Computers are dead. Everybody is sick of how they swallow up our lives, so now we're going out more, reading books, writing on paper with fountain pens, and playing games on boards with dice and counters. Maybe this is better suited to a science fiction novel...:-|
Apple swooped in, took advantage among some of the anti-Microsoft sentiment that developed...
What Apple did was swoop in and offer media consumption devices which offered candy to those who never really needed a computer in the first place. I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad thing. Apple's laptops are still useful to me because I can use them in pretty much exactly the same way as I use my Linux boxes.
I have, of course, considered throwing out OS X and installing Linux on my freebie MacBook, but OS X works "well enough" (with a few features that are actually excellent) that such a gesture would rightly be considered to be making a point to nobody in particular.
If you want to see how a desktop UNIX-based os should do it right, look at OS X.
I came at it the other way around, since I inherited an older-model Mac laptop from my wife when she upgraded. I've been using Linux since the early SLS (later Slackware) distributions on my desktop and server systems. I like the way Apple has gone to some lengths to make issues like dealing with wireless networks pretty much bombproof, but I still prefer the configurability of my desktop Linux systems. The Mac UI isn't bad, but it makes me a bit cranky that there's no way to configure it to suit the user's way of working. Seems it's good to think outside the box, but only if you think the way Apple damn well tells you to.
Also, even after several years, it still bothers me that closing a window on a Mac doesn't terminate the application. I can understand the philosophical rationale (for what it's worth) behind this, but it seems unnecessary and wasteful.
The best way to get Gimp working well on the Mac is to install it via Macports. Most of the ready-made binaries aren't built very well. Also, using ports allows you to skin Gimp (and other GNOME/GTK+ programs) so it looks more consistent with native Mac programs.
The difference between Calc and Excel isn't so much in the number of features, but stability, plain and simple.
Oh dear. Heads up, guys - We've woken up Microsoft's PR department, and the shills are having to earn their keep again.
I've been using OpenOffice since, well, since it was StarOffice, and stability has NEVER been its problem. Startup time used to be slow, but now it's pretty much equal to (or maybe a bit quicker than) MSOffice.
Scared is the word. From the TFA, apropos Microsoft's video ad (Silverlight or WMV if you please): "However, the quotes are far from balanced and indicate a subtle attempt to dismiss OpenOffice in the guise of a fair discussion."
That is completely wrong.
There is nothing subtle about it. Unless you consider being bludgeoned by someone screaming "Give Me All Your Money Or I'll Go Broke" subtle, that is. Pretty much every statement made in it is at best a half-truth, and more commonly an outright lie. This kind of hysterical trolling is the kind of thing we expect from the losing side in a political campaign, and it's an ugly look.
Disc encryption, while great as far as it goes, suffers from being an attempted technical solution to a social problem. Far better to have sensitive data stored on secured systems protected by lock and key, and accessible remotely as required with proper authentication. There is no reason to have personal information for anyone other than yourself stored on any kind of laptop.
Your own information can be stored however you like. If you want to encrypt your whole disc, that's fine; otherwise, it might make sense to just encrypt your sensitive material (e.g. via gpg or equivalent) and leave less-critical material open in an account with decent authentication. This has the advantage of a lower processing overhead.
but rather about giving back to the community (where have I heard that phrase before?)
As to "where", I can't say. As to "when", then I guess the answer is probably not very recently. We seem to vhave allowed ourselves to fall into an ethical hole that informs us that "anything goes" when it comes to making a profit.
If a public library sheds some of its stock which is paid for by the public purse, then that sale is not a legitimate target for plundering by speculators. What is legitimate is for genuine readers prepared to take or make the time to sort through the books to have first grabs at the books for personal enjoyment and/or education,
Yes, it is about giving something back to the community. There are many whose only means of purchasing worthwhile reading material is through such sales, especially if they read a lot. I've been in that boat myself (though nowadays I more often tend to prowl 2nd-hand books online via Amazon, alibris or ABE). Let's not forget that there are still many who don't have access to the internet.
If you have a lot of foes, make the least bad ones neutral to free up space for friending.
If you have any foes at all, maybe you should get out more. Over the last decade or so, I've come across posters with whom I disagree completely enough to nudge me to rank them as a foe, only to find a few months later that they are talking complete sense on another topic.
There's no reason why this forum has to be adversarial, and it would probably be better without this friend/foe claptrap.
Which is only a small fraction of the real infections out there.
Indeed. But what the submission doesn't mention is that while the US may indeed have four times the number of bots of its nearest "rival", it also very likely has four times as many computers in total. In other words, a fairly pointless non-statistic.
The thing I find most scary about that design is the kooky idea of making the back of device in glass as well as the front. It seems like a total case of over-design, doubling the number of components prone to accidental damage for absolutely no functional reason.
Any handheld device will acquire a few scratches and bumps under normal wear, no matter how carefully you look after it. A case in point: the back of my iPod Classic has lots of scratches, while the front is completely unblemished. That's just from putting it down on the non-slip rubber-lined compartment of my car while I'm driving. I would be fucking pissed off if any of those scratches caused the case to fall apart.
Well, Paris gets a bad rap. But if we actually take a step back and think about this, it's not actually such a bad idea.
If I'm going to be busted for the heinous crime of leaving my car parked in a clearway, it's clearly better if this is done with (nearly) incontrovertible evidence of my guilt. Sure, it sucks for me to have to pay a fine (especially if one happens to be French, in which case even participating in such ignoble activities as the taxation system is quite rightly frowned upon), but if there is a rule, one should be prepared to enforce it.
I've known plenty of people who didn't have an IT degree but were still damn good at anything IT related, including coding.
True. I'm not primarily into IT right now, but I got into the field back in the late '70s as a "trainee programmer" - which meant doing everything from being a BOFH, churning out COBOL and "real" programming in FORTRAN to hacking on system binaries when source wasn't available. Since then, I spent some 15 years contracting on various mainframe sites, using a list of programming languages that occupied a couple of pages of A4 on my resumé.
I do not have an IT degree (though I do have others), and occasional forays into IT educational courses have led to me discovering very quickly that they have little to teach me. This might seem a bit sad, but after a while one starts to feel as if the latest philosophical rationnale behind such-and-such a program is all a bit like last year's management theory.
Trouble is, there is a sad perception that "maintenance programming" is uncool and something you give to your least experienced programmer. While maintenance always needs to be done - and is actually really useful for development of skills, since it gives an immediate perspective on how someone (however misguided) has already approached the problem - it doesn't usually give the kudos of "original" work.
I guess this is probably why so many wheels get reinvented in the OSS world. [sigh]
Fair enough. Personally, I would like something between the two extremes - in other words, something exactly like WordPerfect 5.1. That was a stupendous program, and I have never since found its equal. Later versions of WP were just a horrible amalgam of the most simplistic early efforts combined with an atrocious re-interpretation of MSWord's UI.
...the trouble of finding the perfect text editing software (i.e. a piece of software that has absolutely no features)?
Maybe you have never tried a real text editor. Spend a couple of weeks learning the intricacies of emacs or vi[m] if you must, then try again. You won't need a mouse, and you will be working with an editor vastly superior (at processing text) to any Microsoft or Apple product.
Once your text is in place, you can use whatever you want (TeX/LaTeX, OOo, MSWord or whatever) to do the formatting. Getting the input right in the first place is the important thing,
I know of no text editing/authoring/publishing software in existence that requires use of the mouse.
I bought and used my first mouse in 1991. (I was enrolled in an AutoCAD class, and the rodent was a cheap option for use at home).
However, I had managed to survive perfectly well from the mid-'70s without such a crutch. My favourite text editor for many years was TECO, which had variants among many of the mini/mainframe machines of the day, and later became the foundation of EMACS.
TECO was (and still is) a blazingly fast program, ideally suited to quick-and-dirty scripted editing of flat files in a production environment. Some of my colleagues used to complain, however, of its memory usage: the memory involved in remembering all those cryptic commands like "zj-1d" (jump to the end of a file and delete the last character). Wimps.
Seems to me this issue has been explored as thoroughly as it needs to be - by none less than Neal Stephenson in In the Beginning Was The Command Line". The man can write, and having done do on a subject close to the heart of many geeks is doubly cool.
Slashdot Mirror
You have an 8-track player in your car? Cool. ;-)
Computers are dead. Everybody is sick of how they swallow up our lives, so now we're going out more, reading books, writing on paper with fountain pens, and playing games on boards with dice and counters. Maybe this is better suited to a science fiction novel... :-|
Apple swooped in, took advantage among some of the anti-Microsoft sentiment that developed...
What Apple did was swoop in and offer media consumption devices which offered candy to those who never really needed a computer in the first place. I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad thing. Apple's laptops are still useful to me because I can use them in pretty much exactly the same way as I use my Linux boxes.
I have, of course, considered throwing out OS X and installing Linux on my freebie MacBook, but OS X works "well enough" (with a few features that are actually excellent) that such a gesture would rightly be considered to be making a point to nobody in particular.
If you want to see how a desktop UNIX-based os should do it right, look at OS X.
I came at it the other way around, since I inherited an older-model Mac laptop from my wife when she upgraded. I've been using Linux since the early SLS (later Slackware) distributions on my desktop and server systems. I like the way Apple has gone to some lengths to make issues like dealing with wireless networks pretty much bombproof, but I still prefer the configurability of my desktop Linux systems. The Mac UI isn't bad, but it makes me a bit cranky that there's no way to configure it to suit the user's way of working. Seems it's good to think outside the box, but only if you think the way Apple damn well tells you to.
Also, even after several years, it still bothers me that closing a window on a Mac doesn't terminate the application. I can understand the philosophical rationale (for what it's worth) behind this, but it seems unnecessary and wasteful.
[1] Note that verbing is cool!
Well, why not? If it was good enough for Shakespeare, it should be good enough for us.
Now Gimp sucks, at least on the Mac.
The best way to get Gimp working well on the Mac is to install it via Macports. Most of the ready-made binaries aren't built very well. Also, using ports allows you to skin Gimp (and other GNOME/GTK+ programs) so it looks more consistent with native Mac programs.
The difference between Calc and Excel isn't so much in the number of features, but stability, plain and simple.
Oh dear. Heads up, guys - We've woken up Microsoft's PR department, and the shills are having to earn their keep again.
I've been using OpenOffice since, well, since it was StarOffice, and stability has NEVER been its problem. Startup time used to be slow, but now it's pretty much equal to (or maybe a bit quicker than) MSOffice.
Scared is the word. From the TFA, apropos Microsoft's video ad (Silverlight or WMV if you please): "However, the quotes are far from balanced and indicate a subtle attempt to dismiss OpenOffice in the guise of a fair discussion."
That is completely wrong.
There is nothing subtle about it. Unless you consider being bludgeoned by someone screaming "Give Me All Your Money Or I'll Go Broke" subtle, that is. Pretty much every statement made in it is at best a half-truth, and more commonly an outright lie. This kind of hysterical trolling is the kind of thing we expect from the losing side in a political campaign, and it's an ugly look.
A better idea is...mandate full disk encryption.
Disc encryption, while great as far as it goes, suffers from being an attempted technical solution to a social problem. Far better to have sensitive data stored on secured systems protected by lock and key, and accessible remotely as required with proper authentication. There is no reason to have personal information for anyone other than yourself stored on any kind of laptop.
Your own information can be stored however you like. If you want to encrypt your whole disc, that's fine; otherwise, it might make sense to just encrypt your sensitive material (e.g. via gpg or equivalent) and leave less-critical material open in an account with decent authentication. This has the advantage of a lower processing overhead.
but rather about giving back to the community (where have I heard that phrase before?)
As to "where", I can't say. As to "when", then I guess the answer is probably not very recently. We seem to vhave allowed ourselves to fall into an ethical hole that informs us that "anything goes" when it comes to making a profit.
If a public library sheds some of its stock which is paid for by the public purse, then that sale is not a legitimate target for plundering by speculators. What is legitimate is for genuine readers prepared to take or make the time to sort through the books to have first grabs at the books for personal enjoyment and/or education,
Yes, it is about giving something back to the community. There are many whose only means of purchasing worthwhile reading material is through such sales, especially if they read a lot. I've been in that boat myself (though nowadays I more often tend to prowl 2nd-hand books online via Amazon, alibris or ABE). Let's not forget that there are still many who don't have access to the internet.
MAC spoofing is incredibly easy to do for anyone that wants to do it.
It is, but guessing the MAC address of a device that will be accepted by the router might be just a little bit harder.
If you have a lot of foes, make the least bad ones neutral to free up space for friending.
If you have any foes at all, maybe you should get out more. Over the last decade or so, I've come across posters with whom I disagree completely enough to nudge me to rank them as a foe, only to find a few months later that they are talking complete sense on another topic.
There's no reason why this forum has to be adversarial, and it would probably be better without this friend/foe claptrap.
Which is only a small fraction of the real infections out there.
Indeed. But what the submission doesn't mention is that while the US may indeed have four times the number of bots of its nearest "rival", it also very likely has four times as many computers in total. In other words, a fairly pointless non-statistic.
The thing I find most scary about that design is the kooky idea of making the back of device in glass as well as the front. It seems like a total case of over-design, doubling the number of components prone to accidental damage for absolutely no functional reason.
Any handheld device will acquire a few scratches and bumps under normal wear, no matter how carefully you look after it. A case in point: the back of my iPod Classic has lots of scratches, while the front is completely unblemished. That's just from putting it down on the non-slip rubber-lined compartment of my car while I'm driving. I would be fucking pissed off if any of those scratches caused the case to fall apart.
Won't that cause some confusion with Paris?
Well, Paris gets a bad rap. But if we actually take a step back and think about this, it's not actually such a bad idea.
If I'm going to be busted for the heinous crime of leaving my car parked in a clearway, it's clearly better if this is done with (nearly) incontrovertible evidence of my guilt. Sure, it sucks for me to have to pay a fine (especially if one happens to be French, in which case even participating in such ignoble activities as the taxation system is quite rightly frowned upon), but if there is a rule, one should be prepared to enforce it.
I've known plenty of people who didn't have an IT degree but were still damn good at anything IT related, including coding.
True. I'm not primarily into IT right now, but I got into the field back in the late '70s as a "trainee programmer" - which meant doing everything from being a BOFH, churning out COBOL and "real" programming in FORTRAN to hacking on system binaries when source wasn't available. Since then, I spent some 15 years contracting on various mainframe sites, using a list of programming languages that occupied a couple of pages of A4 on my resumé.
I do not have an IT degree (though I do have others), and occasional forays into IT educational courses have led to me discovering very quickly that they have little to teach me. This might seem a bit sad, but after a while one starts to feel as if the latest philosophical rationnale behind such-and-such a program is all a bit like last year's management theory.
Trouble is, there is a sad perception that "maintenance programming" is uncool and something you give to your least experienced programmer. While maintenance always needs to be done - and is actually really useful for development of skills, since it gives an immediate perspective on how someone (however misguided) has already approached the problem - it doesn't usually give the kudos of "original" work.
I guess this is probably why so many wheels get reinvented in the OSS world. [sigh]
If a twitterer gets any responses at all, ever...
Don't you mean a twit? Or, perhaps a twat?
Fair enough. Personally, I would like something between the two extremes - in other words, something exactly like WordPerfect 5.1. That was a stupendous program, and I have never since found its equal. Later versions of WP were just a horrible amalgam of the most simplistic early efforts combined with an atrocious re-interpretation of MSWord's UI.
...the trouble of finding the perfect text editing software (i.e. a piece of software that has absolutely no features)?
Maybe you have never tried a real text editor. Spend a couple of weeks learning the intricacies of emacs or vi[m] if you must, then try again. You won't need a mouse, and you will be working with an editor vastly superior (at processing text) to any Microsoft or Apple product.
Once your text is in place, you can use whatever you want (TeX/LaTeX, OOo, MSWord or whatever) to do the formatting. Getting the input right in the first place is the important thing,
I know of no text editing/authoring/publishing software in existence that requires use of the mouse.
I bought and used my first mouse in 1991. (I was enrolled in an AutoCAD class, and the rodent was a cheap option for use at home).
However, I had managed to survive perfectly well from the mid-'70s without such a crutch. My favourite text editor for many years was TECO, which had variants among many of the mini/mainframe machines of the day, and later became the foundation of EMACS.
TECO was (and still is) a blazingly fast program, ideally suited to quick-and-dirty scripted editing of flat files in a production environment. Some of my colleagues used to complain, however, of its memory usage: the memory involved in remembering all those cryptic commands like "zj-1d" (jump to the end of a file and delete the last character). Wimps.
Seems to me this issue has been explored as thoroughly as it needs to be - by none less than Neal Stephenson in In the Beginning Was The Command Line". The man can write, and having done do on a subject close to the heart of many geeks is doubly cool.
Here, you can buy one for $100...
A quick google search gives $826. It's not exactly the sort of thing you can get from Radio Shack, but whatever works, I guess...
How about the FBI throws you in jail for destruction of government property
You do not have a duty to look after property that someone attaches to you by stealth.
Is the amount of time spent sitting in a cell, the money lost in lawyers fees, and the hassle of going to court really worth it?
If I am blameless, and the authorities are abusing their power, then emphatically YES. Someone has to keep them honest.
Hmmm. If I had found such a device (and if I were confident that it was not a bomb), I would simply "drop" my 60-pound hammer on it. Oops.