...it's about putting a competitor out of business as opposed to keeping people on their platform
Neither of these are particularly attractive characteristics. When the time comes, I'll be voting with my wallet. I currently have a (second-hand, free, but now ageing) MacBook which I will keep using until it breaks, but I won't be replacing it with another Apple product. I've been perfectly happy with Linux on my desktop machines for the last 15 years, so I'll just extend that to my next laptop.
First off, saying a message is a message regardless of the medium does not in any way, shape, or form, imply that no one would paint or write a poem. I'm not sure how you got from point a to point b there.
A clue from my post: Evocation is as much a part of communication as the black and white text.
Also: nobody on Facebook pokes! I've heard of it happening, but for the most part, it's a strawman for people like you to attack.
They do indeed poke. I know many who (sadly) do so all the time. (I dont, but then I don't use Facebook.) Just because you and your associates don't does not make my point a straw man argument, since I am not misrepresenting anyone's point of view.
I do wonder how people stay in touch with people who change their email address. Not everyone emails their whole addressbook to say they changed email.
A message is a message regardless of medium... You miss your old-fashioned aesthetic.
Nonsense. Evocation is as much a part of communication as the black and white text, regardless of the fact that it is essentially non-verbal. Otherwise nobody would bother to paint paintings or write poetry.
Of course, if you have never received a letter any more personal than a final demand from your bank manager, I wouldn't expect you to understand. But you have to agree that a poke from a facebook "friend" can never mean more than "I remember your name occasionally".
Exactly. The statement that "The iPad proved a tablet shouldn't be a portable computer" is a complete non sequitur. The only thing that has been proved is that Apple's vision does not include marketing to people who want to be able to pull up a Unix shell of their choice and start hacking. They are more interested in a product that is essentially like a white-goods appliance for which Apple can sell various widgets.
Of course, Apple is entitled to its own point of view, but this rationale is exactly why I won't be buying an iPad.
Well, for the record Dropline had already existed at that time.
IIRC, I was running Slack 8.1 when GNOME 2.0 came out. You can still see from the package lists at the time that Pat was still distributing GNOME, but only one of the 1.x versions.
I spent way too much time trying to build GNOME myself, and then a guy called Todd Kulesza released Dropline into the wild. I think it got too much for him too in (IIRC) about 2004 when Dropline was taken up by a bunch of other maintainers.
The GP isn't describing the perfect situation. The GP is describing the current situation.
I wasn't expecting my miserable little one-line post to set off this much discussion, but you are correct. I didn't say anything about thought crimes, and I didn't say the woman's employer wasn't an asswipe.
To make it completely clear: Facebook and other social networks are free tools for any stalker or pointy-haired HR manager looking to avoid paying out entitlements to use. Making offhand or ill-considered posts in these forums is simply handing them ammunition that they WILL use.
I'm not saying there's anything good about any aspect of this situation: the world has become an ugly place. We have two choices: take appropriate precautions to allow you to live in this world we have created for ourselves, or stop living.
Being so stupid as to say dumb things on Facebook without realising her words could come back to bite her might be good grounds for not employing her in the first place.
Not so sure I'd agree that. Most people I know who learn Gentoo are simply following a cookbook. If you really want to feel that you're in control, giving Linux From Scratch a try is a good idea, but most of us wouldn't want the burden of trying to maintain a desktop system with that.
He's a living legend in Linux history, and he had the guts to make the right call to drop GNOME when it became too convoluted to maintain.
Pat's a great guy, but his dropping GNOME pissed off a lot of people too, though I understand his reasoning. KDE was at the time a lot easier to build, while GNOME was riddled with circular dependencies that made maintaining it a bitch of a job.
Fortunately for GNOME fans, the job was ably taken up by maintainers of the Dropline GNOME distribution. I have the impression they're getting a bit tired of it now, but others are around to fill the gap.
...mainly hoping to find a distro that is "more user friendly" than Slackware, and after two weeks I just gave up and installed Slackware 12.
I had my wife using Slackware 8.0 through 10. She is not a techie of any kind, but there is nothing unfriendly about Slackware once it is fully set up as a desktop machine. She eventually went over to using Macs because she decided she wanted to use EndNote to handle bibliographic referencing in her PhD thesis, since at the time there was nothing available that was nearly as good.
True, but I always did do a lot of hand-compiling on my Slackware boxes. The thing is, Slackware offers a great platform for tearing stuff down and tinkering with it, while leaving enough of a world to stand on while you do so. I used Slack on my desktop systems for many years (from 1995) until I discovered Arch, which is similar in everything I like about Slack, but with a more powerful package system.
But Slackware is still my preference for any kind of server. It's so simple, I can set it up from bare discs in less than 30 minutes.
Saying "I'm Facebook friends with them" has become synonymous with "they are somebody I know but don't really give enough of a shit about to keep up with in real life".
Well said. Couldn't have put it better myself. Wouldn't go down well with Facebook addicts though, but there's nothing we can do about that.
Your main gripe would seem to be that Facebook is a "social networking" site and that you have no interest in being social, nor in networking.
In my case, that is exactly and literally true. I have a limited number of friends in "meatspace" who are sufficient for me to maintain a status of human being, and that's the way I like it. I have no interest in being prodded or poked as a substitute for genuine interaction.
[Dons curmudgeonly hat] There was a time (not so long ago in my memory, but probably prior to the birth of most readers here) when communication between individuals across continents involved handwritten missives, sometimes stained with coffee, wine, whisky or tears. It is these idiosyncrasies that I miss, as there is no form of electronic communication that can possibly replace them.
I'm fortunate that I live in a sparsely-populated country (Sweden) and I benefit from an 100Mbit downstream with no congestion ever.
Sparsely-populated countries (or regions in my case) are open to variations of definition. I currently live in Perth (Western Australia) but am moving to a comparatively remote area of Tasmania in December. I have enjoyed a reasonable ADSL2+ connection here that is ample for my needs, but nothing is going to give me a 100 Mb/s connection in Tas, given that I can't afford to run cable to the nearest Telstra connection 2 km away. I have had bad experiences with satellite connections in regional West Aus, but I'm hoping the next level up will be workable there. Mountains aren't good for normal wireless...
I have mod points to burn at the moment, but I will just say this: your post is not funny. It is insightful, underrated, interesting and even informative (if the reader is living in a barrel), but it is not fucking funny.
It would be very interesting to see how you think that Google would resolve that problem.
It's very generous of Google to provide this facility, but also a useful distraction from the fact that Google itself is datamining your search activity. Know thine frenemy.
The car manufacturers make sure that there are locks on the car, not that you use them.
I discovered just a couple of days ago that it is actually illegal in some states of Australia to leave your car unlocked. Some of our nanny-state overlords need clubbing over the head with a very large cluebat.
People should not be given special rights for stupidity, they should be left to deal with consequences.
From my viewpoint of self-confessed (or professed) geek, I might agree. But given how easy it is for manufacturers or vendors to provide reasonably safe defaults, this approach is unnecessary.
An instance that comes to mind is a case two or three years ago, on a return visit to the UK (I now live in Australia), I was asked to set up a new WiFi-enabled modem/WAP for a friend. The device that had arrived (free of charge from British Telepom) had sat there in in its packaging for a couple of months. Given my previous (1980s) experience of BT, I expected the worst, but as it turned out, I was seriously impressed at how simple and easy the setup was. The whole process was as idiot-proof as anyone could have made it.
I sometimes wonder if that was because British Telecom has a large pool of idiots to draw on...;-)
For example, "reverse phone books" that provide name/address from a phone number, tend to be pretty controlled...
Does anyone actually bother with them any more? Given the number of ISPs who allocate a number for their SIP VOIP connections, I would assume that would mean such a reverse directory would have to be garnered from a lot of disparate sources. (And I imagine services such as SkypeOut would be impossible.) I wouldn't want that job. I'm sure there must be someone here who works with an ISP who can edify me...
There's a little button on the side your router that lets you turn it OFF
I have a friend who is such a cheapskate, he does exactly that because he begrudges the power company billing him for the 0.3 mA of smoke that it draws. (He hasn't cottoned on to VOIP yet.) I once tried to explain to him that he might just be stressing the components of his modem/router with the power cycle, but no dice. I guess it could be coincidental that he is now on his third such device in just 2 years...
I used to hide my network's SSID, but a couple of visiting members of my household have Windows laptops which feature a failure to recognise or remember it. Since I've adopted a "hands-off" policy of not fixing their machines unless they specifically ask me to (for reasons better left to another post), I now leave it exposed.
As I use WPA2 PSK, my modem logs show no more evidence of unauthorised connections than they did before. There is the "here I am" effect of broadcasting my SSID that isn't really ideal, but at least I'm reasonably confident that no-one can compromise my LAN without putting in more effort than the job is worth.
If you're going to throw stones at Marianne's communication skills, you might take a little more care over your own.
I'm not going to waste time taking issue with the bulk of your unnecessarily intemperate post, but for your edification, I will point out that the word "cunt" does not specifically equate to vagina. The term refers more generally to the genital area, of which the vagina is a part.
I've got FF 3.6.3 here, and no sign of crashes. Actually, I can't remember the last browser crash, and my Alzheimer's hasn't entirely set in yet. And yes, I do have Flash installed. (Along with Adblock, Flashblock and BetterPrivacy.)
Startup time isn't instantaneous on this ageing 2.16GHz MacBook, but it very nearly is on my Athlon X2 desktop machine.
But if Chrome rocks your boat, I won't argue against it. Though the fact that Google uses it for datamining is a bit distasteful to me. As a matter of interest, can anyone enlighten me as to how Chromium compares?
Slashdot Mirror
...it's about putting a competitor out of business as opposed to keeping people on their platform
Neither of these are particularly attractive characteristics. When the time comes, I'll be voting with my wallet. I currently have a (second-hand, free, but now ageing) MacBook which I will keep using until it breaks, but I won't be replacing it with another Apple product. I've been perfectly happy with Linux on my desktop machines for the last 15 years, so I'll just extend that to my next laptop.
First off, saying a message is a message regardless of the medium does not in any way, shape, or form, imply that no one would paint or write a poem. I'm not sure how you got from point a to point b there.
A clue from my post: Evocation is as much a part of communication as the black and white text.
Also:
nobody on Facebook pokes! I've heard of it happening, but for the most part, it's a strawman for people like you to attack.
They do indeed poke. I know many who (sadly) do so all the time. (I dont, but then I don't use Facebook.) Just because you and your associates don't does not make my point a straw man argument, since I am not misrepresenting anyone's point of view.
I do wonder how people stay in touch with people who change their email address. Not everyone emails their whole addressbook to say they changed email.
Why not? It isn't exactly a big effort.
A message is a message regardless of medium... You miss your old-fashioned aesthetic.
Nonsense. Evocation is as much a part of communication as the black and white text, regardless of the fact that it is essentially non-verbal. Otherwise nobody would bother to paint paintings or write poetry.
Of course, if you have never received a letter any more personal than a final demand from your bank manager, I wouldn't expect you to understand. But you have to agree that a poke from a facebook "friend" can never mean more than "I remember your name occasionally".
Exactly. The statement that "The iPad proved a tablet shouldn't be a portable computer" is a complete non sequitur. The only thing that has been proved is that Apple's vision does not include marketing to people who want to be able to pull up a Unix shell of their choice and start hacking. They are more interested in a product that is essentially like a white-goods appliance for which Apple can sell various widgets.
Of course, Apple is entitled to its own point of view, but this rationale is exactly why I won't be buying an iPad.
Well, for the record Dropline had already existed at that time.
IIRC, I was running Slack 8.1 when GNOME 2.0 came out. You can still see from the package lists at the time that Pat was still distributing GNOME, but only one of the 1.x versions.
I spent way too much time trying to build GNOME myself, and then a guy called Todd Kulesza released Dropline into the wild. I think it got too much for him too in (IIRC) about 2004 when Dropline was taken up by a bunch of other maintainers.
The GP isn't describing the perfect situation. The GP is describing the current situation.
I wasn't expecting my miserable little one-line post to set off this much discussion, but you are correct. I didn't say anything about thought crimes, and I didn't say the woman's employer wasn't an asswipe.
To make it completely clear: Facebook and other social networks are free tools for any stalker or pointy-haired HR manager looking to avoid paying out entitlements to use. Making offhand or ill-considered posts in these forums is simply handing them ammunition that they WILL use.
I'm not saying there's anything good about any aspect of this situation: the world has become an ugly place. We have two choices: take appropriate precautions to allow you to live in this world we have created for ourselves, or stop living.
Being so stupid as to say dumb things on Facebook without realising her words could come back to bite her might be good grounds for not employing her in the first place.
Learn Gentoo and you are Linux.
Not so sure I'd agree that. Most people I know who learn Gentoo are simply following a cookbook. If you really want to feel that you're in control, giving Linux From Scratch a try is a good idea, but most of us wouldn't want the burden of trying to maintain a desktop system with that.
He's a living legend in Linux history, and he had the guts to make the right call to drop GNOME when it became too convoluted to maintain.
Pat's a great guy, but his dropping GNOME pissed off a lot of people too, though I understand his reasoning. KDE was at the time a lot easier to build, while GNOME was riddled with circular dependencies that made maintaining it a bitch of a job.
Fortunately for GNOME fans, the job was ably taken up by maintainers of the Dropline GNOME distribution. I have the impression they're getting a bit tired of it now, but others are around to fill the gap.
...mainly hoping to find a distro that is "more user friendly" than Slackware, and after two weeks I just gave up and installed Slackware 12.
I had my wife using Slackware 8.0 through 10. She is not a techie of any kind, but there is nothing unfriendly about Slackware once it is fully set up as a desktop machine. She eventually went over to using Macs because she decided she wanted to use EndNote to handle bibliographic referencing in her PhD thesis, since at the time there was nothing available that was nearly as good.
True, but I always did do a lot of hand-compiling on my Slackware boxes. The thing is, Slackware offers a great platform for tearing stuff down and tinkering with it, while leaving enough of a world to stand on while you do so. I used Slack on my desktop systems for many years (from 1995) until I discovered Arch, which is similar in everything I like about Slack, but with a more powerful package system.
But Slackware is still my preference for any kind of server. It's so simple, I can set it up from bare discs in less than 30 minutes.
One more reason to use the AntiSocial Facebook app: http://apps.facebook.com/antisocialnetworking/index.php
For those of us who don't have Facebook accounts, please explain.
Saying "I'm Facebook friends with them" has become synonymous with "they are somebody I know but don't really give enough of a shit about to keep up with in real life".
Well said. Couldn't have put it better myself. Wouldn't go down well with Facebook addicts though, but there's nothing we can do about that.
Your main gripe would seem to be that Facebook is a "social networking" site and that you have no interest in being social, nor in networking.
In my case, that is exactly and literally true. I have a limited number of friends in "meatspace" who are sufficient for me to maintain a status of human being, and that's the way I like it. I have no interest in being prodded or poked as a substitute for genuine interaction.
[Dons curmudgeonly hat] There was a time (not so long ago in my memory, but probably prior to the birth of most readers here) when communication between individuals across continents involved handwritten missives, sometimes stained with coffee, wine, whisky or tears. It is these idiosyncrasies that I miss, as there is no form of electronic communication that can possibly replace them.
I'm fortunate that I live in a sparsely-populated country (Sweden) and I benefit from an 100Mbit downstream with no congestion ever.
Sparsely-populated countries (or regions in my case) are open to variations of definition. I currently live in Perth (Western Australia) but am moving to a comparatively remote area of Tasmania in December. I have enjoyed a reasonable ADSL2+ connection here that is ample for my needs, but nothing is going to give me a 100 Mb/s connection in Tas, given that I can't afford to run cable to the nearest Telstra connection 2 km away. I have had bad experiences with satellite connections in regional West Aus, but I'm hoping the next level up will be workable there. Mountains aren't good for normal wireless...
but i actually read your signature as Bing-ing (like Googling)
If you even saw the signature, then maybe you should check your viewing options. Sigs almost never offer anything germane to any discussion.
Real life has more commercials than TV.
I have mod points to burn at the moment, but I will just say this: your post is not funny. It is insightful, underrated, interesting and even informative (if the reader is living in a barrel), but it is not fucking funny.
It would be very interesting to see how you think that Google would resolve that problem.
It's very generous of Google to provide this facility, but also a useful distraction from the fact that Google itself is datamining your search activity. Know thine frenemy.
The car manufacturers make sure that there are locks on the car, not that you use them.
I discovered just a couple of days ago that it is actually illegal in some states of Australia to leave your car unlocked. Some of our nanny-state overlords need clubbing over the head with a very large cluebat.
People should not be given special rights for stupidity, they should be left to deal with consequences.
;-)
From my viewpoint of self-confessed (or professed) geek, I might agree. But given how easy it is for manufacturers or vendors to provide reasonably safe defaults, this approach is unnecessary.
An instance that comes to mind is a case two or three years ago, on a return visit to the UK (I now live in Australia), I was asked to set up a new WiFi-enabled modem/WAP for a friend. The device that had arrived (free of charge from British Telepom) had sat there in in its packaging for a couple of months. Given my previous (1980s) experience of BT, I expected the worst, but as it turned out, I was seriously impressed at how simple and easy the setup was. The whole process was as idiot-proof as anyone could have made it.
I sometimes wonder if that was because British Telecom has a large pool of idiots to draw on...
For example, "reverse phone books" that provide name/address from a phone number, tend to be pretty controlled...
Does anyone actually bother with them any more? Given the number of ISPs who allocate a number for their SIP VOIP connections, I would assume that would mean such a reverse directory would have to be garnered from a lot of disparate sources. (And I imagine services such as SkypeOut would be impossible.) I wouldn't want that job. I'm sure there must be someone here who works with an ISP who can edify me...
There's a little button on the side your router that lets you turn it OFF
I have a friend who is such a cheapskate, he does exactly that because he begrudges the power company billing him for the 0.3 mA of smoke that it draws. (He hasn't cottoned on to VOIP yet.) I once tried to explain to him that he might just be stressing the components of his modem/router with the power cycle, but no dice. I guess it could be coincidental that he is now on his third such device in just 2 years...
I used to hide my network's SSID, but a couple of visiting members of my household have Windows laptops which feature a failure to recognise or remember it. Since I've adopted a "hands-off" policy of not fixing their machines unless they specifically ask me to (for reasons better left to another post), I now leave it exposed.
As I use WPA2 PSK, my modem logs show no more evidence of unauthorised connections than they did before. There is the "here I am" effect of broadcasting my SSID that isn't really ideal, but at least I'm reasonably confident that no-one can compromise my LAN without putting in more effort than the job is worth.
If you're going to throw stones at Marianne's communication skills, you might take a little more care over your own.
I'm not going to waste time taking issue with the bulk of your unnecessarily intemperate post, but for your edification, I will point out that the word "cunt" does not specifically equate to vagina. The term refers more generally to the genital area, of which the vagina is a part.
I've got FF 3.6.3 here, and no sign of crashes. Actually, I can't remember the last browser crash, and my Alzheimer's hasn't entirely set in yet. And yes, I do have Flash installed. (Along with Adblock, Flashblock and BetterPrivacy.)
Startup time isn't instantaneous on this ageing 2.16GHz MacBook, but it very nearly is on my Athlon X2 desktop machine. But if Chrome rocks your boat, I won't argue against it. Though the fact that Google uses it for datamining is a bit distasteful to me. As a matter of interest, can anyone enlighten me as to how Chromium compares?