Oh - damn small linux has a nice live version that runs straight from your desktop through QEMU. I'm nix-retarded and it was pretty easy, honestly. I was very impressed by it. Not sure now ubuntu would run on a similar set up but dsl is pretty fun for a super light nix to play with.
Just view bootloader as being similar to grub/lilo/whatever and it's not so scary.:) I'd say it's a *relatively* safe move, it takes special (purposeful) effort to kill win bootloader. Even so, just slave the drive to another windows box and copy it from the master if you have problems.
Very nice. Taking into consideration some of the other users' more thought out posts I'll give ubuntu another shot today or tomorrow. My gripes aren't to bash or hinder the linux community- I really do want them to succeed. I'm by no means a novice pc user so I *may* suffer from familiar vs. intuitive - of which I'll make more consideration of.
...but if I have to do one make/config/whatever...*shakesfist*:p
I'll give it an honest effort and get back to you guys possibly by the weekend if anyone cares.
I'm not sure if it's still an issue but I couldn't figure out for the life of me how to get to the cd drive when trying to perform a rip a few years ago. Then again, I had to ask a nix guy "oh, it's under mnt" or some jazz.
I agree with most of the points made in the article though. Devs needs to get a grasp on what the non-techie public wants if they want their work to be successful. I personally wouldn't mind going back to nix if they made fixes to the above issues.
I've heard this same argument for years and really it just sounds like whining to me. The linux community tries in a lot of aspect to stray far far away from Windows out of principle yet fail to impliment the things Microsoft actually got right.
The typical user should not have to open up a term window to install a program. It should be click and guide you through the rest. That was always my biggest complaint. Sure I could fire up some synaptic or whatever it was but that's not exactly intuitive - I had to have a nix friend of mine tell me it even existed.
Linux, nor Ubuntu, will thrive as a dominant OS as long as users like "Erin" still have trouble figuring things out.
Ok, so don't take things from Windows - but figure it out from the Apple OS. Even granny can use those.
Yet everyone cheers when video games have to be on dvds and computers require small fusion reactors to run the video cards. *rolls eyes*
I'd say a 300% increase is fairly decent considering how many webpages now utlized embedded media (movies/audio players), whereas I don't recall that being the case as much 5 years ago.
It could be worse, it could still be *all* done in flash.
Actually, on Friday I'm in love.:)
However, privacy and yadda yadda yadda. Pedophiles are the lowest of the lowest in my book. Why not use social networking sites as tools to catch those guys? If anything it'll deter them from using those sites to chase their prey.
I view this in the same manner that Passion of the Christ made more Christians, the way Micheal Moore has made more liberals or the way Bill O' Reily made more conservatives. -They didn't. It catered to an audience already set in their ways on the topic. I don't see a crazy threat to my scientific mind here.
If I did...I'd start building sharks with laser beams and build a moat around my house.
I've been hearing this gripe for ages and finally just caved in and made the switch. It was the reasonable choice to just dive in and do it because my profession is basically glorified system admin and tech support.
Was it slow at first? A bit. Can it be tweaked very easily to run well on various machines? Definitely.
This can be done very easily. The people complaining about speed are probably the same ones expecting aero to work fine on a 1ghz box (if by some magic they had a machine compatible with it).
I run vista on both a 2.4 ghz/2gb ram box and a 1.5ghz/512mb ram laptop. Different set ups, equal performance. Do the math.
"To complicate matters further, most active Internet users have at least three separate e-mail addresses, which they give out for work purposes, for personal matters, and for newsletters and commercial offers. Somebody needs to sort it all out"
Somebody needs to sort it all out? Someone not me? No the fuck they don't. I divide my email addresses so ms granny-chain-a-lot spams one account and important shit goes elsewhere. I don't want companies to have an easier time finding me. Especially when 99.9% of them do *not* have my interests in mind as priority.
Offtopic but, you had me until this:
"Microsoft is an ongoing criminal organization, and as such, should be seized under the RICO act, and its parts sold off or its source code simply published for those parts without buyers, and the buyers should be forever blocked from forming a cartel, single company, sharing directors,... to prevent a resurrection of Microsoft."
This is the problem with many slash dotters, they begin with great, credible arguments, then turn themselves into conspiracy theorists and angry anarchists. To me this is the equivalent of when I hear some republic friends of mine have a decent argument to their point but then start dropping phrases like "socialist democratic party". It ruins what credibility you just had.
Point is - if you want to change the methodology of something, rash actions/words wont get you as far as say well thought-out discussions on the topic. Just my two cents.
This *is* a capitalist nation. If you want a better product, use it. *.doc files can be opened with open office, *.pdf with ghostview, etc. No one's forcing you to pay some "corporate tax".
With that said, do I agree with all of their business practices? Not at all. I'm just saying, if you have any intentions on countering them, then come up with more solid words. If you don't, then there's no point in suggesting such harsh actions.
I say they just outsource this to taiwan too since they're already doing such a fine job at making our passports.... National security is national security afterall...
I would actually really enjoy seeing open source go this route. Years ago when I was first introduced to open source this was actually exactly how I thought it was operating until I was educated more on the matter later on. If used for profit, then the profit should be distributed to help continue the growth of the community. If for free, then any progress made on that code (to the best of my knowledge) is typically distributed, again, to help continue the growth of the community.
It seems entirely foolish and far too idealistic for someone to slave over some code for an extended amount of time just to release it and have some other company use it as the infrastructure to their product and watch them make millions while the coder still lives in their parents' basement or whatnot. (I know I know, stereotype, but you get the point).
I almost think it should mandatory for programmers of open source to take a business class or something. Anyone who generates their own products (coders, artists, musicians, etc) really need to realize that in addition to creating their item they also need to be *able* to sell themselves, even if they choose not to. One day they made decide that they need to eat.
As scathing as most of this post is I'll agree on this one point:
"7. Yes, I was about to call the MIT admissions office, but my mother brought up the argument "don't even try, we won't have the money for that", hence this ask slashdot article.
Your mother is a moron, and you shouldn't be listening to her when it comes to this."
My dad's wife offered to type up my applications and decided to make those kinds of decisions without telling me. I only received one rejection letter because the only application she turned in (the only one in-state) she sent out incomplete. Go figure. I suppose it worked out for the best though - I have a "career job" now, working full time while going to school full time at a local technical college making decent money. Would I change things if I could? Definitely. I'd love to have not so much all the time, but the *lifestyle* of university life that I missed out on. I basically went from high school to adult in a matter of six months and now I have responsibilities and BILLS.
However, I am *still* working my way towards MIT. I know I wouldn't be going there 100% for the classroom environment (although still a factor), it would almost definitely be for the social networking with like-minded people as well as the culture surrounding being at an institution like that. I think the image of MIT itself brings about a certain attraction to similar sets of people. Extrapolate from that what you will.:)
I think the key is to realize, yes, you can get schooling anywhere and that education is what you make of it. You really just have to grasp what it is that you really want to gain from your college experience. Remember - degrees are only to advance your value in the eyes of employers; education is what advances your mind and teaches you *how* to think, how to approach problems.
*shrug* The reality today is that American defense research and development is performed primarily by commercial government contractors, not the military themselves. Check out SPAWAR.
"When any computer is repaired or replaced the old drive is dated, put into secure storage for a minimum of 30 days, and then DOD wiped, and then recycled or physically destroyed. (The magnets are really good for hanging things on cubical walls.)
The reason our drives are 'aged' for 30 days is because we can't trust our customers to have a good backup. (or ANY backup...)"
Same policy here. The 30 days is to cover the "oh crap, we forgot to transfer x" or "oh crap, you didn't tell me you had some strange file you needed in some jacked up place". Typically we don't copy the entire drive when replacing drives, but rather user-specific files (my documents/desktop/etc).
In short, what the parent said is exactly dead-on as far as how typical IT policy goes.
I'm glad someone else was thinking the same thing. It's such an absurd trade off to me. There are plenty of ways to deal with heat and making computers start putting out more net emissions than cars would definitely be one way not worth pursuing.
This is precisely my thought on the matter. Tangentially, I believe credit card companies should *require* pin numbers for their cards. I'm noticing less and less people checking for my id. I'll even HAND IT to them and they're like "oh, you didn't buy any liquor or smokes so what's this for?"
Call me what you will, but personally I *still* prefer the performance of a super fast single core (~3.5ghz+) over this over-hyped multi-core phenomenon. I've yet to see any *major* differences between two machines I have that are the same clock speed, one single core, one dual. The difference I do experience is similar to what I'd expect from a.5ghz jump. In other words, the architecture *does* need to change if they have any desire to have any significant performance increases.
Also if they were able to receive funding, say from the/a government then there could be a lot of speculation again about impartiality (is that even a word) and a whole different set of issues. I would like to see them reach the status though where they *could* receive funding as a library though...
I actually thought this would have been more of a successful excuse to insert the phrase "Pick it up and reverse it" within a patent, but I was sadly disappointed.:)
Yes, I'm referencing this:
http://xkcd.com/153/
I'm doing IT support over on my side of the world for a little bit and the mentality seems to have been the same. However, we've been trying harder to resolve those nitpicky issues that have the ability to kill productivity. It IS easier to just say "screw it" and stay with older versions that don't have the same issues, but it doesn't exactly resolve the problem.
Here's an easy example that may affect a lot of corporate people: outlook webmail on ie7. There's some S/MIME add on that gets installed during some update at some point somewhere that will actually put the user in a situation where the minute they hit "Send" the browser crashes and all their work is lost. Simply disable that add on and the problem is solved and life goes on for IE7. And that's really been the *only* major problem we've had on our end, but an enormous problem it was for productivity.
Hopefully IE8 is an massive improvement though and something our users could more easily adopt than say....vista.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh - damn small linux has a nice live version that runs straight from your desktop through QEMU. I'm nix-retarded and it was pretty easy, honestly. I was very impressed by it. Not sure now ubuntu would run on a similar set up but dsl is pretty fun for a super light nix to play with.
Just view bootloader as being similar to grub/lilo/whatever and it's not so scary. :) I'd say it's a *relatively* safe move, it takes special (purposeful) effort to kill win bootloader. Even so, just slave the drive to another windows box and copy it from the master if you have problems.
Very nice. Taking into consideration some of the other users' more thought out posts I'll give ubuntu another shot today or tomorrow. My gripes aren't to bash or hinder the linux community- I really do want them to succeed. I'm by no means a novice pc user so I *may* suffer from familiar vs. intuitive - of which I'll make more consideration of.
...but if I have to do one make/config/whatever...*shakesfist* :p
I'll give it an honest effort and get back to you guys possibly by the weekend if anyone cares.
I'm not sure if it's still an issue but I couldn't figure out for the life of me how to get to the cd drive when trying to perform a rip a few years ago. Then again, I had to ask a nix guy "oh, it's under mnt" or some jazz.
I agree with most of the points made in the article though. Devs needs to get a grasp on what the non-techie public wants if they want their work to be successful. I personally wouldn't mind going back to nix if they made fixes to the above issues.
I've heard this same argument for years and really it just sounds like whining to me. The linux community tries in a lot of aspect to stray far far away from Windows out of principle yet fail to impliment the things Microsoft actually got right.
The typical user should not have to open up a term window to install a program. It should be click and guide you through the rest. That was always my biggest complaint. Sure I could fire up some synaptic or whatever it was but that's not exactly intuitive - I had to have a nix friend of mine tell me it even existed.
Linux, nor Ubuntu, will thrive as a dominant OS as long as users like "Erin" still have trouble figuring things out.
Ok, so don't take things from Windows - but figure it out from the Apple OS. Even granny can use those.
Yet everyone cheers when video games have to be on dvds and computers require small fusion reactors to run the video cards. *rolls eyes* I'd say a 300% increase is fairly decent considering how many webpages now utlized embedded media (movies/audio players), whereas I don't recall that being the case as much 5 years ago. It could be worse, it could still be *all* done in flash.
Easy: Splenda.
Actually, on Friday I'm in love. :)
However, privacy and yadda yadda yadda. Pedophiles are the lowest of the lowest in my book. Why not use social networking sites as tools to catch those guys? If anything it'll deter them from using those sites to chase their prey.
I view this in the same manner that Passion of the Christ made more Christians, the way Micheal Moore has made more liberals or the way Bill O' Reily made more conservatives. -They didn't. It catered to an audience already set in their ways on the topic. I don't see a crazy threat to my scientific mind here. If I did...I'd start building sharks with laser beams and build a moat around my house.
I've been hearing this gripe for ages and finally just caved in and made the switch. It was the reasonable choice to just dive in and do it because my profession is basically glorified system admin and tech support.
Was it slow at first? A bit. Can it be tweaked very easily to run well on various machines? Definitely.
This can be done very easily. The people complaining about speed are probably the same ones expecting aero to work fine on a 1ghz box (if by some magic they had a machine compatible with it).
I run vista on both a 2.4 ghz/2gb ram box and a 1.5ghz/512mb ram laptop. Different set ups, equal performance. Do the math.
"To complicate matters further, most active Internet users have at least three separate e-mail addresses, which they give out for work purposes, for personal matters, and for newsletters and commercial offers. Somebody needs to sort it all out"
Somebody needs to sort it all out? Someone not me? No the fuck they don't. I divide my email addresses so ms granny-chain-a-lot spams one account and important shit goes elsewhere. I don't want companies to have an easier time finding me. Especially when 99.9% of them do *not* have my interests in mind as priority.
Offtopic but, you had me until this: "Microsoft is an ongoing criminal organization, and as such, should be seized under the RICO act, and its parts sold off or its source code simply published for those parts without buyers, and the buyers should be forever blocked from forming a cartel, single company, sharing directors, ... to prevent a resurrection of Microsoft."
This is the problem with many slash dotters, they begin with great, credible arguments, then turn themselves into conspiracy theorists and angry anarchists. To me this is the equivalent of when I hear some republic friends of mine have a decent argument to their point but then start dropping phrases like "socialist democratic party". It ruins what credibility you just had.
Point is - if you want to change the methodology of something, rash actions/words wont get you as far as say well thought-out discussions on the topic. Just my two cents.
This *is* a capitalist nation. If you want a better product, use it. *.doc files can be opened with open office, *.pdf with ghostview, etc. No one's forcing you to pay some "corporate tax".
With that said, do I agree with all of their business practices? Not at all. I'm just saying, if you have any intentions on countering them, then come up with more solid words. If you don't, then there's no point in suggesting such harsh actions.
I say they just outsource this to taiwan too since they're already doing such a fine job at making our passports.... National security is national security afterall...
I would actually really enjoy seeing open source go this route. Years ago when I was first introduced to open source this was actually exactly how I thought it was operating until I was educated more on the matter later on. If used for profit, then the profit should be distributed to help continue the growth of the community. If for free, then any progress made on that code (to the best of my knowledge) is typically distributed, again, to help continue the growth of the community. It seems entirely foolish and far too idealistic for someone to slave over some code for an extended amount of time just to release it and have some other company use it as the infrastructure to their product and watch them make millions while the coder still lives in their parents' basement or whatnot. (I know I know, stereotype, but you get the point). I almost think it should mandatory for programmers of open source to take a business class or something. Anyone who generates their own products (coders, artists, musicians, etc) really need to realize that in addition to creating their item they also need to be *able* to sell themselves, even if they choose not to. One day they made decide that they need to eat.
As scathing as most of this post is I'll agree on this one point: "7. Yes, I was about to call the MIT admissions office, but my mother brought up the argument "don't even try, we won't have the money for that", hence this ask slashdot article. Your mother is a moron, and you shouldn't be listening to her when it comes to this." My dad's wife offered to type up my applications and decided to make those kinds of decisions without telling me. I only received one rejection letter because the only application she turned in (the only one in-state) she sent out incomplete. Go figure. I suppose it worked out for the best though - I have a "career job" now, working full time while going to school full time at a local technical college making decent money. Would I change things if I could? Definitely. I'd love to have not so much all the time, but the *lifestyle* of university life that I missed out on. I basically went from high school to adult in a matter of six months and now I have responsibilities and BILLS. However, I am *still* working my way towards MIT. I know I wouldn't be going there 100% for the classroom environment (although still a factor), it would almost definitely be for the social networking with like-minded people as well as the culture surrounding being at an institution like that. I think the image of MIT itself brings about a certain attraction to similar sets of people. Extrapolate from that what you will. :)
I think the key is to realize, yes, you can get schooling anywhere and that education is what you make of it. You really just have to grasp what it is that you really want to gain from your college experience. Remember - degrees are only to advance your value in the eyes of employers; education is what advances your mind and teaches you *how* to think, how to approach problems.
*shrug* The reality today is that American defense research and development is performed primarily by commercial government contractors, not the military themselves. Check out SPAWAR.
"When any computer is repaired or replaced the old drive is dated, put into secure storage for a minimum of 30 days, and then DOD wiped, and then recycled or physically destroyed. (The magnets are really good for hanging things on cubical walls.)
The reason our drives are 'aged' for 30 days is because we can't trust our customers to have a good backup. (or ANY backup...)"
Same policy here. The 30 days is to cover the "oh crap, we forgot to transfer x" or "oh crap, you didn't tell me you had some strange file you needed in some jacked up place". Typically we don't copy the entire drive when replacing drives, but rather user-specific files (my documents/desktop/etc).
In short, what the parent said is exactly dead-on as far as how typical IT policy goes.
I'm glad someone else was thinking the same thing. It's such an absurd trade off to me. There are plenty of ways to deal with heat and making computers start putting out more net emissions than cars would definitely be one way not worth pursuing.
This is precisely my thought on the matter. Tangentially, I believe credit card companies should *require* pin numbers for their cards. I'm noticing less and less people checking for my id. I'll even HAND IT to them and they're like "oh, you didn't buy any liquor or smokes so what's this for?"
Thanks. *rtfw* :)
Call me what you will, but personally I *still* prefer the performance of a super fast single core (~3.5ghz+) over this over-hyped multi-core phenomenon. I've yet to see any *major* differences between two machines I have that are the same clock speed, one single core, one dual. The difference I do experience is similar to what I'd expect from a .5ghz jump. In other words, the architecture *does* need to change if they have any desire to have any significant performance increases.
Also if they were able to receive funding, say from the/a government then there could be a lot of speculation again about impartiality (is that even a word) and a whole different set of issues. I would like to see them reach the status though where they *could* receive funding as a library though...
Would I be allowed to edit my packets and submit them for approval then? ;)
I actually thought this would have been more of a successful excuse to insert the phrase "Pick it up and reverse it" within a patent, but I was sadly disappointed. :)
Yes, I'm referencing this:
http://xkcd.com/153/
I'm doing IT support over on my side of the world for a little bit and the mentality seems to have been the same. However, we've been trying harder to resolve those nitpicky issues that have the ability to kill productivity. It IS easier to just say "screw it" and stay with older versions that don't have the same issues, but it doesn't exactly resolve the problem. Here's an easy example that may affect a lot of corporate people: outlook webmail on ie7. There's some S/MIME add on that gets installed during some update at some point somewhere that will actually put the user in a situation where the minute they hit "Send" the browser crashes and all their work is lost. Simply disable that add on and the problem is solved and life goes on for IE7. And that's really been the *only* major problem we've had on our end, but an enormous problem it was for productivity. Hopefully IE8 is an massive improvement though and something our users could more easily adopt than say....vista.