-- Right now, to have a good conceptual understanding of Linux and to be really effective with it, one has to have a handle on a *lot* of stuff. Too much stuff. Contrast that to Windows where you could almost train a monkey to use it. Common example - if you screw up your video settings in Windows and get an unusable display, you can reboot into safe mode and fix it relatively easily. If you do the same thing in Linux, you're probably looking at directly editing the X config file or, if you're lucky, using the command-line version of SaX or something similar to fix your problem. That's not an acceptable option if you're selling to the unwashed masses.
-- Differences in distros. I think someone actually mentioned this before, but there needs to be a standard fricking way to reconfigure your system. If you want to reconfigure your network card, you need to go to/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth* if you're running RH, or/etc/network/interfaces if you're running Debian, or/etc/conf.d/net for Gentoo since there's no universal config app for that. There's never going to be a Linux desktop that's popular with the non-geek world unless everyone can decide where everything goes and how it should be configured. Consistency is everything here. Yes, I'm aware of the FHS standard, but there are plenty of distros that don't seem to be.
-- The "RTFM" syndrome. Certainly, I get as annoyed as anyone else when someone bugs me with a question that could easily have been answered by spending 15 seconds in the docs. However, the docs are not in a neat, centralized place - you often have to set off on a damn quest to find what you need. Even if the documentation were more accessible, the sheer arrogance that's shown by a lot of FOSS supporters does a lot to steer people away when they *do* try to dabble their feet in the Linux waters. No one likes to be treated like an idiot (even if they are!), and no one likes to deal with a jerk.
Ultimately, what it comes down to is that Linux development and support isn't centralized. Linux is quite popular on the back-end, but when you look at that more closely you see that it's an environment where there are highly trained people who are qualified to easily deal with the crap I mentioned above. Additionally, most of the more popular back-end software packages (Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc.) is generally maintained by a single group that maintains tight control, so in that situation it's more like dealing with a vendor than a bunch of individuals. I believe that we'll see Linux continue to hang on to the datacenter because it's simply a good system, but I just don't see it becoming a desktop standard to any great degree unless someone does with it what Apple did with BSD.
I don't have a problem with it being called "satellite" radio because of any physics issues, but I do have a problem with it being called "satellite" radio when 95% of the time, the receiver is actually receiving the signal from a ground-based transmitter, at least in my area.
Big time - the ability to have multiple snapshots alone makes Workstation worth the money over Server if you're a developer, but Server is awfully nice in that you don't have to run the VMs on your local box.
I honestly think that most artists would prefer that that you not buy instead of listening to a free copy.
Not if they value concert sales and future potential album sales. Most musicians that I've known would rather you buy their album of course, but would prefer that you somehow be listening to it and enjoying it as opposed to being totally ignorant of their existence.
And the most important thing (to me, anyway) - no more segmented memory. Prior to Win32, the largest single chunk of memory that could be easily be dealt with under Windows was 64KB, and it was a royal PITA dealing with that restriction. With Win32 they didn't attempt to support anything earlier than a 80386, so you could easily use the entire flat memory space. Many, many Windows coders rejoiced.
As Picasso said, "good artists copy, great artists steal." Part of what advances knowledge is building on that which came before, and Apple would do well to understand that. Case in point - it took them *forever* to produce a two-button mouse, even though the rest of the world had long before learned the advantages of such a device. It used to be pretty annoying when you'd spend $3K for a nice shiny new Mac and then still have to buy a decent mouse for it.
Apple definitely has a good UI, but they really need to get past the "not invented here" mentality in order to file some of the sharp edges off.
I have my service through T-Mobile, which including a Nokia 6030 and 1130 minutes was $150 ($50 for the phone and 30 minutes, and $.10/minute for 1000 minutes plus 10% free bonus minutes). The minutes are good for a year, and 10 months into this year's minutes I still have almost 300 left. As I won't have to pay for another phone next year, my yearly cost will drop by 30% then assuming I don't overrun 1000 minutes next year. It's not something that works for everyone, but if you don't use the phone that much it seems silly to pay excessively for the privilege.
Obviously no one wants to talk to me on the phone very much.:-)
Remember that the cost of the phone is included in a contract, and that's why you get the termination fee if you cancel early.
So let's tie the termination fees to the cost of the phone. If you have a high-end smartphone or the latest shiny Motorola toy, fine, you'll get charged out the wazoo for early termination. However, if you have something like a low-end Nokia or brought your own phone to the plan, then there's absolutely no excuse for it.
I switched to T-Mobile for a few months. T-Mobile was a great deal as long as I was in cities. coverage was spotty in suburban areas and even worse in rural areas. This was 2.5 years ago and times might have changed.
Doubtful. I was in Pigeon Forge, TN a couple of weeks ago, and *not once* did I register with T-Mobile the whole time I was there. Most of the time I had zero bars on the phone as well.
I was an old AT&T Wireless customer before Cingular bought them.
Same here. I spent two months with them getting my account cancelled because I had signed up with AT&T for a preferred corporate partner plan that entailed a one-year contract about 16 months prior, and they were attempting to hold me to a two-year contract.
It apparently took the aforementioned two months for them to pull the recording of the original agreement and figure out that they had their head in their ass. After that I promised myself that I'd never agree to a contract for cell service again, and it's saved me a *ton* of money as a result.
I don't have cell data because I also don't have a monthly plan. For the amount of time I spend on the phone it's foolish for me to do anything other than a prepaid plan, which costs me less than $150 per year. I also don't have to submit to ludicrous long-term contracts. In my case, T-Mobile wireless internet access would cost $49.99/month, which is more than I pay for DSL with a static IP.
I'm well able to afford the costs of such a plan, but I simply don't consider that kind of connectivity to be worth it for me.
They simply can't figure out what to do with this environment we all live in to ensure we're protected by the Government from the Government and it's public servants
I'd maintain that it's immoral and unreasonable to expect a police officer to put his life on the line to protect mine if I'm unwilling to take the steps to do it myself, aside from the minor fact that if I'm in a situation where I have to defend myself it's exceedingly unlikely a police officer will be able to reach me in time to help anyway. I think a large part of our problems stem from the larger and larger percentage of people that expect the government to solve all their problems instead of taking care of their own damn selves.
And in a city where people can be detained, searched, and even arrested for riding an unlicensed bicycle, it's not hard for the cops to find reasons to stop and search gangbangers.
Which is part of the reason you'll never find me living in DC. Draconian gun laws, detentions/arrests for trivial things, and a near-total lack of governmental representation aren't my idea of a good time.
Actually, I was wrong - where I live there is a prohibition on open carry of firearms and electric weapons (Tasers, etc.), but those two are the only items explicitly mentioned.
do you guys (/girls) have the right to walk around town with a japanese sword hanging on your belt?
No, but that didn't preclude a mentally ill man from beheading his wife with one then chasing his son outside into the neighborhood and hacking him to death near where I live a few months ago. It really would have been nice for the kid if someone in the neighborhood had been socially responsible and put a bullet into the dad while there was still time.
The real kicker was that it was the kid's birthday. Happy birthday kid, here's a coffin for your present.
Assuming the idiot kid with a Desert Eagle already owns and is using the weapon illegally, what difference did the prohibition on guns make for the community's safety to begin with except to prevent a homeowner from protecting himself when the kid decides to run into one of the surrounding homes for cover?
I agree, a citizcen army couldn't defeat the military army on the field.
But if it ever came to that, it wouldn't be a fight on the field. You can't occupy an area without sending the soldiers in individually, and I believe that a large amount of the fighting would be door to door. There'd certainly be a lot of dead citizens, but with the limited number of soldiers it'd pretty much be a losing war of attrition unless someone like China got involved. If you lost two troops for every five households (and I think that's conservative), the government's losses would become crippling pretty damn quickly.
For those that think I'm mistaken, don't forget the elderly Atlanta woman who recently shot and incapacitated three of the highly-trained and armed-to-the-teeth SWAT members who stormed her house looking for drugs before being shot down herself. Someone better armed and better trained is likely to extract a lot more casualties in the same situation.
The US has a standing volunteer army now though, which kind of does that job.
That in itself flies in the face of the intentions of the framers - there is a prohibition in the Constitution forbidding the allocation of funds in support of an army for more than two years. The idea was that there wasn't supposed to be a standing army, and that any organized army should be swiftly assembled and then dissolved as the need dictated. Instead, we currently have exactly the situation that the authors were concerned about, and the two-year limitation is largely administrative now.
With an army structured as originally intended, we'd also have the bonus of having a pretty damn hard time getting ourselves into situations like Vietnam and Iraq.
You can't fricking read. The Second Amendment is made up of TWO phrases, the first explaining the reason for the right, and the second specifically stating that the right is not to be infringed. The first phrase IS NOT a limitation or condition on the second.
In case you want the current federal definition of "militia", go look it up in 10 USC 311 - it's probably not what you think it is.
Slashdot Mirror
A few of other things to consider:
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth* if you're running RH, or /etc/network/interfaces if you're running Debian, or /etc/conf.d/net for Gentoo since there's no universal config app for that. There's never going to be a Linux desktop that's popular with the non-geek world unless everyone can decide where everything goes and how it should be configured. Consistency is everything here. Yes, I'm aware of the FHS standard, but there are plenty of distros that don't seem to be.
-- Right now, to have a good conceptual understanding of Linux and to be really effective with it, one has to have a handle on a *lot* of stuff. Too much stuff. Contrast that to Windows where you could almost train a monkey to use it. Common example - if you screw up your video settings in Windows and get an unusable display, you can reboot into safe mode and fix it relatively easily. If you do the same thing in Linux, you're probably looking at directly editing the X config file or, if you're lucky, using the command-line version of SaX or something similar to fix your problem. That's not an acceptable option if you're selling to the unwashed masses.
-- Differences in distros. I think someone actually mentioned this before, but there needs to be a standard fricking way to reconfigure your system. If you want to reconfigure your network card, you need to go to
-- The "RTFM" syndrome. Certainly, I get as annoyed as anyone else when someone bugs me with a question that could easily have been answered by spending 15 seconds in the docs. However, the docs are not in a neat, centralized place - you often have to set off on a damn quest to find what you need. Even if the documentation were more accessible, the sheer arrogance that's shown by a lot of FOSS supporters does a lot to steer people away when they *do* try to dabble their feet in the Linux waters. No one likes to be treated like an idiot (even if they are!), and no one likes to deal with a jerk.
Ultimately, what it comes down to is that Linux development and support isn't centralized. Linux is quite popular on the back-end, but when you look at that more closely you see that it's an environment where there are highly trained people who are qualified to easily deal with the crap I mentioned above. Additionally, most of the more popular back-end software packages (Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc.) is generally maintained by a single group that maintains tight control, so in that situation it's more like dealing with a vendor than a bunch of individuals. I believe that we'll see Linux continue to hang on to the datacenter because it's simply a good system, but I just don't see it becoming a desktop standard to any great degree unless someone does with it what Apple did with BSD.
I don't have a problem with it being called "satellite" radio because of any physics issues, but I do have a problem with it being called "satellite" radio when 95% of the time, the receiver is actually receiving the signal from a ground-based transmitter, at least in my area.
Doesn't seem the beta does, dunno about the finished product. I agree that snapshots rule though.
As a developer, I get perverse joy in having the user tied up and put in a corner in such a manner. :-)
"You *WILL* run this software in the manner which *I* determine, you got me boy?!?"
Big time - the ability to have multiple snapshots alone makes Workstation worth the money over Server if you're a developer, but Server is awfully nice in that you don't have to run the VMs on your local box.
(+1, Pwnage)
I honestly think that most artists would prefer that that you not buy instead of listening to a free copy.
Not if they value concert sales and future potential album sales. Most musicians that I've known would rather you buy their album of course, but would prefer that you somehow be listening to it and enjoying it as opposed to being totally ignorant of their existence.
And the most important thing (to me, anyway) - no more segmented memory. Prior to Win32, the largest single chunk of memory that could be easily be dealt with under Windows was 64KB, and it was a royal PITA dealing with that restriction. With Win32 they didn't attempt to support anything earlier than a 80386, so you could easily use the entire flat memory space. Many, many Windows coders rejoiced.
As Picasso said, "good artists copy, great artists steal." Part of what advances knowledge is building on that which came before, and Apple would do well to understand that. Case in point - it took them *forever* to produce a two-button mouse, even though the rest of the world had long before learned the advantages of such a device. It used to be pretty annoying when you'd spend $3K for a nice shiny new Mac and then still have to buy a decent mouse for it.
Apple definitely has a good UI, but they really need to get past the "not invented here" mentality in order to file some of the sharp edges off.
I have my service through T-Mobile, which including a Nokia 6030 and 1130 minutes was $150 ($50 for the phone and 30 minutes, and $.10/minute for 1000 minutes plus 10% free bonus minutes). The minutes are good for a year, and 10 months into this year's minutes I still have almost 300 left. As I won't have to pay for another phone next year, my yearly cost will drop by 30% then assuming I don't overrun 1000 minutes next year. It's not something that works for everyone, but if you don't use the phone that much it seems silly to pay excessively for the privilege.
:-)
Obviously no one wants to talk to me on the phone very much.
Remember that the cost of the phone is included in a contract, and that's why you get the termination fee if you cancel early.
So let's tie the termination fees to the cost of the phone. If you have a high-end smartphone or the latest shiny Motorola toy, fine, you'll get charged out the wazoo for early termination. However, if you have something like a low-end Nokia or brought your own phone to the plan, then there's absolutely no excuse for it.
I switched to T-Mobile for a few months. T-Mobile was a great deal as long as I was in cities. coverage was spotty in suburban areas and even worse in rural areas. This was 2.5 years ago and times might have changed.
Doubtful. I was in Pigeon Forge, TN a couple of weeks ago, and *not once* did I register with T-Mobile the whole time I was there. Most of the time I had zero bars on the phone as well.
Artists: "Nooooooooooooo!"
I was an old AT&T Wireless customer before Cingular bought them.
Same here. I spent two months with them getting my account cancelled because I had signed up with AT&T for a preferred corporate partner plan that entailed a one-year contract about 16 months prior, and they were attempting to hold me to a two-year contract.
It apparently took the aforementioned two months for them to pull the recording of the original agreement and figure out that they had their head in their ass. After that I promised myself that I'd never agree to a contract for cell service again, and it's saved me a *ton* of money as a result.
I don't have cell data because I also don't have a monthly plan. For the amount of time I spend on the phone it's foolish for me to do anything other than a prepaid plan, which costs me less than $150 per year. I also don't have to submit to ludicrous long-term contracts. In my case, T-Mobile wireless internet access would cost $49.99/month, which is more than I pay for DSL with a static IP.
I'm well able to afford the costs of such a plan, but I simply don't consider that kind of connectivity to be worth it for me.
and offer to file complaints with the BBB and the FCC if you don't receive proper assistance
Don't forget to include your state attorney general in the list - there are a few that *love* to beat up on companies that do stuff like this.
They simply can't figure out what to do with this environment we all live in to ensure we're protected by the Government from the Government and it's public servants
I'd maintain that it's immoral and unreasonable to expect a police officer to put his life on the line to protect mine if I'm unwilling to take the steps to do it myself, aside from the minor fact that if I'm in a situation where I have to defend myself it's exceedingly unlikely a police officer will be able to reach me in time to help anyway. I think a large part of our problems stem from the larger and larger percentage of people that expect the government to solve all their problems instead of taking care of their own damn selves.
And in a city where people can be detained, searched, and even arrested for riding an unlicensed bicycle, it's not hard for the cops to find reasons to stop and search gangbangers.
Which is part of the reason you'll never find me living in DC. Draconian gun laws, detentions/arrests for trivial things, and a near-total lack of governmental representation aren't my idea of a good time.
Actually, I was wrong - where I live there is a prohibition on open carry of firearms and electric weapons (Tasers, etc.), but those two are the only items explicitly mentioned.
do you guys (/girls) have the right to walk around town with a japanese sword hanging on your belt?
No, but that didn't preclude a mentally ill man from beheading his wife with one then chasing his son outside into the neighborhood and hacking him to death near where I live a few months ago. It really would have been nice for the kid if someone in the neighborhood had been socially responsible and put a bullet into the dad while there was still time.
The real kicker was that it was the kid's birthday. Happy birthday kid, here's a coffin for your present.
Assuming the idiot kid with a Desert Eagle already owns and is using the weapon illegally, what difference did the prohibition on guns make for the community's safety to begin with except to prevent a homeowner from protecting himself when the kid decides to run into one of the surrounding homes for cover?
I agree, a citizcen army couldn't defeat the military army on the field.
But if it ever came to that, it wouldn't be a fight on the field. You can't occupy an area without sending the soldiers in individually, and I believe that a large amount of the fighting would be door to door. There'd certainly be a lot of dead citizens, but with the limited number of soldiers it'd pretty much be a losing war of attrition unless someone like China got involved. If you lost two troops for every five households (and I think that's conservative), the government's losses would become crippling pretty damn quickly.
For those that think I'm mistaken, don't forget the elderly Atlanta woman who recently shot and incapacitated three of the highly-trained and armed-to-the-teeth SWAT members who stormed her house looking for drugs before being shot down herself. Someone better armed and better trained is likely to extract a lot more casualties in the same situation.
The US has a standing volunteer army now though, which kind of does that job.
That in itself flies in the face of the intentions of the framers - there is a prohibition in the Constitution forbidding the allocation of funds in support of an army for more than two years. The idea was that there wasn't supposed to be a standing army, and that any organized army should be swiftly assembled and then dissolved as the need dictated. Instead, we currently have exactly the situation that the authors were concerned about, and the two-year limitation is largely administrative now.
With an army structured as originally intended, we'd also have the bonus of having a pretty damn hard time getting ourselves into situations like Vietnam and Iraq.
You can't fricking read. The Second Amendment is made up of TWO phrases, the first explaining the reason for the right, and the second specifically stating that the right is not to be infringed. The first phrase IS NOT a limitation or condition on the second.
In case you want the current federal definition of "militia", go look it up in 10 USC 311 - it's probably not what you think it is.
Until the Police and Government are made responsible for my personal safety and can be relied on I'm keeping my weapons.
Don't forget "and can be held legally accountable for the lack to do so."