And if you can keep your bosses from ever reading the parts about using Linux in a limited way (and NEVER let them touch one of these) then it would be good. But you can't. And you can't control the perception that Linux is limited once they start using it in a stunted environment like this.
No doubt--it seems to me that most people rarely forget a bad experience with new things. Let them see Linux for their first time on this wacky machine, and they'll be telling their friends for the next 5 years that they "tried Linux and Windows on the same machine and Linux was slow as hell."
I suppose there's some awesome technical issue beyond my comprehension that would explain why I can't just run either OS on either processor. If anybody knows what it is, I'd love to hear about it.
They are all crooks. The hypocrisy of the democrats who ripped on republicans and Bush and now ignore it when they do the EXACT same type of stuff just kills me.
Yeah, kinda like the Republicans that suddenly remembered they were for non-intrusive government and fiscal conservatism once they weren't running the show any more. It really cracks me up.:)
Oh, I agree that there's lots of businesses that won't use or support desktop Linux because of the plethora of distros. I'm just saying that most of the people working on Linux don't care enough about market share to do anything about it.
Disclaimer, just to avoid the flames: I don't think there's anything wrong with people working in their niche and not worrying about whether or not big business wants Linux on the desktop.
We need a main, reliable, one size fits all DESKTOP distro. that's what we need.
I presume you're spending a significant amount of your free time contributing to this goal, yes? (Sorry, this is apparently my week to be the asshole that asks people how much effort they're putting into things they think other people should be doing)
It would be hard enough to come up with a mutually-agreeable spec for The One True Desktop Distribution (T1TDD). Will it default to KDE or to Gnome? You'd probably need about 1000 years and an army of ninjas to settle that one. Then you could worry about whether emacs, vi, or something else will be the default text editor. That won't take long to work out, right? Then you can get down to the real bikeshedding about the icons and default themes.
Then, once you've come up with the list of things "everybody" agrees should be in the T1TDD, you have to convince all those people that contribute to the many disparate distros to drop what they're doing (which is most likely being done to scratch some particular itch that nobody else cares about) and work on T1TDD.
Maybe it would be nice to have a single unified push on one desktop distribution, and maybe it would make Linux a household name, but that in itself isn't enough to make it happen IMHO.
Glad to hear it, even though it does make me a real asshole for putting you on the spot.:) If everybody making noise about global warming did that much, we'd probably be a lot better off.
If fusion is feasible for a spaceship, why the hell are we not building fusion plants right now or at least spending billions on development of this.
I think the short answer to that is that fusion power is probably not feasible for a spaceship. It's just easy for somebody to pretend it's feasible while they're writing a pie-in-the-sky paper about interstellar spaceships.
If we can develop fusion, global warming is solved and we dont have to worry about it anymore. Then why are we not doing it. Why is it sometimes I get the feeling that while everyone moans about global warming, no one wants to take the initiative and actually fix the problem?
I agree that switching all our energy production to fusion would help with pollution and CO2 production, but there's at least a few climate scientists that think that we've already dumped so much stuff into our atmosphere that we'll still have something to worry about even if CO2 production went to 0% on Monday morning.
You're right that a lot of people in positions of authority feel that "moaning about global warming" is a good substitute for actually doing something, but if I may, I'd like to take this moment and be a real asshole about it: what are YOU doing, personally, to fix it?;)
It seems likely that this sort of ship would be built in space, so any such accident would be taking place many hundreds or thousands of miles away from the earth's surface.
Thing is, that if a family has a lot of books in their house, they are probably are reasonably wealthy. (In particular, not working class. In other words, people with money have kids that tend to do better in school.
I'd say that a family that has a lot of books in their house probably gives a shit about learning things whether they're wealthy or not. When I was a kid, we were frequently at or below the poverty line in terms of family income, and my parents had never been wealthy by any stretch of the imagination, but we had thousands of books in the house--far more than any of my friends with wealthy parents.
I'm sure there's a correlation between wealth and academic performance, but it's probably two effects from the same cause in most cases: the parents have a habit of learning things, and that makes them more likely to have better jobs and children that care about learning.
They should be spending their valuable time actually checking the facts and figures and coming up with some real conclusions not some abstract theory on the reliability of scientific calculations..
They might have some kind of point (I don't know enough about risk assessment to tell, really), but I just thought it was quite misleading to cast this as three Oxford physicists with an actual criticism of the LHC safety analysis.
If one was *really* concerned about Global Warming, one would want a thermostat applied to the Sun. No one has suggested that.
There's more than a couple of people shouting that the sun is the cause of global warming (just turn on some talk radio and listen for half a day), so it has been suggested AFAIK.
As to having a "thermostat applied to the sun," don't we have a bunch of satellites that do nothing but watch the sun and monitor space weather? If there's been some finding that the power delivered by the sun has increased, I missed it. I'd love to see a link.
Yeah, now that you mention it, that's probably more likely than the owner selling it. I imagine anybody with access to that sort of info knows how much hot water they'd be in if they didn't wipe something before they sold it.
And the poor soldier responsible will get shafted too. For what?
Err, he/she will get "shafted" for putting at risk a bunch of people's personal information, as well as information about equipment and a mission, maybe? Would you be thrilled if this genius had dumped your info onto an MP3 and sold it to some random stranger?
If somebody was stupid enough to load a bunch of other people's info onto some personal storage device, then apparently somebody *needs* to smack them upside the head and tell them not to do that any more.
i would think that in an organization as large and as stereotypically stringent as the us army that they'd have some sort of exit policy for equipment and personnel.
I would have thought so, too, until I spent a few years in the US military. You'd be amazed how much and what kind of stuff makes it past policies (exit or otherwise). When I lived in a military town, it seems like I'd see a story every year or so about about service members getting caught with garages full of new and/or used stuff.
Perhaps time to retire all the conspiracy theories...
Oh come on, you know how this is going to go. The conspiracy theorists will claim any photos are real terrain photos with CGI Apollo artifacts added. Or maybe CGI terrain photos with CGI Apollo artifacts added.
I fully believe that there exist people whose belief in their conspiracies is so unshakeable that you could load them onto a rocket, fly their worthless ass to the moon, land them at the Apollo sites, let them see the items firsthand, and they would STILL deny that we went there 40-ish years ago.
Yeah that could actually be true for a few, I suppose. I guess if you *have* to submit something in the most recent Word format (and I know there are businesses and teachers out there that require such things), then the open source offerings won't suffice.
But I still think most people paying for it will just be doing so because they don't know or don't care that they could use something free.
In short, I hope Microsoft does launch this nice program, hopefully with the backing of the law, and other absurd things so we can watch the anvil break the camel's back.
There have been many times in my life when I've said this same sort of thing about decisions I've seen others make. I believe I've seen people say similar things on Slashdot about other decisions Microsoft has made in the last decade. So far, opportunities to say "See! I told you so," have been sparse.
The thing is that the universe appears to be fairly forgiving to makers of decisions we think are dumb. Microsoft is still around, and people are still handing them piles of cash every year, despite all the predictions of doom.
I think that if Microsoft succeeds with this pay-as-you-go program, it will be because there are more ignorant people out there than we suspect.
How is the parent a troll? All it takes is for one politician or insufficiently otherwise occupied celebrity to figure out they can get attention by bringing this "disturbing trend" to light, and you've got the makings of a ban.
Maybe it won't be labeled as terrorism, but it can be used to make people afraid, and that's bleeping golden for the kind of public figures that want attention.
Why is this offtopic? If anybody works out developmental principles that even hint it's possible, we're going to have people in garages (if not in government and privately funded labs) trying to make real-life jackalopes, centaurs, orcs, tauren and FSM knows what else.
You *know* there's people out there that would pay large sums of money to be the first person to own a pet jackalope, to be the first parent of real life furry child, or to be the first Slashdotter to consort with a "real" Orion slave girl. And yes, *somebody* will step out of the shadows to fill that demand as soon as it's possible to do so. That seems entirely on-topic to me.
...For example, fanfic where Spock beams himself to Middle Earth, and has a meaningful discussion with Aragorn, before shooting his ray gun at Magneto, is not "Realistic."
Oh, sorry, I didn't know what Tabula Rasa was without looking it up. I've never worked at a game company, so I didn't know they had a software development culture that was fundamentally different from the niches I've worked in.
The code is used for other projects by the same company.
No, that's just what some delusional PHB or sneaky coder tells the decision makers at the company. In reality it just sits on a CD or in a version control repository until it gets lost or deleted. (Or until somebody needs a new version for some lingering customer that is still using it and wants to pay for a fix).
I'm sure many a coder has told management that they will "re-use that big pile of obfuscated spaghetti code written by the owner or long-gone suspender-wearing senior coder"[1] until management believed it and left them alone so they could build something much better from scratch.
[1] - Please note that anything not written from scratch by the current set of coders falls into this category.
Slashdot Mirror
And if you can keep your bosses from ever reading the parts about using Linux in a limited way (and NEVER let them touch one of these) then it would be good. But you can't. And you can't control the perception that Linux is limited once they start using it in a stunted environment like this.
No doubt--it seems to me that most people rarely forget a bad experience with new things. Let them see Linux for their first time on this wacky machine, and they'll be telling their friends for the next 5 years that they "tried Linux and Windows on the same machine and Linux was slow as hell."
I suppose there's some awesome technical issue beyond my comprehension that would explain why I can't just run either OS on either processor. If anybody knows what it is, I'd love to hear about it.
I wonder if it tastes like the other, other, OTHER white meat?
They are all crooks. The hypocrisy of the democrats who ripped on republicans and Bush and now ignore it when they do the EXACT same type of stuff just kills me.
Yeah, kinda like the Republicans that suddenly remembered they were for non-intrusive government and fiscal conservatism once they weren't running the show any more. It really cracks me up. :)
Oh, I agree that there's lots of businesses that won't use or support desktop Linux because of the plethora of distros. I'm just saying that most of the people working on Linux don't care enough about market share to do anything about it.
Disclaimer, just to avoid the flames: I don't think there's anything wrong with people working in their niche and not worrying about whether or not big business wants Linux on the desktop.
We need a main, reliable, one size fits all DESKTOP distro. that's what we need.
I presume you're spending a significant amount of your free time contributing to this goal, yes? (Sorry, this is apparently my week to be the asshole that asks people how much effort they're putting into things they think other people should be doing)
It would be hard enough to come up with a mutually-agreeable spec for The One True Desktop Distribution (T1TDD). Will it default to KDE or to Gnome? You'd probably need about 1000 years and an army of ninjas to settle that one. Then you could worry about whether emacs, vi, or something else will be the default text editor. That won't take long to work out, right? Then you can get down to the real bikeshedding about the icons and default themes.
Then, once you've come up with the list of things "everybody" agrees should be in the T1TDD, you have to convince all those people that contribute to the many disparate distros to drop what they're doing (which is most likely being done to scratch some particular itch that nobody else cares about) and work on T1TDD.
Maybe it would be nice to have a single unified push on one desktop distribution, and maybe it would make Linux a household name, but that in itself isn't enough to make it happen IMHO.
Glad to hear it, even though it does make me a real asshole for putting you on the spot. :) If everybody making noise about global warming did that much, we'd probably be a lot better off.
If fusion is feasible for a spaceship, why the hell are we not building fusion plants right now or at least spending billions on development of this.
I think the short answer to that is that fusion power is probably not feasible for a spaceship. It's just easy for somebody to pretend it's feasible while they're writing a pie-in-the-sky paper about interstellar spaceships.
If we can develop fusion, global warming is solved and we dont have to worry about it anymore. Then why are we not doing it. Why is it sometimes I get the feeling that while everyone moans about global warming, no one wants to take the initiative and actually fix the problem?
I agree that switching all our energy production to fusion would help with pollution and CO2 production, but there's at least a few climate scientists that think that we've already dumped so much stuff into our atmosphere that we'll still have something to worry about even if CO2 production went to 0% on Monday morning.
You're right that a lot of people in positions of authority feel that "moaning about global warming" is a good substitute for actually doing something, but if I may, I'd like to take this moment and be a real asshole about it: what are YOU doing, personally, to fix it? ;)
It seems likely that this sort of ship would be built in space, so any such accident would be taking place many hundreds or thousands of miles away from the earth's surface.
Thing is, that if a family has a lot of books in their house, they are probably are reasonably wealthy. (In particular, not working class. In other words, people with money have kids that tend to do better in school.
I'd say that a family that has a lot of books in their house probably gives a shit about learning things whether they're wealthy or not. When I was a kid, we were frequently at or below the poverty line in terms of family income, and my parents had never been wealthy by any stretch of the imagination, but we had thousands of books in the house--far more than any of my friends with wealthy parents.
I'm sure there's a correlation between wealth and academic performance, but it's probably two effects from the same cause in most cases: the parents have a habit of learning things, and that makes them more likely to have better jobs and children that care about learning.
They should be spending their valuable time actually checking the facts and figures and coming up with some real conclusions not some abstract theory on the reliability of scientific calculations..
I think I can guess why they're not off doing their own analysis of LHC safety: they probably don't have the skills necessary to do so. Contrary to the summary's assertion that they are "physicists", only one appears to be an actual physicist; it's not clear how much she might know about particle physics or black holes. The others are a philosophy PhD student with a little bit of a science/math background, and a futurist with a PhD in computational neuroscience.
They might have some kind of point (I don't know enough about risk assessment to tell, really), but I just thought it was quite misleading to cast this as three Oxford physicists with an actual criticism of the LHC safety analysis.
If one was *really* concerned about Global Warming, one would want a thermostat applied to the Sun. No one has suggested that.
There's more than a couple of people shouting that the sun is the cause of global warming (just turn on some talk radio and listen for half a day), so it has been suggested AFAIK.
As to having a "thermostat applied to the sun," don't we have a bunch of satellites that do nothing but watch the sun and monitor space weather? If there's been some finding that the power delivered by the sun has increased, I missed it. I'd love to see a link.
Yeah, now that you mention it, that's probably more likely than the owner selling it. I imagine anybody with access to that sort of info knows how much hot water they'd be in if they didn't wipe something before they sold it.
And the poor soldier responsible will get shafted too. For what?
Err, he/she will get "shafted" for putting at risk a bunch of people's personal information, as well as information about equipment and a mission, maybe? Would you be thrilled if this genius had dumped your info onto an MP3 and sold it to some random stranger?
If somebody was stupid enough to load a bunch of other people's info onto some personal storage device, then apparently somebody *needs* to smack them upside the head and tell them not to do that any more.
i would think that in an organization as large and as stereotypically stringent as the us army that they'd have some sort of exit policy for equipment and personnel.
I would have thought so, too, until I spent a few years in the US military. You'd be amazed how much and what kind of stuff makes it past policies (exit or otherwise). When I lived in a military town, it seems like I'd see a story every year or so about about service members getting caught with garages full of new and/or used stuff.
You neither need to have a large, complex, or lengthy project nor be a Perl master or guru.
You do, however, have to be able to fit it all on one line.
Perhaps time to retire all the conspiracy theories ...
Oh come on, you know how this is going to go. The conspiracy theorists will claim any photos are real terrain photos with CGI Apollo artifacts added. Or maybe CGI terrain photos with CGI Apollo artifacts added.
I fully believe that there exist people whose belief in their conspiracies is so unshakeable that you could load them onto a rocket, fly their worthless ass to the moon, land them at the Apollo sites, let them see the items firsthand, and they would STILL deny that we went there 40-ish years ago.
Apparently, scripting is also for posting funny comments to Slashdot after you're dead.
Yeah that could actually be true for a few, I suppose. I guess if you *have* to submit something in the most recent Word format (and I know there are businesses and teachers out there that require such things), then the open source offerings won't suffice.
But I still think most people paying for it will just be doing so because they don't know or don't care that they could use something free.
In short, I hope Microsoft does launch this nice program, hopefully with the backing of the law, and other absurd things so we can watch the anvil break the camel's back.
There have been many times in my life when I've said this same sort of thing about decisions I've seen others make. I believe I've seen people say similar things on Slashdot about other decisions Microsoft has made in the last decade. So far, opportunities to say "See! I told you so," have been sparse.
The thing is that the universe appears to be fairly forgiving to makers of decisions we think are dumb. Microsoft is still around, and people are still handing them piles of cash every year, despite all the predictions of doom.
I think that if Microsoft succeeds with this pay-as-you-go program, it will be because there are more ignorant people out there than we suspect.
How is the parent a troll? All it takes is for one politician or insufficiently otherwise occupied celebrity to figure out they can get attention by bringing this "disturbing trend" to light, and you've got the makings of a ban.
Maybe it won't be labeled as terrorism, but it can be used to make people afraid, and that's bleeping golden for the kind of public figures that want attention.
Why is this offtopic? If anybody works out developmental principles that even hint it's possible, we're going to have people in garages (if not in government and privately funded labs) trying to make real-life jackalopes, centaurs, orcs, tauren and FSM knows what else.
You *know* there's people out there that would pay large sums of money to be the first person to own a pet jackalope, to be the first parent of real life furry child, or to be the first Slashdotter to consort with a "real" Orion slave girl. And yes, *somebody* will step out of the shadows to fill that demand as soon as it's possible to do so. That seems entirely on-topic to me.
Of course it's not dead. It's pining for the fjords.
...For example, fanfic where Spock beams himself to Middle Earth, and has a meaningful discussion with Aragorn, before shooting his ray gun at Magneto, is not "Realistic."
Nooooo....but it'd be AWESOME!!!!!!
You aren't allowed to think that's awesome.
Oh, sorry, I didn't know what Tabula Rasa was without looking it up. I've never worked at a game company, so I didn't know they had a software development culture that was fundamentally different from the niches I've worked in.
The code is used for other projects by the same company.
No, that's just what some delusional PHB or sneaky coder tells the decision makers at the company. In reality it just sits on a CD or in a version control repository until it gets lost or deleted. (Or until somebody needs a new version for some lingering customer that is still using it and wants to pay for a fix).
I'm sure many a coder has told management that they will "re-use that big pile of obfuscated spaghetti code written by the owner or long-gone suspender-wearing senior coder"[1] until management believed it and left them alone so they could build something much better from scratch.
[1] - Please note that anything not written from scratch by the current set of coders falls into this category.