Cable and dsl no matter how fantastic is still a dirt road compared to 100 Mb/s coming from fiber.
This is true, but dirt roads are better than none at all. Although I have an OK dsl2+ connection at home, I spend a lot of time in rural areas, and connections there are woeful. In large areas of Tasmania, for instance, there aren't even any copper phone-lines, so not even any dialup. If you are very lucky, you might be able to get a satellite signal, but if you want to use it for VOIP you can forget it, as the upstream latency is too horrendous for it to be usable.
Yes... like stop the jumping jiggling flashing so fucking annoying that I can't actually read the content I went there to read.
The worst ones are the frames (some javascript artifact?) that pop up and follow your cursor, hiding the content underneath. Adblock and flashblock just don't work on those things. Bastards.
Fortunately, my hosts file kills some of them, but whoever came up with the idea needs to be pegged out on a beach at low tide.
If these books are truly orphaned, it would be vastly preferable if Google were able to find it in themselves to donate some of their vast resources to putting the works up on Project Gutenberg.
That would go a long way towards telling the world that their intentions are honest.
FreeBSD supports Linux binary compatibility as a kernel compile time option (and now available as a module I think).
Thanks, I hadn't been aware of that. I'm not necessarily sure I see any advantage over running the binaries under Linux (especially given that there must be an overhead), but cool idea anyway.
In any case, the submission is a bit confusing where it says that Deb "supports two kernels at the same time". Unless I'm having a total brainfart, that doesn't make sense to me: a Linux binary would no more run under a BSD kernel than it would under DOS (and vice versa).
Unless, of course, he really means everything is re-compiled, which does make sense.
Do you still have to click through the GPL license to install Firefox?
I can't remember having done so on any of my Linux boxen, but IIRC just about any GPL package I've installed on a Mac has a click-through licence. I'm not sure why there should be a diference - maybe Mac users are expected to be used to this kind of thing...
My, you live in a nice cosy little world. Welcome to the real world, where the race is run and the good guys lost. Policemen are not nice guys, and neither are judges. Evidence, schmevidence, police departments are usually adept enough at covering their asses.
All the blogger can really do if he needs his data is to make damn sure he has an off-site backup somewhere the authorities can't get at it.
I'm not affluent at all, but I was happy as a pig in shit when the Google van drove straight past my street without turning down it. (The street is a small cul-de-sc and is a bit hard for some people to turn around in.)
... like "How do we prevent the wireless revolution by patent-trolling the standards committees"?
Hmmm. That's beside the point. If HP, Intel and all the other guys in the band expect any credibility when others step on their patents, they have to be prepared to fork out when they step on someone else's patent. The fact that the technology is widely used doesn't exempt them.
If we have to have a patent system at all, it has to apply to everybody. It is not sufficient to just say "I'm not going to pay, so there! Nyaa nyaa-ni-nyaa nyaa!".
Re:Get rid of the Shell, VI, etc for a month...
on
Linux Needs Critics
·
· Score: 1
...because linux might have a windowing system with the productivity and attractiveness of either Mac OSX or Windows.
OK, productivity: no difference whatsoever. Just what you get used to. Attractiveness: However you like it. Apple (regardless of other benefits) offer almost NO customisation of the interface. Windows is only somewhat more customisable. The more sophisticated desktop environments for *nix (Gnome, KDE...) offer an almost infinite choice of themes and widgets, far beyond anything offered by MS or Apple.
If you are critical of Mac, you are mobbed, beaten, lynched and never allowed to buy a cappuccino again.
My Unix background goes back to the Jurassic period, and I happen to be a Linux fan, so I always seem to piss off lots of Mac fan{boys,girls} when I tell them the reason why I like Macs is because you can always pull up a terminal window to get at a bog-standard BSD command-line whenever there's real work to be done...
This "freeness" (freedom is another issue) is irrelevant. Free software has no reason or right to be substandard, and in fact is often of very high quality indeed. What is not so good is when a substandard project is provided at a high price without adequate maintenance.
One of the most annoying things I have found in Bugzilla is that "WON'T FIX" tag. Regardless of whether or not the actual issue affects myself, anyone who has taken the time and trouble to post input on a project deserves a more apposite response than "stick your criticism where the sun don't shine". It certainly does nothing to foster the kind of goodwill necessary to inspire the hapless user to ever bother again.
Now, I am not saying that coders are not the best critics...
Just as well. I can't think of anyone else even remotely qualified to critically evaluate the Linux kernel.
OK, so I'm being a bit pedantic, but not very. The author of TFA says he is not a programmer, and I believe him. That means he is a user of applications, which he doesn't take the trouble to name, other than to make indirect reference to Ubuntu and Firefox. His gripe with Ubuntu seems to be that the latest release doesn't have enough shiny things in it, and who knows what he's done to his Firefox installation.
He does, however, have a point when he says that "The danger with all open source projects is that the developers become too dominant, and spend all their effort making the software 'just so'--conforming to an ideological principle only they appreciate".
I'm sure all of us (if we're honest) can think of pet peeves with some of the open-source developers' more capriciously craniorectal idiocies in just about any non-trivial project. This has nothing to do with Linux, and is a failing equally shared with closed-source software.
...and it becomes so unbearably slow that I have to restart sCalc.
Then maybe you might try compiling it yourself or find a different binary package. I don't see that symptom at all on my Arch Linux box.
And in response to earlier posts about the slowness: OOo is marginally slower to load than MSOffice on similar hardware here. This also applies to NeoOffice for Mac, which loads slightly faster than the X11 version for the same platform.
But if you actually use it for much *work*, you're not going to re-load the program that often, so the startup time becomes irrelevant, since in operation it is at least as snappy as MSOffice.
Sorry, I thought I had replied, but obviously I got distracted by something shiny.:-)
Your screenshot is indeed not cluttered, but the environment does not consist of the desktop alone. Your screenshot does not show what most users would instantly recognise as a typical KDE environment.The native aplications (with their concomitant bells and whistles) also contribute to the clutter. Or klutter.;-P
However, I have to agree that KDE4 is not as "in your face" as previous versions, and my antipathy is largely a matter of perception. Obviously, I also realise it is perfectly possible for Gnome or KDE to mimic each other (or even that strange thing from Redmond) at the desktop level.
Almost as an aside, I have observed that in the not-too-distant past, native KDE apps have been more feature-complete and less crash-prone than some of the gnomeish offerings, but unfortunately it seems the ball might have been dropped a few times with the transition to KDE4. I guess this is no worse than Gnome's fuckups with the transition to GTK2/Gnome2*, except that being so much later in the game, people are less inclined to forgive this immaturity.
The problem with mobile broadband data is the latency stinks. At the worst case, your latency is closer to (or beyond) satellite...
I can't comment on the iPhone implementation of Skype, but my experience of mobile broadband data has on the whole been pretty good. I spend a lot of time outside major towns in Australia, and I generally find that unless I am in a particularly badly-served location with less than 2 "bars" of signal strength with my entry-level Dodo (re-sold Optus) USB modem connection, I can hold an OK conversation with Skype.
My experience of satellite connection (18 months ago) was gruesome. Downstream latency was acceptable, but for upstream there was no point counting in milliseconds - sometimes it was as much as 10 seconds. So obviously conversations were just a little one-sided.
In any case, demanding isn't getting. The simple thing to do with such a demand is to just tear it up and file it in the recycling bin.
Sure, they could send an army of lawyers and bailiffs after her, but all she has to do in court is say she's unable to pay, and that will pretty much be that. The court will stipulate that she has to pay (say) 50p per week, and the cost of administration will swallow it up.
Talking of pies, that reminds me of this morning's fortune cookie:
In "King Henry VI, Part II," Shakespeare has Dick Butcher suggest to
his fellow anti-establishment rabble-rousers, "The first thing we do, let's
kill all the lawyers." That action may be extreme but a similar sentiment
was expressed by Thomas K. Connellan, president of The Management Group, Inc.
Speaking to business executives in Chicago and quoted in Automotive News,
Connellan attributed a measure of America's falling productivity to an excess
of attorneys and accountants, and a dearth of production experts. Lawyers
and accountants "do not make the economic pie any bigger; they only figure
out how the pie gets divided. Neither profession provides any added value
to product."
According to Connellan, the highly productive Japanese society has
10 lawyers and 30 accountants per 100,000 population. The U.S. has 200
lawyers and 700 accountants. This suggests that "the U.S. proportion of
pie-bakers and pie-dividers is way out of whack." Could Dick Butcher have
been an efficiency expert?
-- Motor Trend, May 1983
...If it means hundreds of deaths, they'll do it....
Well, that's because nobody has thought to stop them.
To all intents and purposes, corporations are able to act exactly as an individual might given sufficient influence and resources. The difference is that most existing legal systems do not hold corporations culpable in the same way as they do an individual. It would be a refreshing change if directors of companies guilty of flagrant abuses occasioning death or injury could be subjected to the same custodial penalties as an individual, but that is just not going to happen in a legal system that values property over human life or rights.
Africa? bullshit. Indians look like niggers but they're actually asian.
If you're going to drag race into this, you could at least get your facts right. Indians are customarily (and I use the word advisedly, since genomic evidence is inconclusive) regarded as caucasian.
Slashdot Mirror
Cable and dsl no matter how fantastic is still a dirt road compared to 100 Mb/s coming from fiber.
This is true, but dirt roads are better than none at all. Although I have an OK dsl2+ connection at home, I spend a lot of time in rural areas, and connections there are woeful. In large areas of Tasmania, for instance, there aren't even any copper phone-lines, so not even any dialup. If you are very lucky, you might be able to get a satellite signal, but if you want to use it for VOIP you can forget it, as the upstream latency is too horrendous for it to be usable.
That's easy enough. Just advertise for a cat herder.
Yes... like stop the jumping jiggling flashing so fucking annoying that I can't actually read the content I went there to read.
The worst ones are the frames (some javascript artifact?) that pop up and follow your cursor, hiding the content underneath. Adblock and flashblock just don't work on those things. Bastards.
Fortunately, my hosts file kills some of them, but whoever came up with the idea needs to be pegged out on a beach at low tide.
If these books are truly orphaned, it would be vastly preferable if Google were able to find it in themselves to donate some of their vast resources to putting the works up on Project Gutenberg.
That would go a long way towards telling the world that their intentions are honest.
FreeBSD supports Linux binary compatibility as a kernel compile time option (and now available as a module I think).
Thanks, I hadn't been aware of that. I'm not necessarily sure I see any advantage over running the binaries under Linux (especially given that there must be an overhead), but cool idea anyway.
In any case, the submission is a bit confusing where it says that Deb "supports two kernels at the same time". Unless I'm having a total brainfart, that doesn't make sense to me: a Linux binary would no more run under a BSD kernel than it would under DOS (and vice versa).
Unless, of course, he really means everything is re-compiled, which does make sense.
Do you still have to click through the GPL license to install Firefox?
I can't remember having done so on any of my Linux boxen, but IIRC just about any GPL package I've installed on a Mac has a click-through licence. I'm not sure why there should be a diference - maybe Mac users are expected to be used to this kind of thing...
...and this is where Clippy was born:
"I see you have just inserted a floppy disk in the drive. Would you like me to completely fuck it up for you?"
My, you live in a nice cosy little world. Welcome to the real world, where the race is run and the good guys lost. Policemen are not nice guys, and neither are judges. Evidence, schmevidence, police departments are usually adept enough at covering their asses.
All the blogger can really do if he needs his data is to make damn sure he has an off-site backup somewhere the authorities can't get at it.
I'm not affluent at all, but I was happy as a pig in shit when the Google van drove straight past my street without turning down it. (The street is a small cul-de-sc and is a bit hard for some people to turn around in.)
... like "How do we prevent the wireless revolution by patent-trolling the standards committees"?
Hmmm. That's beside the point. If HP, Intel and all the other guys in the band expect any credibility when others step on their patents, they have to be prepared to fork out when they step on someone else's patent. The fact that the technology is widely used doesn't exempt them.
If we have to have a patent system at all, it has to apply to everybody. It is not sufficient to just say "I'm not going to pay, so there! Nyaa nyaa-ni-nyaa nyaa!".
...because linux might have a windowing system with the productivity and attractiveness of either Mac OSX or Windows.
OK, productivity: no difference whatsoever. Just what you get used to. Attractiveness: However you like it. Apple (regardless of other benefits) offer almost NO customisation of the interface. Windows is only somewhat more customisable. The more sophisticated desktop environments for *nix (Gnome, KDE...) offer an almost infinite choice of themes and widgets, far beyond anything offered by MS or Apple.
If you are critical of Mac, you are mobbed, beaten, lynched and never allowed to buy a cappuccino again.
My Unix background goes back to the Jurassic period, and I happen to be a Linux fan, so I always seem to piss off lots of Mac fan{boys,girls} when I tell them the reason why I like Macs is because you can always pull up a terminal window to get at a bog-standard BSD command-line whenever there's real work to be done...
This "freeness" (freedom is another issue) is irrelevant. Free software has no reason or right to be substandard, and in fact is often of very high quality indeed. What is not so good is when a substandard project is provided at a high price without adequate maintenance.
One of the most annoying things I have found in Bugzilla is that "WON'T FIX" tag. Regardless of whether or not the actual issue affects myself, anyone who has taken the time and trouble to post input on a project deserves a more apposite response than "stick your criticism where the sun don't shine". It certainly does nothing to foster the kind of goodwill necessary to inspire the hapless user to ever bother again.
Now, I am not saying that coders are not the best critics...
Just as well. I can't think of anyone else even remotely qualified to critically evaluate the Linux kernel.
OK, so I'm being a bit pedantic, but not very. The author of TFA says he is not a programmer, and I believe him. That means he is a user of applications, which he doesn't take the trouble to name, other than to make indirect reference to Ubuntu and Firefox. His gripe with Ubuntu seems to be that the latest release doesn't have enough shiny things in it, and who knows what he's done to his Firefox installation.
He does, however, have a point when he says that "The danger with all open source projects is that the developers become too dominant, and spend all their effort making the software 'just so'--conforming to an ideological principle only they appreciate".
I'm sure all of us (if we're honest) can think of pet peeves with some of the open-source developers' more capriciously craniorectal idiocies in just about any non-trivial project. This has nothing to do with Linux, and is a failing equally shared with closed-source software.
...and it becomes so unbearably slow that I have to restart sCalc.
Then maybe you might try compiling it yourself or find a different binary package. I don't see that symptom at all on my Arch Linux box.
And in response to earlier posts about the slowness: OOo is marginally slower to load than MSOffice on similar hardware here. This also applies to NeoOffice for Mac, which loads slightly faster than the X11 version for the same platform.
But if you actually use it for much *work*, you're not going to re-load the program that often, so the startup time becomes irrelevant, since in operation it is at least as snappy as MSOffice.
How is that offtopic?
:-)
;-P
It's not.
Sorry, I thought I had replied, but obviously I got distracted by something shiny.
Your screenshot is indeed not cluttered, but the environment does not consist of the desktop alone. Your screenshot does not show what most users would instantly recognise as a typical KDE environment.The native aplications (with their concomitant bells and whistles) also contribute to the clutter. Or klutter.
However, I have to agree that KDE4 is not as "in your face" as previous versions, and my antipathy is largely a matter of perception. Obviously, I also realise it is perfectly possible for Gnome or KDE to mimic each other (or even that strange thing from Redmond) at the desktop level.
Almost as an aside, I have observed that in the not-too-distant past, native KDE apps have been more feature-complete and less crash-prone than some of the gnomeish offerings, but unfortunately it seems the ball might have been dropped a few times with the transition to KDE4. I guess this is no worse than Gnome's fuckups with the transition to GTK2/Gnome2*, except that being so much later in the game, people are less inclined to forgive this immaturity.
...most people just can't fathom the existence of unredeemable people without any conscience, capable of looking you straight in the eyes while lying.
:-}
Like politicians, you mean?
The problem with mobile broadband data is the latency stinks. At the worst case, your latency is closer to (or beyond) satellite...
I can't comment on the iPhone implementation of Skype, but my experience of mobile broadband data has on the whole been pretty good. I spend a lot of time outside major towns in Australia, and I generally find that unless I am in a particularly badly-served location with less than 2 "bars" of signal strength with my entry-level Dodo (re-sold Optus) USB modem connection, I can hold an OK conversation with Skype.
My experience of satellite connection (18 months ago) was gruesome. Downstream latency was acceptable, but for upstream there was no point counting in milliseconds - sometimes it was as much as 10 seconds. So obviously conversations were just a little one-sided.
I occasionally get people ridiculing my car as a "girlie car", but my response is always "why should the girls have all the fun?".
In any case, demanding isn't getting. The simple thing to do with such a demand is to just tear it up and file it in the recycling bin.
Sure, they could send an army of lawyers and bailiffs after her, but all she has to do in court is say she's unable to pay, and that will pretty much be that. The court will stipulate that she has to pay (say) 50p per week, and the cost of administration will swallow it up.
Talking of pies, that reminds me of this morning's fortune cookie:
...If it means hundreds of deaths, they'll do it....
Well, that's because nobody has thought to stop them.
To all intents and purposes, corporations are able to act exactly as an individual might given sufficient influence and resources. The difference is that most existing legal systems do not hold corporations culpable in the same way as they do an individual. It would be a refreshing change if directors of companies guilty of flagrant abuses occasioning death or injury could be subjected to the same custodial penalties as an individual, but that is just not going to happen in a legal system that values property over human life or rights.
Africa? bullshit. Indians look like niggers but they're actually asian.
If you're going to drag race into this, you could at least get your facts right. Indians are customarily (and I use the word advisedly, since genomic evidence is inconclusive) regarded as caucasian.