Outrageous! Anything that keeps Slashdotters happy on a cold, lonely night is a 'device' in my book.
Re:Why has /. turned into Digg?
on
Ask Rob Malda
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Why has the number of technical articles dropped so much over the years? IOW - why are you trying to turn/. into Digg?
Oh, come on. Slashdot may suck at times, but Digg is an utter mess. The majority of the stories posted on the front page of Digg usually resembles an exclamation mark orgy, whoever posts the most wins automatically. The comment system is irritating at best, and really useful comments are rare. Someone once said that he reads Digg for the stories, and Slashdot for the comments. Basically, Digg is Fark.com without the humor, and Slashdot is lightyears away from turning into Digg.
Re:The question everyone wants to ask
on
Ask Rob Malda
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· Score: 5, Funny
Seriously is there anything that doesn t turn into a large public dispute when the open source community and their overly large egos are involved Whether its constant squabling over scheduler FUD Linus Torvalds saying that security professional are just running around "wanging opinions" people freaking out about GPLv2 vs GPLv3 vs BSD or this latest issue it seems like we have several large ridiculous disputes a day. Why can t people in the FOSS movement just get along They like to bash Microsoft and talk about how it is attacking other developers companies 3rd party groups but FOSS can t even get along within its own movement. At least Microsoft doesn t attack itself.
What makes you think such behavior only applies to specific groups? Have you been to a Windows forum lately? I visit a DSRL forum regularly, and the Nikon and Canon camps jump down each others' throats regularly. Have you watched a political discussion on TV lately? It's just the way it is. Bigger movements sometimes gain too much momentum, interest groups sometimes get too emotional, fanboys tend to yell a lot. It's a lamentable fact of social life, but it is hardly specific to F/OSS.
Excuse my ignorance, but this open source licensing still confuses me. Can a distribution have both BSD-type and GPL-type licenses bundled together? Could there be a potential conflict in the mechanics of how both are used?
I'm not quite sure what you mean. Do you mean on an application level? If so, the answer is yes. It's what FreeBSD does (so do the other BSDs), they also ship some GNU utilities alongside the BSD kernel and userland, which obviously are under the GPL.
What exactly does "uninformed" as opposed to "informed" voting mean, or more precisely: How can I know if I really am informed, even when I'm generally interested in politics and pay attention to what's going on? I know it's easy to deduce a politician's general stance on things by watching/reading interviews and speeches, but that's not enough to be really informed now, is it?
And regarding actually paying attention to the content of said speeches and interviews: politicians have shown that they usually cannot be trusted, that they will promise almost anything during election campaigns to get more votes, that they often have a tendency to turn 180 degrees once they're established in office, that they can be bribed, that they lie, etc.
So, what truly constitutes "being informed"? I have the feeling that the majority of votes out there actually are uninformed ones.
I can't believe the submitter used the words "private members" in his summary, thus sending hordes of virgin Slashdotters into a never-ending giggle fit. How utterly irresponsible.
Re:A lot more is necessary...
on
AIDS Can Fight AIDS
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· Score: 4, Interesting
... and then we need to wait for the patents to expire so that the people who actually need it can afford what the drug companies will charge.
Uhm, you do know that you can do system administration on the command-line in Linux too, right? (And I bet that there are GUI administration tools for the BSD's too, for that matter...
Yes, Mr. Romero, that's quite obvious, and I think you're misunderstanding what I wrote. I wasn't complaining about the lack of a CLI on Linux or the lack of GUI utilities in BSD. Most of the big Linux distributions come with pretty installers and widgets, and they encourage their users to use those instead of the CLI, so naturally most Linux users who try out one of the BSDs for the first time are rather taken aback by the focus on the CLI and are quick to consider the BSDs old-fashioned and not up the par with Linux. Yes, there's PC-BSD and DesktopBSD, both of them provide nice installers and GUIs, and I also know of Webmin; I was merely pointing out that I find working on the CLI in BSD more comfortable than clicking widgets in Linux, probably due to BSD's more central approach regarding the system layout, compare/etc/rc.conf in BSD to all the runlevel config files in Linux. I never got the hang of them, but again, it's a matter of taste. I just don't want new users to be discouraged by the lack of widgets in BSD as opposed to major Linux distros.
Here's a pretty interesting thread by a BSD user who had to learn to use Debian at work and shares his experiences. He sums up the differences between FreeBSD and Debian quite nicely. Makes for an interesting read.
I've read the press release. What do I get by installing this that I can't get in a 2 year-old Gentoo Linux installation? The BSD's have always been a bit of an enigma to me. Could someone enlighten me?
I'm not sure if this is flamebait or if you really want to be enlightened, but if the BSDs "have always been a bit of an enigma" to you, why not install one of them in a spare partition or fire up a VMware session, and play around with them for awhile? You really don't gain much by reading release information only, you know?
The BSDs provide everything you've come to love in Linux: stability, security, and probably a little more consistency especially regarding system administration and configuration. Linux and the BSDs are both fine systems, but maybe you'll prefer how BSD handles things. I honestly find it easier and more comfortable to do system administration via the CLI on BSD than via the various GUI administration tools in Linux, but that's just a matter of taste.
So, don't just dismiss NetBSD just because a release information page doesn't provide a detailed list of reasons why NetBSD is better than a 2 year old Gentoo installation. Try it out. Get your hands dirty and be "enlightened".
The fish stocks are declining to the point of extinction simply because the human population is too large. There is not enough fish to satiate the appetites of all 6 billion people.
True, but there doesn't need to be enough fish to feed 6 billion people. There are many other food sources, and as usual, a healthy mix does the trick.
Buying farm-raised fish is not the answer. To raise such fish, the farmers harvest other fish from the oceans in order to feed the fish on the farms. The end result is still the depletion of the wildlife in the oceans.
I'm no expert on this, but I am sure researchers can find a way to feed farm fish from sources other than ocean fish, and I'm sure it's already done today to a certain degree.
The only and correct solution is to stop growing the human population. However, no one wants to talk about over-population because talking about it usually elicits accusations of "bigot" or "racist".
Over-population is not a problem in itself, it's entirely a human-made problem because we lacked the foresight to provide an infrastucture that allows for scalability when we built cities and communities. I've seen calculations that asserted that feeding the world's population would be no problem if all resources (both human and natural) were used in a sensible manner, and wouldn't be a problem for years to come. Of course, over-population will be a serious threat once a certain limit is reached, but we are far from reaching it.
The political mantra in the USA is that growing the population is wonderful. Both the "Wall Street Journal" (WSJ) and the "New York Times" (NYT) supports it. Both the WSJ and the NYT argue that unfettered immigration enriches everyone; talk about over-population runs contrary to unfettered immigration.
The West thinks growing the population is wonderful because we're afraid of the East. China is huge and we can't control it, India is following quickly, and some day even the African continent might become a serious contender. Obviously, the Wests answer to this is grow as much as possible.
Over-population reminds me of global warming. Both are very serious problems, yet most people just do not feel the immediacy and seriousness of these problems. So, they hesitate to do anything that is substantive in fixing these problems -- until the day that the huge calamity (i.e. famine or environmental disaster) hits.
Yes, you are right, but to counter those problems, we must first analyse them correctly.
This has to be correct. Aren't predictions of what's going to happen 40 years in the future always correct? No?
Are they ever? Even once?
So, I take it you're still waiting for your delivery of the flying car that the rest of us has been enjoying for years now? Trust me, it's totally worth the wait.
Less Supply = Higher Price
Higher Price = Less Demand
Less Demand = Fish Population Increases
If a can of tuna went for $300 dollars because of a tuna shortage, I bet a lot of people would start cutting back on their tuna consumption.
It doesn't always work that way. For example, real caviar is so expensive that only very few people can afford it, yet many types of sturgeon are endangered, and we have to resort to other means (such as aquaculture) to keep the species from becoming extinct.
What I'm trying to say is, demand and overfishing aren't the only factors at work here. Pollution, global warming, geological changes play a role, too.
You don't have to validate in order to download, but it does require it once you start the install.
I refuse to install it, so I wouldn't know, but thanks for the info. It's interesting to see how serious they take their *GA checks, what with WGA and soon OGA, and even having to validate for unimportant apps. I wonder where this will lead to.
So I have to go through an annoying and possibly bogus WGA check and pray it doesn't result in a false positive if I want to download Windows Defender, you know, a security tool, but I they impose no such checks if I want to download a simple DRM-infested media player? Nice priorities there, Microsoft.
I'm not a web designer. I do know, however, the difference between HTML and XHTML (Wikipedia can be so incredibly useful), but I don't quite understand the advantages of XHTML over HTML. Wikipedia notes this:
Whereas HTML is an application of SGML, a very flexible markup language, XHTML is an application of XML, a more restrictive subset of SGML. Because they need to be well-formed (syntactically correct), XHTML documents allow for automated processing to be performed using a standard XML library--unlike HTML, which requires a relatively complex, lenient, and generally custom parser (though an SGML parser library could possibly be used).
To laymen like me, this sounds rather cryptic. Could any of you web gurus please elaborate, and/or list other advantages of XHTML?
How can they say it leaves no trail when it's based on IE? As far as I know, IE still keeps the browsing history in index.dat which cannot be deleted because it is locked by Windows. I doubt that has changed.
Slashdot Mirror
Fool! I'm not from Georgia.
How odd. I had the exact same conversation with my wife over her spending habits.
Oh, get out, you're such a sympathy whore.
I've never understood all the fuss about the chicken and egg problem - they both taste great.
What exactly does "uninformed" as opposed to "informed" voting mean, or more precisely: How can I know if I really am informed, even when I'm generally interested in politics and pay attention to what's going on? I know it's easy to deduce a politician's general stance on things by watching/reading interviews and speeches, but that's not enough to be really informed now, is it?
And regarding actually paying attention to the content of said speeches and interviews: politicians have shown that they usually cannot be trusted, that they will promise almost anything during election campaigns to get more votes, that they often have a tendency to turn 180 degrees once they're established in office, that they can be bribed, that they lie, etc.
So, what truly constitutes "being informed"? I have the feeling that the majority of votes out there actually are uninformed ones.
I can't believe the submitter used the words "private members" in his summary, thus sending hordes of virgin Slashdotters into a never-ending giggle fit. How utterly irresponsible.
We can genetically modify idiots to fight other idiots!
Yeah, but the idea is not patentable, since Congress has prior art.
Here's a pretty interesting thread by a BSD user who had to learn to use Debian at work and shares his experiences. He sums up the differences between FreeBSD and Debian quite nicely. Makes for an interesting read.
The BSDs provide everything you've come to love in Linux: stability, security, and probably a little more consistency especially regarding system administration and configuration. Linux and the BSDs are both fine systems, but maybe you'll prefer how BSD handles things. I honestly find it easier and more comfortable to do system administration via the CLI on BSD than via the various GUI administration tools in Linux, but that's just a matter of taste.
So, don't just dismiss NetBSD just because a release information page doesn't provide a detailed list of reasons why NetBSD is better than a 2 year old Gentoo installation. Try it out. Get your hands dirty and be "enlightened".
I'm no expert on this, but I am sure researchers can find a way to feed farm fish from sources other than ocean fish, and I'm sure it's already done today to a certain degree.
Over-population is not a problem in itself, it's entirely a human-made problem because we lacked the foresight to provide an infrastucture that allows for scalability when we built cities and communities. I've seen calculations that asserted that feeding the world's population would be no problem if all resources (both human and natural) were used in a sensible manner, and wouldn't be a problem for years to come. Of course, over-population will be a serious threat once a certain limit is reached, but we are far from reaching it.
The West thinks growing the population is wonderful because we're afraid of the East. China is huge and we can't control it, India is following quickly, and some day even the African continent might become a serious contender. Obviously, the Wests answer to this is grow as much as possible.
Yes, you are right, but to counter those problems, we must first analyse them correctly.
It doesn't always work that way. For example, real caviar is so expensive that only very few people can afford it, yet many types of sturgeon are endangered, and we have to resort to other means (such as aquaculture) to keep the species from becoming extinct. What I'm trying to say is, demand and overfishing aren't the only factors at work here. Pollution, global warming, geological changes play a role, too.
So I have to go through an annoying and possibly bogus WGA check and pray it doesn't result in a false positive if I want to download Windows Defender, you know, a security tool, but I they impose no such checks if I want to download a simple DRM-infested media player? Nice priorities there, Microsoft.
Great, now when you go to a website, it will infect the laptop so that it shows ads or porn on the screen. :P
You call it abuse, I call it service!
How can they say it leaves no trail when it's based on IE? As far as I know, IE still keeps the browsing history in index.dat which cannot be deleted because it is locked by Windows. I doubt that has changed.