I haven't, but I probably won't. As an Internet terminal, IE on 98 is acceptable, with the expense of having to reboot every 3-4 days when the wireless card wedgies itself.
True enough. I could run OpenBSD 2.whatever and Netscape 4 at acceptable speeds, or Windows98 and IE 6 at acceptable speeds. You tell me which is a better compromise.
I point it out because for the longest time, the fanboys have promoted Linux as a way to turn an old computer into a new computer. Now it seems that Linux is a way to turn a new computer into a new computer that nobody offers phone support for.
Is that a good card? Will that play my games? How about the games I play tomorrow? Will it play those well?
I ask those questions a lot, which I why I understand the people who buy an XBox, or Playstation. You may have to buy a new one in 2-3 years, but you're guaranteed to not have to worry whether KungFuTheftAutoEvilDiscoTron II will play at an acceptable frame rate or not.
Then I ask myself the question, "Is this going to be as much fun as playing Neverwinter Nights with a bunch of old D&D buddies once a week?", and then I don't even buy the XBox or Playstation.
I wanted to add weight to this argument. I once put together a system for somebody using a 486 and an old Adaptec SCSI card. This was when Pentiums (and the Pentium Pro) were cutting edge. Running Slackware, it made a seriously nice system. Quirky, but stable and useful.
I have an old Thinkpad 760, but it won't run any of the new distros. I used to be able to run OpenBSD 2.something on it with acceptable speed, but XFree86 made point revision and it stopped being reasonably snappy. Running Firefox on any modern distro, BSD, Linux or otherwise, is painful.
However, I can run Win98 on it with little trouble. Is that a good thing? I don't think so.
I've got T-Mobile's all-you-can-eat GPRS data service and a Nokia 3660. The 3660 is a good phone, but you'll be hard-pressed to find one now.
It syncs with iSync; I can use the phone as a Bluetooth modem that works with my Powerbook and my Palm E2, both over GPRS (33.6K-ish speeds), and as an "analog" phone (at a whopping 9600 baud); and the phone isn't monumentally stupid, though the keypad has tiny, tiny number keys.
As a bonus: I've got an IR ThinkOutside folding keyboard that works with both the phone and the Palm. I can, if I really needed to, SSH from the phone. Opera for mobiles works decently well as a browser. (Due to limited memory, sometimes you have to turn the phone off and then on in order to free up contiguous memory for Opera to work. Avoid installing much on the built-in memory, and you'll do better.) The email client on the Nokia is also not painfully awful.
My suggestion: start with the list of iSync-supported phones and go from there. That's what I did. If you can get a phone with support for the higher-speed wireless data (EDGE), go for it, but the GPRS speeds are adequate for occasional emergency use. (Turn off images.)
I'm sorry, but I think you vastly overestimate the size of this market. I can set off a pretty powerful bomb and not kill anybody in the "retro community". However, I will slaughter a lot of iPod users.
Private companies do not have the absolute right to do whatever they want with your mail. If you sign up to receive mail from someone, and they send you an e-mail, then that e-mail is your property
I'm afraid this is not correct. I know in this day and age of everything-is-a-rightisms that it sounds good, but in practice it's simply untrue. Email is a service that ISPs provide, and they provide it according to their terms of service, which undoubtably includes a "best-effort" clause.
If you wish to receive an email from a mailing list, the thing to do is to ensure that that the email address is in your personal whitelist. AOL, et. al. will make best-efforts to deliver mail otherwise, but they also have a responsibility (and need, BTW) to prevent spam.
(I'm not just blowing smoke either--I'm dealing with the AOL problem now, trying to get on the whitelist for a newsletter that I'm responsible for. I know from which I speak, and while I'm not thrilled, when it comes down to it, it's AOL's servers. It's not their problem that they're popular.)
I'm sorry--you're not interested in a stable ecommerce package? You'd prefer a new point-release every 6 months or so? I take it you don't sell much of anything. You likely don't see the value of an enterprise distro such as RHEL or CentOS either.
Health care for employees means that the company cares about the welfare of their employees.
It also takes the decisions of health care out of the hands of the employee, which works out just like any other 3rd-party payer system--usually poorly.
I'm sorry--didn't Penny Arcade farm out their store to ThinkGeek? So your example of RoR's superiority depends on a site that associates a comic with a blog post?
Well, there is 37signals, who made a nice guestbook. That's certainly new.
Just for your edification, I'm not particularly biased towards PHP. It's just that OSCommerce and phpBB2 are widely used and well-supported. My vast indifference to which programming language to use is only exceeded by my impatience with people who demonstrate irrational prejudice towards programming languages. Then I noticed your username, and promptly got over it.
I've seen a thousand links telling me "here's a great place to learn about Ruby-on-Rails". I haven't seen one link that tells me why there's a compelling reason to drop everything I'm doing and refactor all my work into this fledgeling framework.
On a bang-for-buck analysis, it's better to lace together OSCommerce, phpBB2, and one of the random CMSes in order to produce an actual workable Web site that, you know, does something.
Everything that is "typical" has already been done, and debugged, by other projects. Things that are not typical usually require a lot of thinking, testing, and multiple trips back to the well to get things right. This is not where a framework shines, because it's unlikely the framework has anticipated your need exactly, and you're just as likely to be forced to work around the templates assumptions and quirks.
Put another way, RoR seems to do things that are simple very simply, and it seems to do things that have already been done quite simply. But for new, radically different applications, you're still back to straight programming and hand-writing SQL.
While the differences between RHEL and Fedora Linux, the everyday consumer version, are not great
This is not true. The "Enterprise" label means that the distro places importance on stability, both as it applies to crashes and as it applies to software versions. You won't get a bleeding-edge version of the kernel, and you won't get surprised with a version of PHP that breaks your shit when you run an update. RedHat makes an effort to back-port security fixes to previous versions of software included in its "Enterprise Linux". This is very useful for anybody who keeps a corporate intranet running, or for a person running a Web host in a colo in another state. You don't want your customers to be left without a Web site while you argue with a monkey at your colo after you run yum.
Having used both CentOS and RHEL, I'd definitely recommend CentOS. Having been thouroughly rooted by a RedHat default-installed wuftpd many years ago, I never thought I'd recommend a RedHat Linux. But when you account for what I call the "hit-by-bus" factor, if you're at all considerate of your customers, using a thouroughly widespread and well-understood distro like a RedHat ensures that they can find somebody who can admin it if you go tits-up.
Here's an idea, though: Vote independent, or write in your own name. If enough people protest the system like this, eventually a cantidate will come along to take advantage of this.
Christ. Somebody actually thought this comment was worth posting. Let me try:
"Here's a thought. If enough people wear a duck on their heads, we'll soon see commercially manufactured duck hats at Sears."
It's a common fault among Slashdotter's, too. Look at the frequency at which commenters find the same damn thing funny. Slashdot's been recyling the same jokes and prejudices for years. You think that qualifies as "intelligence"?
Well, you did make a snide insult towards politicians. That, at least, is completely novel.
The monthly fee is what keeps me from both DDO and WoW. I've only got a few hours of game-playing time availble to me per week. I like playing Neverwinter Nights with friends. We can all play on an old P-II running the Linux server on my cable modem. We can play for an hour or two a week. We can swap classes midway, if we find our current class isn't any fun, just by coming in with a DM and forceleveling a new character. We can start from level 1, or jump ahead to level 20 to play at the upper end.
The flexibility is great, and you don't have to trust in fate to find non-asshole Internet players. And best of all, I'm not pressured to play every night to get my money's worth. It's just $15/mo, sure. I dunno about other people, but I'm about $15-20-per-monthed out. NWN's method is superior, IMO.
All of the watches are junk. Some are simply expensive junk. Of what use is a USB storage watch that requires a cable in order to connect to the computer?
While I'm at it, "geek chic" is officially annoying. "Ooh, look at the 'geek cred' I get from wearing a vacuum tube watch! What? What time is it? Well, it'll take a couple of seconds for the tube to heat up, but then I can tell you the time!" What utter shit.
Here's a "geek watch"--it tells time, digitally; stopwatch; alarm; can communicate with your desktop over Bluetooth; has some kind of storage, also accessible via Bluetooth or via a standard USB connector; will sync alarms with iCal/schedule/PDA; can perhaps play a simple game such as Breakout or Othello. Extra-extra features: compass; altimeter; barometer. All of these in a watch would be huge, so select and choose a few. But don't give me some crap watch where it's arduous to tell what fucking time it is. How completely useless.
IMO, a "real geek" will have either a $5 digital watch (that keeps perfect time, and may even have a stopwatch and alarm), or a calculator/databank watch (so they can do bigger math than they can do in their head).
To turn this around: it's pretty calculating that ID proponents would go to the public with only those examples for which there is not, and there is likely to never be, solid historical evidence that allows us to track particular pathways.
What is this? "Please stop pointing out the problems with the theory"?
Well, "Intelligent Design/Creationism" can certainly imply that they are co-equal. But, supposing you used it in the "and/or" sense...
You now claim that ID advocates obfuscate evolution. Which they do not, at least the scientific ones who subscribe to it do not. They fully accept evolution--to an extent. They do not believe that evolution fully explains everything, and as such, they offer a substitution.
You are obfuscating the arguments of ID because it is much easier to simply equate them with Creationism (especially young-Earth creationism) than to come up with fossil evidence or genetic proof of the evolution of the flagella; or the eye; or any of the other examples that ID purports to show design.
Uh, no. There's hardly a consensus opinion on the Old-Earthers and Young-Earthers. I think you're really reaching. And failing, but I didn't want to rub your nose in it.
Fascinating. I took your point, and pondered the religious implications of this styrofoam cup of coffee. I did not come up with anything significant--perhaps you could enlighten me?
I think the Intelligent Design/Creationism advocates have done a superb job obfuscating this.
Congratulations on obfuscating Intelligent Design.
Intelligent Design is not Creationism. Unless you are okay with conflating atheism with evolution, and therefore getting it tossed out of the public schools on church-vs-state reasoning. I'm continually impressed by the argument that ID == Creationism, and therefore isn't science, and therefore I'm a rational genius for disagreeing with it. In logic fallacies, that's called a strawman argument.
You're like the OP--"I'm a highly educated atheist, and therefore I'm always right". It takes a special degree of self-important twat go even suggest such a thing.
By definition, those people who believe in the special creation of Man are not "wingnuts". They're the overwhelming majority. You would be the "wingnut" with your highly unpopular and mean-spirited viewpoint.
But namecalling is always so convincing. You have me convinced! Tell me about your newsletter.
Slashdot Mirror
I haven't, but I probably won't. As an Internet terminal, IE on 98 is acceptable, with the expense of having to reboot every 3-4 days when the wireless card wedgies itself.
FPSes like GoldenEye for the Nintendo64?
I point it out because for the longest time, the fanboys have promoted Linux as a way to turn an old computer into a new computer. Now it seems that Linux is a way to turn a new computer into a new computer that nobody offers phone support for.
I ask those questions a lot, which I why I understand the people who buy an XBox, or Playstation. You may have to buy a new one in 2-3 years, but you're guaranteed to not have to worry whether KungFuTheftAutoEvilDiscoTron II will play at an acceptable frame rate or not.
Then I ask myself the question, "Is this going to be as much fun as playing Neverwinter Nights with a bunch of old D&D buddies once a week?", and then I don't even buy the XBox or Playstation.
I have an old Thinkpad 760, but it won't run any of the new distros. I used to be able to run OpenBSD 2.something on it with acceptable speed, but XFree86 made point revision and it stopped being reasonably snappy. Running Firefox on any modern distro, BSD, Linux or otherwise, is painful.
However, I can run Win98 on it with little trouble. Is that a good thing? I don't think so.
It syncs with iSync; I can use the phone as a Bluetooth modem that works with my Powerbook and my Palm E2, both over GPRS (33.6K-ish speeds), and as an "analog" phone (at a whopping 9600 baud); and the phone isn't monumentally stupid, though the keypad has tiny, tiny number keys.
As a bonus: I've got an IR ThinkOutside folding keyboard that works with both the phone and the Palm. I can, if I really needed to, SSH from the phone. Opera for mobiles works decently well as a browser. (Due to limited memory, sometimes you have to turn the phone off and then on in order to free up contiguous memory for Opera to work. Avoid installing much on the built-in memory, and you'll do better.) The email client on the Nokia is also not painfully awful.
My suggestion: start with the list of iSync-supported phones and go from there. That's what I did. If you can get a phone with support for the higher-speed wireless data (EDGE), go for it, but the GPRS speeds are adequate for occasional emergency use. (Turn off images.)
I'm sorry, but I think you vastly overestimate the size of this market. I can set off a pretty powerful bomb and not kill anybody in the "retro community". However, I will slaughter a lot of iPod users.
Private companies do not have the absolute right to do whatever they want with your mail. If you sign up to receive mail from someone, and they send you an e-mail, then that e-mail is your property
I'm afraid this is not correct. I know in this day and age of everything-is-a-rightisms that it sounds good, but in practice it's simply untrue. Email is a service that ISPs provide, and they provide it according to their terms of service, which undoubtably includes a "best-effort" clause.
If you wish to receive an email from a mailing list, the thing to do is to ensure that that the email address is in your personal whitelist. AOL, et. al. will make best-efforts to deliver mail otherwise, but they also have a responsibility (and need, BTW) to prevent spam.
(I'm not just blowing smoke either--I'm dealing with the AOL problem now, trying to get on the whitelist for a newsletter that I'm responsible for. I know from which I speak, and while I'm not thrilled, when it comes down to it, it's AOL's servers. It's not their problem that they're popular.)
I'm sorry--you're not interested in a stable ecommerce package? You'd prefer a new point-release every 6 months or so? I take it you don't sell much of anything. You likely don't see the value of an enterprise distro such as RHEL or CentOS either.
It also takes the decisions of health care out of the hands of the employee, which works out just like any other 3rd-party payer system--usually poorly.
Well, there is 37signals, who made a nice guestbook. That's certainly new.
Just for your edification, I'm not particularly biased towards PHP. It's just that OSCommerce and phpBB2 are widely used and well-supported. My vast indifference to which programming language to use is only exceeded by my impatience with people who demonstrate irrational prejudice towards programming languages. Then I noticed your username, and promptly got over it.
On a bang-for-buck analysis, it's better to lace together OSCommerce, phpBB2, and one of the random CMSes in order to produce an actual workable Web site that, you know, does something.
Everything that is "typical" has already been done, and debugged, by other projects. Things that are not typical usually require a lot of thinking, testing, and multiple trips back to the well to get things right. This is not where a framework shines, because it's unlikely the framework has anticipated your need exactly, and you're just as likely to be forced to work around the templates assumptions and quirks.
Put another way, RoR seems to do things that are simple very simply, and it seems to do things that have already been done quite simply. But for new, radically different applications, you're still back to straight programming and hand-writing SQL.
This is not true. The "Enterprise" label means that the distro places importance on stability, both as it applies to crashes and as it applies to software versions. You won't get a bleeding-edge version of the kernel, and you won't get surprised with a version of PHP that breaks your shit when you run an update. RedHat makes an effort to back-port security fixes to previous versions of software included in its "Enterprise Linux". This is very useful for anybody who keeps a corporate intranet running, or for a person running a Web host in a colo in another state. You don't want your customers to be left without a Web site while you argue with a monkey at your colo after you run yum.
Having used both CentOS and RHEL, I'd definitely recommend CentOS. Having been thouroughly rooted by a RedHat default-installed wuftpd many years ago, I never thought I'd recommend a RedHat Linux. But when you account for what I call the "hit-by-bus" factor, if you're at all considerate of your customers, using a thouroughly widespread and well-understood distro like a RedHat ensures that they can find somebody who can admin it if you go tits-up.
Christ. Somebody actually thought this comment was worth posting. Let me try:
"Here's a thought. If enough people wear a duck on their heads, we'll soon see commercially manufactured duck hats at Sears."
Well, you did make a snide insult towards politicians. That, at least, is completely novel.
The flexibility is great, and you don't have to trust in fate to find non-asshole Internet players. And best of all, I'm not pressured to play every night to get my money's worth. It's just $15/mo, sure. I dunno about other people, but I'm about $15-20-per-monthed out. NWN's method is superior, IMO.
While I'm at it, "geek chic" is officially annoying. "Ooh, look at the 'geek cred' I get from wearing a vacuum tube watch! What? What time is it? Well, it'll take a couple of seconds for the tube to heat up, but then I can tell you the time!" What utter shit.
Here's a "geek watch"--it tells time, digitally; stopwatch; alarm; can communicate with your desktop over Bluetooth; has some kind of storage, also accessible via Bluetooth or via a standard USB connector; will sync alarms with iCal/schedule/PDA; can perhaps play a simple game such as Breakout or Othello. Extra-extra features: compass; altimeter; barometer. All of these in a watch would be huge, so select and choose a few. But don't give me some crap watch where it's arduous to tell what fucking time it is. How completely useless.
IMO, a "real geek" will have either a $5 digital watch (that keeps perfect time, and may even have a stopwatch and alarm), or a calculator/databank watch (so they can do bigger math than they can do in their head).
What is this? "Please stop pointing out the problems with the theory"?
You now claim that ID advocates obfuscate evolution. Which they do not, at least the scientific ones who subscribe to it do not. They fully accept evolution--to an extent. They do not believe that evolution fully explains everything, and as such, they offer a substitution.
You are obfuscating the arguments of ID because it is much easier to simply equate them with Creationism (especially young-Earth creationism) than to come up with fossil evidence or genetic proof of the evolution of the flagella; or the eye; or any of the other examples that ID purports to show design.
Uh, no. There's hardly a consensus opinion on the Old-Earthers and Young-Earthers. I think you're really reaching. And failing, but I didn't want to rub your nose in it.
That's pretty much it. The rest is philosophy.
Fascinating. I took your point, and pondered the religious implications of this styrofoam cup of coffee. I did not come up with anything significant--perhaps you could enlighten me?
Congratulations on obfuscating Intelligent Design.
Intelligent Design is not Creationism. Unless you are okay with conflating atheism with evolution, and therefore getting it tossed out of the public schools on church-vs-state reasoning. I'm continually impressed by the argument that ID == Creationism, and therefore isn't science, and therefore I'm a rational genius for disagreeing with it. In logic fallacies, that's called a strawman argument.
You're like the OP--"I'm a highly educated atheist, and therefore I'm always right". It takes a special degree of self-important twat go even suggest such a thing.
But namecalling is always so convincing. You have me convinced! Tell me about your newsletter.
You're fooling yourself if you don't think that pure materialistic evolution doesn't have religious implications as well.