Early adopters: This is a good example of when you don't want to be an early adopter. The first version of Windows XP caused a lot of grief for users. The first versions of cheap spacecraft are likely to cause even more serious grief.
"Except that Torvalds is not a gifted comedic writer,..."
I agree that Douglas Adams wrote things that were funny. But the fact that someone is taking over the market for inexpensive computers by giving away an operating system he started in his bedroom still causes me to laugh.
"... actually did carry much in the way of essential hardware such as fans, heatsync compound, screws, and other misc things."
In Portland, Oregon the closing of CompUSA stores will mean that the retail Fry's store has no competition in selling the more unusual items. Since Fry's is very adversarial toward its customers, in my opinion, that will mean prices will rise.
My experience is that Com-pooza is horrible, though.
Both stores sell cables for more than $20 that cost less than $2 wholesale.
The spirit of Douglas Adams lives on in the body of Linus
Torvalds, who lives in Portland, creating artistic chaos for commercial
operating systems. Douglas Adams loved technical
gizmos. "Douglas was a keen technologist, writing about such inventions
as e-mail and Usenet before they became widely popular, or even widely
known." Linus Torvalds makes technical gizmos happen.
Better question: "Why are folks just plain abusive?" Lots of Slashdot readers seem to think that, if they know something someone else doesn't, the other person is stupid. So maybe an even better question is, "Why are some people lacking in social skills?" Social ability can be learned; teach yourself.
"They have built out the back end to support high speed bidirectional traffic and this can be seen by the lack of complaints by users on sites such as dslreports.com and others."
Don't all internet providers test for speed measuring tools and make sure they give them good bandwidth?
At the time, Steve Job's remark to John Sculley was understood by many people to be a huge insult. I am supposing that people still think that Jobs intended, maybe unconsciously, to insult Sculley. At the time, Jobs was so abusive that the Apple board of directors was insisting Apple get someone else to help operate the company. I suppose Jobs did not like that idea, but realized he could not arrange anything better. So, he insulted the candidate.
Obesity is a terrible health problem in the United States and elsewhere. Using billions of dollars of advertising, sugar-water companies encourage unhealthy consumption of calories. The resulting obesity kills some people. Does that qualify as abusive in your mind?
Steve Jobs has a history of choosing abusive partners, even though he knows
very clearly they are abusive. First, sugar water salesman John Sculley, and
now SBC, which bought the AT&T name apparently because the name SBC had
such a terrible but deserved reputation.
(Anyone interested in how SBC became AT&T can watch Stephen
Colbert explain in a 1 minute 14 second video:
The New
AT&T.)
Steve Jobs certainly knew SBC/AT&T is abusive; it was a telephone
company then centered in his home state of California. He clearly knew John
Sculley was abusive, he called John Sculley a sugar-water salesman
before he was hired.
Remember, John Sculley arranged that Steve Jobs be fired from Apple.
Then, over a period of years, John Sculley almost destroyed Apple. Eventually,
Sculley was fired, Steve Jobs was hired again, and Apple became strong again.
The evidence is that Steve Jobs is an extremely intelligent person
with a huge anger problem. He has a reputation for being abusive himself.
Having abusive partners seems to be another expression of anger, an attempt to
hide his anger from himself.
It's antiquated partly because we are supposed to let the font designers design the look of the font, and not mess with it.
The two spaces after a period method is antiquated also because it prevents you from doing an efficient search for accidental typing of two spaces between words.
Question: "Do you discriminate against particular types of
online content?"
Answer: "No. There is no discrimination based on the type of
content. Our customers enjoy unfettered access to all the content, services,
and applications that the Internet has to offer. We respect our customers'
privacy and we don't monitor specific customer activities on the Internet or
track individual online behavior such as which Web sites they visit.
Therefore, we do not know whether any individual user is visiting BitTorrent
or any other site."
I guess that is called "plausible deniability". Comcast management
apparently assigned that question to someone who is so ignorant that he thinks
BitTorrent is only a web site, and clearly doesn't understand the issues. I
suppose that later Comcast management can blame the denial on a confused lower
level employee.
I was talking to a Comcast repair technician yesterday who came to
replace a poor quality, non-functional cable modem. He was very uncaring. I
suppose that is the Comcast culture. It must be miserable to work there.
You can't see it with Slashdot's HTML rendering, but whoever typed
that reply for Comcast is back in the days of the typewriter. He or she used
two spaces after every period. That made sense when all type was monospaced.
I wonder if I visited Comcast headquarters, would I see horses tied outside?
Quote: "... those thousands of lawsuits have done nothing but generate ill will from record fans, while costing the labels millions of dollars and doing little (if anything) to actually reduce the amount of file-sharing going on."
Translation: Record executives are sometimes really, really dumb.
Microsoft has once again released a product before it was finished. That has wasted the time of many, many educated people, dragging down their quality of life and their productiveness.
I suggest you give that a little more thought. I don't think you
actually believe that what you said is adequate.
It's true that email communications should all be encrypted. There may
be people who are spying on other people; encryption stops some of the spying.
But the U.S. government is not just spying. The U.S. government has
killed, or contributed to killing, about 11 million people in 24 countries
since the end of the second world war. The U.S. government is using its power
to do harm to other people.
The only way someone can have the opinion that U.S. government
activities are not important is if the people he or she knows are not directly
affected, and he or she takes a position of not caring about other people. If
one of the people who was killed was a member of your family, I think you
would be more concerned than just thinking encryption is a remedy. The U.S.
government has been breaking its own laws and doing harm throughout the world.
The U.S. government has 737 military
bases, about which we are allowed to know. Here is a map of the bigger ones:
Large U.S. military bases.
Encryption is not a complete answer to adversarial behavior. Something
terrible is happening in the world. Mentally ill people with power are using
violence and corruption to make more profit in oil and weapons. We cannot
allow ourselves to imply that we are not concerned about the bigger picture.
I'm guessing that you are concerned, but you didn't express that in
what you said in your parent comment.
What Microsoft and Intel are doing has nothing to do with competition. It is anti-competition. As soon as they kill the OLPC, they will raise their prices. They want to destroy the competition, in my opinion, not compete.
Unfortunately, we don't have a government in the U.S. that respects the rule of law, so the laws against anti-competition won't be applied.
Quote: "With the recent NSA wiretapping activities and increasing Big Brother presence, security and OTR are increasingly important."
The real problem is U.S. government corruption. See this example from Cooperative Research, a complete 911 Timeline of 3962 events: U.S. Government corruption TimeLines.
The government should serve the people, not spy on them.
Marketing people in technological companies often have no knowledge of
technology and don't think it is important to have any.
Western Digital GreenPower Hard Drives seem to be heavily influenced by
that attitude. There seems to be no information about actual speed, giving the
impression that arrogant marketing people have decided that technically
knowledgeable people can be manipulated, and won't notice that lack of
specifications.
It's difficult to compete with Seagate's 5-Year Warranty, reliability is extremely important in most cases. The
cost of a drive failure is far greater than any energy savings, except perhaps
in large data centers with special software. The 5-year warranty says that
Seagate management believes in the reliability of their hard drives, and will
pay if they aren't reliable.
Both the Western Digital and Seagate web sites show the lack of
interest in technology that is due to the arrogance of marketing people. The WD
web site is heavily dependent on JavaScript; web site designers want to add JavaScript to their
resume, but don't want to take the time to understand a complicated computer programming language, so JavaScript
is often poorly written. The WD web site advises me that WD Enterprise
Class GreenPower drives can hold "Up to 250,000 songs (MP3)". I imagine that will impress
Slashdot readers who buy hardware for data centers. NOT.
The Seagate web site advises me that the search facility uses a
certificate that is out of date. I am also advised to upgrade my version of
Flash; I guess Seagate is sucked in by Macromedia/Adobe's method of
advertising its name: Make everyone who visits web sites with Flash frequently see an
advertisement to visit the Flash web site. Do that by bringing out numerous
versions of Flash, and advising visitors to "updgrade".
The Seagate web site Flash is especially
embarrassing. It says "Your On". Click on the Flash and it talks
about "leveraging", a favorite word of those who don't understand technology.
The CEO of Seagate supposedly tells us, "The explosive growth in digital
devices, applications and content is breathtaking..."
The marketing of technical products is usually incompetent,
dishonest, despicable, and self-destructive.
I'm hoping Europeans will help me with the moderation of the parent post. I doubt those who moderated it down really disagree. It's just that many U.S. citizens have difficulty accepting that their government has become somewhat corrupt.
Slashdot Mirror
The technological revolution has happened far faster than the ability of humans to adjust.
TrueCrypt is free encryption for both Windows and Linux. It works extremely well, in my experience.
To me, the Slashdot story reads like someone trying to direct attention away from secret dealing. "Peter" wrote the story; who is he?
MOD PARENT UP!!! It is NOT a troll. Disgusting moderation system.
I suppose Slashdot editors have played video games instead of learning how the world works. Live in a fantasy world, throw away your life.
Early adopters: This is a good example of when you don't want to be an early adopter. The first version of Windows XP caused a lot of grief for users. The first versions of cheap spacecraft are likely to cause even more serious grief.
When you recognize serious danger, skip the usual enthusiasm.
"Except that Torvalds is not a gifted comedic writer, ..."
I agree that Douglas Adams wrote things that were funny. But the fact that someone is taking over the market for inexpensive computers by giving away an operating system he started in his bedroom still causes me to laugh.
People who study women as much as they study computers will become as good with women as they are with computers.
Give money for food; they will have more babies.
Give money for computers; they will teach themselves better lives.
"... actually did carry much in the way of essential hardware such as fans, heatsync compound, screws, and other misc things."
In Portland, Oregon the closing of CompUSA stores will mean that the retail Fry's store has no competition in selling the more unusual items. Since Fry's is very adversarial toward its customers, in my opinion, that will mean prices will rise.
My experience is that Com-pooza is horrible, though.
Both stores sell cables for more than $20 that cost less than $2 wholesale.
For those who have never been in Portland, Oregon, we should explain that people are a little different here.
Question: Why do hippies move to Portland? Answer: Because there are no jobs.
The world's smallest park is here, and the world's largest bookstore.
The spirit of Douglas Adams lives on in the body of Linus Torvalds, who lives in Portland, creating artistic chaos for commercial operating systems. Douglas Adams loved technical gizmos. "Douglas was a keen technologist, writing about such inventions as e-mail and Usenet before they became widely popular, or even widely known." Linus Torvalds makes technical gizmos happen.
"Just send me five or six of those octopus surge protector dealies and I'll be happy."
Bad sign. It doesn't say anything about having 3 MOVs. That means it probably has one, and you aren't completely protected.
Quote: "OK why are folks just plain stupid."
Better question: "Why are folks just plain abusive?" Lots of Slashdot readers seem to think that, if they know something someone else doesn't, the other person is stupid. So maybe an even better question is, "Why are some people lacking in social skills?" Social ability can be learned; teach yourself.
"They have built out the back end to support high speed bidirectional traffic and this can be seen by the lack of complaints by users on sites such as dslreports.com and others."
Don't all internet providers test for speed measuring tools and make sure they give them good bandwidth?
--
Remarkable Occurrences Involving the Bush Family
At the time, Steve Job's remark to John Sculley was understood by many people to be a huge insult. I am supposing that people still think that Jobs intended, maybe unconsciously, to insult Sculley. At the time, Jobs was so abusive that the Apple board of directors was insisting Apple get someone else to help operate the company. I suppose Jobs did not like that idea, but realized he could not arrange anything better. So, he insulted the candidate.
Obesity is a terrible health problem in the United States and elsewhere. Using billions of dollars of advertising, sugar-water companies encourage unhealthy consumption of calories. The resulting obesity kills some people. Does that qualify as abusive in your mind?
That's interesting.
Steve Jobs has a history of choosing abusive partners, even though he knows very clearly they are abusive. First, sugar water salesman John Sculley, and now SBC, which bought the AT&T name apparently because the name SBC had such a terrible but deserved reputation.
(Anyone interested in how SBC became AT&T can watch Stephen Colbert explain in a 1 minute 14 second video: The New AT&T.)
Steve Jobs certainly knew SBC/AT&T is abusive; it was a telephone company then centered in his home state of California. He clearly knew John Sculley was abusive, he called John Sculley a sugar-water salesman before he was hired.
Remember, John Sculley arranged that Steve Jobs be fired from Apple. Then, over a period of years, John Sculley almost destroyed Apple. Eventually, Sculley was fired, Steve Jobs was hired again, and Apple became strong again.
The evidence is that Steve Jobs is an extremely intelligent person with a huge anger problem. He has a reputation for being abusive himself. Having abusive partners seems to be another expression of anger, an attempt to hide his anger from himself.
Quote: "Why do Americans refer to a large group of people as singular?"
Because the word "group" is singular, as is the word "company".
It's antiquated partly because we are supposed to let the font designers design the look of the font, and not mess with it.
The two spaces after a period method is antiquated also because it prevents you from doing an efficient search for accidental typing of two spaces between words.
Comcast continues to deny they are blocking or discriminating with traffic. (See "Hot Topics" in the middle of the page.)
See this nonsense linked from that page:
Question: "Do you discriminate against particular types of online content?"
Answer: "No. There is no discrimination based on the type of content. Our customers enjoy unfettered access to all the content, services, and applications that the Internet has to offer. We respect our customers' privacy and we don't monitor specific customer activities on the Internet or track individual online behavior such as which Web sites they visit. Therefore, we do not know whether any individual user is visiting BitTorrent or any other site."
I guess that is called "plausible deniability". Comcast management apparently assigned that question to someone who is so ignorant that he thinks BitTorrent is only a web site, and clearly doesn't understand the issues. I suppose that later Comcast management can blame the denial on a confused lower level employee.
I was talking to a Comcast repair technician yesterday who came to replace a poor quality, non-functional cable modem. He was very uncaring. I suppose that is the Comcast culture. It must be miserable to work there.
You can't see it with Slashdot's HTML rendering, but whoever typed that reply for Comcast is back in the days of the typewriter. He or she used two spaces after every period. That made sense when all type was monospaced. I wonder if I visited Comcast headquarters, would I see horses tied outside?
Quote: "... those thousands of lawsuits have done nothing but generate ill will from record fans, while costing the labels millions of dollars and doing little (if anything) to actually reduce the amount of file-sharing going on."
Translation: Record executives are sometimes really, really dumb.
LOL.
Every second you spend with a video game pretending to kill other people is a second you didn't spend learning to be more socially sophisticated.
Excessive playing of any game is its own punishment.
"Vista... general pointlessness as an upgrade..."
Praising Microsoft products again, I see.
Microsoft has once again released a product before it was finished. That has wasted the time of many, many educated people, dragging down their quality of life and their productiveness.
That is NOT "pointlessness". That is abuse.
Joshua O'Brien,
I suggest you give that a little more thought. I don't think you actually believe that what you said is adequate.
It's true that email communications should all be encrypted. There may be people who are spying on other people; encryption stops some of the spying.
But the U.S. government is not just spying. The U.S. government has killed, or contributed to killing, about 11 million people in 24 countries since the end of the second world war. The U.S. government is using its power to do harm to other people.
The only way someone can have the opinion that U.S. government activities are not important is if the people he or she knows are not directly affected, and he or she takes a position of not caring about other people. If one of the people who was killed was a member of your family, I think you would be more concerned than just thinking encryption is a remedy. The U.S. government has been breaking its own laws and doing harm throughout the world.
The U.S. government has 737 military bases, about which we are allowed to know. Here is a map of the bigger ones: Large U.S. military bases.
Encryption is not a complete answer to adversarial behavior. Something terrible is happening in the world. Mentally ill people with power are using violence and corruption to make more profit in oil and weapons. We cannot allow ourselves to imply that we are not concerned about the bigger picture. I'm guessing that you are concerned, but you didn't express that in what you said in your parent comment.
You are right.
What Microsoft and Intel are doing has nothing to do with competition. It is anti-competition. As soon as they kill the OLPC, they will raise their prices. They want to destroy the competition, in my opinion, not compete.
Unfortunately, we don't have a government in the U.S. that respects the rule of law, so the laws against anti-competition won't be applied.
Quote: "With the recent NSA wiretapping activities and increasing Big Brother presence, security and OTR are increasingly important."
The real problem is U.S. government corruption. See this example from Cooperative Research, a complete 911 Timeline of 3962 events: U.S. Government corruption TimeLines.
The government should serve the people, not spy on them.
Marketing people in technological companies often have no knowledge of technology and don't think it is important to have any.
Western Digital GreenPower Hard Drives seem to be heavily influenced by that attitude. There seems to be no information about actual speed, giving the impression that arrogant marketing people have decided that technically knowledgeable people can be manipulated, and won't notice that lack of specifications.
It's difficult to compete with Seagate's 5-Year Warranty, reliability is extremely important in most cases. The cost of a drive failure is far greater than any energy savings, except perhaps in large data centers with special software. The 5-year warranty says that Seagate management believes in the reliability of their hard drives, and will pay if they aren't reliable.
Both the Western Digital and Seagate web sites show the lack of interest in technology that is due to the arrogance of marketing people. The WD web site is heavily dependent on JavaScript; web site designers want to add JavaScript to their resume, but don't want to take the time to understand a complicated computer programming language, so JavaScript is often poorly written. The WD web site advises me that WD Enterprise Class GreenPower drives can hold "Up to 250,000 songs (MP3)". I imagine that will impress Slashdot readers who buy hardware for data centers. NOT.
The Seagate web site advises me that the search facility uses a certificate that is out of date. I am also advised to upgrade my version of Flash; I guess Seagate is sucked in by Macromedia/Adobe's method of advertising its name: Make everyone who visits web sites with Flash frequently see an advertisement to visit the Flash web site. Do that by bringing out numerous versions of Flash, and advising visitors to "updgrade".
The Seagate web site Flash is especially embarrassing. It says "Your On". Click on the Flash and it talks about "leveraging", a favorite word of those who don't understand technology. The CEO of Seagate supposedly tells us, "The explosive growth in digital devices, applications and content is breathtaking..."
The marketing of technical products is usually incompetent, dishonest, despicable, and self-destructive.
I'm hoping Europeans will help me with the moderation of the parent post. I doubt those who moderated it down really disagree. It's just that many U.S. citizens have difficulty accepting that their government has become somewhat corrupt.