I can't tell if you're being pedantic or just ignorant. Yes, technically it doesn't require the root password, but it does require root access, which Ubuntu prefers to provide through asking for the user's own password instead of one master password. That doesn't mean that method of gaining root access can't be easily turned off. In fact there's a pretty gui for doing just that.
Apparently, neither are you. Not all users have effective root access on Ubuntu. It also wouldn't be hard in an enterprise environment to set it up so users could install any software they wanted, but only from an approved repository, and just not put any games in that repository.
At least now we know why people will believe anything they read on the internet---they can't smell the author.
There really is a feeding frenzy going on at the government trough right now, isn't there? If "that smells suspicious" made the cut, what other figures of speech can we get paid to test? I think I'll see if I can get paid to study why feet smell and noses run. Or the scientific difference between shutting up and quieting down.
I don't know if I'm typical, but I still see plenty of commercials. Sometimes I watch live, sometimes I leave it running when my wife uses the commercial break for a bathroom break, sometimes I'll watch a commercial when it catches my eye as I'm fast forwarding. New commercials are not introduced very often, and the vast majority of them I've seen often enough to recognize as they flash past. It still has its intended effect, perhaps moreso because I'm not annoyed by the repetition.
It doesn't matter if the neophyte is doing the typing and clicking or not. If they don't know why they're doing it, they still haven't got a clue about the computer.
Actually, Linux is more like a car that might require some assembly. Whether you assemble it or someone does it for you, once it's together it's as easy to drive as anything.
It's amazing they even bother to pay their workers with that kind of power. Imagine how responsive our government would be if any individual, at any time, for a reasonable amount of effort, could quit paying taxes to it and instead pay taxes and receive services from its competitor.
Yeah, I understood it was meant to be a joke, but Congress works much too fast when it suits them, usually to the people's detriment. Perpetuating misconceptions like that just really bugs me. In this particular case, because opponents of the bill may have done more to let their representatives know it, if they didn't believe it was already too late for Congress to act to delay the transition. Myths do have an effect on people's behavior.
Do I have to say I told you so? I realize it's difficult on slashdot to tell the difference between someone who's just blowing smoke and someone who actually regularly reads the congressional report, for example, but you might want to do your research first next time just in case you happen to be responding to the latter.
Re:Facebook is one of my pigeonholing tools
on
FBML Essentials
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Not to mention if you happen to live thousands of miles away from several of your friends.
Re:I have resisted Facebook and will continue to
on
FBML Essentials
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I am also well beyond those years, but have recently joined Facebook. I wouldn't say it's a platform only for teens, but a platform that is as mature as your friends are. I like it for two reasons:
First, I live far away from where I grew up, and I miss the short casual interactions that naturally come from close proximity. Email, blogs, and even phone calls don't lend themselves as well to things like short offhand comments about a book you're reading.
Second, I was surprised at how quickly it connected me with people I haven't seen in a long time, like since high school. People I wish I hadn't lost track of.
I know the slashdot crowd has a certain amount of counterculture pride, but sometimes people take it too far and miss out on something that is both popular and potentially worthwhile.
I know they already do something similar. When the draconian restrictions on pseudoephedrine were being debated, as a severe allergy sufferer, I did some research on the actual effect of the legislation so I could write an intelligent letter to my representatives. Part of that was knowing how much pseudoephedrine it takes to make a batch of meth , so I could know if the restrictions would do any good in combating meth production or just inconvenience a lot of law abiding allergy sufferers for no reason.
It may be obvious to you, but in my naivete, I googled meth recipes, and came up with nothing except links to rehab facilities and dire warnings that my IP address was logged for the DEA.
I never got a follow up from that experience (that I know of---maybe I'm considered one of the successes on a report in a classified vault somewhere), but I'd be interested to know how effective it was for its intended purpose. Might be an idea to build on for spam or really any sort of social engineering.
Most of the urgency around the "keep the current deadline" side of the argument is that digital TV is more bandwidth efficient, and the reclaimed bandwidth is wanted for public safety communications.
Will it pass?
Probably not, unless they cram it in a popular bill.
Umm, did you miss the part where they have 40 more votes than they need to pass it? It only failed yesterday because it takes two thirds to suspend the rules and pass, which is what they do when a bill is popular enough that they want to skip the cumbersome debate and amendment process. They have time to get through that process before the deadline. It may not pass in its current form, but I wouldn't bet on the deadline staying put. 800,000 voters suddenly not being able to watch TV is not the kind of publicity democrats want right now.
Accepting a statement without proof minimizes the cost of acquiring new information at the expense of increased risk of the information being wrong. The cost of being wrong also varies widely depending on the nature of the information.
For students in a mathematics course, a statement being made by an instructor at an accredited university, backed up by a text from a well-known publisher, is proof enough. Furthermore, not only is the risk of the information being incorrect very small, the likelihood of that misinformation leading to a costly mistake is also very small. The combination is negligible. By insisting on proving every assertion, you are costing a lot of your students' valuable learning time, and providing very little actual benefit in return.
I used to feel the same as you about blind obedience until I had children of my own. Children especially, but even adults to a lesser extent, often don't truly understand the consequences of their decisions until it is too late to avoid them. The costs of not blindly obeying can be very high sometimes. If my kids do not stop the instant I tell them, they could get seriously hurt. I make a point to explain myself afterward, but I need them to blindly obey first.
I know a lot of parents who are afraid to take their children anywhere, because their children do not obey them. In order for them to obey on the urgent things, they must have had practice on mundane things, and too many parents think it is cruel to ask their children to obey mundane requests.
Yes, objectively evaluating a source is an important skill, but it takes a long time to build up enough wisdom and experience to effectively do so. Frankly, some people never get there, and until and unless they do, questioning everything is counterproductive at best and dangerous at worst.
I love KDE, and I love it because of KDE 3.5. Why not keep using that?
What?! That would make you just like those windows users who still use XP. And everyone knows the whole point of Linux is so we can be different from them. Report for re-education immediately.
So, if you need VBscripts or mailmerge, you're out there on the fringe.
That's mostly in response to those who only have an MS office hammer, so every problem looks like a nail. No one needs VBscripts or Microsoft's implementation of mailmerge. They need a tool to fulfill their business requirement of sending out mass mailings or whatever the case may be. Us "zealots" only make fun of those who wed themselves too closely to one of many possible solutions, to the point they are utterly dependent on it.
The OP is lucky his office is so small. It's entirely feasible to audit every office document they have, and put it into one of the following bins: discard, keep read-only copy (i.e. print to pdf), easily converted to OO.org, hard to convert to OO.org.
My guess is there will be very few documents in the latter category, but without knowing what's in there, he can't make a good report on the feasibility of switching.
If his report shows that Sue in marketing regularly does mail merge for 10,000 customers and OO.org is painfully inadequate with that number, there are more options than concluding Sue needs MS Office. In my opinion, no office suite is probably the best tool for a job that size.
And, point of order, why are we comparing a 2001 version (2004 if you count SP2) of Windows to a 2008 version of Ubuntu?
Maybe because the vast majority of Windows users run XP and the vast majority of Ubuntu users run recent versions?
The one thing many scientifically-minded people fail to take away from their college course in benchmarking is that a rigorously scientific comparison is often not the best comparison. Who cares what the latest and greatest, optimally tuned, super fair, scientific benchmark says if an average user experience is far different?
Yeah, speaking of mysterious voices, the first time I ever used a modem when I was 18, I had unplugged the phone in my excitement to test it out. So the modem picks up to dial, and in addition to some of the usual screeches, I hear it say "hello?" a few times. Well, as it was my first time ever hearing a modem connect, I didn't know any better, so I thought it was some sort of speech synthesis letting me know it was doing a handshake routine or something. It didn't connect, though, so I hung it up and tried again.
Same thing happened with the hellos, only this time it also said my name. Well, I was dialing a friend's BBS, so I figured his computer knew it was me, and was signaling my modem somehow to identify itself. Still didn't pass any data, though, but on the third try I finally got through, but no hellos. Strange. It must only do that when there's an error.
So I'm talking with my Grandma a few days later, and she tells me she tried to call, but the phone kept ringing and ringing forever, then kept screeching and beeping at her "quite rudely," so she finally gave up. Well, I hadn't dialed her number, and my modem wasn't set up to answer, so I still didn't think it was my fault. Then it dawned on me that the phone had been unplugged, so I wouldn't hear it ring, and she must have been the mysterious artificial voice I was unsuccessfully trying to get working again. Interesting that she happened to call at that exact moment.
So, a Bachelor's and Master's degree in computer engineering later, I can now design a modem from the silicon through the software, but when people ask me "stupid" questions, I try not to forget I was once the clueless luser who heard voices coming from his computer.
No offense to tech support people, but compared to other professionals like mechanics and doctors, tech support is not a job that truly qualified people stay in very long. People get a lot of useless if not downright bad advice from tech support. Couple that with the bizarre-sounding (to them) things you ask them to do, and it's no wonder they are reluctant.
We should start a thread about annoying people on the other end of the phone.
Me: I need the IP address for the DNS server please.
Tech Support: What version of Windows are you using?
Me: I don't use Windows. I use Linux, but I know right where to put it in. Can you just tell me the address?
Tech Support: But our service only works with Windows. Do you have a Windows computer you could use?
Me: I haven't had a Windows partition since 1998, but I know it works on Linux because it was working up until last week when my hard drive crashed. You don't have to know anything about Linux. Just tell me the IP address for the DNS server, and I'll take care of the rest.
Tech Support: So you have Windows 98?
Me: Sure, why not?
[Tech support goes through the motions while I pretend to click and type stuff in, until he gets to the part I need.]
I don't know. Things are getting so bad that I'm starting to think prices are set by supply and demand rather than random slashdotters' arbitrary ideas of fair prices.
I don't know. We haven't had a windows partition at home since 2000, but 2008 was the year my not tech savvy wife bought an MP3 player without my knowledge, the first one for our family, and called me at work asking which program to use to put songs on it. I told her, expecting I would get a lot of questions and problems to debug when I got home.
When I didn't get such questions, I thought she just didn't get around to trying it, but to my surprise she pulled it out later and was already done downloading songs without a single question from me. "It was easy," she said when I asked.
If that doesn't mark The Year of the Linux Desktop, I don't know what does.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't tell if you're being pedantic or just ignorant. Yes, technically it doesn't require the root password, but it does require root access, which Ubuntu prefers to provide through asking for the user's own password instead of one master password. That doesn't mean that method of gaining root access can't be easily turned off. In fact there's a pretty gui for doing just that.
Apparently, neither are you. Not all users have effective root access on Ubuntu. It also wouldn't be hard in an enterprise environment to set it up so users could install any software they wanted, but only from an approved repository, and just not put any games in that repository.
At least now we know why people will believe anything they read on the internet---they can't smell the author.
There really is a feeding frenzy going on at the government trough right now, isn't there? If "that smells suspicious" made the cut, what other figures of speech can we get paid to test? I think I'll see if I can get paid to study why feet smell and noses run. Or the scientific difference between shutting up and quieting down.
I don't know if I'm typical, but I still see plenty of commercials. Sometimes I watch live, sometimes I leave it running when my wife uses the commercial break for a bathroom break, sometimes I'll watch a commercial when it catches my eye as I'm fast forwarding. New commercials are not introduced very often, and the vast majority of them I've seen often enough to recognize as they flash past. It still has its intended effect, perhaps moreso because I'm not annoyed by the repetition.
It doesn't matter if the neophyte is doing the typing and clicking or not. If they don't know why they're doing it, they still haven't got a clue about the computer.
Actually, Linux is more like a car that might require some assembly. Whether you assemble it or someone does it for you, once it's together it's as easy to drive as anything.
It's amazing they even bother to pay their workers with that kind of power. Imagine how responsive our government would be if any individual, at any time, for a reasonable amount of effort, could quit paying taxes to it and instead pay taxes and receive services from its competitor.
I don't know...the rate of people who abruptly stop watching TV the day they die is alarmingly high. I'm not ready to take that risk.
Yeah, I understood it was meant to be a joke, but Congress works much too fast when it suits them, usually to the people's detriment. Perpetuating misconceptions like that just really bugs me. In this particular case, because opponents of the bill may have done more to let their representatives know it, if they didn't believe it was already too late for Congress to act to delay the transition. Myths do have an effect on people's behavior.
Do I have to say I told you so? I realize it's difficult on slashdot to tell the difference between someone who's just blowing smoke and someone who actually regularly reads the congressional report, for example, but you might want to do your research first next time just in case you happen to be responding to the latter.
Not to mention if you happen to live thousands of miles away from several of your friends.
I am also well beyond those years, but have recently joined Facebook. I wouldn't say it's a platform only for teens, but a platform that is as mature as your friends are. I like it for two reasons:
First, I live far away from where I grew up, and I miss the short casual interactions that naturally come from close proximity. Email, blogs, and even phone calls don't lend themselves as well to things like short offhand comments about a book you're reading.
Second, I was surprised at how quickly it connected me with people I haven't seen in a long time, like since high school. People I wish I hadn't lost track of.
I know the slashdot crowd has a certain amount of counterculture pride, but sometimes people take it too far and miss out on something that is both popular and potentially worthwhile.
I know they already do something similar. When the draconian restrictions on pseudoephedrine were being debated, as a severe allergy sufferer, I did some research on the actual effect of the legislation so I could write an intelligent letter to my representatives. Part of that was knowing how much pseudoephedrine it takes to make a batch of meth , so I could know if the restrictions would do any good in combating meth production or just inconvenience a lot of law abiding allergy sufferers for no reason.
It may be obvious to you, but in my naivete, I googled meth recipes, and came up with nothing except links to rehab facilities and dire warnings that my IP address was logged for the DEA.
I never got a follow up from that experience (that I know of---maybe I'm considered one of the successes on a report in a classified vault somewhere), but I'd be interested to know how effective it was for its intended purpose. Might be an idea to build on for spam or really any sort of social engineering.
Most of the urgency around the "keep the current deadline" side of the argument is that digital TV is more bandwidth efficient, and the reclaimed bandwidth is wanted for public safety communications.
Umm, did you miss the part where they have 40 more votes than they need to pass it? It only failed yesterday because it takes two thirds to suspend the rules and pass, which is what they do when a bill is popular enough that they want to skip the cumbersome debate and amendment process. They have time to get through that process before the deadline. It may not pass in its current form, but I wouldn't bet on the deadline staying put. 800,000 voters suddenly not being able to watch TV is not the kind of publicity democrats want right now.
Accepting a statement without proof minimizes the cost of acquiring new information at the expense of increased risk of the information being wrong. The cost of being wrong also varies widely depending on the nature of the information.
For students in a mathematics course, a statement being made by an instructor at an accredited university, backed up by a text from a well-known publisher, is proof enough. Furthermore, not only is the risk of the information being incorrect very small, the likelihood of that misinformation leading to a costly mistake is also very small. The combination is negligible. By insisting on proving every assertion, you are costing a lot of your students' valuable learning time, and providing very little actual benefit in return.
I used to feel the same as you about blind obedience until I had children of my own. Children especially, but even adults to a lesser extent, often don't truly understand the consequences of their decisions until it is too late to avoid them. The costs of not blindly obeying can be very high sometimes. If my kids do not stop the instant I tell them, they could get seriously hurt. I make a point to explain myself afterward, but I need them to blindly obey first.
I know a lot of parents who are afraid to take their children anywhere, because their children do not obey them. In order for them to obey on the urgent things, they must have had practice on mundane things, and too many parents think it is cruel to ask their children to obey mundane requests.
Yes, objectively evaluating a source is an important skill, but it takes a long time to build up enough wisdom and experience to effectively do so. Frankly, some people never get there, and until and unless they do, questioning everything is counterproductive at best and dangerous at worst.
What?! That would make you just like those windows users who still use XP. And everyone knows the whole point of Linux is so we can be different from them. Report for re-education immediately.
It's pretty sad when you have to do a double-take in your news reader to make sure you're not reading an onion article.
That's mostly in response to those who only have an MS office hammer, so every problem looks like a nail. No one needs VBscripts or Microsoft's implementation of mailmerge. They need a tool to fulfill their business requirement of sending out mass mailings or whatever the case may be. Us "zealots" only make fun of those who wed themselves too closely to one of many possible solutions, to the point they are utterly dependent on it.
The OP is lucky his office is so small. It's entirely feasible to audit every office document they have, and put it into one of the following bins: discard, keep read-only copy (i.e. print to pdf), easily converted to OO.org, hard to convert to OO.org.
My guess is there will be very few documents in the latter category, but without knowing what's in there, he can't make a good report on the feasibility of switching.
If his report shows that Sue in marketing regularly does mail merge for 10,000 customers and OO.org is painfully inadequate with that number, there are more options than concluding Sue needs MS Office. In my opinion, no office suite is probably the best tool for a job that size.
Maybe because the vast majority of Windows users run XP and the vast majority of Ubuntu users run recent versions?
The one thing many scientifically-minded people fail to take away from their college course in benchmarking is that a rigorously scientific comparison is often not the best comparison. Who cares what the latest and greatest, optimally tuned, super fair, scientific benchmark says if an average user experience is far different?
And early next year, someone will post a comment on Slashdot claiming Google copied the idea from Microsoft.
And get modded informative.
Yeah, speaking of mysterious voices, the first time I ever used a modem when I was 18, I had unplugged the phone in my excitement to test it out. So the modem picks up to dial, and in addition to some of the usual screeches, I hear it say "hello?" a few times. Well, as it was my first time ever hearing a modem connect, I didn't know any better, so I thought it was some sort of speech synthesis letting me know it was doing a handshake routine or something. It didn't connect, though, so I hung it up and tried again.
Same thing happened with the hellos, only this time it also said my name. Well, I was dialing a friend's BBS, so I figured his computer knew it was me, and was signaling my modem somehow to identify itself. Still didn't pass any data, though, but on the third try I finally got through, but no hellos. Strange. It must only do that when there's an error.
So I'm talking with my Grandma a few days later, and she tells me she tried to call, but the phone kept ringing and ringing forever, then kept screeching and beeping at her "quite rudely," so she finally gave up. Well, I hadn't dialed her number, and my modem wasn't set up to answer, so I still didn't think it was my fault. Then it dawned on me that the phone had been unplugged, so I wouldn't hear it ring, and she must have been the mysterious artificial voice I was unsuccessfully trying to get working again. Interesting that she happened to call at that exact moment.
So, a Bachelor's and Master's degree in computer engineering later, I can now design a modem from the silicon through the software, but when people ask me "stupid" questions, I try not to forget I was once the clueless luser who heard voices coming from his computer.
No offense to tech support people, but compared to other professionals like mechanics and doctors, tech support is not a job that truly qualified people stay in very long. People get a lot of useless if not downright bad advice from tech support. Couple that with the bizarre-sounding (to them) things you ask them to do, and it's no wonder they are reluctant.
We should start a thread about annoying people on the other end of the phone.
Me: I need the IP address for the DNS server please.
Tech Support: What version of Windows are you using?
Me: I don't use Windows. I use Linux, but I know right where to put it in. Can you just tell me the address?
Tech Support: But our service only works with Windows. Do you have a Windows computer you could use?
Me: I haven't had a Windows partition since 1998, but I know it works on Linux because it was working up until last week when my hard drive crashed. You don't have to know anything about Linux. Just tell me the IP address for the DNS server, and I'll take care of the rest.
Tech Support: So you have Windows 98?
Me: Sure, why not?
[Tech support goes through the motions while I pretend to click and type stuff in, until he gets to the part I need.]
I don't know. Things are getting so bad that I'm starting to think prices are set by supply and demand rather than random slashdotters' arbitrary ideas of fair prices.
I don't know. We haven't had a windows partition at home since 2000, but 2008 was the year my not tech savvy wife bought an MP3 player without my knowledge, the first one for our family, and called me at work asking which program to use to put songs on it. I told her, expecting I would get a lot of questions and problems to debug when I got home.
When I didn't get such questions, I thought she just didn't get around to trying it, but to my surprise she pulled it out later and was already done downloading songs without a single question from me. "It was easy," she said when I asked.
If that doesn't mark The Year of the Linux Desktop, I don't know what does.