I'm not a big fan of TV and I'm not much into today's pop music so I must ask...
Does MTV count for much of anything anymore? I know when I was in high school they had a lot of pull but the last I had seen of them was that they seemed to be like a fish in it's death throws on dry land. They tried to release a few films that saw little or no profit, their music empire was reduced to 10 music videos a day and the rest of their shows were a couple of really really bad "reality" shows that were as predictable as most pre-teen dramas on Nickelodeon.
I'm just wondering if they ever got their shit together or if the modern pop scene is so bad that this passes as a "music" channel and people are forced to stew in their own misery and filth or defect to VH1 with all the Glenn Fry, Enya and Stevie Nicks videos one can tolerate.
No, I have a point without this since the "clean" products that Walmart is selling is being put out by the producer, they're not "censoring" anything. No one is twisting anyone's arm. Stop acting like someone is being oppressed here.
Once again this is the classic case of people mistaking inconvenience for oppression.
WalMart has the right to pick and choose what they carry. Why is it if they don't choose to carry something that you like because of their own self-imposed moral standards that you feel like you're the one being put off?
Maybe you'd like it if WalMart could dictate what you have to buy from them?
They have the right to choose just as much as you do. It's not censorship in the modernly acceptable term.
I've noticed more and more how much people hate having other people exercise their right to choose if they're not choosing the most outrageous choices. Just another sign of the decline of civilization.
And do they still sell bullets? Saw that one in Bowling for Columbine. It would be odd to censor CDs that contain a few swear words, and yet sell lethal projectiles.
Yeah, God forbid that Walmart (as much as I do hate them) uses their legal right to pick and choose what they sell.
Let's come over your house and make some heavy handed decisions on what is right or what is hypocritical and start to force you to live by our definition of a good life. Let's see how fast you bitch.
I can't believe that people see the legal right to choose as being somehow oppressive just because it's not the choice that they would have made.
My local Christian book store doesn't sell Hustler! That's Censorship! Those Nazis!
My local adult bookstore doesn't sell the Bible! That's Censorship! Those Nazis!
My local country radio station refuses to play "Tooling for Anus" by The Meatmen! That's Censorship! Those Nazis!
And on and on...
Can we get over this "Store X sells items that are profitable since they're desirable to their target customer" and stop calling it censorship for once and for all? Because a business uses their legal right to choose what they do and do not sell hardly fits into the definition of censorship. On the most technical level, yes. But the word has long overgrown it's Webster dictionary definition in modern society.
Reading the article would mean that you'd have to be one of the lucky 6 people to get to it before it was slashdotted. I've seen some articles go fast but this one takes the cake.
Not to mention the short life spans. These guys lived to be what? Early 20s or so? Hell, there are people in their early 20s who still don't have all of their secondary teeth. If teeth were being replaced every 10-12 years throughout your life you'd probably have little use for a dentist too.
I don't know if anyone has brought this up yet but what kind of precautions would need to be taken to ensure that the fiber didn't suffer from the ill effect of corrosive agents in a sewer system to make this viable for deployment on the community level?
We drain all kinds of trash into the sewage system: detergents, lye, human waste, etc etc etc. This stuff has to cause some harm sooner or later.
Stop buying their overpriced, outdated, low quality, (and in some cases.. Sony) dangerous products.
If people are willing to no longer buy them they should not download them either. Trash is trash at any price or effort.
But frankly, they obviously have a product that people want and that you have a problem with. If you had not real interest you would have glanced over the blurb and kept moving. This is what I do when the blurb is about TV top game units. I don't own one, no interest in one. The business that happens with them rarely bothers me so I glance at it to keep up on what may or may not be going on but I don't invest any real time into it.
Contrary to popular belief, everything the RIAA ever collected a royalty on could vanish from planet earth with little or no consequence. Lets face it, most commercial music products just aren't very good anyway.
Pure opinion. And a flippant one at that.
Feel free to hate everything that was ever released on a major* but the bottom line is that there is a lot of culture going on in these recordings. I'm not going to sit here and try to deny that an artist has a good offering because his "brothers-mothers-sisters-cousin" was involved in an organization that has shady business practices some 10+ years after their recording was released. Hell, some of these bands are still putting out good music that is more then worth my consumer dollar. I'm not going to blame the artist for someone else's bullshit. That would be like me throwing a punch at you on the street because I found out that your 3rd cousin killed someone in a DUI incident. It's nonsense.
*Yes, I know the RIAA also represents some pretty small labels too.
but we know that spacewalks occur all the time routinely.
What's risky about this isn't the space walk itself but the concept of damaging more tiles. It's a delicate operation and one slip can make things go from bad to worse easily.
Perhaps there is a financial motivation for not carrying out the repair?
What financial motivation? The material already exist onboard. There is no investment and the amounts by which NASA would be set back in the case of a mid-air breakup or even a safe landing with an unusable shuttle far outweighs using the patch method. If you're going to say something like this I'd think that you'd need to back it up with some logic (even if it's faulty) or fall suspect to producing FUD. Not to be a dick but I find it to be a dismissive remark that borders on trollish.
What I'd like to see is an actual breakdown of the possible positive and negative consequences of each course of action and the probabilities that NASA has assigned to the outcomes. I'm really hoping that they've put some serious statistical analysis into this decision and aren't just flying by the seat of their pants.
Again, not to be a dick but I'd like to give the guys at NASA some credit here and pretty much chalk this up to random speculation of a problem that has been reviewed by NASA's best engineers for hundreds, if not thousands, of man hours. A PDF with some stats is not going to convey the experience of the teams in question. I know we joke that NASA has certain problems that are rather embarrassing but I'd like to think they went the extra mile on this one.
Certainly, the article quotes a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Douglas Osheroff, as saying that the repairs "can only increase their chances of making it down."
Let's requote that: the [successful] repairs "can only increase their chances of making it down."
Again, I think it's a matter of potentially doing more harm then good. I think if NASA had a guarantee from the mouth of God that this repair would not cause more damage they'd go for it in a second. They'd be fools not to. This isn't a question of if the repairs will help but a question of pros and cons.
I'm not going to say that everything is going to work out but I certainly hope they do. If I were up there I'd be more willing to trust the ground engineers at this point. Not to say that Dr. Osheroff doesn't know what he's talking about, he's well versed on the subject but I don't know how much he really knows about this incident and what his take is on the chances of making the situation worse with a potentially botched repair job.
How about that? Wizards wants to turn D&D into the new CCG at a higher premium! Keep pumping out new books with new editions and making each book dependent on another to keep those coffers filled.
I swear that if my current group goes all ape-shit over 4.o that I'm done. I've refused to buy 3.5 and 4.0 is the last straw.
I'm sure it won't matter much to WotC though as thousands of teens who don't remember the long life of AD&D 1&2 will think this is the normal progression will shell out tons of money for a new magazine (I refuse to call some of these supplements books) to get a whole 2 new classes that they'll probably never play.
Yes, I know you can use the GIMP, but Photoshop is industry standard
And anyone who uses both of these products knows why too. Don't get me wrong, I use GIMP and for a free application it's actually very nice but at the same time it's certainly no Photoshop.
It may just help those companies move to Linux that much faster, and isn't THAT a good thing?
For whom? Adobe probably doesn't give a damn. In fact, given their lack of support for Linux my guess is that they don't give a damn at all. It's pretty obvious that Adobe either doesn't feel that they have anything to gain by supporting Linux or they're hoping to move to more of a web style app that will allow them to not worry about the who OS war wasteland.
Nowadays they spend more money and time examining their own machinery than examining the space.
While I'm sure the holes in the tiles of the shuttle is not part of NASA's plan I think it's actually a very useful part of the mission.
We need to get beyond this whole concept of sending up the best and the brightest and throwing gobs of money at the program. We need to get to the point where we will have establishments (most likely lunar at first) where we're going to have real workers and not just high end engineers.
The idea of doing maintenance in space is going to be part of this future colonization. Being able to know how to do real work in this environment is going to bring us much closer to those goals. If we're yanking people out of a space station or colony every time the slightest maintenance needs done we're going to be paying big bucks with little return.
The lessons learned with the tiles on the shuttle and the heavy maintenance schedule of the Mir are going to take us a long way in establishing real working environments instead of just clean room type experiments.
While it's at least mildly interesting I had a real problem with one of the linked sources. Not the linked source itself but the obviously photoshopped cruise liner.
What the hell is that all about? I know that it may be able to swing this in the future but let's not get out of hand. Not to mention that my 12 year old nephew is a better photoshop hacker.
as soon as somebody make something moderately successful they try to supplant it with their own offerings
Yeah, I hear a lot about this. I notice the same taboo status isn't applied to the likes of Google.
It also bothers me that the same people who claim that MS copies everything everyone else does also claims that long copyright policies stifle innovation too. So on one hand copying something lacks innovation but if someone can't copy something innovation is suddenly stifled? I must have missed something there.
And, gee, I actually pointed out things that can be, and are, being "done here". But I can see how you'd miss it. I mean, look at me say "It'll happen eventually. Open standards are in the interest of the consumers, and eventually they spread. Consider how many networking models there were in the 80's, and then by the late 90's it was all TCP/IP, despite vendors attempts at lock-in. The same will happen with open-source software and general computing, it'll just take a while." That just reeks of "poor me" despair.
What does this do for software support again. Can we stay on topic here?
BTW: Another great attempt to take my quote out of context. Won't work here.
And I didn't 'blame the competition' any more than "to an extent".
Oh, now the excuse for the excuse. Ok, fine.
IBM owned computing until the late 80s, early 90s, but they made mistakes that MS took advantage of. It's not like IBM couldn't have stopped MS if they'd recognized the situation, but they were wedded to their mainframe business. Now MS is wedded to (a really ill-advised level of) backward compatibility (see the "Raymond Chen" stuff in that link) and the Windows codebase, which has grown to a size that it's unmanageable by the techniques they use. This leads to security issues (sure, it's possible to secure windows, but look how many people have trouble getting a regular oil change and ask yourself if they can keep a computer secure) and huge shipping delays and massive feature dumps so they can ship at all. Those are mistakes, and Linux is capitalizing on them.
Yeah, waiting for the other guy to fail to get ahead. You said it yourself right in the quote above. Isn't that what got you ranting in the first place?
You're just filing me away as another Linux zealot, even though I explicitly recognize the problem you point out and have listed specific strategies that are being pursued to deal with it. If that's your bag, well, okay, have a nice life and all.
I am taking you as another zealot. That's true. You're one of the people in the community that makes me uncomfortable taking up too much of my time with Linux. The rants alienates me. Too much fanaticism does that to people.
And if you recognize the problem you certainly haven't spoken about it. Tell me where in your posts you address the software support issues for the Linux platform that was originally addressed in my first posting.
No need. Microsoft just revoked your license because you upgraded to a new Socket AM2 motherboard. Have a nice day. Enjoy buying another copy of Windows Vista
yeah, I heard the same song and dance about XP. Odd thing is that it never happened.
And I don't want my kids dumbed down. And there is an advantage with Linux at the moment, because not only do they have to get their hands dirty to do a lot of complex things (which is highly instructive), there is a path to becoming even more adept because the source code of nearly everything is open.
Yeah, an open source they're likely to never see or care about let alone make some use of it. It's K-12. Show me the complex things they're going to do in a classroom environment while they're learning math, science, history and such on the side? Show me how many of these kids will really benefit from ever seeing any amount of code let alone the code to Linux.
As I said before I have witnessed what is being taught on the college level today to fledgling coders; the For Dummies books are more insightful. This kind of curriculum just isn't being taught in public schools.
If they grow up to be an admin, then they already are learning the tools of the job. I don't see MS taking over the server market, and I think they have no where to go but to cede market share to linux on the desktop.
So the 1 in 300 kids in your kids graduating class should take priority why? Not to mention that Linux does not have that much of the market share to nail the coffin on Windows just yet.
But in any case, if you want future admins learning on Linux because it has the current marketshare don't be a hypocrite and demand Linux on the desktop since it suffers much worse then Windows does on the server marketshare.
No, not really. A lot of "instruction" in the use of computers assumes, like you, that everyone is/should be using Windows and Office
Face facts, it's the majority today and shows no right signs of slowing.
This assumed uniformity often reduces the level of instruction to "find option X in menu Y." That kind of instruction is useless once menu Y doesn't exist or has new options or is replaced by a ribbon.
Actually, it seems that you're the only one who has assumed that.
My daughter is fifteen and has already used at least three or four versions of Windows, Fedora and Ubuntu. She's happy with Ubuntu. I'd bet she's a lot more capable of adapting to an uncertain computing future than someone who's been taught only how to work with Microsoft products.
You know, as much as that sounds fantastic the bottom line is that I can get an 8 year old to do that in a day. The question goes from "using" it to understanding it. In an educational environment we can't introduce kids to 3 different office suites beyond the basics and expect for them to still learn other subject matter. By going with the prevalent office suite of today we can show them that a spreadsheet can be more then simple cell formulas and show them when a spreadsheet is being used erroneously like a database. These concepts are much more important then showing them that there is more then one office suite. Just because they're only learning RDBM on a single product doesn't mean that the only thing they learn is where a function is on a menu. That's far more important to me then the compupolitics of open versus closed source.
I wonder if their teachers have the same flexibility....
Given the current classroom political correct nonsense and only having these kids attention for about 20 minutes a day? I doubt they could teach it and even if they could teach it (which is the important question, imho) they'd only ever scratch the surface. But hey, if you're happy with a public school graduate looking at you and shrugging when you mention a concept like mail merge feel free to beat kids over the head with open source and linux and closed source. Fuck, take up some of their time teaching them about BeOS and Solaris while you're at it. If it's all about choice and nothing about concept I guess the level of comprehension means nothing as long as they can drop names.
If I may diffidently suggest, the common participant in every argument you've ever had is... you. If you keep having the same arguments, it's at least conceivable that you have something to do with that.
Again, try twisting my words to give them meaning they never had. Not hard since they were never said either and your lack of a quote confirms it.
Oh, you mean here? Ah, yes, no one has ever thought of handing out LiveCDs before. Good one!
Oh, and your points were fresh and not mentioned for the thousandth time in this article alone? Please. Or do you go to every thread and point out every post that has thoughts that other people have thought of before? If you do you must not have much of a life since that's what 99.99% of slashdot really is.
Oh, and let's not forget the reply: "The Live CD approach is a good idea. I think I should keep some in my locker at work and give them away whenever there is some kind of interest. Funny I didn't think of that yet:-)". How about that? For as much as you've slagged me for bringing up something that others have already pointed out I've managed to get another user to consider it in the future. Maybe you should be off calling him a fucktard or something? It's unbelievable that you put me down for pointing something out to another user even when he admits that he never thought of it. I guess it make you feel like a real man.
Keep on trying to skirt the FACT that I'm in this for progress. You're here to pat yourself on the back.
But let's see what you say in that comment: "I guess that's the catch-22. Linux needs big software to get the user base that it take to make it worth big software's investments to support Linux." And let's see what I had to say: "But there really is a chicken-and-egg problem in the desktop arena, and just saying 'Y'all need to try harder' isn't going to cut it... there still aren't many commercial games for Linux, because there isn't a big market for Linux games, in part because... there aren't many commercial games for Linux. That's a real problem, and that's what I and others are referring to when talking about the trouble of invading a monopoly market."
And hey, that's what I'm referring to when I mention software support. My methodology is a lot less "poor me" and more "what can be done here". If you can't accept that attitude I guess you're the real loser.
I guess I will keep thinking that. You certainly seem to, though you don't appear to recognize it when it's not stated in precisely your wording...
No, I don't blame competition for my own failures. So I'm not thinking that at all. At least not for the same reasons you may think that.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not a big fan of TV and I'm not much into today's pop music so I must ask...
Does MTV count for much of anything anymore? I know when I was in high school they had a lot of pull but the last I had seen of them was that they seemed to be like a fish in it's death throws on dry land. They tried to release a few films that saw little or no profit, their music empire was reduced to 10 music videos a day and the rest of their shows were a couple of really really bad "reality" shows that were as predictable as most pre-teen dramas on Nickelodeon.
I'm just wondering if they ever got their shit together or if the modern pop scene is so bad that this passes as a "music" channel and people are forced to stew in their own misery and filth or defect to VH1 with all the Glenn Fry, Enya and Stevie Nicks videos one can tolerate.
No, I have a point without this since the "clean" products that Walmart is selling is being put out by the producer, they're not "censoring" anything. No one is twisting anyone's arm. Stop acting like someone is being oppressed here.
Once again this is the classic case of people mistaking inconvenience for oppression.
WalMart has the right to pick and choose what they carry. Why is it if they don't choose to carry something that you like because of their own self-imposed moral standards that you feel like you're the one being put off?
Maybe you'd like it if WalMart could dictate what you have to buy from them?
They have the right to choose just as much as you do. It's not censorship in the modernly acceptable term.
I've noticed more and more how much people hate having other people exercise their right to choose if they're not choosing the most outrageous choices. Just another sign of the decline of civilization.
And do they still sell bullets? Saw that one in Bowling for Columbine. It would be odd to censor CDs that contain a few swear words, and yet sell lethal projectiles.
Yeah, God forbid that Walmart (as much as I do hate them) uses their legal right to pick and choose what they sell.
Let's come over your house and make some heavy handed decisions on what is right or what is hypocritical and start to force you to live by our definition of a good life. Let's see how fast you bitch.
I can't believe that people see the legal right to choose as being somehow oppressive just because it's not the choice that they would have made.
My local Christian book store doesn't sell Hustler! That's Censorship! Those Nazis!
My local adult bookstore doesn't sell the Bible! That's Censorship! Those Nazis!
My local country radio station refuses to play "Tooling for Anus" by The Meatmen! That's Censorship! Those Nazis!
And on and on...
Can we get over this "Store X sells items that are profitable since they're desirable to their target customer" and stop calling it censorship for once and for all? Because a business uses their legal right to choose what they do and do not sell hardly fits into the definition of censorship. On the most technical level, yes. But the word has long overgrown it's Webster dictionary definition in modern society.
FCC Puts 4.6 Billion Minimum Bid on Spectrum Auction?
I'll take two of them!
Reading the article would mean that you'd have to be one of the lucky 6 people to get to it before it was slashdotted. I've seen some articles go fast but this one takes the cake.
Not to mention the short life spans. These guys lived to be what? Early 20s or so? Hell, there are people in their early 20s who still don't have all of their secondary teeth. If teeth were being replaced every 10-12 years throughout your life you'd probably have little use for a dentist too.
I don't know if anyone has brought this up yet but what kind of precautions would need to be taken to ensure that the fiber didn't suffer from the ill effect of corrosive agents in a sewer system to make this viable for deployment on the community level?
We drain all kinds of trash into the sewage system: detergents, lye, human waste, etc etc etc. This stuff has to cause some harm sooner or later.
Come on. Who hasn't hacked fark?
Err... I mean... yeah... this is terrible. Terrible I tell you.
Stop buying their overpriced, outdated, low quality, (and in some cases.. Sony) dangerous products.
If people are willing to no longer buy them they should not download them either. Trash is trash at any price or effort.
But frankly, they obviously have a product that people want and that you have a problem with. If you had not real interest you would have glanced over the blurb and kept moving. This is what I do when the blurb is about TV top game units. I don't own one, no interest in one. The business that happens with them rarely bothers me so I glance at it to keep up on what may or may not be going on but I don't invest any real time into it.
Contrary to popular belief, everything the RIAA ever collected a royalty on could vanish from planet earth with little or no consequence. Lets face it, most commercial music products just aren't very good anyway.
Pure opinion. And a flippant one at that.
Feel free to hate everything that was ever released on a major* but the bottom line is that there is a lot of culture going on in these recordings. I'm not going to sit here and try to deny that an artist has a good offering because his "brothers-mothers-sisters-cousin" was involved in an organization that has shady business practices some 10+ years after their recording was released. Hell, some of these bands are still putting out good music that is more then worth my consumer dollar. I'm not going to blame the artist for someone else's bullshit. That would be like me throwing a punch at you on the street because I found out that your 3rd cousin killed someone in a DUI incident. It's nonsense.
*Yes, I know the RIAA also represents some pretty small labels too.
but we know that spacewalks occur all the time routinely.
What's risky about this isn't the space walk itself but the concept of damaging more tiles. It's a delicate operation and one slip can make things go from bad to worse easily.
Perhaps there is a financial motivation for not carrying out the repair?
What financial motivation? The material already exist onboard. There is no investment and the amounts by which NASA would be set back in the case of a mid-air breakup or even a safe landing with an unusable shuttle far outweighs using the patch method. If you're going to say something like this I'd think that you'd need to back it up with some logic (even if it's faulty) or fall suspect to producing FUD. Not to be a dick but I find it to be a dismissive remark that borders on trollish.
What I'd like to see is an actual breakdown of the possible positive and negative consequences of each course of action and the probabilities that NASA has assigned to the outcomes. I'm really hoping that they've put some serious statistical analysis into this decision and aren't just flying by the seat of their pants.
Again, not to be a dick but I'd like to give the guys at NASA some credit here and pretty much chalk this up to random speculation of a problem that has been reviewed by NASA's best engineers for hundreds, if not thousands, of man hours. A PDF with some stats is not going to convey the experience of the teams in question. I know we joke that NASA has certain problems that are rather embarrassing but I'd like to think they went the extra mile on this one.
Certainly, the article quotes a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Douglas Osheroff, as saying that the repairs "can only increase their chances of making it down."
Let's requote that: the [successful] repairs "can only increase their chances of making it down."
Again, I think it's a matter of potentially doing more harm then good. I think if NASA had a guarantee from the mouth of God that this repair would not cause more damage they'd go for it in a second. They'd be fools not to. This isn't a question of if the repairs will help but a question of pros and cons.
I'm not going to say that everything is going to work out but I certainly hope they do. If I were up there I'd be more willing to trust the ground engineers at this point. Not to say that Dr. Osheroff doesn't know what he's talking about, he's well versed on the subject but I don't know how much he really knows about this incident and what his take is on the chances of making the situation worse with a potentially botched repair job.
How about that? Wizards wants to turn D&D into the new CCG at a higher premium! Keep pumping out new books with new editions and making each book dependent on another to keep those coffers filled.
I swear that if my current group goes all ape-shit over 4.o that I'm done. I've refused to buy 3.5 and 4.0 is the last straw.
I'm sure it won't matter much to WotC though as thousands of teens who don't remember the long life of AD&D 1&2 will think this is the normal progression will shell out tons of money for a new magazine (I refuse to call some of these supplements books) to get a whole 2 new classes that they'll probably never play.
Yes, I know you can use the GIMP, but Photoshop is industry standard
And anyone who uses both of these products knows why too. Don't get me wrong, I use GIMP and for a free application it's actually very nice but at the same time it's certainly no Photoshop.
It may just help those companies move to Linux that much faster, and isn't THAT a good thing?
For whom? Adobe probably doesn't give a damn. In fact, given their lack of support for Linux my guess is that they don't give a damn at all. It's pretty obvious that Adobe either doesn't feel that they have anything to gain by supporting Linux or they're hoping to move to more of a web style app that will allow them to not worry about the who OS war wasteland.
Hold on, I'm "asinine" and you're "underinformed"? And I'm the one putting people in little boxes? For what it is, yes, you're a troll.
Oh, so your response was underinformed. Mine is asinine? Ok, I see where this is going. Move along. I don't bother with trolls much.
Nowadays they spend more money and time examining their own machinery than examining the space.
While I'm sure the holes in the tiles of the shuttle is not part of NASA's plan I think it's actually a very useful part of the mission.
We need to get beyond this whole concept of sending up the best and the brightest and throwing gobs of money at the program. We need to get to the point where we will have establishments (most likely lunar at first) where we're going to have real workers and not just high end engineers.
The idea of doing maintenance in space is going to be part of this future colonization. Being able to know how to do real work in this environment is going to bring us much closer to those goals. If we're yanking people out of a space station or colony every time the slightest maintenance needs done we're going to be paying big bucks with little return.
The lessons learned with the tiles on the shuttle and the heavy maintenance schedule of the Mir are going to take us a long way in establishing real working environments instead of just clean room type experiments.
While it's at least mildly interesting I had a real problem with one of the linked sources. Not the linked source itself but the obviously photoshopped cruise liner.
What the hell is that all about? I know that it may be able to swing this in the future but let's not get out of hand. Not to mention that my 12 year old nephew is a better photoshop hacker.
We'z gonna fix yo bucket! What we haz right here is a crack in da tile instead of crack in da vile.
Word! Pass dat pipe, homie.
as soon as somebody make something moderately successful they try to supplant it with their own offerings
Yeah, I hear a lot about this. I notice the same taboo status isn't applied to the likes of Google.
It also bothers me that the same people who claim that MS copies everything everyone else does also claims that long copyright policies stifle innovation too. So on one hand copying something lacks innovation but if someone can't copy something innovation is suddenly stifled? I must have missed something there.
As if I didn't have enough work to keep me busy...
Apparently not. You still have time to sit around and post on Slashdot... Not that I have any room to talk, I'm just saying...
And, gee, I actually pointed out things that can be, and are, being "done here". But I can see how you'd miss it. I mean, look at me say "It'll happen eventually. Open standards are in the interest of the consumers, and eventually they spread. Consider how many networking models there were in the 80's, and then by the late 90's it was all TCP/IP, despite vendors attempts at lock-in. The same will happen with open-source software and general computing, it'll just take a while." That just reeks of "poor me" despair.
What does this do for software support again. Can we stay on topic here?
BTW: Another great attempt to take my quote out of context. Won't work here.
And I didn't 'blame the competition' any more than "to an extent".
Oh, now the excuse for the excuse. Ok, fine.
IBM owned computing until the late 80s, early 90s, but they made mistakes that MS took advantage of. It's not like IBM couldn't have stopped MS if they'd recognized the situation, but they were wedded to their mainframe business. Now MS is wedded to (a really ill-advised level of) backward compatibility (see the "Raymond Chen" stuff in that link) and the Windows codebase, which has grown to a size that it's unmanageable by the techniques they use. This leads to security issues (sure, it's possible to secure windows, but look how many people have trouble getting a regular oil change and ask yourself if they can keep a computer secure) and huge shipping delays and massive feature dumps so they can ship at all. Those are mistakes, and Linux is capitalizing on them.
Yeah, waiting for the other guy to fail to get ahead. You said it yourself right in the quote above. Isn't that what got you ranting in the first place?
You're just filing me away as another Linux zealot, even though I explicitly recognize the problem you point out and have listed specific strategies that are being pursued to deal with it. If that's your bag, well, okay, have a nice life and all.
I am taking you as another zealot. That's true. You're one of the people in the community that makes me uncomfortable taking up too much of my time with Linux. The rants alienates me. Too much fanaticism does that to people.
And if you recognize the problem you certainly haven't spoken about it. Tell me where in your posts you address the software support issues for the Linux platform that was originally addressed in my first posting.
No need. Microsoft just revoked your license because you upgraded to a new Socket AM2 motherboard. Have a nice day. Enjoy buying another copy of Windows Vista
yeah, I heard the same song and dance about XP. Odd thing is that it never happened.
Try again.
And I don't want my kids dumbed down. And there is an advantage with Linux at the moment, because not only do they have to get their hands dirty to do a lot of complex things (which is highly instructive), there is a path to becoming even more adept because the source code of nearly everything is open.
Yeah, an open source they're likely to never see or care about let alone make some use of it. It's K-12. Show me the complex things they're going to do in a classroom environment while they're learning math, science, history and such on the side? Show me how many of these kids will really benefit from ever seeing any amount of code let alone the code to Linux.
As I said before I have witnessed what is being taught on the college level today to fledgling coders; the For Dummies books are more insightful. This kind of curriculum just isn't being taught in public schools.
If they grow up to be an admin, then they already are learning the tools of the job. I don't see MS taking over the server market, and I think they have no where to go but to cede market share to linux on the desktop.
So the 1 in 300 kids in your kids graduating class should take priority why? Not to mention that Linux does not have that much of the market share to nail the coffin on Windows just yet.
But in any case, if you want future admins learning on Linux because it has the current marketshare don't be a hypocrite and demand Linux on the desktop since it suffers much worse then Windows does on the server marketshare.
No, not really. A lot of "instruction" in the use of computers assumes, like you, that everyone is/should be using Windows and Office
Face facts, it's the majority today and shows no right signs of slowing.
This assumed uniformity often reduces the level of instruction to "find option X in menu Y." That kind of instruction is useless once menu Y doesn't exist or has new options or is replaced by a ribbon.
Actually, it seems that you're the only one who has assumed that.
My daughter is fifteen and has already used at least three or four versions of Windows, Fedora and Ubuntu. She's happy with Ubuntu. I'd bet she's a lot more capable of adapting to an uncertain computing future than someone who's been taught only how to work with Microsoft products.
You know, as much as that sounds fantastic the bottom line is that I can get an 8 year old to do that in a day. The question goes from "using" it to understanding it. In an educational environment we can't introduce kids to 3 different office suites beyond the basics and expect for them to still learn other subject matter. By going with the prevalent office suite of today we can show them that a spreadsheet can be more then simple cell formulas and show them when a spreadsheet is being used erroneously like a database. These concepts are much more important then showing them that there is more then one office suite. Just because they're only learning RDBM on a single product doesn't mean that the only thing they learn is where a function is on a menu. That's far more important to me then the compupolitics of open versus closed source.
I wonder if their teachers have the same flexibility....
Given the current classroom political correct nonsense and only having these kids attention for about 20 minutes a day? I doubt they could teach it and even if they could teach it (which is the important question, imho) they'd only ever scratch the surface. But hey, if you're happy with a public school graduate looking at you and shrugging when you mention a concept like mail merge feel free to beat kids over the head with open source and linux and closed source. Fuck, take up some of their time teaching them about BeOS and Solaris while you're at it. If it's all about choice and nothing about concept I guess the level of comprehension means nothing as long as they can drop names.
If I may diffidently suggest, the common participant in every argument you've ever had is... you. If you keep having the same arguments, it's at least conceivable that you have something to do with that.
:-)". How about that? For as much as you've slagged me for bringing up something that others have already pointed out I've managed to get another user to consider it in the future. Maybe you should be off calling him a fucktard or something? It's unbelievable that you put me down for pointing something out to another user even when he admits that he never thought of it. I guess it make you feel like a real man.
Again, try twisting my words to give them meaning they never had. Not hard since they were never said either and your lack of a quote confirms it.
Oh, you mean here? Ah, yes, no one has ever thought of handing out LiveCDs before. Good one!
Oh, and your points were fresh and not mentioned for the thousandth time in this article alone? Please. Or do you go to every thread and point out every post that has thoughts that other people have thought of before? If you do you must not have much of a life since that's what 99.99% of slashdot really is.
Oh, and let's not forget the reply: "The Live CD approach is a good idea. I think I should keep some in my locker at work and give them away whenever there is some kind of interest. Funny I didn't think of that yet
Keep on trying to skirt the FACT that I'm in this for progress. You're here to pat yourself on the back.
But let's see what you say in that comment: "I guess that's the catch-22. Linux needs big software to get the user base that it take to make it worth big software's investments to support Linux." And let's see what I had to say: "But there really is a chicken-and-egg problem in the desktop arena, and just saying 'Y'all need to try harder' isn't going to cut it... there still aren't many commercial games for Linux, because there isn't a big market for Linux games, in part because... there aren't many commercial games for Linux. That's a real problem, and that's what I and others are referring to when talking about the trouble of invading a monopoly market."
And hey, that's what I'm referring to when I mention software support. My methodology is a lot less "poor me" and more "what can be done here". If you can't accept that attitude I guess you're the real loser.
I guess I will keep thinking that. You certainly seem to, though you don't appear to recognize it when it's not stated in precisely your wording...
No, I don't blame competition for my own failures. So I'm not thinking that at all. At least not for the same reasons you may think that.