Surely the best way to start out is to set your machine up with dual boot, so you can start using Linux, but still have access to all your Windows stuff if necessary. The article rather sounds as if you are going to completely blow away your windows installation, which I think is a very dangerous thing to do straight off as a newbie. All the backup stuff is good, but you should really be doing this anyway on a regular basis. Although a backup is certainly recommended before doing anything as heavy as a new O/S install, it's much safer just to resize your old partitions and use the empty space to install Linux in. This is what I did, and in fact I'm still using the FAT32 partition with most of my data on, simply because I can access it from both Linux and Windows. I haven't quite got replacements for all my standard Windows apps yet, so this way I can get the best of both worlds, and be safe. I'm surprised THG didn't recommend this.
>thanks for the personal attack. OK, maybe the Fox News thing was out of order. Apologies for that. But see the point about Guantanamo.
>Maybe the ideas that you think are "the truth" aren't as mainstream as you would like? Yes, this is exactly why people need to use alternative news sources, because what you get from the mainstream isn't the truth.
>I'm familiar with Guantanamo, thanks for being patronizing I wasn't being patronising. You seemed surprised that things could happen "without publicly reviewable process, or transparency of any kind." I simply gave a rather obvious example.
>even Guantanamo isn't outside the rule of law Yeah, it's only taken over two years of total limbo, with no right to see a lawyer, no being charged with any crime, no right even to see their families. If that's not outside the law, I don't know what is.
>The links you gave me were interesting, but didn't really answer my original question You asked for links to back up my accusation of illegal detentions, I gave you one. "There are 5,000 Iraqi detainees the CPA admits to holding, a number most suspect is a gross underestimate. Many of them are imprisoned indefinitely and without charges." If that title alone doesn't answer your question, then I don't know what will.
And laying the down some facts, with references to back them up, isn't evangelism. It's the cold hard truth.
I thought you must be joking at first, it's either that or you only watch Fox News!
>without publicly reviewable process, or transparency of any kind.
I take it you have actually heard of Guantanamo?
As for links, how's this report for a start. You might also like to regularly check out some of the articles on Cursor.org for some of the non mainstream news, or Riverbend for real life stories from Iraq.
You seem to have perfectly summed up everything that's wrong with current US policy.
If there's something you are doing somewhere that is causing terrorists to come and attack you, then not changing what you are doing is not only childish and stubborn, but plain stupid.
Unfortunately you have forgotten that with this attitude, policies will have to change, but not the ones that were wrong in the first place. Instead you put in place new policies to 'defend' yourself against the terrorists, which usually ends up trampling on the rights of a large number of innocent people. This just creates more terrorists from those people. You now have a vivious circle, where it will now look even worse for you to change your original policies, and you start having to do even more Draconian measures because there are now even more terrorists etc. etc. For a good example of this, check out Iraq, which has once again become the land of midnight raids where people get 'disappeared', but it's all in the name of freedom and democracy this time. When the Russians used to do this in Afghanistan, they estimated they created 6 new terrorists from the family of every guy they took away. I don't suppose it's much different here.
Of course nobody wants it to look like the terrorists won, but on the other hand, what do you do if their grievances are right? Of course I absolutely decry their methods, but you *have* to look at what they actually want to achieve. They're not all just evil guys who woke up one morning and said "Hey let's take on the USA this year"! Sure there are a few extreme radical nuts who you won't be able to stop at all, but they have a lot of manpower because other people agree with them. If you try to work out what the initial grievances of that large number of people actually are, and do something to sort them out, then the nuts have no recruits and the whole thing goes away.
Maybe this sounds like a naive sort of dreamland to you, but your way sure as hell doesn't seem to be working. Do you really feel safer now than you were 2 years ago? Why don't you ask the people in Madrid how they feel?
I believe if you actually look at a story not too far from here, on a website known by some as/., you'll find a review of some "next generation mail clients", most of which are actually available on Linux.
I mean, even if you don't RTFA, at least RTFAS (RTFA Summary).
However, even if the user started typing again straight away, they probably wouldn't beat the prompt coming back if it took less than 0.1 seconds, whereas they would if it took 2 seconds. Now we have the difference between making the user wait 'some' extra time over and above the natural typing pause time, and making the user wait for 'no' extra time. So I assert that 'infinitely faster' still holds!
>No, you still have to display the newline. Damn, I knew someone would spot that. But do you have to wait for that to be transmitted, or does the Terminal produce that on its own? I suppose either way, you also need to wait for the prompt to return, which *will* be transmitted. Damn damn, well it was funny while it lasted.
>Hope you're not a programmer... Oh tough break, I am. But guess what, I may not use the same rigour in my slashdot posts as I do when I'm writing code.
displaying... 20 characters (plus the newline)... would take about a couple of seconds to display, while displaying nothing would be 20 times faster
Surely displaying nothing takes no time at all, and is therefore *infinitely* faster.
Hey we finally proved it, Unix is infinitely faster than Windows, yay!
The whole point of this article is to see how many/. readers actually get to the end of it.
"slashdot-karma-whoring sectarianism" is tucked way down near the end in the last paragraph. Over 40 posts already and nobody else has spotted it yet!
seeing a movie provides a more realistic window into the mind of its director than a book does
I can't agree with you here. I think they are simply two different mediums, with different strengths and weaknesses.
For example, a book can easily build up a character with a quick description of their childhood, background, etc, and can also give you insights into how they think, by telling you what they're thinking. A film must find other ways.
On the other hand, a film can provide much more detail with things like costumes, scenery etc., which may not be described in much detail in a book.
I'm not sure those are really good examples, but hopefully you get my point. There are some very powerful movies, and some very powerful books. I don't think either medium is necessarily *better* than the other.
the movie does a better job at realizing Jackson's Middle Earth than the book does at realizing Tolkien's Middle Earth
Absolutely not, in fact, how could this possibly be right? Everything that Peter Jackson has imagined has originally come out of the book. Remember that he and the whole crew tried very hard to make the films as close to the books as possible, while still being a good film. They may have changed the actual story in some parts, but the whole world of middle earth, and the peoples/creatures in it, all come directly from the book.
In fact, one of the things that I was most suprised about, was how close the film came to my own imagination's version of things. I think that goes to show that there really is an incredible richness in the book that is simply expressed in the film.
I absolutely agree. I hate any name that begins with "My". It's just pants!!
It's as if some years ago, some marketroid deep in the basements of Redmond once wanted to leave a bit earlier than normal on a friday afternoon:
Engineer: "Hey marketing dude, what shall we call this new thing we've got here?"
Marketing Dude: "Aw hell I dunno, let's just call it 'MyThing'".
Then, incredibly, other marketroids the world over simply gave in and got assimilated:
Marketroid1: "Well that's it then, Microsoft have come up with the ultimate naming scheme, might as well take our stock options and retire now."
Marketroid2: "Hey wait a moment, they can't trademark just the 'My' part of it right? So we can call our other thing that we make 'MyOtherThing', yay!"
Marketroids the world over rejoiced, and never did any work again, even though they were getting paid even more than before because they were coming up with names as good as Microsoft's.
Unfortunately, the rest of us got stuck with the stupid friggin' Mythis, Mythat, Mykitchensink, ad infinitum.
And as for having 'my' in *both* the product and company name, all I can say is: "My, oh my, oh my!!!"
There's an interesting interview with Blu Cantrell(might need reg.), in which she compares the RIAA to the porn industry. Basically, she has more respect for the porn side: "At least with the sex business they're gonna give you your money in your hand after you're done. The music business, you get screwed and you don't even get your money!"
(Oh bo**ox, forgot to switch format to POT, AND forgot to preview)...
Why can't there be settings for this in the DVD player, e.g.: Setup Menu: 1. Default audio language - Japanese 2. Default subtitles - On 3. Default subtitle language - French 4. Start playing movie automatically - No
What's the problem? Yes people want different things, but there's no reason not to cater for all possibilities.
(In fact, I think my DVD player has a default language setting, so we're some of the way there).
Why can't there be settings for this in the DVD player, e.g.:
Setup Menu:
1. Default audio language - Japanese
2. Default subtitles - On
3. Default subtitle language - French
3. Start playing movie automatically - No
What's the problem? Yes people want different things, but there's no reason not to cater for all possibilities.
(In fact, I think my DVD player has a default language setting, so we're some of the way there).
Whoa steady on there pal, I think you have the wrong end of the stick here.
My point was that this wonderful new technology *could* have been just as simple to use as older technology, but it's not. And there's really no good reason why it's not.
I most certainly did not complain about doing things for my children, who I love dearly, and who mean the world to me. The way DVDs work still pisses me off when I'm doing it for myself. I simply used my children as an example for how simple the things *should* be to use.
Try and read posts more carefully in future, and work out what the arguments actually are. Then reply constructively. Thank you.
This sort of highlights two problems I have with the way DVDs work at the moment:
1. What sort of arrogance is it that allows the film makers to prevent me from skipping over bits I don't want to see. Hey, I've got some news, if I don't want to watch it, I don't have to look at the TV! All this does is piss me off and waste my time. I've bought the damned thing, it's mine to do with as I please, just let me do it.
2. Great technology, but is it easier/as easy to use as 'old technology' videos? No way. With a video, all you had to do was stick it in, and the player started playing automatically: my 3 year old could quite happily switch the TV on, slam in the video he wanted, and away he went. Now with a DVD, you put the disc in, press play, wait for the bits you'r not allowed to skip through, wait for the menu to come up, press play *again*, and eventually get to the actual film. This is too complicated for my son, so now I have to do this. Even my 5 year old daughter has trouble getting this to work sometimes.
This is just another case of the media corporations having too much control over the consumer products. It means the products aren't 100% designed to help the consumer, but are limited in some ways that just help the media corporations to make more money, or have more control (another example of this is mobile phones, at least in the UK).
a car, really isn't the type of vehicle at 'NEEDS' a lot of computer controlling.
'NEEDS' have nothing to do with it. How many gadgets do you need? Well, not many. How many can you have if you really want? How many fish in the sea man?
I submitted a story about this a while ago (rejected of course because I don't know the secret handshake), in the latest high end models, the cost of the electronics is rapidly approaching 50% of the cost of the car. Yes nearly HALF!
Well, you've got all those things like navigation, tuner, TV, MP3 player, cellphone, rearview camera, electronic windows and mirrors, A/C, let's just put it all in one box baby! And all the bits can talk to each other. So when your airbag goes off, your cellphone can automatically make an emergency call, retrieving your GPS coordinates from the navigation system. Or, when your engine management system predicts failure of some critical component within 100 miles, it navigates you straight to the nearest service centre. You need it *all* man, come on baby you know you want it?
I swear I'm not making this stuff up, I write software for some of these systems! And yes, there's a hell of a lot of it. And like you, it completely doesn't fill me with confidence how much of the car is being taken over by this stuff.
For example from the article:
"We couldn't breathe because there was no air"
and
"it took a long time to break the windows as the "glass proved to be very resistant"
Now that is scary. What happened to manual backups? On my washing machine, there's an electronic door opener, but there's also a hidden tab you can pull manually in the event of a power cut etc. There's no way in hell it should be impossible to open the doors if the system crashes, that really sucks! There's no way those systems are bulletproof.
Slashdot Mirror
Surely the best way to start out is to set your machine up with dual boot, so you can start using Linux, but still have access to all your Windows stuff if necessary. The article rather sounds as if you are going to completely blow away your windows installation, which I think is a very dangerous thing to do straight off as a newbie.
All the backup stuff is good, but you should really be doing this anyway on a regular basis. Although a backup is certainly recommended before doing anything as heavy as a new O/S install, it's much safer just to resize your old partitions and use the empty space to install Linux in.
This is what I did, and in fact I'm still using the FAT32 partition with most of my data on, simply because I can access it from both Linux and Windows. I haven't quite got replacements for all my standard Windows apps yet, so this way I can get the best of both worlds, and be safe. I'm surprised THG didn't recommend this.
>thanks for the personal attack.
OK, maybe the Fox News thing was out of order. Apologies for that. But see the point about Guantanamo.
>Maybe the ideas that you think are "the truth" aren't as mainstream as you would like?
Yes, this is exactly why people need to use alternative news sources, because what you get from the mainstream isn't the truth.
>I'm familiar with Guantanamo, thanks for being patronizing
I wasn't being patronising. You seemed surprised that things could happen "without publicly reviewable process, or transparency of any kind." I simply gave a rather obvious example.
>even Guantanamo isn't outside the rule of law
Yeah, it's only taken over two years of total limbo, with no right to see a lawyer, no being charged with any crime, no right even to see their families. If that's not outside the law, I don't know what is.
>The links you gave me were interesting, but didn't really answer my original question
You asked for links to back up my accusation of illegal detentions, I gave you one.
"There are 5,000 Iraqi detainees the CPA admits to holding, a number most suspect is a gross underestimate. Many of them are imprisoned indefinitely and without charges."
If that title alone doesn't answer your question, then I don't know what will.
And laying the down some facts, with references to back them up, isn't evangelism. It's the cold hard truth.
>without publicly reviewable process, or transparency of any kind.
I take it you have actually heard of Guantanamo?
As for links, how's this report for a start. You might also like to regularly check out some of the articles on Cursor.org for some of the non mainstream news, or Riverbend for real life stories from Iraq.
You seem to have perfectly summed up everything that's wrong with current US policy.
If there's something you are doing somewhere that is causing terrorists to come and attack you, then not changing what you are doing is not only childish and stubborn, but plain stupid.
Unfortunately you have forgotten that with this attitude, policies will have to change, but not the ones that were wrong in the first place. Instead you put in place new policies to 'defend' yourself against the terrorists, which usually ends up trampling on the rights of a large number of innocent people. This just creates more terrorists from those people. You now have a vivious circle, where it will now look even worse for you to change your original policies, and you start having to do even more Draconian measures because there are now even more terrorists etc. etc. For a good example of this, check out Iraq, which has once again become the land of midnight raids where people get 'disappeared', but it's all in the name of freedom and democracy this time. When the Russians used to do this in Afghanistan, they estimated they created 6 new terrorists from the family of every guy they took away. I don't suppose it's much different here.
Of course nobody wants it to look like the terrorists won, but on the other hand, what do you do if their grievances are right? Of course I absolutely decry their methods, but you *have* to look at what they actually want to achieve. They're not all just evil guys who woke up one morning and said "Hey let's take on the USA this year"! Sure there are a few extreme radical nuts who you won't be able to stop at all, but they have a lot of manpower because other people agree with them. If you try to work out what the initial grievances of that large number of people actually are, and do something to sort them out, then the nuts have no recruits and the whole thing goes away.
Maybe this sounds like a naive sort of dreamland to you, but your way sure as hell doesn't seem to be working. Do you really feel safer now than you were 2 years ago? Why don't you ask the people in Madrid how they feel?
Why the hell is this scored '5:interesting'?
/., you'll find a review of some "next generation mail clients", most of which are actually available on Linux.
I believe if you actually look at a story not too far from here, on a website known by some as
I mean, even if you don't RTFA, at least RTFAS (RTFA Summary).
However, even if the user started typing again straight away, they probably wouldn't beat the prompt coming back if it took less than 0.1 seconds, whereas they would if it took 2 seconds.
Now we have the difference between making the user wait 'some' extra time over and above the natural typing pause time, and making the user wait for 'no' extra time.
So I assert that 'infinitely faster' still holds!
>No, you still have to display the newline.
Damn, I knew someone would spot that. But do you have to wait for that to be transmitted, or does the Terminal produce that on its own? I suppose either way, you also need to wait for the prompt to return, which *will* be transmitted. Damn damn, well it was funny while it lasted.
>Hope you're not a programmer...
Oh tough break, I am. But guess what, I may not use the same rigour in my slashdot posts as I do when I'm writing code.
Surely displaying nothing takes no time at all, and is therefore *infinitely* faster.
Hey we finally proved it, Unix is infinitely faster than Windows, yay!
It sure is, but when do you take a break to breathe?
The whole point of this article is to see how many /. readers actually get to the end of it.
"slashdot-karma-whoring sectarianism" is tucked way down near the end in the last paragraph. Over 40 posts already and nobody else has spotted it yet!
I can't agree with you here. I think they are simply two different mediums, with different strengths and weaknesses.
For example, a book can easily build up a character with a quick description of their childhood, background, etc, and can also give you insights into how they think, by telling you what they're thinking. A film must find other ways.
On the other hand, a film can provide much more detail with things like costumes, scenery etc., which may not be described in much detail in a book.
I'm not sure those are really good examples, but hopefully you get my point. There are some very powerful movies, and some very powerful books. I don't think either medium is necessarily *better* than the other.
the movie does a better job at realizing Jackson's Middle Earth than the book does at realizing Tolkien's Middle Earth
Absolutely not, in fact, how could this possibly be right? Everything that Peter Jackson has imagined has originally come out of the book. Remember that he and the whole crew tried very hard to make the films as close to the books as possible, while still being a good film. They may have changed the actual story in some parts, but the whole world of middle earth, and the peoples/creatures in it, all come directly from the book.
In fact, one of the things that I was most suprised about, was how close the film came to my own imagination's version of things. I think that goes to show that there really is an incredible richness in the book that is simply expressed in the film.
It's as if some years ago, some marketroid deep in the basements of Redmond once wanted to leave a bit earlier than normal on a friday afternoon:
Engineer: "Hey marketing dude, what shall we call this new thing we've got here?"
Marketing Dude: "Aw hell I dunno, let's just call it 'MyThing'".
Then, incredibly, other marketroids the world over simply gave in and got assimilated:
Marketroid1: "Well that's it then, Microsoft have come up with the ultimate naming scheme, might as well take our stock options and retire now."
Marketroid2: "Hey wait a moment, they can't trademark just the 'My' part of it right? So we can call our other thing that we make 'MyOtherThing', yay!"
Marketroids the world over rejoiced, and never did any work again, even though they were getting paid even more than before because they were coming up with names as good as Microsoft's.
Unfortunately, the rest of us got stuck with the stupid friggin' Mythis, Mythat, Mykitchensink, ad infinitum.
And as for having 'my' in *both* the product and company name, all I can say is: "My, oh my, oh my!!!"
I've always wondered why Linus left the 'sh' off the last word.
>BTW: Who else confuses WindRiver and WinDriver?
Nobody, it's just you.
Yes, but you know what that means:
Press Release:
SCO DDOSed by long haired hippy anarchists, again!
There's an interesting interview with Blu Cantrell(might need reg.), in which she compares the RIAA to the porn industry. Basically, she has more respect for the porn side: "At least with the sex business they're gonna give you your money in your hand after you're done. The music business, you get screwed and you don't even get your money!"
Ah, a chuckle as soon as I come into work in the morning really does me good. Thanks mate.
And you're right, those THX trailers really do grab their attention don't they.
Hey, serves you right for buying a Microsoft DVD player ;-)
It's very easy:
Setup Menu:
1. Autoplay: On/Off
Now we're both happy!
(Oh bo**ox, forgot to switch format to POT, AND forgot to preview)...
Why can't there be settings for this in the DVD player, e.g.:
Setup Menu:
1. Default audio language - Japanese
2. Default subtitles - On
3. Default subtitle language - French
4. Start playing movie automatically - No
What's the problem? Yes people want different things, but there's no reason not to cater for all possibilities.
(In fact, I think my DVD player has a default language setting, so we're some of the way there).
Why can't there be settings for this in the DVD player, e.g.: Setup Menu: 1. Default audio language - Japanese 2. Default subtitles - On 3. Default subtitle language - French 3. Start playing movie automatically - No What's the problem? Yes people want different things, but there's no reason not to cater for all possibilities. (In fact, I think my DVD player has a default language setting, so we're some of the way there).
Whoa steady on there pal, I think you have the wrong end of the stick here.
My point was that this wonderful new technology *could* have been just as simple to use as older technology, but it's not. And there's really no good reason why it's not.
I most certainly did not complain about doing things for my children, who I love dearly, and who mean the world to me. The way DVDs work still pisses me off when I'm doing it for myself. I simply used my children as an example for how simple the things *should* be to use.
Try and read posts more carefully in future, and work out what the arguments actually are. Then reply constructively. Thank you.
This sort of highlights two problems I have with the way DVDs work at the moment:
1. What sort of arrogance is it that allows the film makers to prevent me from skipping over bits I don't want to see. Hey, I've got some news, if I don't want to watch it, I don't have to look at the TV! All this does is piss me off and waste my time. I've bought the damned thing, it's mine to do with as I please, just let me do it.
2. Great technology, but is it easier/as easy to use as 'old technology' videos? No way. With a video, all you had to do was stick it in, and the player started playing automatically: my 3 year old could quite happily switch the TV on, slam in the video he wanted, and away he went. Now with a DVD, you put the disc in, press play, wait for the bits you'r not allowed to skip through, wait for the menu to come up, press play *again*, and eventually get to the actual film. This is too complicated for my son, so now I have to do this. Even my 5 year old daughter has trouble getting this to work sometimes.
This is just another case of the media corporations having too much control over the consumer products. It means the products aren't 100% designed to help the consumer, but are limited in some ways that just help the media corporations to make more money, or have more control (another example of this is mobile phones, at least in the UK).
So, about the same as the road accidents then.
'NEEDS' have nothing to do with it. How many gadgets do you need? Well, not many. How many can you have if you really want? How many fish in the sea man?
I submitted a story about this a while ago (rejected of course because I don't know the secret handshake), in the latest high end models, the cost of the electronics is rapidly approaching 50% of the cost of the car. Yes nearly HALF!
Well, you've got all those things like navigation, tuner, TV, MP3 player, cellphone, rearview camera, electronic windows and mirrors, A/C, let's just put it all in one box baby! And all the bits can talk to each other. So when your airbag goes off, your cellphone can automatically make an emergency call, retrieving your GPS coordinates from the navigation system. Or, when your engine management system predicts failure of some critical component within 100 miles, it navigates you straight to the nearest service centre. You need it *all* man, come on baby you know you want it?
I swear I'm not making this stuff up, I write software for some of these systems! And yes, there's a hell of a lot of it. And like you, it completely doesn't fill me with confidence how much of the car is being taken over by this stuff.
For example from the article:
"We couldn't breathe because there was no air"
and
"it took a long time to break the windows as the "glass proved to be very resistant"
Now that is scary. What happened to manual backups? On my washing machine, there's an electronic door opener, but there's also a hidden tab you can pull manually in the event of a power cut etc. There's no way in hell it should be impossible to open the doors if the system crashes, that really sucks! There's no way those systems are bulletproof.
Man, I can't wait for electronic brakes!!!