I got really tired of untwisting all those ties on my babie's toys. So whenever we get a new toy, I take out the wire cutters. Makes everything go much faster. The ones that are worse are the black plastic disk with the screw that goes into the toy. You need an actual screw driver to get the packaging off.
If you want to test for compatibility with Safari, then you may want to try Konquerer. They have the same code base AFAIK. However, I've found a few differences between the two browsers, but it's probably about as close as you're going to get to Safari without buying a Mac. If you have a team of developers, and the all need access to one MAC, you can have multiple users logged into a single computer, each with their own VNC session, which means that multiple developers can use the same computer at the same time. Basically you log in each user with fast user switching, and each user starts a VNC Process on a different port. The only downside is that the users have to be logged in again and the VNC process restarted each time the computer is restarted. But I find that if you're just testing Websites, you don't need to restart your computer very much.
Ok, then here's my submission for a "voting machine". The voting machine is a wooden stick with a piece of graphite down the center which can be used to mark a piece of paper. The paper is marked by person, with an X, using said wooden stick. The ballot is placed in a box, but the voter, which will later be read by an optical scanner. The optical scanner, in this case, is a person, who looks at paper, counts it, records the count for each candidate. People are allowed to watch the optical scanner work to ensure it is counting correctly.
Did you watch Hacking Democracy? Do you know how hard it is to get a full recount done? In the voting area shown in the film, you get to count 3% of the ballots that are chosen "randomly" and if the results are different then a full recount can be done. However, the ballot selections weren't really random, and with the other hacks possible, it doesn't really matter anyway. With the memory card trick, you could do the -1, +1 votes thing, and then count 3% of the votes, and they would all be counted correctly, but until you counted all the votes, you wouldn't know that the machine had actually given you a bad count.
I think it's kind of a way of laundering money. You sell drugs or other illegal items, then you pay off someones credit card, then use that credit card to buy things. Money becomes harder to trace. The authorities usually like to trace the bank accounts of suspected criminals to see how much money is going in and out. However, if the criminal uses other peoples accounts to spend their money, then the authorities can't trace it.
If "X" is a valid signature, then so is See ID. Many people's signatures don't look anything like their actual name, and are often illegible anyway. See ID should be a perfectly acceptable signature.
I wonder if that's valid in Canada as well. Just about every grocery store I see says they require ID on credit card transactions over some specified amount. Usually something low like $50. If this is in the merchant agreement, then I think they should have their credit card privileges taken away for 1 month or something if they are asking for ID. I guess the problem is that they can still ask, but they can't refuse you if you don't present ID.
That's very strange. At the two banks I use, I am required to swipe my card and enter my PIN for any transaction. I thought this was standard procedure. I couldn't imagine the bank allowing people to take out money without entering the PIN, or providing some other method of identification.
Unfortunately, some of use have websites directed at customers who won't go for the "Blame MS" approach. Some people just want it to look right. They don't want to switch browsers, and they don't want to have to do anything to resolve the problem. If the website doesn't look right on their browser, then it is the fault of the person who designed said website. This may not be completely right, since it is MS's fault, but that's not the way most people think.
I don't know if having the world settle on one single file format will help much. I mean, for the web, we have HTML+CSS, but it seems like Microsoft has some "bugs" in their implementation, and since IE is the most popular browser, we're all forced to make webpages that adhere to the MS way of doing things. I imagine the same thing might happen, if ODF was mandated as the standard. MS would make a bug-ridden ODF reader/writer for MSWord, which would still be what most people would use, because that's what they're familiar with, and we'd be stuck in the same boat as we are with HTML. If you didn't use MS Word, then you would end up having a document that didn't look quite the way it's supposed to.
If you want lots of packages, and you like Mandriva, you might want to try using the PLF sources, via EasyURPMI. They provide tons of packages, and I very rarely find a piece of software for Linux that isn't available via this channel. Makes installing software a breeze.
I've seen this with Mandriva, however I've also seen it with just about every other distro out there. Most of the time the bugs in Mandriva are acceptable. I tried SUSE 10.1, and the updating software was completely broken on a fresh install, and this is an acknowledged bug. How this got out the door without being caught is beyond me. With Fedora I've had problems with X not starting up on a fresh install, even when I tried using the standard VESA driver. I admit that sometimes Mandriva is a little buggy, although 2006 and 2007 seem to be pretty good, but it's not like they are the only ones, and at least the bugs aren't as catastrophic as they seem to be with other distros.
However, I'm willing to pay extra for the Analog signal. I could get a satellite package with pretty much all the same channels for cheaper than I'm paying for my digital cable. However, the first 70 channels also come over analog, which means I can split the signal, tape stuff on my VCR, or watch TV in another room without paying for an extra digital decoder. There's plenty of advantages to having the analog signal still there. Sometimes the digital signal goes down, but the analog signal still works.
I guess you need to shop elsewhere for your cables. Cables For Less has HDMI Cables for $12 (3 foot) and $16 (6 foot). Just because the big retailers charge tons for cables, doesn't mean you have to pay those prices.
My biggest problem with HDTV is that it just means my cable bill is bigger at the end of every month. I already spend $50 on cable TV. I don't think having a High Def picture is worth the extra per month cost. Sure, if I could get a nice TV and be done with it, then maybe I could buy into HDTV, but digital cable has already made my cable bill expensive enough.
I don't think anybody said it was really easy. But you listen to the Gentoo fan boys talk about how emerge makes everything so easy. I tried it, couldn't even get it installed. Then I found out your supposed to do a Live CD to do the install, not the universal "Install" CD, and that the Quick install Guide isn't really all that quick. Maybe it would be a nice distro if I ever got it to work right.
Have they factored in the amount of energy required to create the layer of bubbles?Seems like creating a layer of bubbles around the hull of a giant ship would take quite a bit of energy.
Re:Comment on Fedora in general.
on
Fedora Linux
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I never found Ubuntu all the user friendly. I don't have any idea where it gets that reputation from. I've never found Fedora to be that much better. The best distro I've found so far is Mandriva. It's the only distro that consistently (for the last 5 years) that I've been able to install and have everything "Just Work". I have tried other distros because every else is raving about Ubuntu, or Fedora, or Suse, or Gentoo, but I haven't found that any of them work as well as Mandriva has.
I'm not talking about people knowing how a computer works. But they should know how the programs they use work. It would be like people operating cars without know how the signal lights work, or how the cruise control works. Sure you can get from point A to point B, but you don't really know how to use the car. And you could have a lot easier time using your car if you would learn how to do things properly. It's all about making stuff seem easier, so that people never need to learn the "hard (fast) way" to get things done. From the first time somebody thought it would be easier to put a bold icon on the top of the screen to turn the font bold, instead of the users having to read the manual, and figure out they could type CTRL+B, computers have been getting less efficient. Sure the shortcut is still there, but there's a bunch of people being unproductive because they are doing things the slow way. I've seen tons of people go to their mouse and right click to copy, or even worse, go in search of the edit menu, when they should really be pressing CTRL+C. This is the problem with productivity with computers. Nobody wants to learn the fast way to do things, so we're stuck waiting for everybody to search around in menus for the option they want.
Computers have actually gotten less efficient as we've tried to make them more "user friendly". Wordperfect 5.1 was amazing. You want to do something Ctrl+Alt+F5, there you go, now back to work. All this adding of GUIs and other stuff actually make us less efficient. You can work so much faster when you're doing everything with keystrokes. I don't know where the idea of "you don't have to know anything to use a computer" came from. I think people should have to learn how to use things. Nobody tries to sell you a table saw and says, don't bother reading the manual or getting any training, this thing is easy to use. Nobody does that with a car either. Granted you can die or get seriously hurt in those situations, but it still illustrates a point. Computers are complex, and for people to think they can operate one without any training is just being naive. Sure you'll get some stuff done, but you will reach a limit very fast.
If copyright lasts for so long, then where is the incentive for the author to actually create more works? If you can write a single book/song/whatever, and live off the royalties for the next 95 years, then where is your incentive to create more works? Copyright shouldn't give someone the ability to live their entire life off of something they created when they were 20. They should have to continue to work and produce new works if they want to make a living. Copyright should last 5-10 years from initial publication, after that, write a new song, or get a job doing something else.
I think the reason that you can say the TCO of windows is lower is because you can pay some brain dead monkey to be a sysadmin, and have it work. It won't be well optimized, and it won't be completely secure, but for the most part it will work. Now consider Linux. You can't just really pay some guy with an MCDBA/MC??? or equivalent to operate your systems, because there isn't really any equivalent of that in the Linux world. Even most self taught Linux people are more knowledgeable than a lot of the "Microsoft Certified" people out there. So, because the Linux tech actually has more talent, and actually deserves to get paid more. It's like comparing the average Perl programmer to the average.Net programmer. On average, the Perl programmers will be more skilled and therefore more expensive. There's a lot of.Net programmers who took some 4 month course, and think they are now programmers, and a lot of companies hire these people. Studies show that.Net developers cost less, because they are less qualified. Not to say all.Net developers are idiots, but working in.Net development myself, I have to say there's quite a few of them.
Quebec french is it's own little dialect of french, which is mangled french mixed with english. They user words like "Beurre de Peanut" and "Pickle" instead of "Beurre D'Arachide" and "Cornichon". It's really a problem, considering those of us outside of Quebec are taught proper french, and then when we grow up, aren't able to talk with any of the quebecers.
It's really interesting because they give the french manuals for the english games in Ontario too, or at least in Ottawa. Some of the games require major reading to get through the game, and having the manual won't help. Games like Chibi-robo require you to be able to read and understand english to be able to play the game. But they include the french instruction manual, just to comply with the law.
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I got really tired of untwisting all those ties on my babie's toys. So whenever we get a new toy, I take out the wire cutters. Makes everything go much faster. The ones that are worse are the black plastic disk with the screw that goes into the toy. You need an actual screw driver to get the packaging off.
Which is basically what I said, that I've found a few differences, but if you really aren't going to buy Mac, then that's as close as you will get.
If you want to test for compatibility with Safari, then you may want to try Konquerer. They have the same code base AFAIK. However, I've found a few differences between the two browsers, but it's probably about as close as you're going to get to Safari without buying a Mac. If you have a team of developers, and the all need access to one MAC, you can have multiple users logged into a single computer, each with their own VNC session, which means that multiple developers can use the same computer at the same time. Basically you log in each user with fast user switching, and each user starts a VNC Process on a different port. The only downside is that the users have to be logged in again and the VNC process restarted each time the computer is restarted. But I find that if you're just testing Websites, you don't need to restart your computer very much.
Ok, then here's my submission for a "voting machine". The voting machine is a wooden stick with a piece of graphite down the center which can be used to mark a piece of paper. The paper is marked by person, with an X, using said wooden stick. The ballot is placed in a box, but the voter, which will later be read by an optical scanner. The optical scanner, in this case, is a person, who looks at paper, counts it, records the count for each candidate. People are allowed to watch the optical scanner work to ensure it is counting correctly.
Did you watch Hacking Democracy? Do you know how hard it is to get a full recount done? In the voting area shown in the film, you get to count 3% of the ballots that are chosen "randomly" and if the results are different then a full recount can be done. However, the ballot selections weren't really random, and with the other hacks possible, it doesn't really matter anyway. With the memory card trick, you could do the -1, +1 votes thing, and then count 3% of the votes, and they would all be counted correctly, but until you counted all the votes, you wouldn't know that the machine had actually given you a bad count.
I think it's kind of a way of laundering money. You sell drugs or other illegal items, then you pay off someones credit card, then use that credit card to buy things. Money becomes harder to trace. The authorities usually like to trace the bank accounts of suspected criminals to see how much money is going in and out. However, if the criminal uses other peoples accounts to spend their money, then the authorities can't trace it.
If "X" is a valid signature, then so is See ID. Many people's signatures don't look anything like their actual name, and are often illegible anyway. See ID should be a perfectly acceptable signature.
I wonder if that's valid in Canada as well. Just about every grocery store I see says they require ID on credit card transactions over some specified amount. Usually something low like $50. If this is in the merchant agreement, then I think they should have their credit card privileges taken away for 1 month or something if they are asking for ID. I guess the problem is that they can still ask, but they can't refuse you if you don't present ID.
That's very strange. At the two banks I use, I am required to swipe my card and enter my PIN for any transaction. I thought this was standard procedure. I couldn't imagine the bank allowing people to take out money without entering the PIN, or providing some other method of identification.
Unfortunately, some of use have websites directed at customers who won't go for the "Blame MS" approach. Some people just want it to look right. They don't want to switch browsers, and they don't want to have to do anything to resolve the problem. If the website doesn't look right on their browser, then it is the fault of the person who designed said website. This may not be completely right, since it is MS's fault, but that's not the way most people think.
I don't know if having the world settle on one single file format will help much. I mean, for the web, we have HTML+CSS, but it seems like Microsoft has some "bugs" in their implementation, and since IE is the most popular browser, we're all forced to make webpages that adhere to the MS way of doing things. I imagine the same thing might happen, if ODF was mandated as the standard. MS would make a bug-ridden ODF reader/writer for MSWord, which would still be what most people would use, because that's what they're familiar with, and we'd be stuck in the same boat as we are with HTML. If you didn't use MS Word, then you would end up having a document that didn't look quite the way it's supposed to.
If you want lots of packages, and you like Mandriva, you might want to try using the PLF sources, via EasyURPMI. They provide tons of packages, and I very rarely find a piece of software for Linux that isn't available via this channel. Makes installing software a breeze.
I've seen this with Mandriva, however I've also seen it with just about every other distro out there. Most of the time the bugs in Mandriva are acceptable. I tried SUSE 10.1, and the updating software was completely broken on a fresh install, and this is an acknowledged bug. How this got out the door without being caught is beyond me. With Fedora I've had problems with X not starting up on a fresh install, even when I tried using the standard VESA driver. I admit that sometimes Mandriva is a little buggy, although 2006 and 2007 seem to be pretty good, but it's not like they are the only ones, and at least the bugs aren't as catastrophic as they seem to be with other distros.
However, I'm willing to pay extra for the Analog signal. I could get a satellite package with pretty much all the same channels for cheaper than I'm paying for my digital cable. However, the first 70 channels also come over analog, which means I can split the signal, tape stuff on my VCR, or watch TV in another room without paying for an extra digital decoder. There's plenty of advantages to having the analog signal still there. Sometimes the digital signal goes down, but the analog signal still works.
I guess you need to shop elsewhere for your cables. Cables For Less has HDMI Cables for $12 (3 foot) and $16 (6 foot). Just because the big retailers charge tons for cables, doesn't mean you have to pay those prices.
My biggest problem with HDTV is that it just means my cable bill is bigger at the end of every month. I already spend $50 on cable TV. I don't think having a High Def picture is worth the extra per month cost. Sure, if I could get a nice TV and be done with it, then maybe I could buy into HDTV, but digital cable has already made my cable bill expensive enough.
I don't think anybody said it was really easy. But you listen to the Gentoo fan boys talk about how emerge makes everything so easy. I tried it, couldn't even get it installed. Then I found out your supposed to do a Live CD to do the install, not the universal "Install" CD, and that the Quick install Guide isn't really all that quick. Maybe it would be a nice distro if I ever got it to work right.
Have they factored in the amount of energy required to create the layer of bubbles?Seems like creating a layer of bubbles around the hull of a giant ship would take quite a bit of energy.
I never found Ubuntu all the user friendly. I don't have any idea where it gets that reputation from. I've never found Fedora to be that much better. The best distro I've found so far is Mandriva. It's the only distro that consistently (for the last 5 years) that I've been able to install and have everything "Just Work". I have tried other distros because every else is raving about Ubuntu, or Fedora, or Suse, or Gentoo, but I haven't found that any of them work as well as Mandriva has.
I'm not talking about people knowing how a computer works. But they should know how the programs they use work. It would be like people operating cars without know how the signal lights work, or how the cruise control works. Sure you can get from point A to point B, but you don't really know how to use the car. And you could have a lot easier time using your car if you would learn how to do things properly. It's all about making stuff seem easier, so that people never need to learn the "hard (fast) way" to get things done. From the first time somebody thought it would be easier to put a bold icon on the top of the screen to turn the font bold, instead of the users having to read the manual, and figure out they could type CTRL+B, computers have been getting less efficient. Sure the shortcut is still there, but there's a bunch of people being unproductive because they are doing things the slow way. I've seen tons of people go to their mouse and right click to copy, or even worse, go in search of the edit menu, when they should really be pressing CTRL+C. This is the problem with productivity with computers. Nobody wants to learn the fast way to do things, so we're stuck waiting for everybody to search around in menus for the option they want.
Computers have actually gotten less efficient as we've tried to make them more "user friendly". Wordperfect 5.1 was amazing. You want to do something Ctrl+Alt+F5, there you go, now back to work. All this adding of GUIs and other stuff actually make us less efficient. You can work so much faster when you're doing everything with keystrokes. I don't know where the idea of "you don't have to know anything to use a computer" came from. I think people should have to learn how to use things. Nobody tries to sell you a table saw and says, don't bother reading the manual or getting any training, this thing is easy to use. Nobody does that with a car either. Granted you can die or get seriously hurt in those situations, but it still illustrates a point. Computers are complex, and for people to think they can operate one without any training is just being naive. Sure you'll get some stuff done, but you will reach a limit very fast.
If copyright lasts for so long, then where is the incentive for the author to actually create more works? If you can write a single book/song/whatever, and live off the royalties for the next 95 years, then where is your incentive to create more works? Copyright shouldn't give someone the ability to live their entire life off of something they created when they were 20. They should have to continue to work and produce new works if they want to make a living. Copyright should last 5-10 years from initial publication, after that, write a new song, or get a job doing something else.
I think the reason that you can say the TCO of windows is lower is because you can pay some brain dead monkey to be a sysadmin, and have it work. It won't be well optimized, and it won't be completely secure, but for the most part it will work. Now consider Linux. You can't just really pay some guy with an MCDBA/MC??? or equivalent to operate your systems, because there isn't really any equivalent of that in the Linux world. Even most self taught Linux people are more knowledgeable than a lot of the "Microsoft Certified" people out there. So, because the Linux tech actually has more talent, and actually deserves to get paid more. It's like comparing the average Perl programmer to the average .Net programmer. On average, the Perl programmers will be more skilled and therefore more expensive. There's a lot of .Net programmers who took some 4 month course, and think they are now programmers, and a lot of companies hire these people. Studies show that .Net developers cost less, because they are less qualified. Not to say all .Net developers are idiots, but working in .Net development myself, I have to say there's quite a few of them.
Quebec french is it's own little dialect of french, which is mangled french mixed with english. They user words like "Beurre de Peanut" and "Pickle" instead of "Beurre D'Arachide" and "Cornichon". It's really a problem, considering those of us outside of Quebec are taught proper french, and then when we grow up, aren't able to talk with any of the quebecers.
It's really interesting because they give the french manuals for the english games in Ontario too, or at least in Ottawa. Some of the games require major reading to get through the game, and having the manual won't help. Games like Chibi-robo require you to be able to read and understand english to be able to play the game. But they include the french instruction manual, just to comply with the law.