Come on now, get off your high horse for a second and relax.
It does not make you any more of a geek just because something, such as an OS install, is difficult or complicated to do.
I realize that for some reason that I cannot fathom, some people actually enjoy the mundane hours spent searching through your system and editing config files to make your system usable. If this makes you feel better about yourself because you feel superior to those of us who would rather not have to deal with this crap, that's fine by me. But let the rest of us have the option to do something efficiently and easily.
It is this kind of attitude that makes people hesitant to switch to Linux. If the installation is such a high hurdle, a lot of people are not going to be willing to give Linux a chance. They will ask themselves why are they spending hours just trying to make their system bootable when OS X or Windows was already working fine.
I know I thought this when I tried to install Debian, and I am far more knowledgeable than your average user. I'm a comp sci major who has learned a lot about unices from using OS X, yet the Debian install was still so daunting that I nearly gave up midway through. I can't imagine how an average user would be feeling.
Just because something is simple and works well does not mean that people cannot appreciate the complexity. But more importantly, I think that if Linux is ever to be for the masses, it is vital that people are not required to realize the complexity of an OS. When people install OS X, they (well most anyways) don't think, "Oh wow, this is really amazingy that Apple has put out Unix-on-the-desktop and made it so easy to use while still giving people all the power of a Unix." Instead, they say, "Oh cool, I click a couple times, and it just works."
People learning math don't go straight to differential equations. They start with 2+2. The same applies to computers. People don't want to start their Linux experience in/etc trying to find the file they need to edit. They want to go through as painless of an install as possible and see what Linux has to offer like OpenOffice, Mozilla, etc. Most of the distros have realized this, so hopefully soon this ease of use will become a reality.
If someone wants to get unfettered access to the internet, if they have some desire and some knowledge they will always be able to. Even if there was no 802.11 whatsoever, I'm sure anyone who is able to take 4 airplanes and crash 3 into major landmarks is also smart enough to physically tap into someones line and gain the access they would have gained through an 802.11 network.
All this will do is cause the end of 802.11 access for most consumers until better security is devised. Corporations should be able to hire people to secure their wireless networks. Geeks will be able to secure their home networks, but right now that is beyond the average consumer. If I tried to tell my father than he should use an SSH tunnel for better security, he would look at me befuddled.
Re:The day of a single very powerful CPU is over..
on
End In Sight For Alpha
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Granted, many apps don't fully use distributed processing power, but the ones that need most CPU probably do.
Even after considering the extra money spent to develop an app to scale well with parallel processing, the savings from using multiple "cheap" processors compared to one expensive high performance processor will still make it worth it. Not only that, but then you have an app that you can scale up as needed (assuming it was designed well) without having to purchase a whole new set of hardware, but rather just by adding a couple more processors to your current cluster.
Some people have pointed out that Chimera is at 0.6 already. However, as much of an improvement as this is for stability, I think it should be noted that turning of disk caching increases stability as much if not much more. Since I turned off disk caching I have only had one crash of Chimera as opposed to crashing about once every 2-3 days. (This is with the nightly builds that tend to be less stable than the regular release.) Turn of disk caching and enable http pipelining, and Chimera beats the pants off anything out there. It's fast, it has tabs, and it's nearly as stable as the other browsers even though it's a beta.
If he freezes the code for the 12th anniversary of getting his first computer for use with linux, one can only imagine what he gets his wife for their wedding anniversary.
If you are interested in truly protecting your data, you have to realize that making backups is just a start. Next comes protecting those backups from floods, fires, and other catastrophes that might occur. What do you do to protect your backups?
If you lose your backups to fire, flood, or whatever, just make new backups. The percentage of incidents where you would lose both your backups and the originals (given that they are stored in separate places) has to be so minimal that only someone who is either incredibly paranoid or has some really, really important would need to do anything more than create one set of backups.
Even though this bond won't be voted on until Nov 2004 in California, it's about time we work on some decent public transit in this state. Outside of BART and maybe Caltrain, public transportation is horrible out here. Los Angeles is the second biggest city in the country, and it is quite possibly the worst public transit system (or lack thereof) I have ever seen for a big city.
New York has their subway, Boston has the T, and Chicago has the L. I haven't tried Chicago, but in Boston and New York their systems work great. You don't need a car because you can hop on a train and get pretty much anywhere you need to go with no more than a couple blocks of walking.
But unlike these cities, out here we have hardly anything at best. BART is great to get around in the East Bay and to get you to San Francisco, but once you are in the city you are walking pretty much anywhere. Caltrains is a decent option for people in the south bay who want to go to the city, but it is pretty slow and only goes to 4th street, once again leaving you a hefty walk if you are going anywhere other than Pac Bell Park.
However, as bad as it is up north, down south it is an utter joke. The pathetic excuse for a subway system in Los Angeles serves so little of the city that it's practically useless. Other than that, you have an unreliable bus system that couldn't follow a time schedule to save someone's life. I don't know about anything in San Diego, but as far as I know they don't have anything special.
While it won't be put into place for a long time even if the bond gets passed, I'm hoping this is a step in the right direction. Even though this system is state-wide rather than city-wide, I have a feeling that if we can get a really successful model to follow, cities will jump on the bandwagon and start making changes for the better.
I don't if the parent is a troll, a little slow, or some combination thereof, but how the hell did it get modded up to +5?
If you would look at the route map you would see that it covers pretty much all the major parts of the Bay Area. Once in the Bay Area you could use BART and/or Caltrains to get around.
For the Norcal to/from Socal commuters, the rail does go out of the way a little when it goes through the Central Valley, but this is probably a good idea so that it covers growing areas like Fresno and Bakersfield and can get to Merced more easily for when the UC goes in there. A line that branches off after the Grapevine and heads straight to Los Banos rather than through those other stops would speed things up some for those commuters, but I don't think the extra costs would be worth it.
On/., the rage is always "Look I can replace this proprietary setup with Linux/OSS/FSF/whatever." While this can be an excellent idea given the right personel, what about a solution that is more feasible for a successor who is not necessarily a Linux guru to maintain. Given the list of what this guy wants/needs, he could get it all set up (other than the x86's) for under $3,000 using Apple hardware and software. For $2,500, a K-12 school can get an XServe that comes with an unlimited client license for OS X Server. All the server software he lists either comes with OS X Server (usually with a nice GUI) or can be compiled under Darwin. For the 5 Macs, he can get OS X for 70 bucks apiece (education discount again) for a total of $350. So aside from whatever he chooses for the x86 desktops, he could have everything else set up for $2,850. So rather than having a setup where it would require someone with a pretty hefty knowledge of Linux to administer, for a few grand more he could have a setup that is able to take advantage of all that open source software while providing a much greater ease of use.
How did they do that without cheating? By cheating I mean using something other than dominos and/or having a person stop and restart the falling process midway through.
I would say this qualifies both as news for nerds and stuff that matters. The only thing I question is why this is not in YRO. This is about a bill that would let some agencies have unfettered access to your email (news for nerds) without even probable cause (stuff that matters).
On another note, I think it's time I get GPG and start encrypting my email if/when this bill passes.
It's not a problem with the RIAA necessarily, it's a problem with the shitty artists. I don't steal music, and I have about 100 CDs I have bought. I would say on average I've paid $14-15, and I'll be damned if 95% of them weren't well worth the money. For the very large majority of those albums, I can listen to them the whole way through because they are complete albums. For almost all the others (excluding the 5% that I would cosider bad purchases), there's maybe one or two crappy songs I skip. Over the summer I worked construction for 10 bucks an hour, which after taxes basically means I needed two hours of work to get a CD. To me, hauling lumber for two hours is well worth an album I'm going to listen to many, many times. If people would stop buying the crap that is out there on MTV and getting CDs they only want for one song, they wouldn't have as much of a problem paying these prices for their CDs.
The article itself, or the fact that it seems like the majority of posters have failed to:
A) RTFA B) Notice that this is "from the funny-funny-haha dept." C) Read the editors comment Hemos left in the little blurb once again clueing them into the fact that the article is a joke just like the ignorant fools who have started to bitch already.
So a handfull of agents here is no big deal. Stealing is stealing, bandwidth is not exempt.
But it is a big deal because they are sending FBI agents to raid houses for what seems to be not much more than petty theft. I don't know how much bandwidth they stole, but it cannot be worth that much money to warrant the FBI getting involved. If the FBI was called in everytime something that relatively cheap was stolen, they would be overwhelmed. What else are they going to argue? That these were dangerous computer geeks were too hopped up on Mountain Dew for the local police to handle them?
Now that articles are making pre-emptive Simpsons jokes, if they would just include "OMG FP FP FP!!" and "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of...", we could eliminate half the comments on Slashdot.
He spends all that time modding multiple cases and a monitor, and there are no Legos in sight! A truly sweet case mod without Legos is like a peanut butter sandwich without jelly.
...instead WorldCom should be shut down instead to set an example
Well that's great in theory and all, but there's this little issue of the UUnet. For right now it's probably better than a known quantity (as bad as they may be) controls it.
That would only be if it were divided evenly. Most likely anyone with a three letter acronym for a title that begins with a 'C' will see at least a million of that per person and there rest of the service staff will get to bend over and take one for the company.
Ok, say for sake of discussion the top 20 guys take a million apiece, thus leaving $5 million for 300 people. That's nearly $17k per person. If that's bending over for the company, let me be the first one to grab my ankles.
A store can easily be protected by purchasing video cameras. That doesn't make it legal to burglarize a store that just uses lock-and-key.
The problem with your analogy is that they didn't even use a lock and key. Their doors were open for business and now they are getting mad that someone came in before they could put up the big neon "OPEN" sign.
Slashdot Mirror
Come on now, get off your high horse for a second and relax.
/etc trying to find the file they need to edit. They want to go through as painless of an install as possible and see what Linux has to offer like OpenOffice, Mozilla, etc. Most of the distros have realized this, so hopefully soon this ease of use will become a reality.
It does not make you any more of a geek just because something, such as an OS install, is difficult or complicated to do.
I realize that for some reason that I cannot fathom, some people actually enjoy the mundane hours spent searching through your system and editing config files to make your system usable. If this makes you feel better about yourself because you feel superior to those of us who would rather not have to deal with this crap, that's fine by me. But let the rest of us have the option to do something efficiently and easily.
It is this kind of attitude that makes people hesitant to switch to Linux. If the installation is such a high hurdle, a lot of people are not going to be willing to give Linux a chance. They will ask themselves why are they spending hours just trying to make their system bootable when OS X or Windows was already working fine.
I know I thought this when I tried to install Debian, and I am far more knowledgeable than your average user. I'm a comp sci major who has learned a lot about unices from using OS X, yet the Debian install was still so daunting that I nearly gave up midway through. I can't imagine how an average user would be feeling.
Just because something is simple and works well does not mean that people cannot appreciate the complexity. But more importantly, I think that if Linux is ever to be for the masses, it is vital that people are not required to realize the complexity of an OS. When people install OS X, they (well most anyways) don't think, "Oh wow, this is really amazingy that Apple has put out Unix-on-the-desktop and made it so easy to use while still giving people all the power of a Unix." Instead, they say, "Oh cool, I click a couple times, and it just works."
People learning math don't go straight to differential equations. They start with 2+2. The same applies to computers. People don't want to start their Linux experience in
If someone wants to get unfettered access to the internet, if they have some desire and some knowledge they will always be able to. Even if there was no 802.11 whatsoever, I'm sure anyone who is able to take 4 airplanes and crash 3 into major landmarks is also smart enough to physically tap into someones line and gain the access they would have gained through an 802.11 network.
All this will do is cause the end of 802.11 access for most consumers until better security is devised. Corporations should be able to hire people to secure their wireless networks. Geeks will be able to secure their home networks, but right now that is beyond the average consumer. If I tried to tell my father than he should use an SSH tunnel for better security, he would look at me befuddled.
Granted, many apps don't fully use distributed processing power, but the ones that need most CPU probably do.
Even after considering the extra money spent to develop an app to scale well with parallel processing, the savings from using multiple "cheap" processors compared to one expensive high performance processor will still make it worth it. Not only that, but then you have an app that you can scale up as needed (assuming it was designed well) without having to purchase a whole new set of hardware, but rather just by adding a couple more processors to your current cluster.
Some people have pointed out that Chimera is at 0.6 already. However, as much of an improvement as this is for stability, I think it should be noted that turning of disk caching increases stability as much if not much more. Since I turned off disk caching I have only had one crash of Chimera as opposed to crashing about once every 2-3 days. (This is with the nightly builds that tend to be less stable than the regular release.) Turn of disk caching and enable http pipelining, and Chimera beats the pants off anything out there. It's fast, it has tabs, and it's nearly as stable as the other browsers even though it's a beta.
If he freezes the code for the 12th anniversary of getting his first computer for use with linux, one can only imagine what he gets his wife for their wedding anniversary.
The O(1) scheduler.
Most people tend to believe that computers and their associated bits are tools, not support structures for religions.
I'm guessing you have never used emacs or vi.
Hey, when you can't beat em...
...copy them?
If you are interested in truly protecting your data, you have to realize that making backups is just a start. Next comes protecting those backups from floods, fires, and other catastrophes that might occur. What do you do to protect your backups?
If you lose your backups to fire, flood, or whatever, just make new backups. The percentage of incidents where you would lose both your backups and the originals (given that they are stored in separate places) has to be so minimal that only someone who is either incredibly paranoid or has some really, really important would need to do anything more than create one set of backups.
Even though this bond won't be voted on until Nov 2004 in California, it's about time we work on some decent public transit in this state. Outside of BART and maybe Caltrain, public transportation is horrible out here. Los Angeles is the second biggest city in the country, and it is quite possibly the worst public transit system (or lack thereof) I have ever seen for a big city.
New York has their subway, Boston has the T, and Chicago has the L. I haven't tried Chicago, but in Boston and New York their systems work great. You don't need a car because you can hop on a train and get pretty much anywhere you need to go with no more than a couple blocks of walking.
But unlike these cities, out here we have hardly anything at best. BART is great to get around in the East Bay and to get you to San Francisco, but once you are in the city you are walking pretty much anywhere. Caltrains is a decent option for people in the south bay who want to go to the city, but it is pretty slow and only goes to 4th street, once again leaving you a hefty walk if you are going anywhere other than Pac Bell Park.
However, as bad as it is up north, down south it is an utter joke. The pathetic excuse for a subway system in Los Angeles serves so little of the city that it's practically useless. Other than that, you have an unreliable bus system that couldn't follow a time schedule to save someone's life. I don't know about anything in San Diego, but as far as I know they don't have anything special.
While it won't be put into place for a long time even if the bond gets passed, I'm hoping this is a step in the right direction. Even though this system is state-wide rather than city-wide, I have a feeling that if we can get a really successful model to follow, cities will jump on the bandwagon and start making changes for the better.
I don't if the parent is a troll, a little slow, or some combination thereof, but how the hell did it get modded up to +5?
If you would look at the route map you would see that it covers pretty much all the major parts of the Bay Area. Once in the Bay Area you could use BART and/or Caltrains to get around.
For the Norcal to/from Socal commuters, the rail does go out of the way a little when it goes through the Central Valley, but this is probably a good idea so that it covers growing areas like Fresno and Bakersfield and can get to Merced more easily for when the UC goes in there. A line that branches off after the Grapevine and heads straight to Los Banos rather than through those other stops would speed things up some for those commuters, but I don't think the extra costs would be worth it.
Finally, the Northridge quake was in '94.
On /., the rage is always "Look I can replace this proprietary setup with Linux/OSS/FSF/whatever." While this can be an excellent idea given the right personel, what about a solution that is more feasible for a successor who is not necessarily a Linux guru to maintain. Given the list of what this guy wants/needs, he could get it all set up (other than the x86's) for under $3,000 using Apple hardware and software. For $2,500, a K-12 school can get an XServe that comes with an unlimited client license for OS X Server. All the server software he lists either comes with OS X Server (usually with a nice GUI) or can be compiled under Darwin. For the 5 Macs, he can get OS X for 70 bucks apiece (education discount again) for a total of $350. So aside from whatever he chooses for the x86 desktops, he could have everything else set up for $2,850. So rather than having a setup where it would require someone with a pretty hefty knowledge of Linux to administer, for a few grand more he could have a setup that is able to take advantage of all that open source software while providing a much greater ease of use.
"Can you see it now?" "Yes." "Can you see it now?" "Yes." "Can you see it now?" "Yes." "Good..."
!. Do this ...
2. Do that
9. ???^H^H^HCharge money
10. Profit!
Damn, who would have thought that this whole time the way to make money was to *gasp* charge for your services?!
How did they do that without cheating? By cheating I mean using something other than dominos and/or having a person stop and restart the falling process midway through.
(I know, RTFA, but I don't speak German.)
I would say this qualifies both as news for nerds and stuff that matters. The only thing I question is why this is not in YRO. This is about a bill that would let some agencies have unfettered access to your email (news for nerds) without even probable cause (stuff that matters).
On another note, I think it's time I get GPG and start encrypting my email if/when this bill passes.
Apple plans to put out computers with CPUs made by IBM
Umm, have you not heard of the G3? Guess who makes those.
Well, as a bit of a Mac zealot, at least now I know that my kind aren't nearly the most fanatical people using PPC these days.
It's not a problem with the RIAA necessarily, it's a problem with the shitty artists. I don't steal music, and I have about 100 CDs I have bought. I would say on average I've paid $14-15, and I'll be damned if 95% of them weren't well worth the money. For the very large majority of those albums, I can listen to them the whole way through because they are complete albums. For almost all the others (excluding the 5% that I would cosider bad purchases), there's maybe one or two crappy songs I skip. Over the summer I worked construction for 10 bucks an hour, which after taxes basically means I needed two hours of work to get a CD. To me, hauling lumber for two hours is well worth an album I'm going to listen to many, many times. If people would stop buying the crap that is out there on MTV and getting CDs they only want for one song, they wouldn't have as much of a problem paying these prices for their CDs.
The article itself, or the fact that it seems like the majority of posters have failed to:
A) RTFA
B) Notice that this is "from the funny-funny-haha dept."
C) Read the editors comment Hemos left in the little blurb once again clueing them into the fact that the article is a joke just like the ignorant fools who have started to bitch already.
So a handfull of agents here is no big deal. Stealing is stealing, bandwidth is not exempt.
But it is a big deal because they are sending FBI agents to raid houses for what seems to be not much more than petty theft. I don't know how much bandwidth they stole, but it cannot be worth that much money to warrant the FBI getting involved. If the FBI was called in everytime something that relatively cheap was stolen, they would be overwhelmed. What else are they going to argue? That these were dangerous computer geeks were too hopped up on Mountain Dew for the local police to handle them?
Now that articles are making pre-emptive Simpsons jokes, if they would just include "OMG FP FP FP!!" and "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of...", we could eliminate half the comments on Slashdot.
He spends all that time modding multiple cases and a monitor, and there are no Legos in sight! A truly sweet case mod without Legos is like a peanut butter sandwich without jelly.
...instead WorldCom should be shut down instead to set an example
Well that's great in theory and all, but there's this little issue of the UUnet. For right now it's probably better than a known quantity (as bad as they may be) controls it.
That would only be if it were divided evenly. Most likely anyone with a three letter acronym for a title that begins with a 'C' will see at least a million of that per person and there rest of the service staff will get to bend over and take one for the company.
Ok, say for sake of discussion the top 20 guys take a million apiece, thus leaving $5 million for 300 people. That's nearly $17k per person. If that's bending over for the company, let me be the first one to grab my ankles.
A store can easily be protected by purchasing video cameras. That doesn't make it legal to burglarize a store that just uses lock-and-key.
The problem with your analogy is that they didn't even use a lock and key. Their doors were open for business and now they are getting mad that someone came in before they could put up the big neon "OPEN" sign.