How refreshing. A Slashdot article about a worm exploiting Windows, without the usual childish jibes. Or FUD. Or spelling mistakes. Well done, Dynamoo!
I havn't tried GIMP, so I don't know if it falls into that category or not, but if the UI was designed to function in the same method as common Windows or Mac graphics applications (read Photoshop or PSP), I doubt people would complain.
So I'm going to complain.
The one thing that's pissed me off most about GIMP (and I've only started using it recently, under Windows) is that there's a File menu but it doesn't have a Save or Save As option. The image window has no menu at all. I'm supposed to figure out that right-clicking the image will give me a menu with File in it,and pick up Save from there. Why?
A close second is pissing me off right now. I started GIMP, opened the File menu to make sure I wasn't talking out of my ass, and then Alt-Tabbed back into Mozilla. The damned menu is sitting on top of Slashdot, as I type this comment. Why? Dear God, why?
I tolerate it because I can't afford Photoshop, and the GIMP lets me use the PanoTools filters. That doesn't mean I like it. Nor does it mean that I shouldn't expect the damned basics to work properly, or at least the same as everything else.
"Struts is such a big over-engineered pile of shit."
I was going to mod this Insightful, but then thought, nah. You see, it doesn't go quite far enough. I've used Struts, once, and that was once too many. Repeat after me, children:
Struts is the festering soiled nappy of the bastard spawn of Satan.
Over 2 years with the current Win2K install (what the hell is the original poster doing?), and it's behaving relatively well (touch wood), but if I had to start from scratch tomorrow I'd probably do something like this:
Norton Internet Security
Mozilla
Netscape 4 (an abortion, I only use it for testing)
ICQ (might go for Trillian if it supports ICQ chat now)
Bryce 4
GIMP
Apache
PHP
MySQL
PFE
AdAware would follow soon but isn't critical to getting up and running - I recently ran it for the first time and had only a handful of nasties (single figures).
Other stuff would get downloaded and installed on a Bint (Bollocks! I need that!) basis.
Heh - as I was typing this Norton caught a copy of Netsky inbound. Can't believe I used to work without AV or firewall, what the hell was I thinking?
In the case of Kim Jong Il, we probably can't do #2. He is not ready to accept anyone's assistance as far as improving the lives of his people.
Ah. So that's why the North Korean government has appealed for international humanitarian assistance to deal with the mess left by that little train oops, and why there's a UN humanitarian mission on its way there right now?
Insightful, my ass. Anti-Anti-America != Insightful.
Damn, now I've done it, I'm sticking up for the evil commies. I'll send you a postcard from Cuba.
Of course! If it isn't accurate immediately, you simply refine it and post it again in a couple of weeks. Once you've had about 4 dupes, you should be getting pretty darned accurate...
the justice system should be required to get a search warrent [sic] to get access to that black box. This means the need to show probable cause that says the need to get access to the box. And just being in an accident is not probable cause.
If I crash my car badly enough that the police are involved, I'll have to undergo a routine breath test (I'm in.uk). I don't see how taking data from a black box to see if I was speeding is any different from taking data from my breath to see if I'd been drinking. I was also breathalysed after being caught speeding, and thought nothing of it. This is also routine (not the speeding, the breath test).
They should need to show evidence that you were in fact in violation of some law and that the black box could provide the proof of that violation.
If they don't smell alcohol on my breath and I can walk straight, what evidence do they have that I was over the drink/drive limit? How do they get "probable cause"? The breath test is routine, whether you reek of whisky or not - and I don't see any harm in a black-box check also being routine.
Of course, I might disagree if I were convicted on what the box said. I guess I'll just have to crash hard enough to wreck the black box:)
Of course it is open source, so if you don't like it you can change it yourself.
Except I can't. I don't have the time, knowledge or inclination. The software or the OS is a tool to aid me in my chosen (or paid) activity. Time spent changing the tools is time I could have been enjoying or earning.
Im my last job, they moved us over from WinNT to Red Hat with KDE. For a while I had two machines sitting on my desk. On one occasion I wanted to print something double-sided. I forget the specifics, but if I wanted to print double-sided from the Linux/KDE machine I had to type a fucking lpr command complete with all the relevant switches. (But it isn't in a shell, it's in a nice box with an OK button underneath so it must be usable, right?) Or I could unlock the Windows box and select Double Sided on a set of radio buttons.
You seem to be saying that I should re-write the relevant part of KDE to give me all those command line options as a nice pointy-clicky interface, if that's what I want. And I can see your point. But my point is, when I can pay for something that does what I want, and when most of my gripes with OSS are with basic usability issues, why on earth would I hack KDE to bits? I will pay someone to do the interface properly, and if he happens to be Bill Gates, that's just tough for OSS.
I'm considered by my friends and family to be a geek. If the software or the OS isn't usable, and I won't rip it apart, does anyone here seriously think my Dad will? Do you think my Dad's going to read through man pages to teach himself how to print? I tried that and still chose to print from the Windows machine. This is what OSS is up against, and (as has been discussed elsewhere in this topic) until the usability is at a level where people would pay for the product, no Joe Public person is going to tolerate it even if he's paid nothing. I'm certainly not going near KDE again, that left a nasty taste in my mouth.
(Mods: This is not intended as flamebait or trolling, but it's hard to express the strength of my feeling without sounding like it is!)
I want to know just how big of a rock can drop on my office overnight without destroying me in my house.
If I could enter two sets of lat/long co-ordinates, select how much damage I'm prepared to take, and get a blast zone overlaid onto a map, that would be cool.
I believe that if Shakespeare were alive today, he'd be working in Hollywood, pumping out those rare summer blockbusters with enough intelligence to entertain the intellectual snobs (like me) while simultaneously having enough guns, explosions, and sex to make it interesting.
My God.... My primary school teacher called me that when I was 8 - because I didn't like any of the books aimed at 8-year-olds. Life was hell for months after that. Great to finally see someone admitting to being an intellectual snob!
But you find guns, explosions and sex to be only interesting, not entertaining?:-)
There's no way to make someone hate reading faster than english classes.
For me, it was English classes where I not only read the work in question (not usually a problem), but was then forced to pick through another book that told me what I was supposed to think the original author meant.
I tend to devour books very quickly, then spend several weeks digesting them to get the depth that I missed while doing the visual download. I am perfectly capable of working out what a book might have been about for myself, and - while I'd be quite happy to discuss it - I'm absolutely not going to regurgitate someone else's opinion just to pass some exam.
In most subjects I got straight A's, except for the odd B where I really couldn't be bothered. English Lit, though, was a borderline pass every term - and I think that was only because they didn't have the heart to fail me. Same with PE, but that's not a subject:-)
This is true, but there certainly aren't several GB of sectors reserved for errors.:)
Errors like installing Windows XP, Word, Excel, Outlook, those would probably consume several GB. If these abortions come pre-installed, I guess you could say the space was "reserved for errors".
I'm not a Linux person, so mod me into oblivion if you want to.:P I run Windows, my parents run Windows. I had Linux/KDE at work, found the learning curve steep, and wouldn't want to put my parents through it.
The biggest problem I've had is in convincing them that viruses, security, etc., are a problem for them, and that they need to be worried (well, mostly Dad, since Mum tends to stay offline and play Tetris). I must be paranoid and scaremongering - after all, what kind of fool buys a UPS for his home PC?! If that's not tinfoil-hat-paranoid, what is? So trying to convince Dad that he should get one of his tech-literate friends (I live at the other end of the country) to sort him out with at least AV and firewall was, ultimately, futile.
Futile, that is, until one afternoon I found 7 emails in my inbox, all with the same size attachment, all from people Dad knows - none of whom have my address. Christ. Picked up the phone... "Dad, you have a virus."
Took a long time to convince him. Then another half an hour to determine that it was most likely Klez. Then three hours (on my phone bill) to talk him through downloading and running a disinfection tool. Throughout, I was getting anger and disbelief that it could possibly have happened to him, rants about the sort of people that would write this stuff (not just Klez, but Windows too!).... everything except, "I wish I'd installed that anti-virus software like you said..."
After all that was done, I'd had enough. So I laid down the law. "I've told you before to sort it out. If you'd had AV on there, this would not have happened. I will not do this again, and I will not support anything to do with this machine unless and until you get someone to install what I've told you to." (Felt great, talking to my Dad like he talked to me when I was 5!)
Took two days of refusing to talk about computers, during which time he was continually running the disinfection tool as all the people he'd infected re-infected him, but eventually he went out and bought Norton Internet Security, and got someone to set it all up. He still whinges about the cost, even though he sees it saving his ass every day - but at least now he pays attention when I say something is important.
The web site sucks ass but the products look pretty damn cool. They also make headlight-activated LED road studs - seen these on the motorway north of Brighton, you can turn your headlights off and drive in total darkness at 85mph, following the LEDs (till you run into the other idiot doing the same thing)...
Slashdot Mirror
So, which virus or worm did you write? :-)
Monday: Float about and do stuff
Tuesday: Float about and do stuff
Wednesday: Float about and do stuff
Thursday: Float about and do stuff
Friday: Float about and do stuff
Saturday: It's the weekend! Float about and do stuff
Sunday: Float about and put next week's calendar in
I'm not convinced by the eyebrows, at all. The skin is damned good though.
Somebody needs their ass kicked over this one. Hopefully nobody dies as a result.
Dude, that would have to be one hell of an ass-kicking...
Fine, but would anyone in the media these days know what to do with a dictionary, .com or otherwise?
How refreshing. A Slashdot article about a worm exploiting Windows, without the usual childish jibes. Or FUD. Or spelling mistakes. Well done, Dynamoo!
Of course, then came the comments... :-)
I havn't tried GIMP, so I don't know if it falls into that category or not, but if the UI was designed to function in the same method as common Windows or Mac graphics applications (read Photoshop or PSP), I doubt people would complain.
So I'm going to complain.
The one thing that's pissed me off most about GIMP (and I've only started using it recently, under Windows) is that there's a File menu but it doesn't have a Save or Save As option. The image window has no menu at all. I'm supposed to figure out that right-clicking the image will give me a menu with File in it,and pick up Save from there. Why?
A close second is pissing me off right now. I started GIMP, opened the File menu to make sure I wasn't talking out of my ass, and then Alt-Tabbed back into Mozilla. The damned menu is sitting on top of Slashdot, as I type this comment. Why? Dear God, why?
I tolerate it because I can't afford Photoshop, and the GIMP lets me use the PanoTools filters. That doesn't mean I like it. Nor does it mean that I shouldn't expect the damned basics to work properly, or at least the same as everything else.
Would that be a radio antenna on its head?
Hax0rus, anyone?
"Struts is such a big over-engineered pile of shit."
I was going to mod this Insightful, but then thought, nah. You see, it doesn't go quite far enough. I've used Struts, once, and that was once too many. Repeat after me, children:
Struts is the festering soiled nappy of the bastard spawn of Satan.
Ugh. Now wash your mouths out with soap.
Over 2 years with the current Win2K install (what the hell is the original poster doing?), and it's behaving relatively well (touch wood), but if I had to start from scratch tomorrow I'd probably do something like this:
AdAware would follow soon but isn't critical to getting up and running - I recently ran it for the first time and had only a handful of nasties (single figures).
Other stuff would get downloaded and installed on a Bint (Bollocks! I need that!) basis.Heh - as I was typing this Norton caught a copy of Netsky inbound. Can't believe I used to work without AV or firewall, what the hell was I thinking?
In the case of Kim Jong Il, we probably can't do #2. He is not ready to accept anyone's assistance as far as improving the lives of his people.
Ah. So that's why the North Korean government has appealed for international humanitarian assistance to deal with the mess left by that little train oops, and why there's a UN humanitarian mission on its way there right now?
Insightful, my ass. Anti-Anti-America != Insightful.
Damn, now I've done it, I'm sticking up for the evil commies. I'll send you a postcard from Cuba.
Funny. (Score:4, Funny)
Ah, this is the secret. I really must stop using Flamebait, Overrated and Troll as subjects!
Of course! If it isn't accurate immediately, you simply refine it and post it again in a couple of weeks. Once you've had about 4 dupes, you should be getting pretty darned accurate...
the justice system should be required to get a search warrent [sic] to get access to that black box. This means the need to show probable cause that says the need to get access to the box. And just being in an accident is not probable cause.
If I crash my car badly enough that the police are involved, I'll have to undergo a routine breath test (I'm in .uk). I don't see how taking data from a black box to see if I was speeding is any different from taking data from my breath to see if I'd been drinking. I was also breathalysed after being caught speeding, and thought nothing of it. This is also routine (not the speeding, the breath test).
They should need to show evidence that you were in fact in violation of some law and that the black box could provide the proof of that violation.
If they don't smell alcohol on my breath and I can walk straight, what evidence do they have that I was over the drink/drive limit? How do they get "probable cause"? The breath test is routine, whether you reek of whisky or not - and I don't see any harm in a black-box check also being routine.
Of course, I might disagree if I were convicted on what the box said. I guess I'll just have to crash hard enough to wreck the black box :)
Of course it is open source, so if you don't like it you can change it yourself.
Except I can't. I don't have the time, knowledge or inclination. The software or the OS is a tool to aid me in my chosen (or paid) activity. Time spent changing the tools is time I could have been enjoying or earning.
Im my last job, they moved us over from WinNT to Red Hat with KDE. For a while I had two machines sitting on my desk. On one occasion I wanted to print something double-sided. I forget the specifics, but if I wanted to print double-sided from the Linux/KDE machine I had to type a fucking lpr command complete with all the relevant switches. (But it isn't in a shell, it's in a nice box with an OK button underneath so it must be usable, right?) Or I could unlock the Windows box and select Double Sided on a set of radio buttons.
You seem to be saying that I should re-write the relevant part of KDE to give me all those command line options as a nice pointy-clicky interface, if that's what I want. And I can see your point. But my point is, when I can pay for something that does what I want, and when most of my gripes with OSS are with basic usability issues, why on earth would I hack KDE to bits? I will pay someone to do the interface properly, and if he happens to be Bill Gates, that's just tough for OSS.
I'm considered by my friends and family to be a geek. If the software or the OS isn't usable, and I won't rip it apart, does anyone here seriously think my Dad will? Do you think my Dad's going to read through man pages to teach himself how to print? I tried that and still chose to print from the Windows machine. This is what OSS is up against, and (as has been discussed elsewhere in this topic) until the usability is at a level where people would pay for the product, no Joe Public person is going to tolerate it even if he's paid nothing. I'm certainly not going near KDE again, that left a nasty taste in my mouth.
(Mods: This is not intended as flamebait or trolling, but it's hard to express the strength of my feeling without sounding like it is!)
And pigs _can_ fly.
DAMN those police helicopters!
I want to know just how big of a rock can drop on my office overnight without destroying me in my house.
If I could enter two sets of lat/long co-ordinates, select how much damage I'm prepared to take, and get a blast zone overlaid onto a map, that would be cool.
Grrr. It undid them anyway. Never mind. :P
To blame all anti-American sentiment on any one thing is just as stupid.
One thing like, umm, I dunno... America?
Sommerfeldt set about to find a way to drown out the whinny noise from built-in fans that cool computers and other electronic devices.
Did he try a fan with less horsepower?
I believe that if Shakespeare were alive today, he'd be working in Hollywood, pumping out those rare summer blockbusters with enough intelligence to entertain the intellectual snobs (like me) while simultaneously having enough guns, explosions, and sex to make it interesting.
My God.... My primary school teacher called me that when I was 8 - because I didn't like any of the books aimed at 8-year-olds. Life was hell for months after that. Great to finally see someone admitting to being an intellectual snob!
But you find guns, explosions and sex to be only interesting, not entertaining? :-)
There's no way to make someone hate reading faster than english classes.
For me, it was English classes where I not only read the work in question (not usually a problem), but was then forced to pick through another book that told me what I was supposed to think the original author meant.
I tend to devour books very quickly, then spend several weeks digesting them to get the depth that I missed while doing the visual download. I am perfectly capable of working out what a book might have been about for myself, and - while I'd be quite happy to discuss it - I'm absolutely not going to regurgitate someone else's opinion just to pass some exam.
In most subjects I got straight A's, except for the odd B where I really couldn't be bothered. English Lit, though, was a borderline pass every term - and I think that was only because they didn't have the heart to fail me. Same with PE, but that's not a subject :-)
This is true, but there certainly aren't several GB of sectors reserved for errors. :)
Errors like installing Windows XP, Word, Excel, Outlook, those would probably consume several GB. If these abortions come pre-installed, I guess you could say the space was "reserved for errors".
I'm not a Linux person, so mod me into oblivion if you want to. :P I run Windows, my parents run Windows. I had Linux/KDE at work, found the learning curve steep, and wouldn't want to put my parents through it.
The biggest problem I've had is in convincing them that viruses, security, etc., are a problem for them, and that they need to be worried (well, mostly Dad, since Mum tends to stay offline and play Tetris). I must be paranoid and scaremongering - after all, what kind of fool buys a UPS for his home PC?! If that's not tinfoil-hat-paranoid, what is? So trying to convince Dad that he should get one of his tech-literate friends (I live at the other end of the country) to sort him out with at least AV and firewall was, ultimately, futile.
Futile, that is, until one afternoon I found 7 emails in my inbox, all with the same size attachment, all from people Dad knows - none of whom have my address. Christ. Picked up the phone... "Dad, you have a virus."
Took a long time to convince him. Then another half an hour to determine that it was most likely Klez. Then three hours (on my phone bill) to talk him through downloading and running a disinfection tool. Throughout, I was getting anger and disbelief that it could possibly have happened to him, rants about the sort of people that would write this stuff (not just Klez, but Windows too!).... everything except, "I wish I'd installed that anti-virus software like you said..."
After all that was done, I'd had enough. So I laid down the law. "I've told you before to sort it out. If you'd had AV on there, this would not have happened. I will not do this again, and I will not support anything to do with this machine unless and until you get someone to install what I've told you to." (Felt great, talking to my Dad like he talked to me when I was 5!)
Took two days of refusing to talk about computers, during which time he was continually running the disinfection tool as all the people he'd infected re-infected him, but eventually he went out and bought Norton Internet Security, and got someone to set it all up. He still whinges about the cost, even though he sees it saving his ass every day - but at least now he pays attention when I say something is important.
Something like these?
The web site sucks ass but the products look pretty damn cool. They also make headlight-activated LED road studs - seen these on the motorway north of Brighton, you can turn your headlights off and drive in total darkness at 85mph, following the LEDs (till you run into the other idiot doing the same thing)...