I've been toying with the same idea or switching for a while. Of course this subject has been done to death on/. but heck, I'll do it some more:
My main worry is that I'll switch, drink the Apple kool-aid, then wake up one morning and think "The novelty of the pretty eye-candy has worn off now. What do I have that I would not have with GNU/Linux with (say) KDE?"
Apart from a hole in my bank balance, not much I would say.
But then I'm not a graphics person, nor do I play games or have weird peripherals with unknown drivers.
So sub-$500 or not, what would I really gain by switching to OSX as opposed to GNU/Linux (I'm a-liking Debian these days)? Speaking a member of the disgruntled-but-somehow-sticking-with-it Windoze community, that is.
SpamCannibal is basically a proactive tarpit, the ethics of which I'm sure we will debate, but I can't help thinking that if this approach was at least an option for sysadmins being snowed under with crap (I've tried to get the IPCop maintainers, and others interested) then the world would be a better place for it.
> The news is so heavily skewed to the left OR the > right (depending on your outlet) that you have to > go to several different sources to get even a > glimmer of the truth.
You think the mass media is *polarised* too much!!? What kind of perception of political discourse do you have?
The problem as I see it is that the mass media simply repeat accepted "facts" about events with only tiny, tiny variations.
To illustrate what I mean, take the now ubiquitous 9/11. Apart from referring to some vague idea of "hatred for our way of life," has anyone in the main stream media actually attempted to *explain* why Bin Laden et. al. hate the USA so much? Why are so many countries hostile to the West?
I'll wager not one serious attempt at giving a comprehensive explanation has been attempted. Why? Because it's just too difficult to set up the facts, give the right background to the arguments and generally get over the huge wall of what people have accepted to be "true" about the situation.
It takes 5 seconds to parrot something about an "evil empire intent on destroying the American way of life" but about an hour to explain why the biggest terrorist operations of all are run out of Washington.
That's not a conspiracy theory - it's just the way the media works. The bigger challenge is to work out how the accepted truths are constructed.
> And yet, they didn't. But we did point out that you > were using a bogus argument, demonstrating the > value of the feedback that you get when everyone contributes. > >Thank you for volunteering to be an object lesson.
If I had any mod point you'd get them all. That has got to be this year's best/. mini-thread.
You can hardly blame people for wanting to use what they know. Sit somebody who's only ever used Windows in front of a Mac and ask them to do just about anything and they just won't be able to do it. Even if they can, the effort will be too much.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying Macs are difficult to use, I'm just saying people will naturally want to wait to use a PC rather than expeience the pain to trying to work out how to use a new system - be that Mac, KDE, BeOS or anything. The idea that an operating system of any kind can be "intuitive" really *is* stupid though.
Re:As long as you have the space
on
Digital Packrats
·
· Score: 1
> Don't be so assuming.
Hear hear!
That also goes for the endlessly-parroted assumption that we will never be able to read our data in n years time.
I have files on DVD now that were orginally on 3" floppies, in LocoScript format, which I converted to AmiPro on 5.25" floppies, which I later saved as MS Word on 3.5" floppies, then copied to CD. I'll be doing the same once DVD shows signs of biting the dust.
This is hardly a huge price to pay for the information revolution, particularly as you can usually do a lot of the conversion in batch operations taking a matter of minutes to do.
Of course, those with large amounts of data need to put in more effort, but then you would have correspondingly more resources (and reason) to apply that effort in the first place. If not, then what are you doing with it anyway?
It's always bothered me that authentication is the default condition for systems when in so many cases just a simple user name would do. firstame.lastname, hit enter and get in.
Why do you need to demand a password from every user that, say, wants to edit a document on the file server? Why does a VPN need a login as well as a password to see the file servers after that? Why do I need a password to get to the timesheet application on the intranet when I'm ON the network already? What's wrong with just giving it my name? Even worse, why do all these systems require a different pattern of login? Even if I wanted to use my super-secret, 8-character password for the VPN, I can't bacause it wants a 10-character password with at least three numbers in it. So I reach for the stickynotes.
If authenticaion was NOT the norm, perhaps people would THINK about whether there was anything important they wanted to protect, and then ask their admins to protect it with massive encryped highly-authenticted logins.
As it is, the current situation stifles that mentality. It's literally a false sense of security. "It's all passworded up to the eyeballs every whick way you can imagine - everything must be secure!" Then they wonder why users write stuff down on sticky notes...
I realise that if you don't know what's secret then you have no choice to protect it all, but jesus, the current situation is just nuts.
> But even in the UK, aren't TV news crews allowed > to record video of such events as much as they > want? Maybe I don't see the point after all...
They are (AFAIK), but I meant that just because you can, doesn't mean you should. Simply not telling people that they are being filmed is at the very least impolite.
For a couple of years, I was a volunteer for the Legal Defence and Monitoring Group here in the UK. One of the main things we did was to monitor police behaviour on demonstrations to make sure that the police were acting within the law.
At the time, we discouraged the use of video cameras for collecting evidence of police behaviour because of the problems with interpretation of footage. We preferred for each monitor instead to take written notes (recorded on the day with a dicataphone) at regular intervals (once every 10mins or so) since a report that nothing was happening was often as valuable as a report that all hell was breaking loose. The police usually said they were reacting to provocation before taking the decision to modify people's skulls, and any evidence to the contrary was valuable.
While the former issue might be solved by the "network effect" described, the latter issue is not unless those with cameras record everything, or at least sample the situation at regular intervals.
In short, even if you still have some form of organisation operating the cameras, you're in for a FAR heavier invasion of privacy burden: compare a written note saying "14:55 - Nothing happening" to 10 seconds of footage showing people, their faces, their placards, their expressions... and nothing happening.
> China and India understand that an educated > population is the only way to make it in today's > world
I know this is somewhat contentious, but how exactly does an "education" (other than learning to read, write and perform basic mathematics) help? I don't see a connection between being able to run a business and knowing what the capital city of Brazil is, or who wrote Paradise Lost.
The fact that the leading economies all have had large education systems doesn't mean that's a route to economic success. Any number of factors could be responsible. For example, they've also employed slave labour at various times to boost their economies (at least, Britain, the USA, Japan and most other European countries have).
What makes you so sure education is so critical? Do you mean vocational training? In which case that's something else entirely isn't it?
Gone to a bookstore lately and looked at some of the drivel on the shelves there? How about fringe scientific research, Holocaust denial, cult religion? All of that was around before the net. The net is just a mirror of what's already there. The only difference is you can accesses it a lot more easily than before.
Big of him to keep it up there. He has a couple of good points I think, but was basically just voicing what most old journos thought about the net when it came along: "What will become of us when anyone can publish an article and anyone can read it?" There was an amazing amount of bile thrown at the Internet by people like him at the time as I recall.
>The fact that under OSX you are NOT logged in as an >admin account, and various services/ports most >people don't need are turned off make life much >harder for the script kiddies that trivially crack >a Windows box.
Last I checked, most virus/worms/trojans out there could operate just fine if the user was logged in as a non-privileged user. The 'sploits just get root don't they?
Hey - what's an occasional tautology amongst friends? I note the poster didn't say "David Glen Lewis, 39 who became somewhat dead after being hit by a car while out of town."
>You are free to go to a part of the world like >North Korea and "unplug yourself" from this evil >"Matrix" of capitalistic greed anytime you want to. >You just have to leave your computer at home:^)
So you think that the existence of a country that's supposed to be an awful place is an excuse not to make your own country a better place to live?
Jeesus - seems like things haven't got much better in the US since McCarthyism was around.
Couple this story with the recent pronouncement by James Lovelock and others that nuclear power may in fact be the only way to save the world after all, how does this square?
Nuclear energy seems to boil down to two things: cost and danger. If we sort out the first one, will we learn to live with the second? After all, in terms of simple loss of life, cars kill about the same number of people every year as a jumbo jet going down with all hands, and we accept that as necessary.
This is perhaps one of those things that I shouldn't articulate, but am I the only person who thinks that the Amazon logo (and the logo they put under their subsidiary company names/logos) looks like the underside of an erect human penis?
I know this is filthy and obscene to all right-thinking people, but the phallic symbolism is too obvious for me not to notice. And the fact hat Amazon is a global brand makes this observation even more ludicrous.
When I first looked at Skype I thought "Cool! Free calls!"
Then I looked at the details. I'd have to use a mic or use a headset at my PC. And be in ear-shot of the PC to hear it ring, etc. Bummer. Reduced the attraction of Skype by almost 50% in my opinion.
Then I looked at the Skype Shop. Oh cool! A they sell Skype Handsets!
But WTF!?? They're NOT WIRELESS!!! Read that again:
THEY ARE NOT WIRELESS!
Skype: that is the most insanely stupid thing! Why sell handsets that are not wireless? Are you mad? Do you WANT people to screw up their faces and go WTF and then bitch on/. about you?
etc. etc. That's what I thought anyway. I know they're (probably) not mad, and stuff, but jesus - some attention to detail in the "shop" would not go amiss.
If you've not read the book, or (for the impatient) seen the film of Noam Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent" - his analysis of how the media works in modern democracies - then you would do well to seek it out.
Lots of people here are talking about the media and whether it's "left" or "right." Chomsky's analysis makes some interesting points about media coverage of a number of issues over the past 30 years or so, and how the media's function in a democracy is to dictate the terms of reference, boundaries and, ultimately, what is left and right in most contexts. It says some other stuff as well of course. The film in particular is very good.
Here Britain, the situation is just as bad. A 512K ADSL connection will probably cost you about $28 a month. There is a bloodsucking monopoly that has been dragging its heels on broadband implementation for years to preserve its lucrative leased line business, rural areas are only just getting connections, and I live in an area of the island's capital city and I can't get cable.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been toying with the same idea or switching for a while. Of course this subject has been done to death on /. but heck, I'll do it some more:
My main worry is that I'll switch, drink the Apple kool-aid, then wake up one morning and think "The novelty of the pretty eye-candy has worn off now. What do I have that I would not have with GNU/Linux with (say) KDE?"
Apart from a hole in my bank balance, not much I would say.
But then I'm not a graphics person, nor do I play games or have weird peripherals with unknown drivers.
So sub-$500 or not, what would I really gain by switching to OSX as opposed to GNU/Linux (I'm a-liking Debian these days)? Speaking a member of the disgruntled-but-somehow-sticking-with-it Windoze community, that is.
> The best way to fight spam is to go home and turn
> off your mom's zombie computer...
In effect, that's what I'm doing with SpamCannibal.
SpamCannibal is basically a proactive tarpit, the ethics of which I'm sure we will debate, but I can't help thinking that if this approach was at least an option for sysadmins being snowed under with crap (I've tried to get the IPCop maintainers, and others interested) then the world would be a better place for it.
> The news is so heavily skewed to the left OR the
> right (depending on your outlet) that you have to
> go to several different sources to get even a
> glimmer of the truth.
You think the mass media is *polarised* too much!!? What kind of perception of political discourse do you have?
The problem as I see it is that the mass media simply repeat accepted "facts" about events with only tiny, tiny variations.
To illustrate what I mean, take the now ubiquitous 9/11. Apart from referring to some vague idea of "hatred for our way of life," has anyone in the main stream media actually attempted to *explain* why Bin Laden et. al. hate the USA so much? Why are so many countries hostile to the West?
I'll wager not one serious attempt at giving a comprehensive explanation has been attempted. Why? Because it's just too difficult to set up the facts, give the right background to the arguments and generally get over the huge wall of what people have accepted to be "true" about the situation.
It takes 5 seconds to parrot something about an "evil empire intent on destroying the American way of life" but about an hour to explain why the biggest terrorist operations of all are run out of Washington.
That's not a conspiracy theory - it's just the way the media works. The bigger challenge is to work out how the accepted truths are constructed.
> And yet, they didn't. But we did point out that you
/. mini-thread.
> were using a bogus argument, demonstrating the
> value of the feedback that you get when everyone contributes.
>
>Thank you for volunteering to be an object lesson.
If I had any mod point you'd get them all. That has got to be this year's best
You can hardly blame people for wanting to use what they know. Sit somebody who's only ever used Windows in front of a Mac and ask them to do just about anything and they just won't be able to do it. Even if they can, the effort will be too much.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying Macs are difficult to use, I'm just saying people will naturally want to wait to use a PC rather than expeience the pain to trying to work out how to use a new system - be that Mac, KDE, BeOS or anything. The idea that an operating system of any kind can be "intuitive" really *is* stupid though.
> Don't be so assuming.
Hear hear!
That also goes for the endlessly-parroted assumption that we will never be able to read our data in n years time.
I have files on DVD now that were orginally on 3" floppies, in LocoScript format, which I converted to AmiPro on 5.25" floppies, which I later saved as MS Word on 3.5" floppies, then copied to CD. I'll be doing the same once DVD shows signs of biting the dust.
This is hardly a huge price to pay for the information revolution, particularly as you can usually do a lot of the conversion in batch operations taking a matter of minutes to do.
Of course, those with large amounts of data need to put in more effort, but then you would have correspondingly more resources (and reason) to apply that effort in the first place. If not, then what are you doing with it anyway?
See, not as off-topic as you thought!
It's always bothered me that authentication is the default condition for systems when in so many cases just a simple user name would do. firstame.lastname, hit enter and get in.
Why do you need to demand a password from every user that, say, wants to edit a document on the file server? Why does a VPN need a login as well as a password to see the file servers after that? Why do I need a password to get to the timesheet application on the intranet when I'm ON the network already? What's wrong with just giving it my name? Even worse, why do all these systems require a different pattern of login? Even if I wanted to use my super-secret, 8-character password for the VPN, I can't bacause it wants a 10-character password with at least three numbers in it. So I reach for the stickynotes.
If authenticaion was NOT the norm, perhaps people would THINK about whether there was anything important they wanted to protect, and then ask their admins to protect it with massive encryped highly-authenticted logins.
As it is, the current situation stifles that mentality. It's literally a false sense of security. "It's all passworded up to the eyeballs every whick way you can imagine - everything must be secure!" Then they wonder why users write stuff down on sticky notes...
I realise that if you don't know what's secret then you have no choice to protect it all, but jesus, the current situation is just nuts.
They (or somebody) sold a cordless handset.
On their shop they sell a "CyberPhone":
"Plugged into the USB port of your PC / laptop, you can chat using the Cyberphone just as you would on a normal telephone. "
Cool. But it still means I have to be at my PC to make/receive calls.
Hey Skype: sell cordless CyberPhones and you're on!
> But even in the UK, aren't TV news crews allowed
> to record video of such events as much as they
> want? Maybe I don't see the point after all...
They are (AFAIK), but I meant that just because you can, doesn't mean you should. Simply not telling people that they are being filmed is at the very least impolite.
For a couple of years, I was a volunteer for the Legal Defence and Monitoring Group here in the UK. One of the main things we did was to monitor police behaviour on demonstrations to make sure that the police were acting within the law.
At the time, we discouraged the use of video cameras for collecting evidence of police behaviour because of the problems with interpretation of footage. We preferred for each monitor instead to take written notes (recorded on the day with a dicataphone) at regular intervals (once every 10mins or so) since a report that nothing was happening was often as valuable as a report that all hell was breaking loose. The police usually said they were reacting to provocation before taking the decision to modify people's skulls, and any evidence to the contrary was valuable.
While the former issue might be solved by the "network effect" described, the latter issue is not unless those with cameras record everything, or at least sample the situation at regular intervals.
In short, even if you still have some form of organisation operating the cameras, you're in for a FAR heavier invasion of privacy burden: compare a written note saying "14:55 - Nothing happening" to 10 seconds of footage showing people, their faces, their placards, their expressions... and nothing happening.
> China and India understand that an educated
> population is the only way to make it in today's
> world
I know this is somewhat contentious, but how exactly does an "education" (other than learning to read, write and perform basic mathematics) help? I don't see a connection between being able to run a business and knowing what the capital city of Brazil is, or who wrote Paradise Lost.
The fact that the leading economies all have had large education systems doesn't mean that's a route to economic success. Any number of factors could be responsible. For example, they've also employed slave labour at various times to boost their economies (at least, Britain, the USA, Japan and most other European countries have).
What makes you so sure education is so critical? Do you mean vocational training? In which case that's something else entirely isn't it?
Gone to a bookstore lately and looked at some of the drivel on the shelves there? How about fringe scientific research, Holocaust denial, cult religion? All of that was around before the net. The net is just a mirror of what's already there. The only difference is you can accesses it a lot more easily than before.
and here it is, in all it's wonderful glory
Big of him to keep it up there. He has a couple of good points I think, but was basically just voicing what most old journos thought about the net when it came along: "What will become of us when anyone can publish an article and anyone can read it?" There was an amazing amount of bile thrown at the Internet by people like him at the time as I recall.
>The fact that under OSX you are NOT logged in as an
>admin account, and various services/ports most
>people don't need are turned off make life much
>harder for the script kiddies that trivially crack
>a Windows box.
Last I checked, most virus/worms/trojans out there could operate just fine if the user was logged in as a non-privileged user. The 'sploits just get root don't they?
Hooray! At least *somebody* got my joke!
Whenever I see something about the semantic web, I go back to Clay Shirky's critique of it.
A useful antidote to the hype.
Hey - what's an occasional tautology amongst friends? I note the poster didn't say "David Glen Lewis, 39 who became somewhat dead after being hit by a car while out of town."
>You are free to go to a part of the world like :^)
>North Korea and "unplug yourself" from this evil
>"Matrix" of capitalistic greed anytime you want to.
>You just have to leave your computer at home
So you think that the existence of a country that's supposed to be an awful place is an excuse not to make your own country a better place to live?
Jeesus - seems like things haven't got much better in the US since McCarthyism was around.
Couple this story with the recent pronouncement by James Lovelock and others that nuclear power may in fact be the only way to save the world after all, how does this square?
Nuclear energy seems to boil down to two things: cost and danger. If we sort out the first one, will we learn to live with the second? After all, in terms of simple loss of life, cars kill about the same number of people every year as a jumbo jet going down with all hands, and we accept that as necessary.
This is perhaps one of those things that I shouldn't articulate, but am I the only person who thinks that the Amazon logo (and the logo they put under their subsidiary company names/logos) looks like the underside of an erect human penis?
I know this is filthy and obscene to all right-thinking people, but the phallic symbolism is too obvious for me not to notice. And the fact hat Amazon is a global brand makes this observation even more ludicrous.
"year of birth of Jesus Christ"
Hm. Hard to estimate a "fact" like that.
When I first looked at Skype I thought "Cool! Free calls!"
/. about you?
Then I looked at the details. I'd have to use a mic or use a headset at my PC. And be in ear-shot of the PC to hear it ring, etc. Bummer. Reduced the attraction of Skype by almost 50% in my opinion.
Then I looked at the Skype Shop. Oh cool! A they sell Skype Handsets!
But WTF!?? They're NOT WIRELESS!!! Read that again:
THEY ARE NOT WIRELESS!
Skype: that is the most insanely stupid thing! Why sell handsets that are not wireless? Are you mad? Do you WANT people to screw up their faces and go WTF and then bitch on
etc. etc. That's what I thought anyway. I know they're (probably) not mad, and stuff, but jesus - some attention to detail in the "shop" would not go amiss.
If you've not read the book, or (for the impatient) seen the film of Noam Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent" - his analysis of how the media works in modern democracies - then you would do well to seek it out.
Lots of people here are talking about the media and whether it's "left" or "right." Chomsky's analysis makes some interesting points about media coverage of a number of issues over the past 30 years or so, and how the media's function in a democracy is to dictate the terms of reference, boundaries and, ultimately, what is left and right in most contexts. It says some other stuff as well of course. The film in particular is very good.
> as the saying goes, the law is not an ass.
The law is never NOT an ass. The quote is by a character called Beadle Bumble in a booked called "Oliver Twist" by Charles Dickens:
"If the law believes that, sir, then the Law is an Ass!"
Really, the poor understanding of English literature these days...
Here Britain, the situation is just as bad. A 512K ADSL connection will probably cost you about $28 a month. There is a bloodsucking monopoly that has been dragging its heels on broadband implementation for years to preserve its lucrative leased line business, rural areas are only just getting connections, and I live in an area of the island's capital city and I can't get cable.