Not just him, but a lot of other people, including me. Obviously not everyday 'geeks' know what they are, just a self-important few.
As for saying 'well google it', it's not my job to find out something so I'm interested in an article, it's up to the article submitter to sell the story to me, if he wants me to read it. Every salesman worth his salt knows that.
To be fair, there's a good chance that this Open Office will have problems. And it's still in beta, and I don't know if it has equivalent functionality to Access. It's very early to declare a winner.
That's not really what I'm on about, one program opening another to perform a particular function, like slrn or mutt opening up vim to edit a message. I mean Outlook and Word are still two different program.
There isn't a file manager I'm personally satisfied with. All the different functionality seems to be spread out across different programs. Yeah I know, it's open source, I can do it myself. But I'm not a programmer, I don't have the knack, it doesn't come to me. And even if I were a programmer, file managers are just one thing I'm not satisfied with, there's all sorts of other things I don't like, hundreds, I can't dedicate my free time to fixing every single thing I don't like. Even just one would take years to perfect. Many projects have many many people working on them, and have done for years, and they're still flawed, what chance do I have?
Something interesting? Since when is Enterprise interesting? It's more boring than reality TV shows, and less inspired than DIY programmes.
Anyone can use the Internet, not just you priveledged 'geeks', and your huge numbers aren't very huge at all. The 'beer swilling idiot' doesn't get his knickers in a twist over a crap TV programme being cancelled after way too many episodes. It's already had about 80 hasn't it? Red Dwarf only had half of that, and that's a far better show.
Well then, the only explanation is that you never read newspapers, magazines or academic papers. I see that thing all the time, all over the place. You'd best buck your ideas up, I'm beginning to think that this 'Anonymous Coward' poster isn't very bright.
$1,000,000 to walk onto a set, read out a few dreary lines, then go to the bank. Good work if you can get it. Makes me wonder why they didn't pay a lot less money and get some decent actors instead, and some decent script-writers who could write jokes.
Yeah, that's something that seems to infect American TV like a cancer. People want to see the same boring programmes over and over again. They'd rather have 600 shitty new episodes of a programme that ran out of ideas years ago, than watch something new. Just look at Friends, 700 episodes, 4 jokes. Or watch the Simpsons script-writers continually scrape the bottom of the barrel: "Oh god, we're like, the longest running cartoon ever, we rule", yeah except if you only count the decent episodes it only ran for a few years.
People say things like 'How can we possible exist without friends/simpsons/star trek on TV?' Dunno, perhaps you could watch the old, better repeats, or get the DVDs, or watch something new. Just because you once enjoyed a programme doesn't mean you need new episodes on every week. Wouldn't you rather have good memories of a great programme than a current reminder of what a once-great programme has sank to?
Personally I think Star Trek has run out of ideas. It'd be a better idea to raise money for a new, better programme.
I don't know if anyone's willing to throw that much money at something that's supposed to be 'free', i.e. done for pleasure in your own time. And at $200 a time, you'd have to do like one a week to make a proper living out of it. Are there that many projects worthy of putting bounties on that could be completed by a single person in a week?
But on the bright side, there'd be no income tax or anything, as you'd be effectively unemployed.
I'm not so sure about that, I have 512MB of RAM, Athlon 2000, and it takes 10 seconds at least for KDE to start up. This just for a very small part of the OS which doesn't really do an awful lot other than put borders and titlebars on Windows.
As for Konqueror, well I think Firefox has taken the open-source browser crown. Saying that, I use Konqueror for browsing images on the local filesystem. As a general file-manager it's not really up to it, and it's not really up to it as an Internet browser. I think the misguided idea to merge the Internet and file-manager was a bad one. You don't see people trying to merge word processors and e-mail programs.
People can switch to a new platform just for one or two killer games, you only need to look at the consoles to confirm it.
But Linux has nethack and tux-racer, surely these are the killer games needed for 2005 to be the year of the Linux desktop?
The commercial games have portability problems. Not all Linux users run on X86. Binary compatibility is a moving target on Linux.
Portability isn't a problem when you're only aiming for X86. People writing games for Macs aren't writing for people who've gotten OSX to work on their electric toaster, they're writing them for people running it on Macs. The same is true for Linux, write them for X86, every other platform is so insignificant that it would be lost in the noise.
Just goes to show you that Windows isn't good for anything. No security, and games are slow too.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. I'm sure that installing games and drivers is much easier on Windows. Also the availability of games and drivers is much greater on Windows. As for speed, I'm not convinced. Linux seems pretty slow in just changing windows. Whereas in Windows the new window comes up snappily, in Linux you get a slight delay. Also you can't change resolution or colour-depth on the fly. Yeah you can do Ctrl+alt+minus, but this doesn't actually work properly.
I use Linux and I'd like it if all the games on Windows, and the hardware, worked flawlessly on Linux, but those days are a long way off.
Well let's be fair, the contents are hardly comparable either. It's not like these Linux games are inventing all these great new paradigms and incredible original gameplay. Just seems like a stream of Doom and Civilisation and Tetris clones.
There is no actual victim, but there doesn't need to be. It's not illegal because someone is being victimised directly, it's because if there was no law against copyright infringement, then everyone would pirate everything, the copyright holders would be broke. It's quite a simple concept: someone produces some content, say a song, they then, either directly or via a record company, sell copies of it. This leads to profit. If there is no copyright law, then there are no copies sold, and no profit, and therefore producing music as a livelihood practically disappears. You may not agree with it because you want things for free and think you deserve it just because, but the law makes sense. You can't really argue against it.
Of course you get modded up because of the culture of 'I can do anything I want on my computer even if it's illegal but then ripping off music makes me almost like Gandhi' which infests slashdot.
I'm not criticising people who download music. I've done it, I've downloaded plenty of copyrighted material. But I don't come up with bullshit justifications like 'I'm not actually taking anything so it's ok' or 'the record industry is evil and deserves it', or 'the business model is obsolete so I have the right to break copyright law because I don't like it and it's my right to force an industry to do business as I say so'. I don't come up with crap like that, I just want stuff for free. I want to download it and I don't want to pay for it. End of story. I don't give a shit, I don't think it's right, I don't think I'm morally superior to the evil record companies, I just don't it because I want to. Why can't people be honest for once?
These fines are of a sensible level. They're high enough to act as a punishment and a deterrent, but not stupidly high like the $150,000 MPAA lawsuits. There is a sensible result here, you can't really argue with it. What other result do you expect? Do you expect the record companies to sit back and let people pirate their music? Or do you want them to sue people for even more money? This seems like a sensible balance.
This guy made a point of explaining in his blog (when it was up) that Microsoft doesn't ship software, and he admires that Amazon ships software immediately, via the web.
I think that's an unfair comparison. As far as I'm aware, Amazon doesn't ship software, it's a web-site. Changes to their software involve changing the single installation on their website, they don't have to get hundreds of millions of people to change their own computer.
On the Google OS note, I think this would be great, the world is crying out for a decent alternative to Windows. OSX only runs on expensive specialist hardware, and Linux is well, imagine a man with each limb tied to a horse, and each horse pulling in a different direction. Linux is that man, the horses are the OSS development community. A Google OS could cut all the horses but one, and the horse would be pulling in a single direction, and would get somewhere.
You mean, a bridge designed by putting components together, or a plane designed by taking existing devices and building a plane out of them? The 'low level' equivalent to this would be putting the bridge together atom-by-atom, forging all the parts yourself, designing and making all the bolts yourself, never using anything that's already been made. I wouldn't drive over a bridge designed that way, it's much safer to drive over a bridge where the individual parts have been made by experts in the field, rather than a jack-of-all-trades.
What on earth does any of that have to do with OSS vs CSS? You've just rambled completely off topic. Anyway, you can get C for Windows and java for Linux. I think you've clicked on the wrong discussion, you're looking for 'Low-level programming advocacy'.
You'd have a point, if he was going to a primarily OSS-company advocating commercial software, calling the people behind OSS hippies and nutcases. There's a difference between your opinions on an anonymous message board and your opinions in a company meeting.
Also, it's not irony, it's hypocricy. I think it's quite ironic that you got those words mixed up, and that the OSS fanboys modded you up anyway.
I have no problem adding to a sentence if the driver is drunk. But if they haven't harmed anyone or damaged any property, I find it hard to justify a punishment.
So you're saying, that if someone is driving five times over the limit, and doesn't crash or kill anyone, then it should be completely legal? Are you some kind of idiot? Do you realise what sort of carnage it would cause, how many people would be killed, if drink-driving was legalised? Are you saying we should let countless people be killed just so people have the right to drive drunk?
As for the new phishing law, if someone puts up a fake-website to collect people's details for the purpose of defrauding them, stealing their life-savings or getting them into untold debt, how can any sane person have any objection to it being an imprisonable offence? I've heard some crap on slashdot. I can put up with people justifying copyright-infringement, I can put up with people complaining about the same laws that apply to non-Internet services being applied to the Internet, but this takes the fucking biscuit. Your argument makes absolutely no sense. You're a fucking idiot. Jesus Christ. Please tell me this is a troll?
It looks like a piece of software. Hardly comparable to a proper piece of hardware. First of all you'd need a TV card, and as it's a Linux program, your choice of TV cards is seriously slashed. You have to be very careful. Most Linux-compatible cards don't even say whether they work with Linux or not. Then you have to hope you've got a decent one that isn't choppy. Then you need a dedicated computer to run it, and to find a way to hook it up to the TV unless your household like to crowd around the computer to watch TV. Also watch out for incompatabilities, like a TV card which causes the modem to crash the computer.
It is all compatible. Why wouldnt it be? RAM compatibility isnt a big problem anymore. It actually is for Macs though. $300+ for the 1G upgrade on a mini? ouch.
The mini comes with RAM, you don't need to upgrade it. It's not made for people (i.e. obsessive nerds) who upgrade the computer just for the sake of it. That's the beauty of it, you just plug the thing in.
Newegg sells protection plans if that is what you want. You must be the type of person that buys the extended warranty as bestbuy. This is a valid point, but how often does hardware fail and can you actually swap out a component on a mini? nope, not without voiding your warranty.
You don't need to swap out the component. Diving inside is for nerds, i.e. not the market the mini is aimed at. You just send it back and have something else fix it. No fucking about finding 3rd party warranties and insurance.
Macs are for people who just want to use their computer, not fuck about with it and worry about processor speed and video-card RAM. The same idea goes for OSX vs Linux.
Education is very important, you can't unload trucks when your 55 for a living anymore.
Yes you can. I work in a place where there are people in their 60s doing hard physical labour for 12 hours a day, and have been doing for decades. The time and money spent on education could be spent making money instead, so you end up with savings rather than massive debts. Also manual-labour jobs are a lot easier and there's no stress or responsibility, you can come home and completely forget your job until you clock in again. And you don't have to wear a suit and tie. And you can swear a lot and be sexist without being sacked for offending someone.
Also with the way the IT industry is going, most programming jobs will probably be in India soon, so now's the time to get into management, which won't be outsourced.
10 digital channels, only if you have digital TV, and then the channels are crap, with all the reject programmes that couldn't get on terrestrial. And get this, even if you don't have digital TV, and have no intention of watching them, you STILL have to pay for them! Yes, you have to pay so someone else can watch their TV with no adverts.
The radio stations are incredibly bland and dumbed down (much like the TV). The news is as biased as anywhere else, just see the Hutton Report. The website is ok, but the licence fee doesn't fund it.
So effectively you're paying £120 a year for two channels. What great value for money. At least with Sky you get the football.
American TV generally has a much higher concentration of hot girls than real life. In real life maybe 1 in 50 girls might be attractive, on something like the OC it's probably more like 3 in 4 mininum. Also on TV there's a good chance you will get to see them take their clothes off.
Slashdot Mirror
Not just him, but a lot of other people, including me. Obviously not everyday 'geeks' know what they are, just a self-important few.
As for saying 'well google it', it's not my job to find out something so I'm interested in an article, it's up to the article submitter to sell the story to me, if he wants me to read it. Every salesman worth his salt knows that.
To be fair, there's a good chance that this Open Office will have problems. And it's still in beta, and I don't know if it has equivalent functionality to Access. It's very early to declare a winner.
That's not really what I'm on about, one program opening another to perform a particular function, like slrn or mutt opening up vim to edit a message. I mean Outlook and Word are still two different program.
There isn't a file manager I'm personally satisfied with. All the different functionality seems to be spread out across different programs. Yeah I know, it's open source, I can do it myself. But I'm not a programmer, I don't have the knack, it doesn't come to me. And even if I were a programmer, file managers are just one thing I'm not satisfied with, there's all sorts of other things I don't like, hundreds, I can't dedicate my free time to fixing every single thing I don't like. Even just one would take years to perfect. Many projects have many many people working on them, and have done for years, and they're still flawed, what chance do I have?
Something interesting? Since when is Enterprise interesting? It's more boring than reality TV shows, and less inspired than DIY programmes.
Anyone can use the Internet, not just you priveledged 'geeks', and your huge numbers aren't very huge at all. The 'beer swilling idiot' doesn't get his knickers in a twist over a crap TV programme being cancelled after way too many episodes. It's already had about 80 hasn't it? Red Dwarf only had half of that, and that's a far better show.
Well then, the only explanation is that you never read newspapers, magazines or academic papers. I see that thing all the time, all over the place. You'd best buck your ideas up, I'm beginning to think that this 'Anonymous Coward' poster isn't very bright.
Perhaps they're referring to the Valentine's Day Massacre.
$1,000,000 to walk onto a set, read out a few dreary lines, then go to the bank. Good work if you can get it. Makes me wonder why they didn't pay a lot less money and get some decent actors instead, and some decent script-writers who could write jokes.
Yeah, that's something that seems to infect American TV like a cancer. People want to see the same boring programmes over and over again. They'd rather have 600 shitty new episodes of a programme that ran out of ideas years ago, than watch something new. Just look at Friends, 700 episodes, 4 jokes. Or watch the Simpsons script-writers continually scrape the bottom of the barrel: "Oh god, we're like, the longest running cartoon ever, we rule", yeah except if you only count the decent episodes it only ran for a few years.
People say things like 'How can we possible exist without friends/simpsons/star trek on TV?' Dunno, perhaps you could watch the old, better repeats, or get the DVDs, or watch something new. Just because you once enjoyed a programme doesn't mean you need new episodes on every week. Wouldn't you rather have good memories of a great programme than a current reminder of what a once-great programme has sank to?
Personally I think Star Trek has run out of ideas. It'd be a better idea to raise money for a new, better programme.
I don't know if anyone's willing to throw that much money at something that's supposed to be 'free', i.e. done for pleasure in your own time. And at $200 a time, you'd have to do like one a week to make a proper living out of it. Are there that many projects worthy of putting bounties on that could be completed by a single person in a week?
But on the bright side, there'd be no income tax or anything, as you'd be effectively unemployed.
I'm not so sure about that, I have 512MB of RAM, Athlon 2000, and it takes 10 seconds at least for KDE to start up. This just for a very small part of the OS which doesn't really do an awful lot other than put borders and titlebars on Windows.
As for Konqueror, well I think Firefox has taken the open-source browser crown. Saying that, I use Konqueror for browsing images on the local filesystem. As a general file-manager it's not really up to it, and it's not really up to it as an Internet browser. I think the misguided idea to merge the Internet and file-manager was a bad one. You don't see people trying to merge word processors and e-mail programs.
People can switch to a new platform just for one or two killer games, you only need to look at the consoles to confirm it.
But Linux has nethack and tux-racer, surely these are the killer games needed for 2005 to be the year of the Linux desktop?
The commercial games have portability problems. Not all Linux users run on X86. Binary compatibility is a moving target on Linux.
Portability isn't a problem when you're only aiming for X86. People writing games for Macs aren't writing for people who've gotten OSX to work on their electric toaster, they're writing them for people running it on Macs. The same is true for Linux, write them for X86, every other platform is so insignificant that it would be lost in the noise.
Just goes to show you that Windows isn't good for anything. No security, and games are slow too.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. I'm sure that installing games and drivers is much easier on Windows. Also the availability of games and drivers is much greater on Windows. As for speed, I'm not convinced. Linux seems pretty slow in just changing windows. Whereas in Windows the new window comes up snappily, in Linux you get a slight delay. Also you can't change resolution or colour-depth on the fly. Yeah you can do Ctrl+alt+minus, but this doesn't actually work properly.
I use Linux and I'd like it if all the games on Windows, and the hardware, worked flawlessly on Linux, but those days are a long way off.
Well let's be fair, the contents are hardly comparable either. It's not like these Linux games are inventing all these great new paradigms and incredible original gameplay. Just seems like a stream of Doom and Civilisation and Tetris clones.
Unless you're Michael Jackson, then you go for the ass first.
There is no actual victim, but there doesn't need to be. It's not illegal because someone is being victimised directly, it's because if there was no law against copyright infringement, then everyone would pirate everything, the copyright holders would be broke. It's quite a simple concept: someone produces some content, say a song, they then, either directly or via a record company, sell copies of it. This leads to profit. If there is no copyright law, then there are no copies sold, and no profit, and therefore producing music as a livelihood practically disappears. You may not agree with it because you want things for free and think you deserve it just because, but the law makes sense. You can't really argue against it.
Of course you get modded up because of the culture of 'I can do anything I want on my computer even if it's illegal but then ripping off music makes me almost like Gandhi' which infests slashdot.
I'm not criticising people who download music. I've done it, I've downloaded plenty of copyrighted material. But I don't come up with bullshit justifications like 'I'm not actually taking anything so it's ok' or 'the record industry is evil and deserves it', or 'the business model is obsolete so I have the right to break copyright law because I don't like it and it's my right to force an industry to do business as I say so'. I don't come up with crap like that, I just want stuff for free. I want to download it and I don't want to pay for it. End of story. I don't give a shit, I don't think it's right, I don't think I'm morally superior to the evil record companies, I just don't it because I want to. Why can't people be honest for once?
These fines are of a sensible level. They're high enough to act as a punishment and a deterrent, but not stupidly high like the $150,000 MPAA lawsuits. There is a sensible result here, you can't really argue with it. What other result do you expect? Do you expect the record companies to sit back and let people pirate their music? Or do you want them to sue people for even more money? This seems like a sensible balance.
This guy made a point of explaining in his blog (when it was up) that Microsoft doesn't ship software, and he admires that Amazon ships software immediately, via the web.
I think that's an unfair comparison. As far as I'm aware, Amazon doesn't ship software, it's a web-site. Changes to their software involve changing the single installation on their website, they don't have to get hundreds of millions of people to change their own computer.
On the Google OS note, I think this would be great, the world is crying out for a decent alternative to Windows. OSX only runs on expensive specialist hardware, and Linux is well, imagine a man with each limb tied to a horse, and each horse pulling in a different direction. Linux is that man, the horses are the OSS development community. A Google OS could cut all the horses but one, and the horse would be pulling in a single direction, and would get somewhere.
You mean, a bridge designed by putting components together, or a plane designed by taking existing devices and building a plane out of them? The 'low level' equivalent to this would be putting the bridge together atom-by-atom, forging all the parts yourself, designing and making all the bolts yourself, never using anything that's already been made. I wouldn't drive over a bridge designed that way, it's much safer to drive over a bridge where the individual parts have been made by experts in the field, rather than a jack-of-all-trades.
What on earth does any of that have to do with OSS vs CSS? You've just rambled completely off topic. Anyway, you can get C for Windows and java for Linux. I think you've clicked on the wrong discussion, you're looking for 'Low-level programming advocacy'.
You'd have a point, if he was going to a primarily OSS-company advocating commercial software, calling the people behind OSS hippies and nutcases. There's a difference between your opinions on an anonymous message board and your opinions in a company meeting.
Also, it's not irony, it's hypocricy. I think it's quite ironic that you got those words mixed up, and that the OSS fanboys modded you up anyway.
drunk driving
I have no problem adding to a sentence if the driver is drunk. But if they haven't harmed anyone or damaged any property, I find it hard to justify a punishment.
So you're saying, that if someone is driving five times over the limit, and doesn't crash or kill anyone, then it should be completely legal? Are you some kind of idiot? Do you realise what sort of carnage it would cause, how many people would be killed, if drink-driving was legalised? Are you saying we should let countless people be killed just so people have the right to drive drunk?
As for the new phishing law, if someone puts up a fake-website to collect people's details for the purpose of defrauding them, stealing their life-savings or getting them into untold debt, how can any sane person have any objection to it being an imprisonable offence? I've heard some crap on slashdot. I can put up with people justifying copyright-infringement, I can put up with people complaining about the same laws that apply to non-Internet services being applied to the Internet, but this takes the fucking biscuit. Your argument makes absolutely no sense. You're a fucking idiot. Jesus Christ. Please tell me this is a troll?
It looks like a piece of software. Hardly comparable to a proper piece of hardware. First of all you'd need a TV card, and as it's a Linux program, your choice of TV cards is seriously slashed. You have to be very careful. Most Linux-compatible cards don't even say whether they work with Linux or not. Then you have to hope you've got a decent one that isn't choppy. Then you need a dedicated computer to run it, and to find a way to hook it up to the TV unless your household like to crowd around the computer to watch TV. Also watch out for incompatabilities, like a TV card which causes the modem to crash the computer.
I'd rather just buy a box and plug it in.
It is all compatible. Why wouldnt it be? RAM compatibility isnt a big problem anymore. It actually is for Macs though. $300+ for the 1G upgrade on a mini? ouch.
The mini comes with RAM, you don't need to upgrade it. It's not made for people (i.e. obsessive nerds) who upgrade the computer just for the sake of it. That's the beauty of it, you just plug the thing in.
Newegg sells protection plans if that is what you want. You must be the type of person that buys the extended warranty as bestbuy. This is a valid point, but how often does hardware fail and can you actually swap out a component on a mini? nope, not without voiding your warranty.
You don't need to swap out the component. Diving inside is for nerds, i.e. not the market the mini is aimed at. You just send it back and have something else fix it. No fucking about finding 3rd party warranties and insurance.
Macs are for people who just want to use their computer, not fuck about with it and worry about processor speed and video-card RAM. The same idea goes for OSX vs Linux.
Education is very important, you can't unload trucks when your 55 for a living anymore.
Yes you can. I work in a place where there are people in their 60s doing hard physical labour for 12 hours a day, and have been doing for decades. The time and money spent on education could be spent making money instead, so you end up with savings rather than massive debts. Also manual-labour jobs are a lot easier and there's no stress or responsibility, you can come home and completely forget your job until you clock in again. And you don't have to wear a suit and tie. And you can swear a lot and be sexist without being sacked for offending someone.
Also with the way the IT industry is going, most programming jobs will probably be in India soon, so now's the time to get into management, which won't be outsourced.
10 digital channels, only if you have digital TV, and then the channels are crap, with all the reject programmes that couldn't get on terrestrial. And get this, even if you don't have digital TV, and have no intention of watching them, you STILL have to pay for them! Yes, you have to pay so someone else can watch their TV with no adverts.
The radio stations are incredibly bland and dumbed down (much like the TV). The news is as biased as anywhere else, just see the Hutton Report. The website is ok, but the licence fee doesn't fund it.
So effectively you're paying £120 a year for two channels. What great value for money. At least with Sky you get the football.
American TV generally has a much higher concentration of hot girls than real life. In real life maybe 1 in 50 girls might be attractive, on something like the OC it's probably more like 3 in 4 mininum. Also on TV there's a good chance you will get to see them take their clothes off.