Why the hell can't you useless bastards program something to real, external standards? Why does every damn thing have to be proprietary? Every time I land on a site where some lazy-ass developer programmed to IE's so-called standards without bothering to check any real browsers I curse Redmond and all who dwell there.
Your browser doesn't do *anything* better than Opera or Firefox - if it did, a very *few* proprietaries *might* be excusable. I know the original intent of the product was to try to change the Internet into the MSNet by proprietarizing it, but haven't you caught on that it won't work yet?
in summary: Why do you continue to include proprietary bullcrap in your browser?
Proprietary formats that aren't portable between systems at predatory prices that don't reflect *any* of the cost savings of digital vs. physical distribution.
I read public-domain e-books constantly - I'd love to be able to include more up-to-date stuff..
Typical fucking neocon asshole comment. It's not choice when there's the one company that owns the local infrastructure to choose from. It's not choice when that company doesn't offer you the services you want/need, especially when they don't have to because they have no competition.
Wake up! The market system is the best (read: most practical) system anybody has come up with yet, but there are some things it does really badly. Either we have to legislate and enforce good behavior (ie honest terms, rational prices, broad availability) or we ('cause the government is us) have to take things even further into our own hands.
Unlike you Republican folk, who live in the kinds of neighborhoods that always seem rather well served, somehow, I've lived in enough places with one lousy choice - or not even that - to wonder what kind of crack you're smoking when you go off about how private enterprise would make the world a utopia if only we would let it be.
Mand[rake|riva] ships with a very easy-to-use printer admin tool. I know that they're kinda low on the geek cred scale, at least in the states, but their distros are a hell of a lot better for your Aunt Gertrude than FC or Deb will ever be.
In other words, the geek distros are still hard to use, but that doesn't mean all distros are.
Whenever I'm cleaning up yet another Windows disaster (I run Linux myself), among other precautionary measures, I set ".vbs" extension files to open with Notepad instead of the "Visual Basic Scripting Agent". Seriously, has there ever been a legitimate use for vbs?
Avoid consumer-grade WD like the plague. I've encountered loads of catastrophic failures with WD, occasional probs with Hitachi/IBM and Maxtor, but never a hiccup from my Seagates.
I'm a thirty year old hack of various languages who was forced to take a FORTRAN course as an engineering undergrad... I might agree that there aren't any 'programmer' users of FORTRAN under 40, but there're still quite a few left in engineering/science/math who use it.
Blinded by rage, I made a tactical error. 'Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory' was a movie that insulted everything that made the book 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory' great.
In the foreword to The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide, which, IIRC, was, appropriately enough, written for a different edition, Adams himself writes about the slew of mutually contradictory forms in which his creation has appeared, and commenting on one pair (the original radio broadcast and the scripts thereof, again IIRC) claims to be quite uncomfortable about the idea that there exist two versions which don't contradict each other. TBTWAGOS,OC (to be taken with a grain of salt, of course)
It would be very much in keeping with the spirit of the multi-media empire that Douglas created for the movie to resemble, but in most important points contradict, each and every rendition that has come before. What I am desperately hoping for is a movie that is unfaithful to the book, radio, tv, lp, etc plots but undyingly faithful to the spirit of those various incarnations. 'Cause it was DNA that rocked all of those, not the specifics of the plots.
Probably much too late in the posting for anybody to read this, but anyway, WTF are months for, anyway? They don't correspond to anything astronomical (apart from being originally based on lunar cycles) and they just screw with things with the irregular lumps of days.
And anyway, the whole idea of "it's easier to swallow because it's only slightly different" on which this scheme seems to be based is fundamentally flawed. Any change to something which is so thoroughly taken for granted by so many people is going to be a huge change, whether it is qualitatively a minor or major change. And if you think it's important enough to implement such a huge change, please go whole hog and do it right, without any silly months to mess it up!
"Calendar change has happened before" doesn't cut it. Between your employer cutting your check, your landlord demanding your rent, and your supervisor conducting your quarterly review I'd say it's fair to say that modern folks have a little more vested interest in what the days do than they did in the 16th century.
Realizing that a lot of techies really like their jobs, and, for an overly stereotyped handful, jobs/computers are their lives, am I the only one that's sick and tired of being asked to compete with people stupid enough to put up with 50-60-70-80 hour workweeks on a regular basis?
Dammit, people, the reason the PHBs can get away with this sh1t is that they know that even if you have the self-respect to refuse they can easily replace you with someone that doesn't value self and family enough to say no.
I know that folks in the US have been trained from birth to believe that worker solidarity = communism = ultimate evil, but those whose comments can be summed up as "stop yer whining and get back to work" miss the damn point. I want to work to live, not live to work. When there are enough workers willing to whore themselves out, it makes it impossible for the non-whores to expect fair treatment.
If the developer community would stop putting up with it, the PHBs wouldn't be able to require it anymore.
Dear Slashdot "Editors"... Please for christmas, can Santa bring you all an unabridged grammar book and a spell checker.
Excuse me Mr Pot, but the Kettle has asked me to point out that:
Christmas should be capitalized. Regardless of your feelings on the subject, it is the proper name of a holiday.
... Santa bring you all... should be Santa bring you each (unless of course you meant that one would suffice for all of them, in which case the "all" is extraneous)
You are using "can" where "may" belongs, which is generally acceptable in modern usage, BUT
...you are, in essence, asking the direct object of your sentence if the subject of the sentence will perform a certain service. If you want Santa to do something, you should ask Santa.
A more grammatically appropriate expression of your sentiments is:
Dear Slashdot "Editors" - I certainly hope each of you has asked Santa for an unabridged grammar reference and a spell-checker for Christmas this year!
That being said, I rather suspect that the aforementioned editors are primarily responsible for article selection. To expect copy editing from a free and continuously updated website seems just a bit extravagant.
I opened this post up to see the comments and saw an awful lot of, "gee, the US ain't so bad" comments - too many to choose just one to reply to, in fact - including several that apparently attributed to Canada the blob stretching from New York to Chicago, showing either a rather frightful ignorance of geography or a failure to look at the actual image. I simply wanted to point out that, according to both wackjob Hippie rhetoric and the satellite imagery in question, the US is easily the most egregious offender among "developed" nations.
And yes, Europe has a good blob going too, but let's remember that Europe has about twice the population of the US, in about two-thirds of the space, and still manages a smaller blob.
Are we looking at different images, or are the commenters just as ignorant of geography as the average slashdot reader is ignorant, of, say, the mating rituals of the human species? Or have we been overrun by neocons?
The single biggest blot, other than the one over everybody's favorite red menace, is square over the northeastern US. The richest country pollutes more than anyone except the country that does all of the richest country's dirty work (and has more people than everyone else combined, to boot).
You wouldn't put up with it in your paper mail. Why do we have to put up with it in our email?
Any marketing, whether political, charitable, pre-existing "relationship," whatever, where the cost is directly borne by the recipient should be illegal. Period.
NOW, DAMMIT!
Why is it so hard for the useless pieces of dog crap that have weaseled their way to public office to grasp this? What kind of retards have we been voting for, anyway?
If there are any government officials reading, I am most certainly talking about YOU. Get off of your ass and start explaining this in nice, short, idiot-proof words to everybody you can get your mouth in front of!
Check out disklessworkstations.com. It's run by the guy(s) who developed LTSP; they have several years of experience now setting up and maintaining thin-client setups.
There is no justification for ever installing full-blown PCs in this kind of environment. (No, I don't work for or with these guys, I just have way more experience than I ever wanted administering extensive networks of independent PCs in environments where the cumulative equivalent of VT's Big Mac was brought to bear on tasks that cumulatively required roughly a dual P4). Web browsing, word processing and the like require almost no processing power. Unless your users are creating/editing/transcoding audio or video, compiling elaborate programs, or doing deep data searches on local data, the computing power is wasted.
Not to mention the time wasted on cleaning up after clueless users (in a properly configured thin client environment users are only users, not manipulators, of the core operating environment), keeping up with the latest patches, x number of software/OS "up"grades instead of one (and the requisite hardware upgrades - two, three years down the road, instead of replacing a library full of obsolete machines, you replace one, and keep your clients),... I could go on, but/. comments aren't supposed to be books, so I'll stop.
Slashdot Mirror
Why the hell can't you useless bastards program something to real, external standards? Why does every damn thing have to be proprietary? Every time I land on a site where some lazy-ass developer programmed to IE's so-called standards without bothering to check any real browsers I curse Redmond and all who dwell there.
Your browser doesn't do *anything* better than Opera or Firefox - if it did, a very *few* proprietaries *might* be excusable. I know the original intent of the product was to try to change the Internet into the MSNet by proprietarizing it, but haven't you caught on that it won't work yet?
in summary:
Why do you continue to include proprietary bullcrap in your browser?
I'm waiting for January 23, 2058
Just a note to our current administration - Orwell did not intend 1984 to be a how-to.
Proprietary formats that aren't portable between systems at predatory prices that don't reflect *any* of the cost savings of digital vs. physical distribution.
I read public-domain e-books constantly - I'd love to be able to include more up-to-date stuff..
Wake up! The market system is the best (read: most practical) system anybody has come up with yet, but there are some things it does really badly. Either we have to legislate and enforce good behavior (ie honest terms, rational prices, broad availability) or we ('cause the government is us) have to take things even further into our own hands.
Unlike you Republican folk, who live in the kinds of neighborhoods that always seem rather well served, somehow, I've lived in enough places with one lousy choice - or not even that - to wonder what kind of crack you're smoking when you go off about how private enterprise would make the world a utopia if only we would let it be.
Mand[rake|riva] ships with a very easy-to-use printer admin tool. I know that they're kinda low on the geek cred scale, at least in the states, but their distros are a hell of a lot better for your Aunt Gertrude than FC or Deb will ever be.
In other words, the geek distros are still hard to use, but that doesn't mean all distros are.
Whenever I'm cleaning up yet another Windows disaster (I run Linux myself), among other precautionary measures, I set ".vbs" extension files to open with Notepad instead of the "Visual Basic Scripting Agent". Seriously, has there ever been a legitimate use for vbs?
No, I don't own stock.
Maybe if you changed it to under 30...
Blinded by rage, I made a tactical error. 'Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory' was a movie that insulted everything that made the book 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory' great.
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was the greatest disservice ever done to a great book.
Be ashamed. Be very ashamed.
It would be very much in keeping with the spirit of the multi-media empire that Douglas created for the movie to resemble, but in most important points contradict, each and every rendition that has come before. What I am desperately hoping for is a movie that is unfaithful to the book, radio, tv, lp, etc plots but undyingly faithful to the spirit of those various incarnations. 'Cause it was DNA that rocked all of those, not the specifics of the plots.
Is there ever a time when you can consider your systems secure against an attacker with physical access?
Obviously Spirit wandered into a bad neighborhood where Martian bums keep wiping the panels with greasy rags that only make things worse.
Probably much too late in the posting for anybody to read this, but anyway, WTF are months for, anyway? They don't correspond to anything astronomical (apart from being originally based on lunar cycles) and they just screw with things with the irregular lumps of days.
And anyway, the whole idea of "it's easier to swallow because it's only slightly different" on which this scheme seems to be based is fundamentally flawed. Any change to something which is so thoroughly taken for granted by so many people is going to be a huge change, whether it is qualitatively a minor or major change. And if you think it's important enough to implement such a huge change, please go whole hog and do it right, without any silly months to mess it up!
"Calendar change has happened before" doesn't cut it. Between your employer cutting your check, your landlord demanding your rent, and your supervisor conducting your quarterly review I'd say it's fair to say that modern folks have a little more vested interest in what the days do than they did in the 16th century.
Dammit, people, the reason the PHBs can get away with this sh1t is that they know that even if you have the self-respect to refuse they can easily replace you with someone that doesn't value self and family enough to say no.
I know that folks in the US have been trained from birth to believe that worker solidarity = communism = ultimate evil, but those whose comments can be summed up as "stop yer whining and get back to work" miss the damn point. I want to work to live, not live to work. When there are enough workers willing to whore themselves out, it makes it impossible for the non-whores to expect fair treatment.
If the developer community would stop putting up with it, the PHBs wouldn't be able to require it anymore.
Excuse me Mr Pot, but the Kettle has asked me to point out that:
- Christmas should be capitalized. Regardless of your feelings on the subject, it is the proper name of a holiday.
... Santa bring you all... should be Santa bring you each (unless of course you meant that one would suffice for all of them, in which case the "all" is extraneous)- You are using "can" where "may" belongs, which is generally acceptable in modern usage, BUT
...you are, in essence, asking the direct object of your sentence if the subject of the sentence will perform a certain service. If you want Santa to do something, you should ask Santa.
A more grammatically appropriate expression of your sentiments is:Dear Slashdot "Editors" - I certainly hope each of you has asked Santa for an unabridged grammar reference and a spell-checker for Christmas this year!
That being said, I rather suspect that the aforementioned editors are primarily responsible for article selection. To expect copy editing from a free and continuously updated website seems just a bit extravagant.
Need I say more?
I opened this post up to see the comments and saw an awful lot of, "gee, the US ain't so bad" comments - too many to choose just one to reply to, in fact - including several that apparently attributed to Canada the blob stretching from New York to Chicago, showing either a rather frightful ignorance of geography or a failure to look at the actual image. I simply wanted to point out that, according to both wackjob Hippie rhetoric and the satellite imagery in question, the US is easily the most egregious offender among "developed" nations.
And yes, Europe has a good blob going too, but let's remember that Europe has about twice the population of the US, in about two-thirds of the space, and still manages a smaller blob.
Wake up and ditch the SUVs, folks.
Are we looking at different images, or are the commenters just as ignorant of geography as the average slashdot reader is ignorant, of, say, the mating rituals of the human species? Or have we been overrun by neocons?
The single biggest blot, other than the one over everybody's favorite red menace, is square over the northeastern US. The richest country pollutes more than anyone except the country that does all of the richest country's dirty work (and has more people than everyone else combined, to boot).
LATFI! (look at the _ucking image!)
If I devise a technique to filter, oh, I don't know, undesirable HAM radio advertising, and patent it, can I get this kind of publicity, too?
Competition is good for market economies. Monopolies suck.
Tell me the actual dimensions, dammit!
'nuff said
Any marketing, whether political, charitable, pre-existing "relationship," whatever, where the cost is directly borne by the recipient should be illegal. Period.
NOW, DAMMIT!
Why is it so hard for the useless pieces of dog crap that have weaseled their way to public office to grasp this? What kind of retards have we been voting for, anyway?
If there are any government officials reading, I am most certainly talking about YOU. Get off of your ass and start explaining this in nice, short, idiot-proof words to everybody you can get your mouth in front of!
There is no justification for ever installing full-blown PCs in this kind of environment. (No, I don't work for or with these guys, I just have way more experience than I ever wanted administering extensive networks of independent PCs in environments where the cumulative equivalent of VT's Big Mac was brought to bear on tasks that cumulatively required roughly a dual P4). Web browsing, word processing and the like require almost no processing power. Unless your users are creating/editing/transcoding audio or video, compiling elaborate programs, or doing deep data searches on local data, the computing power is wasted.
Not to mention the time wasted on cleaning up after clueless users (in a properly configured thin client environment users are only users, not manipulators, of the core operating environment), keeping up with the latest patches, x number of software/OS "up"grades instead of one (and the requisite hardware upgrades - two, three years down the road, instead of replacing a library full of obsolete machines, you replace one, and keep your clients),... I could go on, but /. comments aren't supposed to be books, so I'll stop.