1) Driver Support: Maybe what you say is true, but my personal experience has been otherwise -- Linux picked up all my hardware automatically, while Windows (XP) didn't.
Well, Linux distros are relatively recent. The point is not whether they install automatically, it's how easily you can get them to install in general. Even if Windows doesn't automatically detect it, the hardware usually comes with a CD with drivers on. I can't remember ever buying some hardware which came with Linux drivers. You usually have to trawl around the Internet to find something which sort of half works if you're lucky.
Nvidia cards work, but I don't know if any others do. Installing the nvidia drivers is an adventure in itself. God help you if you don't know the command line. Linux is also the bane of dialup users with its near total lack of internal modem support.
I for one have TV cards that don't work with Linux. The number which actually do work are like needles in the haystack. Even if someone else says they've found one which works on Linux, if you get one yourself you might often find that it's a slightly different version which is completely incompatible.
3) Openoffice, Kword, Abiword, antiword... all open Word files. The reason most Linux users hate to receive Word attachments is a philosophy thing, not that they can't open them.
I reason I hate them isn't philosophical, as a non-hippy I don't give a damn about open standards or open source or all of that, I just want the computer to bloody work. Open Office is a nightmare compared to MS Office. I'd rather use Excel 97 than the latest Open Office spreadsheet. The thing STILL opens all at once rather than as individual apps. The support for Office files is half-baked at best.
If he wants people to use 'GNU' perhaps he should have come up with a better name. I mean, even if there was a decent way to pronounce it, it's named after something that looks like a goat.
I, along with everyone else, will just keep calling the whole system 'Linux', and by done with it.
Outsourcing of our jobs should be made illegal. You're doing nothing more than hurting your fellow countrymen..
Companies exist to make themselves money, not other Americans. I don't see why you're entitled to a job just because you have the same passport as whoever founded the company, even if you're no more qualified than a foreigner. I don't know if legally you can stop companies employing people in other countries.
I bet you don't buy entirely American-produced food, or use entirely American-made electronics, or only access American internet-content, or drive entirely American cars, watch only American films and TV programmes, only wear American-made clothes, so how can you expect an American company to only employ Americans?
We live in a global market now. This means you can buy things from all over the world, you can communicate with people all over the world, it also means that companies can employ people all over the world. This is a good thing.
Restricting employement based on arbitrary national boundaries is a horrific and outdated concept.
Regardless, I agree with Hood, I would very much prefer to hear that jobs are being outsourced more and more to Americans rather than being sent overseas to India.
Why? Does someone have more of a right to a job because they're American?
Slashdot is always complaining about things like DVD regions, saying that the concept of borders in an international market is obsolete. Well, that cuts both ways.
Well, one thing's for sure, we NEED an unmanned, automated baggage system. The other week, baggage handlers proved themselves to be totally unreliable. Hopefully someone can invent a decent, cheap automated system so all the baggage handlers can be sacked. That's not even considering them stealing, damaging suitcases and just being downright lazy.
A 'blog' is someone's personal journal, which is on the Internet. These comments aren't a diary. Slashdot is just a normal forum, with the discussions attached to news stories.
The only 'blog-like' thing on this site is the journal facility, which hardly anyone uses.
You've got it wrong again. Begging the question means avoiding it. The old meaning of 'beg' is 'avoid'. In this case the article avoided the question of whether anti-ageing was necessary.
I love it when people try to be clever by pointing out someone's mistake, then end up being wrong themselves. I think there's a German word for that sort of thing.
What???? The general sentiment is NOT that Google=good. You've been listening to too much propaganda and paid Slashvertisements. There is a growing feeling that Google is over-hyped and nowhere near as good as they think they are. I know it's nice to think that anyone who doesn't like Google is a Microsoft astroturfer, but......it's EXTREMELY ARROGANT to think that no-one in the world could dislike Google. Not everyone has happily accepted the brainwashing.
Actually, it means exactly what I thought. The article talked about stopping ageing, without asking whether that was necessary. In doing so, it begged the question of whether slowing down ageing was desirable. In trying to be clever, you've actually made yourself look stupid. Like the people who spelt viruses 'virii'.
I slightly agree about point of view, they give apologies. But they're shallow apologies, copouts, written by the marketing department, saying nothing and conceding nothing. Then they carry on doing the same crap over and over again as if no-one had complained.
They still speak over end credits. They still hype everything up rather than letting it speak for itself. They still show endless reality TV programmes. They still use presenters who are paid too much and just patronise the viewer, as if we were 5 years old. They still use irritating sequences of those red people before programmes, rather than just showing us a timetable of what's on next, or the the time, or anything which is informative rather than meaningless fluff. They still show adverts for digital TV which insult the intelligence of anyone with a IQ over 50. They still threaten us with fines even if we've paid the TV licence. They still play loud annoying music over programmes drowning out anything else. They still hide programmes on obscure digital channels, whilst the mainstream channels are showing crap. The news is still dumbed down beyond belief. They still show endless repeats. They still take up an hour to show the lottery numbers, padding it out with an insulting game show which would offend retards. They still haven't sacked Natasha Kaplinksi or Mark Lawrenson.
But why would they improve when they get the same money and all the perks for maintaining the medeocrity?
Why should you have to install some extra shitty software just to view media content? There's no excuse for not using standard formats that can be viewed by default by any OS. It is not the BBC's business to be lining Real's pockets.
If they streamed them over the Internet they wouldn't be able to make money selling them to other countries. DVDs wouldn't sell the same either. Both of those are huge sources of income.
Why should we export our way of life? Britain is rubbish. It's perpetually grey, miserable and dirty. America has sunny beaches, gunfights, gangsters, attractive women and all sorts of stuff we don't get.
How can we compete with Hollywood? Britain's film output is atrocious.
In real life, people are seperated based on ability level, what's wrong with that? Children of similar ability should be taught together, no point having geniuses in the same classes as retards.
You can't learn social skills at home because you're cut off from reality. Social skills aren't just about learning how to have intelligent debates with adults on politics, it's about getting on with DIFFERENT TYPES OF PEOPLE. When you're stuck at home being homeschooled by your middle-class parents, the only people you're going to interact with regularly (i.e. 8 hours a day), are your middle-class parents. And that's it.
That's not healthy. Kids need to grow up around other kids, not locked in the house for 8 hours a day.
At the moment, the parents who home school are generally middle-class, well-educated and rich. They can afford one parent to stay at home, and have the ability to teach them.
Now what happens when the parents are uneducated and don't know anything about what they're teaching? Bear in mind we're talking about 90% of the population, not like in your white-bread upbringing.
Now assume that both parents work full time jobs. Who does the home schooling? Now assume there are 3-4 kids, all different ages with different requirements. If professional trained teachers can't cope with them, what makes you think untrained, uneducated amateur teachers would manage?
Then wonder how you replace sports, or even breaks. Kids are fat enough as it is, even playing football at lunchtime. Now take that away and have them having their breaks at home with no-one to play with. They'll get even fatter.
Current home-schooling parents probably have giant houses with large rooms/studies. What happens in a tiny terraced house or council flat, with barely enough room to move let alone teach?
You can't rely on technology, it's too unreliable. It would be a disaster for lessons to be missed because the Internet connection was down or some software crashed or a PSU failed. Everyone who's ever used a computer knows how fickle they are.
modern school children can find information on virtually ANY issue simply by checking the Internet.
Yeah, but what if they need CORRECT information? I don't want kids learning from wikipedia trolls or articles written by people who don't know what they're doing but they saw something on TV and regurgitated it onto the Internet.
How can the social aspect not be that big? You can't compete with the social development gained from being around their peers 8 hours a day, added to whatever they do in the evening. There's no opportunity to develop social skills working alone at home. I for one would get cabin fever from that.
Why is it that all the pro-ipod posts are modded up, and all the pro-rio posts are modded down? Shouldn't moderation be impartial? I can't see what purpose it serves to try and censor posts to give the site a particular bias. Surely Slashdot as a place of supposedly intelligent enlightened people should be above that, but maybe not.
Everything ugly compared to the Ipod? They're all small lumps of plastic, none of them look either good or bad, no worse than a mobile phone or a remote control. They spend 99.99% of their time in your pocket anyway so what does it matter?
I can't believe how shallow people are when it comes to commodity electronics. You're just backing up the opinion that people buy Ipods because it's fashionable rather than making an informed decision based on functionality and needs. How many of the trendy lefties in Starbucks with white headphones actually compared it to the alternatives, and how many bought it because it's what everyone else is buying?
I'd rather have unskippability, memory access that uses common standards rather than proprietary software, low cost, high battery life, songs playing after each other without delay, rather than a funny wheel I'll rarely use and some white headphones.
Apple flat out owns this market and the future looks great...what it can lead to.
How is it great that one corporation owns a market? Doesn't seem like it will lead to much choice for the consumer. But then again what do consumers matter? As far as you're concerned, all that matters in society is shareholder's profits.
This begs the question of whether we need people to live even longer. We already have an ageing population, the ratio of workers to pensioners is getting smaller and smaller as people live longer.
Pensioners are already whining about low pensions. Old workers are already whining about having to work longer. People living even longer is going to make the problem EVEN WORSE.
Imagine having to work till 120. Imagine you're a labourer laying bricks. By fifty you can barely walk upright. By sixty you have arthritis, at sixty-five, you're ready to collapse. But you can't retire at 65 any more, now you have to work another half a century.
We don't need people living longer. Perhaps the obesity epidemic can help turn the tide in the other direction.
This is because the ads on the traditional media are what supports it, so they don't/can't make you watch the ads if you don't partake of their service.
Adverts don't support my TV, what are you talking about? How do billboards support anything for me? Maybe I should have to opt in for them. Spam's no worse than any other form of advertising.
The thing about Harry Potter books is that they're only really any good if you never read books before. Everything in there's a cliche stolen from somewhere else. If you actually read books regularly then Harry Potter is like a watered down second-rate rip off.
But the most people don't read, explaining the popularity of Harry Potter.
That's not the best example. J.K. Rowling is the McDonald's of literature. Would you say that therefore the burger flipper at McDonalds is the best chef in the world?
Although a counter point is Dan Brown, proving that both men and women can write crap books.
As for the rest of you pack of rabid nerds, you're just confirming what I already suspected: you secretely hate copyright law and want to be able to download everything for free. I mean come on, today I woke up to nearly a dozen replies, all of them whining about copyrights, without actually saying anything.
I mean, if you've got an opinion then state it, but all you do is throw red herrings about how 'illegal != immoral' or how 'piracy != theft', without actually giving a solid opinion.
Download all you want, just don't try to justify it because it makes you look stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
1) Driver Support: Maybe what you say is true, but my personal experience has been otherwise -- Linux picked up all my hardware automatically, while Windows (XP) didn't.
Well, Linux distros are relatively recent. The point is not whether they install automatically, it's how easily you can get them to install in general. Even if Windows doesn't automatically detect it, the hardware usually comes with a CD with drivers on. I can't remember ever buying some hardware which came with Linux drivers. You usually have to trawl around the Internet to find something which sort of half works if you're lucky.
Nvidia cards work, but I don't know if any others do. Installing the nvidia drivers is an adventure in itself. God help you if you don't know the command line. Linux is also the bane of dialup users with its near total lack of internal modem support.
I for one have TV cards that don't work with Linux. The number which actually do work are like needles in the haystack. Even if someone else says they've found one which works on Linux, if you get one yourself you might often find that it's a slightly different version which is completely incompatible.
3) Openoffice, Kword, Abiword, antiword... all open Word files. The reason most Linux users hate to receive Word attachments is a philosophy thing, not that they can't open them.
I reason I hate them isn't philosophical, as a non-hippy I don't give a damn about open standards or open source or all of that, I just want the computer to bloody work. Open Office is a nightmare compared to MS Office. I'd rather use Excel 97 than the latest Open Office spreadsheet. The thing STILL opens all at once rather than as individual apps. The support for Office files is half-baked at best.
What the hell is a CDMA phone? I don't know of any phones which don't have sim cards. How on earth do you get onto a network then?
If he wants people to use 'GNU' perhaps he should have come up with a better name. I mean, even if there was a decent way to pronounce it, it's named after something that looks like a goat.
I, along with everyone else, will just keep calling the whole system 'Linux', and by done with it.
Outsourcing of our jobs should be made illegal. You're doing nothing more than hurting your fellow countrymen..
Companies exist to make themselves money, not other Americans. I don't see why you're entitled to a job just because you have the same passport as whoever founded the company, even if you're no more qualified than a foreigner. I don't know if legally you can stop companies employing people in other countries.
I bet you don't buy entirely American-produced food, or use entirely American-made electronics, or only access American internet-content, or drive entirely American cars, watch only American films and TV programmes, only wear American-made clothes, so how can you expect an American company to only employ Americans?
We live in a global market now. This means you can buy things from all over the world, you can communicate with people all over the world, it also means that companies can employ people all over the world. This is a good thing.
Restricting employement based on arbitrary national boundaries is a horrific and outdated concept.
Regardless, I agree with Hood, I would very much prefer to hear that jobs are being outsourced more and more to Americans rather than being sent overseas to India.
Why? Does someone have more of a right to a job because they're American?
Slashdot is always complaining about things like DVD regions, saying that the concept of borders in an international market is obsolete. Well, that cuts both ways.
Well, one thing's for sure, we NEED an unmanned, automated baggage system. The other week, baggage handlers proved themselves to be totally unreliable. Hopefully someone can invent a decent, cheap automated system so all the baggage handlers can be sacked. That's not even considering them stealing, damaging suitcases and just being downright lazy.
Not really.
A 'blog' is someone's personal journal, which is on the Internet. These comments aren't a diary. Slashdot is just a normal forum, with the discussions attached to news stories.
The only 'blog-like' thing on this site is the journal facility, which hardly anyone uses.
You're supposed to take the sim card out. That's what normally happens. If your phone's stolen you've got about a 0.001% chance of getting it back.
You've got it wrong again. Begging the question means avoiding it. The old meaning of 'beg' is 'avoid'. In this case the article avoided the question of whether anti-ageing was necessary.
I love it when people try to be clever by pointing out someone's mistake, then end up being wrong themselves. I think there's a German word for that sort of thing.
What???? The general sentiment is NOT that Google=good. You've been listening to too much propaganda and paid Slashvertisements. There is a growing feeling that Google is over-hyped and nowhere near as good as they think they are. I know it's nice to think that anyone who doesn't like Google is a Microsoft astroturfer, but... ...it's EXTREMELY ARROGANT to think that no-one in the world could dislike Google. Not everyone has happily accepted the brainwashing.
Actually, it means exactly what I thought. The article talked about stopping ageing, without asking whether that was necessary. In doing so, it begged the question of whether slowing down ageing was desirable. In trying to be clever, you've actually made yourself look stupid. Like the people who spelt viruses 'virii'.
I slightly agree about point of view, they give apologies. But they're shallow apologies, copouts, written by the marketing department, saying nothing and conceding nothing. Then they carry on doing the same crap over and over again as if no-one had complained.
They still speak over end credits.
They still hype everything up rather than letting it speak for itself.
They still show endless reality TV programmes.
They still use presenters who are paid too much and just patronise the viewer, as if we were 5 years old.
They still use irritating sequences of those red people before programmes, rather than just showing us a timetable of what's on next, or the the time, or anything which is informative rather than meaningless fluff.
They still show adverts for digital TV which insult the intelligence of anyone with a IQ over 50.
They still threaten us with fines even if we've paid the TV licence.
They still play loud annoying music over programmes drowning out anything else.
They still hide programmes on obscure digital channels, whilst the mainstream channels are showing crap.
The news is still dumbed down beyond belief.
They still show endless repeats.
They still take up an hour to show the lottery numbers, padding it out with an insulting game show which would offend retards.
They still haven't sacked Natasha Kaplinksi or Mark Lawrenson.
But why would they improve when they get the same money and all the perks for maintaining the medeocrity?
Why should you have to install some extra shitty software just to view media content? There's no excuse for not using standard formats that can be viewed by default by any OS. It is not the BBC's business to be lining Real's pockets.
Actually at the time we were too busy spanking the French in Europe to bother about the colonies.
If they streamed them over the Internet they wouldn't be able to make money selling them to other countries. DVDs wouldn't sell the same either. Both of those are huge sources of income.
Why should we export our way of life? Britain is rubbish. It's perpetually grey, miserable and dirty. America has sunny beaches, gunfights, gangsters, attractive women and all sorts of stuff we don't get.
How can we compete with Hollywood? Britain's film output is atrocious.
In real life, people are seperated based on ability level, what's wrong with that? Children of similar ability should be taught together, no point having geniuses in the same classes as retards.
You can't learn social skills at home because you're cut off from reality. Social skills aren't just about learning how to have intelligent debates with adults on politics, it's about getting on with DIFFERENT TYPES OF PEOPLE. When you're stuck at home being homeschooled by your middle-class parents, the only people you're going to interact with regularly (i.e. 8 hours a day), are your middle-class parents. And that's it.
That's not healthy. Kids need to grow up around other kids, not locked in the house for 8 hours a day.
Won't scale, and I'll tell you why:
At the moment, the parents who home school are generally middle-class, well-educated and rich. They can afford one parent to stay at home, and have the ability to teach them.
Now what happens when the parents are uneducated and don't know anything about what they're teaching? Bear in mind we're talking about 90% of the population, not like in your white-bread upbringing.
Now assume that both parents work full time jobs. Who does the home schooling? Now assume there are 3-4 kids, all different ages with different requirements. If professional trained teachers can't cope with them, what makes you think untrained, uneducated amateur teachers would manage?
Then wonder how you replace sports, or even breaks. Kids are fat enough as it is, even playing football at lunchtime. Now take that away and have them having their breaks at home with no-one to play with. They'll get even fatter.
Current home-schooling parents probably have giant houses with large rooms/studies. What happens in a tiny terraced house or council flat, with barely enough room to move let alone teach?
You can't rely on technology, it's too unreliable. It would be a disaster for lessons to be missed because the Internet connection was down or some software crashed or a PSU failed. Everyone who's ever used a computer knows how fickle they are.
modern school children can find information on virtually ANY issue simply by checking the Internet.
Yeah, but what if they need CORRECT information? I don't want kids learning from wikipedia trolls or articles written by people who don't know what they're doing but they saw something on TV and regurgitated it onto the Internet.
How can the social aspect not be that big? You can't compete with the social development gained from being around their peers 8 hours a day, added to whatever they do in the evening. There's no opportunity to develop social skills working alone at home. I for one would get cabin fever from that.
Why is it that all the pro-ipod posts are modded up, and all the pro-rio posts are modded down? Shouldn't moderation be impartial? I can't see what purpose it serves to try and censor posts to give the site a particular bias. Surely Slashdot as a place of supposedly intelligent enlightened people should be above that, but maybe not.
Everything ugly compared to the Ipod? They're all small lumps of plastic, none of them look either good or bad, no worse than a mobile phone or a remote control. They spend 99.99% of their time in your pocket anyway so what does it matter?
I can't believe how shallow people are when it comes to commodity electronics. You're just backing up the opinion that people buy Ipods because it's fashionable rather than making an informed decision based on functionality and needs. How many of the trendy lefties in Starbucks with white headphones actually compared it to the alternatives, and how many bought it because it's what everyone else is buying?
I'd rather have unskippability, memory access that uses common standards rather than proprietary software, low cost, high battery life, songs playing after each other without delay, rather than a funny wheel I'll rarely use and some white headphones.
Apple flat out owns this market and the future looks great...what it can lead to.
How is it great that one corporation owns a market? Doesn't seem like it will lead to much choice for the consumer. But then again what do consumers matter? As far as you're concerned, all that matters in society is shareholder's profits.
when a country is entertained and will readily buy things such as blood pudding, jellied eels, Spotted Dick, liver and lights, and kidney pie
Why is that surprising? McDonald's makes good business: people will eat anything.
This begs the question of whether we need people to live even longer. We already have an ageing population, the ratio of workers to pensioners is getting smaller and smaller as people live longer.
Pensioners are already whining about low pensions. Old workers are already whining about having to work longer. People living even longer is going to make the problem EVEN WORSE.
Imagine having to work till 120. Imagine you're a labourer laying bricks. By fifty you can barely walk upright. By sixty you have arthritis, at sixty-five, you're ready to collapse. But you can't retire at 65 any more, now you have to work another half a century.
We don't need people living longer. Perhaps the obesity epidemic can help turn the tide in the other direction.
This is because the ads on the traditional media are what supports it, so they don't/can't make you watch the ads if you don't partake of their service.
Adverts don't support my TV, what are you talking about? How do billboards support anything for me? Maybe I should have to opt in for them. Spam's no worse than any other form of advertising.
The thing about Harry Potter books is that they're only really any good if you never read books before. Everything in there's a cliche stolen from somewhere else. If you actually read books regularly then Harry Potter is like a watered down second-rate rip off.
But the most people don't read, explaining the popularity of Harry Potter.
That's not the best example. J.K. Rowling is the McDonald's of literature. Would you say that therefore the burger flipper at McDonalds is the best chef in the world?
Although a counter point is Dan Brown, proving that both men and women can write crap books.
You're thinking of trademark.
As for the rest of you pack of rabid nerds, you're just confirming what I already suspected: you secretely hate copyright law and want to be able to download everything for free. I mean come on, today I woke up to nearly a dozen replies, all of them whining about copyrights, without actually saying anything.
I mean, if you've got an opinion then state it, but all you do is throw red herrings about how 'illegal != immoral' or how 'piracy != theft', without actually giving a solid opinion.
Download all you want, just don't try to justify it because it makes you look stupid.