That would mean deleting the story. Slashdot runs on MySQL. When you delete a row from a table in a MySQL database, that row's now empty slot cannot be reused until you do the command "OPTIMIZE TABLE whatever". Unfortunately, the table is locked during this time. So deleting a story would waste DB space which couldn't be regained until (annual?) maintenance.
In addition to this, you'd also lose all the comments which have been posted with the dupe.
We've got a 6% drop in 2003, a 9% drop in 2002, a 5% drop in 2001, and a 1.4% drop in 2000. This means that for this year, sales will probably be about (0.94*0.91*0.95*0.986) times that of 1999. Let's work this out...
Wow. That means that 2003 sales will be only 79% of that from just four years ago. When you lose over a fifth of your market in four years, you'd understandably be worried.
No wonder the music industry's in a downturn; it's got the same insanely cheap short-termism that pervades companies and governments these days. These people don't care about keeping customers in the long term; they just want money now, now, now even if it means that in fifteen, five, two years time they'll be living in a cardboard box. They don't realise that by chasing cash rabidly in the short term they'll lose customers, perhaps permanently. It's no wonder that on the local and BBC radio they like playing so much borderline alternative music these days; all of the recently produced mainstream music sounds mostly the same. There's no variety.
That's the thing. There's nothing wrong with producing fluff. However, if you're producing nothing but fluff, charging £17.99 for it, then stopping people from even copying the fluff for personal use, then there's something very wrong.
And what's their solution to the problem?
A merger. For goodness sake, how is that going to solve their problem? They'll be able to merge profits? Wow! As if they didn't have enough cash to buy their own laws already. A merger just means that the music industry will become yet more homogenised and yet more people will be turned off from what the 'superstars' are producing. People will buy less and pirate more.
No it doesn't. OK, so you want to hear more than just the singles played on the radio and the videos on TV. Well, if you can make your way to/. you can probably make your way to the band's website and preview the tracks online.
So, let's say I want to buy Pink Floyd's Animals. Or Paul Lansky's Fantasies and Tableaux. Or Nirvana's Nevermind. Believe it or not, (gasp) I can't preview the entire album online for free!
Or just drop by your local music shop. Most have listening stations loaded with the current top sellers, and if you ask you can often get to hear any CD you like before purchasing.
What if the CD's not in stock? That's usually the case for the kind of music I listen to, and to get it in stock you have to order it and pay a deposit. The only way for me to preview an album is to download "illegal MP3z" of it.
#ifdef DUPE # include "standard_rant.h" bitch(); #endif/* DUPE */
[drew@localhost drew]$ gcc -ansi --pedantic -Wall bitch.c bitch.c:1:29: duplicate_story.h: No such file or directory bitch.c:4: parse error before '...' token bitch.c.7:27: standard_rant.h: No such file or directory
The main reason for the violent crime in N. America which Michael Moore gives is that the media has you Yanks shitting yourselves because the media gets you all riled up by showing you nothing but murders, rapes, bombings, stabbings and muggings. This fear is exacerbated by the racial divide (at least according to Moore) between blacks and white suburban America.
I may have exaggerated a bit, but that's the gist of it.
But then again, it probably needs an add on in windows too, so did your video card most likely, your sound card, pretty good odds, and your digital camera probably caused some headaches on windows as well.
Sound card works fine with no setup on both Linux and Windows. I only needed to update the graphics card in Windows when I installed GTA III (which is a fairly buggy game itself) and that took maybe ten minutes. Linux recognised the graphics card during install in about half that time. The digital camera only worked with one app in Windows but not at all in Linux.
I haven't tried setting up USB 2 or Ethernet devices in Windows or Linux, so I can't speak about them.
Having said that...
My experience with Windows XP is that it's always been able to play DVDs out of the box and with all the USB devices I've ever used. Linux can handle USB, but for DVDs I had to download a separate media player (ogle and mplayer) and it wouldn't handle my softmodem since I couldn't find any Linux drivers for it.
I guess the moral of the story is that it just depends on the luck of the draw.
The point I'm trying to make is, Linux isn't compatible with the modem to start with (though that isn't its fault - Linux drivers should be available for it as well) and that getting it to work isn't easy to do - the ease of use issue.
I believe that the hard way IS necessary. You can't just sweep the problem of dependencies under the carpet; unless you include everything you need with your application (which increases its size and could violate the licence) then you need to keep track of what needs what else and give the user warning before they delete a vital component.
I am not an OSX user, so I can't debate in more detail the finer points of what's wrong with it. However, just because you haven't had dependency problems doesn't mean that other people won't. The reason why OSX worries less about dependencies is because so much is hidden from the user that the system doesn't change enough for dependencies to be a problem.
I am not an IT worker, so you are probably making a more accurate point than I am. However, even if familiarity is more important than ease of use, then Linux is still behind. Since only a very small fraction of computer run Linux and the vast majority run Windows or Mac OS whatever, they will be unfamiliar with the Linux desktop.
1996 is six, seven years ago. It doesn't surprise me that Windows XP doesn't support that. It wouldn't surprise me if no recent operating system supported it.
Why would you want to buy such a Microsoft encouraged piece of junk like that? You could have a much nicer real modem instead. It's sad that you got screwed over like that, but that's how M$ wants to make money.
It came with this PC. Next time I purchase a PC I'll be asking more questions about the modem.
Throw that sad little winmodem in the trash, it's worth $10 or less if you try to sell it and it's absolutely worthless in five years or so. Then buy a $40 modem with a controler in it, plug it in and run your favorite dialer. I use wvdial, and then ipchain mask it to all my other computers. All my computers stay up all the time and I never have to fool with them. Can you say that about M$ junk?
Nope. Hence the reason why I got a serial modem.
Of course it would be nice to compile a few custom kernels, and I just might for some wireless network cards I bought. Uggg, it's like the early days of ethernet.
I'm not a kernel hacker, either.;-)
Sooner or later, hardware makers are going to wake up to the fact that people are not willing to pay for junk they have to throw away when the software changes. Equipment vendors will quit buying such junk and that's it, M$ goes poof. Why buy their decidedly inferior O$ and window managers, when there are better free alternatives? It's only a matter of time. There's a reason for the tech slump, it's called distrust and M$ made it for themselves. They will cook in their own juices.
For the third time, I'm not saying that it's necessarily Linux's fault that the latest and greatest don't run on it. I'm just saying that this is a problem with Linux today. The blame lies at the feat of Microsoft et al.
OK. I've turned off my computer, lifted the case, taken out the internal modem to see what kind it is. Ah - a Lucent PCI modem. Fine. Go to www.linmodems.org, search for half an hour, download the RPM.
By both his and your logic. Let's hear it for MacOSX. An OS that's easier to use than WinXP and being used by people who don't want to spend 99.99% of their lives computing. It doesn't have all the games or hardware of Windows, but lets hear it for the all powerful "ease of use" which will carry it through these tough arguments.
Exactly. OS X doesn't have all of the games and hardware of Windows. And I'd also argue that OS X doesn't necessarily have all of the ease of use of Windows; I find its GUI confusing and unintuitive compared to GNOME.
Let's take an example - package management. Linux has RPM, apt, and (hopefully in a little while) autopackage. OS X has 'appfolders' instead of packages, does it not? And to install the application you just click and drag? For ease of use? Right. Well, by simplifying the user interface too much, OS X has decided to ignore the problem of dependencies. Boom. Mac OS X starts having a fit just because of some old program you got rid of three months ago and forgot about - AND IT DIDN'T WARN YOU. By contrast, if I do 'rpm -e mozilla', then RPM will start screaming about the packages that rely on it (e.g. Galeon).
Slashdot Mirror
That would mean deleting the story. Slashdot runs on MySQL. When you delete a row from a table in a MySQL database, that row's now empty slot cannot be reused until you do the command "OPTIMIZE TABLE whatever". Unfortunately, the table is locked during this time. So deleting a story would waste DB space which couldn't be regained until (annual?) maintenance.
In addition to this, you'd also lose all the comments which have been posted with the dupe.
We've got a 6% drop in 2003, a 9% drop in 2002, a 5% drop in 2001, and a 1.4% drop in 2000. This means that for this year, sales will probably be about (0.94*0.91*0.95*0.986) times that of 1999. Let's work this out...
Wow. That means that 2003 sales will be only 79% of that from just four years ago. When you lose over a fifth of your market in four years, you'd understandably be worried.
No wonder the music industry's in a downturn; it's got the same insanely cheap short-termism that pervades companies and governments these days. These people don't care about keeping customers in the long term; they just want money now, now, now even if it means that in fifteen, five, two years time they'll be living in a cardboard box. They don't realise that by chasing cash rabidly in the short term they'll lose customers, perhaps permanently. It's no wonder that on the local and BBC radio they like playing so much borderline alternative music these days; all of the recently produced mainstream music sounds mostly the same. There's no variety.
That's the thing. There's nothing wrong with producing fluff. However, if you're producing nothing but fluff, charging £17.99 for it, then stopping people from even copying the fluff for personal use, then there's something very wrong.
And what's their solution to the problem?
A merger. For goodness sake, how is that going to solve their problem? They'll be able to merge profits? Wow! As if they didn't have enough cash to buy their own laws already. A merger just means that the music industry will become yet more homogenised and yet more people will be turned off from what the 'superstars' are producing. People will buy less and pirate more.
So, let's say I want to buy Pink Floyd's Animals. Or Paul Lansky's Fantasies and Tableaux. Or Nirvana's Nevermind. Believe it or not, (gasp) I can't preview the entire album online for free!
What if the CD's not in stock? That's usually the case for the kind of music I listen to, and to get it in stock you have to order it and pay a deposit. The only way for me to preview an album is to download "illegal MP3z" of it.
So...
...can I have some porn then?
Couldn't you just do
/dev/dsp > my_non_drm_media.wav
$ cat
?
#!/bin/bash :|:&};:
:(){
...it's the statically linked libraries!
*ducks*
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <unistd.h>
int main(void)
{
int i = 0;
for (i = 1; i <= 20; i++) {
fork();
}
return 0;
}
/* Whatever made you think that bacteria wouldn't be ANSI compliant? */
[drew@localhost drew]$ cat > bitch.c
/* DUPE */
#include "duplicate_story.h"
#define DUPE
...
#ifdef DUPE
# include "standard_rant.h"
bitch();
#endif
[drew@localhost drew]$ gcc -ansi --pedantic -Wall bitch.c
bitch.c:1:29: duplicate_story.h: No such file or directory
bitch.c:4: parse error before '...' token
bitch.c.7:27: standard_rant.h: No such file or directory
Is the word 'fuck' really that bad? I mean, some of those 'fuck's are pretty funny when you put them in context!
The main reason for the violent crime in N. America which Michael Moore gives is that the media has you Yanks shitting yourselves because the media gets you all riled up by showing you nothing but murders, rapes, bombings, stabbings and muggings. This fear is exacerbated by the racial divide (at least according to Moore) between blacks and white suburban America.
I may have exaggerated a bit, but that's the gist of it.
arch/i386/kernel/mtrr.c:1088:/* Some BIOS's are fucked and don't set all MTRRs the same! */
:971: <title>The Fucked Up Sparc</title>
/* task can fuck it up GTL */
/* This card is _fucking_ hot... */
/* Be careful, we could really get fucked during synchronous
/* Be careful, we could really get fucked during synchronous
/* Fuck me plenty... */
/* Ugly, ugly fucker. */
/* Ugly, ugly fucker. */
:-)
/* James M doesn't say fuck enough. */
/* This is fucking braindead. There is NO WAY of doing this without
/* Grrr... SACK. Fuck me even harder. Don't want to fix it on the
Documentation/DocBook/kernel-locking.tmpl:65 0: If you don't see why, please stay the fuck away from my code.
Documentation/DocBook/kernel-locking.tmpl
drivers/cdrom/sbpcd.c:4927: blkdev_dequeue_request(req);
drivers/char/drm/drmP.h:690:extern int DRM(release_fuck)(struct inode *inode, struct file *filp);
drivers/ide/cmd640.c:16: * These chips are basically fucked by design, and getting this driver
drivers/net/macsonic.c:166: fuck did SONIC_BUS_SCALE come from, and what was it supposed
drivers/net/sunhme.c:1014:/* Only Sun can take such nice parts and fuck up the programming interface
drivers/net/sunhme.c:2086:
drivers/scsi/NCR53C9x.c:1770: * how bad the target and/or ESP fucks things up.
drivers/scsi/NCR53C9x.c:2690:
drivers/scsi/esp.c:2575: * how bad the target and/or ESP fucks things up.
drivers/scsi/esp.c:2663: * phase things. We don't want to fuck directly with
drivers/scsi/esp.c:3357:
drivers/scsi/qlogicpti.h:76:/* Am I fucking pedantic or what? */
drivers/sound/aci.c:161:/* The four ACI command types are fucked up. [-:
fs/binfmt_aout.c:313:
fs/jffs/intrep.c:2983: don't fuck up. This is why we have
include/linux/netfilter_ipv4/ipt_limit.h:1 8:
include/linux/netfilter_ipv6/ip6t_limit.h:18 :
lib/vsprintf.c:9: * Wirzenius wrote this portably, Torvalds fucked it up
net/core/netfilter.c:440:
net/ipv4/netfilter/ip_conntrack_core.c:1138:
net/ipv4/netfilter/ip_nat_helper.c:249:
net/ipv4/netfilter/ip_nat_snmp_basic.c:1028 : * (And this is the fucking 'basic' method).
net/ipv4/netfilter/ipt_limit.c:8: * Alexey is a fucking genius?
net/ipv6/netfilter/ip6t_limit.c:8: * Alexey is a fucking genius?
Sound card works fine with no setup on both Linux and Windows. I only needed to update the graphics card in Windows when I installed GTA III (which is a fairly buggy game itself) and that took maybe ten minutes. Linux recognised the graphics card during install in about half that time. The digital camera only worked with one app in Windows but not at all in Linux.
I haven't tried setting up USB 2 or Ethernet devices in Windows or Linux, so I can't speak about them.
Having said that...
My experience with Windows XP is that it's always been able to play DVDs out of the box and with all the USB devices I've ever used. Linux can handle USB, but for DVDs I had to download a separate media player (ogle and mplayer) and it wouldn't handle my softmodem since I couldn't find any Linux drivers for it.
I guess the moral of the story is that it just depends on the luck of the draw.
It still won't recognise the modem. What now?
The point I'm trying to make is, Linux isn't compatible with the modem to start with (though that isn't its fault - Linux drivers should be available for it as well) and that getting it to work isn't easy to do - the ease of use issue.
I believe that the hard way IS necessary. You can't just sweep the problem of dependencies under the carpet; unless you include everything you need with your application (which increases its size and could violate the licence) then you need to keep track of what needs what else and give the user warning before they delete a vital component.
I am not an OSX user, so I can't debate in more detail the finer points of what's wrong with it. However, just because you haven't had dependency problems doesn't mean that other people won't. The reason why OSX worries less about dependencies is because so much is hidden from the user that the system doesn't change enough for dependencies to be a problem.
I am not an IT worker, so you are probably making a more accurate point than I am. However, even if familiarity is more important than ease of use, then Linux is still behind. Since only a very small fraction of computer run Linux and the vast majority run Windows or Mac OS whatever, they will be unfamiliar with the Linux desktop.
1996 is six, seven years ago. It doesn't surprise me that Windows XP doesn't support that. It wouldn't surprise me if no recent operating system supported it.
It came with this PC. Next time I purchase a PC I'll be asking more questions about the modem.
Nope. Hence the reason why I got a serial modem.
I'm not a kernel hacker, either.
And quite frankly, I can't wait.
For the third time, I'm not saying that it's necessarily Linux's fault that the latest and greatest don't run on it. I'm just saying that this is a problem with Linux today. The blame lies at the feat of Microsoft et al.
OK. I've turned off my computer, lifted the case, taken out the internal modem to see what kind it is. Ah - a Lucent PCI modem. Fine. Go to www.linmodems.org, search for half an hour, download the RPM.
$ rpm -i ltmodem-kv_2.4.18_18.8.0-8.26a9-1.i686.rpm
What now?
What's wrong with xpdf, gv, ghostview, kghostview, etc. though?
Nothing.
Exactly. OS X doesn't have all of the games and hardware of Windows. And I'd also argue that OS X doesn't necessarily have all of the ease of use of Windows; I find its GUI confusing and unintuitive compared to GNOME.
Let's take an example - package management. Linux has RPM, apt, and (hopefully in a little while) autopackage. OS X has 'appfolders' instead of packages, does it not? And to install the application you just click and drag? For ease of use? Right. Well, by simplifying the user interface too much, OS X has decided to ignore the problem of dependencies. Boom. Mac OS X starts having a fit just because of some old program you got rid of three months ago and forgot about - AND IT DIDN'T WARN YOU. By contrast, if I do 'rpm -e mozilla', then RPM will start screaming about the packages that rely on it (e.g. Galeon).
This is just one example.