management side. Or even beforehand.
This is why they shouldn't engage in FUD. Not to be nice. If they want to 'win', spend that money and make a better product.
From TFA: "Shared source is Microsoft's foray into community development, started back in 2001 when Linux was just a hobby for the blue-haired ponytail set."
Many distros only come only with open source programs by default. Which you can go yourself and change without paying anyone anything.
And the Linux kernel is also open. Just don't expect your changes to necessarily go into effect on the 'official' kernel. Just like the MS's shared source code will have 1 official version and then whatever the customers changed out there which they can't even share with each other because they signed NDAs and whatnot up the wazoo just to see the code. Unlike Linux.
MS, stop attacking Linux and mind your own business. You have less and less credibility when you keep attacking Open Source in general with your FUD and your customers are catching on. It's better to salvage what dignity you have and shut up. If and when you stop spreading FUD, your credibility might go up and you can stop spending billions advertising yourself and attacking others. But then, that would totally go against the grain of what is a marketing company, not a software engineering company.
Lastly, even if this is a scam, the potential is there for the buyer to actually own the land. I once bought a tiny parcel of land from a company with a clear title. Years later, the title came into question, yet the new other owner couldn't find any previous owner anywhere. The company I bought from went bankrupt years before, and the courts awarded me the land with maybe $500 in legal fees.
I guess, but it sounds like software patents where someone who 'discovers' an idea and then sits on it and sue people who actually make use of it....
Plus, this assumes the people who sell you the 'deed' actually have a right to sell you the property in the first place - how is this coordinated? What if 10 different companies are selling the same land over and over again? You might as well print up a fancy deed for yourself. In fact, you might as well print up a fancy deed for a bunch of idiots for, say, $50 a piece and they think they own a part of the moon and you get a bunch of nearly free cash.
I'm in favor of the land on it first, then 'improve' it, then worry about 'ownership' afterwords idea. Anything else is unmasked greed for wanting something without sticking any work on it.
Yeah, I just thought about that too. I would imagine rejection would be much lower if they use one's own cells and thus the immune system wouldn't have to be artificially weakened through pills - you don't get that benefit through organ farming....
of this over, say, growing organs in either the lab or in animals like pigs? The latter sounds feasible, the former really sounds like something out of a Sci-Fi novel that may come true 50 or 100 years from now, if that. (Reminds me of the nano-tech....)
I could see the practicalities for something like skin but livers and kidneys?
After swearing off of them after buying the 7500/100 around '96ish with the buggy OS 7.5 (?) I can't remember.
Anyway Pre-OSX Mac was really dead and starting to smell really bad.
But so is Windows now. The past year, I got my parents to buy 2 Apple notebooks because they don't do anything major and I got sick of the adaware/avg-antivirus/spybot_detect_and_destroy/sp ywareblaster/MicrosoftSpywareBetaSomething routine everytime I came over. Not to mention the mandatory half-year reinstallation when the registry got corrupted or when stubborn unwanted programs wouldn't be uninstalled or initialized and hogged resources at start up.
Now, after initial setup is done, I can come over and have 0 computer crap to put up with. Thank god, my peace of mind is worth more than the premium of a pair of stupid notebooks.
There - 2 Mac 'converts' that had nothing to do with the iPod
And this is called Falsifiability. In order for a scientific theory to be such, and to be worthwhile, it has to predict something. Otherwise it's worthless - this notion was around long befor Einstein's time.
When you introduce a new theory, you usually have to have something to back it up for it to be back it. Even if it just a series of tests that attempted to falsify said theory and the falsification failed.
Next time someone posts "Einstein says", please have a source. Dead men can't refute so called 'quotes.'
Einstein provided mathematical proofs in his groundbreaking articles IIRC.
I believe this new discovery when I see the conceptual proofs, namely this mystery device in action with 3rd parties able to test it. Till then, I'll nod my head and smile.
There's a lack of people getting a google mail address?
I got one because I already had a Yahoo and MSN address. Hotmail deleted my name because I didn't sign in a whopping 30 days and the Yahoo one is swamped by mailing lists/spam - now I know better to prevent that - by keeping on signing services to my Yahoo address:)
Many others I know got a gmail address just because.
Promises are cheap. Slashvertising must be cheap too.
Do these people have any track record? It's a startup? So I guess not.
Why is this making news before it comes out?
All I'm reading here are big promises on a product that a cross between.Mac/Google's offerings so- anything new to see here?
Oh wait....
From TFA: "Not only is TransMedia selling Glide to end users, it's also licensing the software to media companies [b]so they can sell it as a branded service.[/b ] As a result, companies like Comcast, Disney, SBC, and Verizon will have the opportunity to offer an integrated, monetizable service that, at first glance, look significantly more compelling than the offerings from Internet portals like AOL and Internet software services like MySpace.com."
Gee, what I wanted, along with those Disney and eBay branded credit cards I don't have nor want.... just the corporations I trust with my personal info.
But the article is almost talking as if the goal of doubling the now 25% efficency being doubled are being guaranteed to be met which is hardly the case - it's been over 30 years (where it was what 8% effieciency?) since solar cells were introduced and many other countrie/companies have been working on improving efficiency without that huge jump in performance - Germany/France in particular.
There are all kinds of other issues I know - mono and so on - and it's not as simple as I make out. But I think it's an important and overlooked ingredient. If the software is free and the only way you make money is support, you want a *difficult* product that *requires* a lot of support.
Providing the actual support costs money - the more customers you have with probelms, the more support staff you have to hire. Also, your customer will be none to impressed with the product quality.
Providing support is largely providing peace-of-mind.
It's almost like the insurance business, the insurance don't want you to get into an accident (for the financial sake of all involved) but they are there as long as you pay your premiums on time. They make money by the premiums minus the cost of accidents, so it's desirable for customers to have less, not more, accidents.
As in, Congress passes a law saying soldiers must be quartered (or if you think having police power installed on a router is quartering, Congress passes a law requiring police power installed on routers.) We're at war with terrorists, recall. I don't think the courts would buy that a University of buisness is a "house" in any event. Use encryption if you want privacy.
Read it again:
Amendment III
Quartering of soldiers: No Soldier shall,
a)in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner
b)nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.
Now from http://www.fff.org/comment/com0204a.asp "What does our Constitution say about war? Our Founders divided war into two separate powers: Congress was given the power to declare war and the president was given the power to wage war. What that means is that under our system of government, the president cannot legally wage war against another nation in the absence of a declaration of war against that nation from Congress."
I don't know if a 'war' (vs "police action") has been declared by congress against "terrorists", but I know Bush declared victory over Iraq already. So I assume we are not in an actual state of war, other than the one the administration wants against 'terrorists' which doesn't count according to the constitution unless congress declares it, otherwise it's just a buzzwords to indefinitely oppress us (the people) of the US.
Perhaps the courts won't declare a University a house, but this may be more dependent whether said University is publicly funded or privately funded rather than what we think of a 'house.'
Slashdot Mirror
What kind of keyboard you have that you need to look at the source code to switch them around?
???
Well, for one, the for-pay distribution target mostly businesses so a loss at the individual level (home user) is not so important - and Businesses want peace of mind that comes with support.
Also, there are licenses that for-pay distributions have to pay to be allowed to distribute. This isn't in the base linux system but stuff like various non-free multimedia codecs or the nonfree mp3 format IIRC. It's too much hassle for businesses to track these down but they don't want to be caught with their pants down if a software audit ever comes in. Enter Redhat/whover, they took care of this already.
Notice that distros like Ubuntu have you download this stuff from other repositories and not their own, meaning that you are responsible for having the correct licenses. For a home user, this is not likely going to be a risk, but the business owner is well to cover is ass.
In my experience, (current Ubuntu user), the distro that autodetects the most stuff for you is the easiest^_^ And all package based major distros are all about the same amount of work getting something to work if it's not autodetected. Source based distros like Gentoo can be another can of worms, I'm not sure.
If the article is all there to go on, it is sensationalist.
I see nothing over coercion:
"Dr. Schatten, who was to have led the organization's board of directors, says he is now severing collaboration with Dr. Hwang, due to questions over the source of human eggs used in a 2004 cloning project, and errors in a 2005 paper coauthored by the scientists.
A 2004 news report in the journal Nature said at least one female laboratory worker had provided eggs for the project, an allegation that Dr. Hwang has denied on several occasions. Under U.S. rules, collecting eggs from women working on a cloning project would be considered unethical. In the original paper, published by the journal Science last year, the scientists said the eggs all came from anonymous donors."
Stupid Question: Could they be prosecuted/sued under the DMCA for trying to bypass the security in a computer?
It would be sweet to give big corps a taste of their own legislation.
Actually a bit lower, but more than enough:
http://www.yourcongress.com/ViewArticle.asp?artic
But they are designing the system. Working within the system should be no problem for them.
Sorry if I don't feel enough sympathy for lawyers. For that, I'd have to get my stopwatch and start billing you time which is coincidentally only at $500 per hour + expenses:P
The problems is, there seems to be very little leadership in the US goverment. We have a congress full of bought senators and representatives making the law based on how their corporate donors want it.
It's not a best effort. Except a best effort to stay in office.
When something goes wrong, there's also no leadership. The buck gets passed.
Things might be different if we had citizen politicians who served a term or two because they have vision and can get back to another job if things don't pan out. But our country has changed since the constitution came into being and now it's almost all career politicians. Check statistics, 95% of congress critters are lawyers. That alone nearly accounts for all the fucked up shit that gets passed.
Is it me or do these busybody administrators raise the level of comments from any other BS you read on the net to newsworthy by their own actions?
I think spreading FUD or misinformation about something is always an attack on that front.
It's like the attack ads on TVs by politicians (or by lobbyists) attacking the other guy. It's getting so bad in New Jersey campaigns, I don't even know who's running against who, all I'm being told is who NOT to vote for.
Perhaps it's utopian, but I hate negative advertising in most cases because it attempts to circumvent the audience's ability to choose and go straight to spoonfeeding you the "right" choice instead of having a platform to stand on (Here, this is what I'm about, if you this a good direction to go in, please choose me) and letting people decide to choose based on the candidate's own merits instead of manipulating base emotions.
If you watch Linus, he almost never resorts to 'negative' advertising. He lets his work and ideas speak for themselves, and so he attracted a following which helped him make what we know today as Linux. The people who boo out MS, aren't paid by him (though sometimes some individuals go overboard and become idiotic in their blind fanaticism, and yes I'm guilty of acting idiotic towards MS too sometimes).
However, many, but not all, of the people praising MS and booing Linux are being paid by MS. They wouldn't even care otherwise. So it is up to MS to control much of it.
I feel MS uses this negative advertising to such a laughable extreme (TCO studies, etc) that nearly no informed person in the Technical sector believes them outright anymore - and that will hurt them as a business when some of those people graduate from the purely Technical side to the management side. Or even beforehand.
This is why they shouldn't engage in FUD. Not to be nice. If they want to 'win', spend that money and make a better product.
From TFA:
"Shared source is Microsoft's foray into community development, started back in 2001 when Linux was just a hobby for the blue-haired ponytail set."
WTF?!
Many distros only come only with open source programs by default. Which you can go yourself and change without paying anyone anything.
And the Linux kernel is also open. Just don't expect your changes to necessarily go into effect on the 'official' kernel. Just like the MS's shared source code will have 1 official version and then whatever the customers changed out there which they can't even share with each other because they signed NDAs and whatnot up the wazoo just to see the code. Unlike Linux.
MS, stop attacking Linux and mind your own business. You have less and less credibility when you keep attacking Open Source in general with your FUD and your customers are catching on. It's better to salvage what dignity you have and shut up. If and when you stop spreading FUD, your credibility might go up and you can stop spending billions advertising yourself and attacking others. But then, that would totally go against the grain of what is a marketing company, not a software engineering company.
I guess, but it sounds like software patents where someone who 'discovers' an idea and then sits on it and sue people who actually make use of it....
Plus, this assumes the people who sell you the 'deed' actually have a right to sell you the property in the first place - how is this coordinated? What if 10 different companies are selling the same land over and over again? You might as well print up a fancy deed for yourself. In fact, you might as well print up a fancy deed for a bunch of idiots for, say, $50 a piece and they think they own a part of the moon and you get a bunch of nearly free cash.
I'm in favor of the land on it first, then 'improve' it, then worry about 'ownership' afterwords idea. Anything else is unmasked greed for wanting something without sticking any work on it.
Yeah, I just thought about that too. I would imagine rejection would be much lower if they use one's own cells and thus the immune system wouldn't have to be artificially weakened through pills - you don't get that benefit through organ farming....
of this over, say, growing organs in either the lab or in animals like pigs? The latter sounds feasible, the former really sounds like something out of a Sci-Fi novel that may come true 50 or 100 years from now, if that. (Reminds me of the nano-tech....)
I could see the practicalities for something like skin but livers and kidneys?
After swearing off of them after buying the 7500/100 around '96ish with the buggy OS 7.5 (?) I can't remember.
p ywareblaster/MicrosoftSpywareBetaSomething routine everytime I came over. Not to mention the mandatory half-year reinstallation when the registry got corrupted or when stubborn unwanted programs wouldn't be uninstalled or initialized and hogged resources at start up.
Anyway Pre-OSX Mac was really dead and starting to smell really bad.
But so is Windows now. The past year, I got my parents to buy 2 Apple notebooks because they don't do anything major and I got sick of the adaware/avg-antivirus/spybot_detect_and_destroy/s
Now, after initial setup is done, I can come over and have 0 computer crap to put up with. Thank god, my peace of mind is worth more than the premium of a pair of stupid notebooks.
There - 2 Mac 'converts' that had nothing to do with the iPod
"No."
--Albert Einstein
And this is called Falsifiability. In order for a scientific theory to be such, and to be worthwhile, it has to predict something. Otherwise it's worthless - this notion was around long befor Einstein's time.
When you introduce a new theory, you usually have to have something to back it up for it to be back it. Even if it just a series of tests that attempted to falsify said theory and the falsification failed.
Next time someone posts "Einstein says", please have a source. Dead men can't refute so called 'quotes.'
I meant in my original post "if I were him I would have sued the PO, etcetera."
Not as a simple slashdot poster:(
P.O. = Police Officer in this case.
And in America you can sue almost anyone at anytime for anything;) If you are successful or not is a different matter.
Remember that OJ was sued by the family of his ex-wife for unlawful death and they won. He was never convicted and they were technically not involved.
Couldn't he appeal? I would have sued the P.O., the state, and anybody else involved on that witchhunt.
Extraordinary Claims require Extraordinary Proof.
Einstein provided mathematical proofs in his groundbreaking articles IIRC.
I believe this new discovery when I see the conceptual proofs, namely this mystery device in action with 3rd parties able to test it. Till then, I'll nod my head and smile.
There's a lack of people getting a google mail address?
I got one because I already had a Yahoo and MSN address. Hotmail deleted my name because I didn't sign in a whopping 30 days and the Yahoo one is swamped by mailing lists/spam - now I know better to prevent that - by keeping on signing services to my Yahoo address:)
Many others I know got a gmail address just because.
Promises are cheap. Slashvertising must be cheap too.
.Mac/Google's offerings so- anything new to see here?
Do these people have any track record? It's a startup? So I guess not.
Why is this making news before it comes out?
All I'm reading here are big promises on a product that a cross between
Oh wait....
From TFA:
"Not only is TransMedia selling Glide to end users, it's also licensing the software to media companies [b]so they can sell it as a branded service.[/b ] As a result, companies like Comcast, Disney, SBC, and Verizon will have the opportunity to offer an integrated, monetizable service that, at first glance, look significantly more compelling than the offerings from Internet portals like AOL and Internet software services like MySpace.com."
Gee, what I wanted, along with those Disney and eBay branded credit cards I don't have nor want.... just the corporations I trust with my personal info.
But the article is almost talking as if the goal of doubling the now 25% efficency being doubled are being guaranteed to be met which is hardly the case - it's been over 30 years (where it was what 8% effieciency?) since solar cells were introduced and many other countrie/companies have been working on improving efficiency without that huge jump in performance - Germany/France in particular.
Providing the actual support costs money - the more customers you have with probelms, the more support staff you have to hire. Also, your customer will be none to impressed with the product quality.
Providing support is largely providing peace-of-mind.
It's almost like the insurance business, the insurance don't want you to get into an accident (for the financial sake of all involved) but they are there as long as you pay your premiums on time. They make money by the premiums minus the cost of accidents, so it's desirable for customers to have less, not more, accidents.
Read it again:
Amendment III
Quartering of soldiers: No Soldier shall,
a)in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner
b)nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.
Now from http://www.fff.org/comment/com0204a.asp
"What does our Constitution say about war? Our Founders divided war into two separate powers: Congress was given the power to declare war and the president was given the power to wage war. What that means is that under our system of government, the president cannot legally wage war against another nation in the absence of a declaration of war against that nation from Congress."
I don't know if a 'war' (vs "police action") has been declared by congress against "terrorists", but I know Bush declared victory over Iraq already. So I assume we are not in an actual state of war, other than the one the administration wants against 'terrorists' which doesn't count according to the constitution unless congress declares it, otherwise it's just a buzzwords to indefinitely oppress us (the people) of the US.
Perhaps the courts won't declare a University a house, but this may be more dependent whether said University is publicly funded or privately funded rather than what we think of a 'house.'