The crank-shaft is a device which translates rotary into linear motion and is central to much of the machinery in the modern world, not least the internal combustion engine.
First, don't they have that backwards? Doesn't a crankshaft typically translate linear motion (like, pistons firing) into rotary motion (transmission components spinning)? I mean, granted, it ought to be able to work either way...but I can't think of any obvious applications today where we're using it the way they suggest...
And second, it strikes me that the assignment of the invention of the crankshaft almost has to be purely arbitrary; certainly there were people using cranks to bring buckets up out of wells, and/or in windmills, etc., long before this invention. And I'd be darn surpised if Archimedes wasn't familiar with the general concept.
And what I said (roughly: "you don't have any clue what you're talking about") is still far more accurate.
Simply the weight this man pushes with no data to back his claims is what is really influential.
The very suggestion that a stock analyst is just going out and making a guess about this with "no data" is laughable. Again, you haven't the slightest idea how these people work, and you're just piling up bullshit assumptions. This guy does have data, and if you went and read his whole analysis, I'm sure you would find that he has justifiable reasons for thinking this. In fact, if you had only read the article (which, by the way, almost certainly barely scratches the surface of his report) you would have noticed several pieces of his evidence that were mentioned there:
1)There have been reports from designers who were supposedly working on AMD-based designs for Dell.
2)Dell began selling AMD chips (retail-style) on their website a few months ago.
3)This analyst personally conversed with Michael Dell and was told that the sales force was demanding Opteron servers.
4)Dell's inventory doesn't check out; if they are going to continue only working with Intel chips, they aren't keeping as many of them on hand as could normally be expected.
5)This analyst claims to have other, anonymous, sources in the industry who say this is going to happen.
6)It has been within the last 12 months that Opterons have become the obvious choice for servers.
7)Last week Michael Dell publicly said using AMD was a distinct possibility.
Of these, numbers 1 and 5 aren't the strongest points ever. But it is certainly worth noting that I can't recall Mr. Dell going out of his way to feed the rumor mill like that before. And in light of the very good evidence in the rest of the list, those other points are worth considering. And even more importantly, none of these factors has been true in years past when this speculation has surfaced. And furthermore, it seems like a lot of people are out here saying "people say this all the time" without paying any attention to the difference between a technology writer/pundit/columnist (who gets to make whatever wild and unfounded speculation he wants, without any accountability) and a stock analyst (whose job depends on the reasonability of his reports and the veracity of his evidence).
I would like to know whether anyone can recall an analyst having predicted this before, and what evidence they cited at that time. Because I've been following AMD and Dell both for quite some time (from an investor's point of view; I have owned shares of both from time to time, and yes, I currently own some AMD) and I can't say I saw that.
But whether this will all come to pass is not exactly the point. The point is, stock analysts base their predictions on actual data...that's their job. They give their employers amazingly exhaustive reports about this sort of thing. So when you just go shooting off your mouth about how this guy has "no data" and is just trying to pump a stock for personal gain (something he can go to jail for) you sound like an idiot. Particularly when you yourself have absolutely no evidence for your own position.
Oh, and as it happens, I came across this other story this morning, here which contains this paragraph:
According to Santiago, AMD chips are likely to be incorporated into 10% of Dell's servers, 5% of its desktops and 3% of its notebooks by the end of 2006. AMD will have processors in 20% of Dell's servers in 2007. (Santiago doesn't own AMD shares.)
So I guess that pretty much eviscerates your whole completely unfounded argument. Not that I hadn't already done that anyway...
No joke, did anyone even do a check on this analist? A 4 percent increase in AMD stock could be worth some money to someone with enough AMD stock. It's not likely a plot, but there isn't really any other reason this guy would have a professional opinion.
Er...well, the other reason he would have a professional opinion is that his profession is having an opinion on the future activities of the companies he analyzes.
Seriously, your comment shows complete ignorance of what a stock analyst does. The people he works for are paying him to guess at the future performance of a company, which is to say that it's his job to speculate whether or not Dell might buy AMD processors, and what impact that is likely to have on share price.
Oh yeah, and it's also extremely illegal for paid/licensed analysts to pump stocks they own. If he owns a bunch of AMD and sells it tomorrow he's in some serious shit with the SEC. So I wouldn't go flipping out over the obvious self-interest conspiracy.
...I went ahead and drilled down 5 or 6 levels here just to make sure.
Yep.
This guy is a fucking idiot.
First he says it's so terrible that so many things depend on Python (gee...turns out people *wrote* some shit in Python) and neglects the fact that *Portage* was written in Python. When everyone jumps him about this he replies with completely unfounded hatred of Python for no adequately explained reason, and therefore concludes that nothing should be written in Python and certainly not Portage, because Python "sucks."
His suggestion appears to be that everyone should always write everything in C. I can only assume this is due to his never having written an application in C.
With the myriad of real Windows security problems he focuses on the Messenger service???
Hey clueless, maybe the security problem is not having a firewall.
Er...doesn't the Windows firewall let Messenger traffic through? So, wouldn't a remote vulnerability in Messenger still be a problem even if you had the firewall on?
Or are you saying we should all have seperate network devices as firewalls, and not allow messenger traffic out? Which is another way of saying, "Hey clueless, maybe the security problem is not having purchased a second computer running something other than Windows to protect your first computer because it's running Windows."
Right? I mean, your linksys box is just a linux or bsd computer...
Don't get me wrong, I've got my only Windows box behind a firewall. But I don't share your "blame the user" mentality; I see no reason to excuse the system manufacturer from making a product so poor as to require the user to buy some other system to serve the sole purpose of protecting it. Any manufacturer that sets up that situation on a "living-room" device like home PCs clearly deserves to be pissing the public off.
I disagree. I've been carrying samsung flip phones for 4 years now, all with outside buttons, always in my pocket with other stuff, and I don't think it adds significantly to the missed calls. Pressing the outside buttons just silences the ringer, it doesn't immediately go to voicemail...so you nearly always hear it before you push the button, even if you push it accidentally.
On the other hand, the camera button of my latest phone being on the outside is quite annoying; I have a growing collection of pictures of the inside of my pocket.
Yeah, I'm with soapy; you got any pics or anything? I've got a pretty decent spot I could throw one of these up...your description gives me enough that maybe I could get something together on my own, but I'm very interested in any elaboration you might be able to give on the overall structure, coil design, hookups, etc.
That's not accurate. Lots of tier 2 and lower providers own their infrastructure. The important qualification of being a tier 1 ISP is that they don't pay anyone else to exchange traffic with them. The tier 1 guys are all predicated on the idea that they are huge enough that none of the others of them can afford to not have good and direct peering with them. Level3 can't afford to not be peered with MCI, and MCI can't afford to not be peered with AT&T, etc. So they all peer for free with each other. The tier 2 providers pay somebody to exchange traffic.
Also, the description of this story is probably also wrong; cogent isn't a tier 1 provider. Most sources seem to think (although the contract negotiations are confidential) that cogent was already paying Level3 for their peering, but that Level3 decided they wanted more money, based on the amount of traffic they were moving and which direction it was going.
But anyhow, your description doesn't work...the ISP that I used to work for that had 2000 customers would have qualified as tier 1 by your definition.
Nope, sorry; your argument, while grounded in correct facts, is based on an unlike analogy and doesn't correctly treat the issue of squatters.
Your hypothetical, the ford.com site about river crossings, would indeed be acceptable under normal trademark policy. However, that's not what a squatter does. We are not talking about people who bought domain names that happened to be trademarks and used them for unrelated purposes. We are talking about people who bought domain names for no reason other than to sell them to the trademark owners. In that instance, when you are talking about someone buying ford.com and trying to sell it to Ford Motor Company, obviously the commercial interest of the domain squatter is "in the same market" as Ford Motor Company. They are selling the domain to deal with the business of selling cars.
If someone buys a domain that happens to be a registered trademark, and uses it for unrelated purposes, this is acceptable. If someone buys a domain name that's a registered trademark for the sole purpose of selling it to the trademark holder, then by definition they are interacting in the same market and it qualifies as trademark infringement.
Thanks for bringing this up, because it does allow me to clarify this part of the issue, which I didn't mention in the first post. But do note that not only do you disagree with me, but you also disagree with the very well-documented views of court systems in many, many nations. Everyone who matters (a group that doesn't include either of us) has already decided that I'm right about this.
Mostly this article seems well reasoned. But his treatment of domain name squatters and "large corporations making ugly noises about owning trademarks" is just plain wrong.
His version of this is that savvy individuals went and bought up domains like "ford.com" and waited for companies like Ford to come looking for them, and then charged a lot of money for the transfer. This much is (rather obviously) correct. But he seems to think that it was completely wrong and unjust for these companies to sue these squatters, calling it the normal workings of the free market.
Well, I've got news for this guy....he needs to take "Trademarks 101" or something similar, and spend just a minute or two thinking of just what the fuck a trademark is good for anyway. Because the whole point of a trademark is to restrict other people from using a name for commercial gain. The idea is that the owner of the trademark has invested time and money in popularizing that trademark, thus giving the name itself value. So, if someone other than the owner of the trademark uses the same name for its own gain (without permission), that someone is basically "stealing" this value from the owner.
So, yes, the squatters were operating in a "free market." But they were also trying to make money by selling an address that contained a registered trademark. That's just as ridiculous as me opening my own restaurant called "Burger King" and trying to force the real chain to buy me out. It wasn't legal from day one, and it's standard trademark policy.
But I guess that doesn't fit well with the overall feel that this guy wants the piece to have....that huge corporations and governments have screwed up (and are screwing up) the Internet for us all. Nevermind that they gave it to us in the first place.
Jesus fucking Christ. This has got to be the worst number doctoring all day long. From TFA:
There is one caveat: Symantec counts only those security flaws that have been confirmed by the vendor. According to security monitoring company Secunia, there are 19 security issues that Microsoft still has to deal with for Internet Explorer, while there are only three for Firefox.
Oh, well that's just a minor fucking nuclear bomb. Doesn't that make the count 28 to 32? For fuck's sake....the 19 vulnerabilities that Microsoft simply hasn't acknowledged just don't count? This new revelation should make it much cheaper to make secure software...after all, I'm sure it takes far fewer man-hours to do nothing then it does to fix something, and according to Symantec, it produces better results, too!
Firefox does indeed make patches available. Look at Gentoo Linux - it is currently at Firefox v1.0.6_r7.
A Gentoo -rx version number does not indicate a new version of a piece of software; it indicates a new ebuild version using the same source code as the previous -rx-1. If the source's version is bumped, the Gentoo version will change the number before the -r, and drop the -r until such time as another revision of the ebuild based on that new code is available, when said new revision will be -r1.
If you have a Gentoo system, you can take a look at/usr/portage/www-client/mozilla-firefox/ChangeLog if you'd like to know what changed in the Gentoo ebuild to require the -rx version bumps. Mostly they were responses to GLSA's.
The Enter key being a different shape and the pipe/backslash moving is simply because you are comparing keyboards for different countries... in your case probably US vs UK.
I doubt it. That should be easy enough to tell by the presence/absence of the pound (the money, not the hash) symbol and euro symbol. I know I've shaken my fist in anger at these differences, and I know that I was using different US keyboards.
I believe keyboards should have the pipe/backslash above the enter key (beside the ] key), which should be a simple rectangle two normal keys in width. But some keyboards I use frequently now have inverted-L enter keys, which effectively take up the room the pipe would use. Then they either a)make the backspace key normal size instead of double-width and put the pipe beside it (which mean's I'm constantly pressing \ when I want to back up) or put it down between the righthand ctrl and alt keys (which means I can't find it).
Of course, none of this compares to the anguish of using a Sun keyboard, which basically just rearranges the whole world....but I don't do that often enough to really irk me.
Anyway, I just wanted to let you know that you're full of it; keyboards from within the same country (at least if that country is the US) definitely do have major differences, and that sucks.
That said, the rest of this guy's points are downright ridiculous. Having a preference for mechanical mice over optical ones is as foolish as prefering carburated engines over fuel-injection. And scroll wheels are awesome. Now if he wanted to bitch/moan about the passing of the mechanical keyboards, I could understand, but these complaints are downright silly.
This reminds me of someone's farsical description of a "Microsoft Toaster." The part that sticks out in my memory was that it would use a quad xeon controller....one processor for each side of each piece of toast.
May be by area, but since places like India drive on the left that's rather a lot of population.
You did see that the Chinese are left-drivers, right? Also, what percentage of these populations are actually drivers anyway? Something tells me there are more cars in the US than in either of those places.
(Note, that's just a guess. I could easily be wrong, but it is worth noting that there are far more cars in the US than people.)
Would another company be allowed to build poles and run lines right next the current lines? If not, it seems that the phone companies should have to share/lease them out at a fair price.
This isn't about the poles or the lines. It's about the DSLAM. But the answer is yes and yes...as long as the other company is a CLEC. They can lease the lines as unbundled network elements, and then they can install their own DSLAM and provide ADSL.
That said, it's outrageously expensive for any CLEC to try to put their own equipment in right alongside the ILEC's, and they'll be starting from way, way, way behind if they do. I don't think there's any question here that this just murdered every small ADSL provider overnight. Including the one I work for.
Mandrake hasn't been based on RedHat since like the 6.x series. It's LSB compliant too. And though it did start out as RH+KDE, the automatic dependency checking/resolving was its important contribution.
That said, has anybody used recent Mandriva? Is it any good? I thought Mandrake was the best (binary) distro going until about 9.2, when I saw the release lose a lot of polish (vs. 9.1, which for its time I thought was really solid) and start having stupid things break. I haven't used anything later than 10.x, using gentoo and going through a bunch of debian-based distros since.
Now that is funny. mkdosfs is just a symlink to mkfs.vfat on my box...so the directions I gave could be used as easily with that command in its place. But the link you give is to a port of the Linux code to Windows. So, it's code written for Linux to emulate the behavior of a Windows program, which was then ported back to Windows because it was more functional.
Slashdot Mirror
The crank-shaft is a device which translates rotary into linear motion and is central to much of the machinery in the modern world, not least the internal combustion engine.
First, don't they have that backwards? Doesn't a crankshaft typically translate linear motion (like, pistons firing) into rotary motion (transmission components spinning)? I mean, granted, it ought to be able to work either way...but I can't think of any obvious applications today where we're using it the way they suggest...
And second, it strikes me that the assignment of the invention of the crankshaft almost has to be purely arbitrary; certainly there were people using cranks to bring buckets up out of wells, and/or in windmills, etc., long before this invention. And I'd be darn surpised if Archimedes wasn't familiar with the general concept.
And what I said (roughly: "you don't have any clue what you're talking about") is still far more accurate.
Simply the weight this man pushes with no data to back his claims is what is really influential.
The very suggestion that a stock analyst is just going out and making a guess about this with "no data" is laughable. Again, you haven't the slightest idea how these people work, and you're just piling up bullshit assumptions. This guy does have data, and if you went and read his whole analysis, I'm sure you would find that he has justifiable reasons for thinking this. In fact, if you had only read the article (which, by the way, almost certainly barely scratches the surface of his report) you would have noticed several pieces of his evidence that were mentioned there:
1)There have been reports from designers who were supposedly working on AMD-based designs for Dell.
Of these, numbers 1 and 5 aren't the strongest points ever. But it is certainly worth noting that I can't recall Mr. Dell going out of his way to feed the rumor mill like that before. And in light of the very good evidence in the rest of the list, those other points are worth considering. And even more importantly, none of these factors has been true in years past when this speculation has surfaced. And furthermore, it seems like a lot of people are out here saying "people say this all the time" without paying any attention to the difference between a technology writer/pundit/columnist (who gets to make whatever wild and unfounded speculation he wants, without any accountability) and a stock analyst (whose job depends on the reasonability of his reports and the veracity of his evidence).2)Dell began selling AMD chips (retail-style) on their website a few months ago.
3)This analyst personally conversed with Michael Dell and was told that the sales force was demanding Opteron servers.
4)Dell's inventory doesn't check out; if they are going to continue only working with Intel chips, they aren't keeping as many of them on hand as could normally be expected.
5)This analyst claims to have other, anonymous, sources in the industry who say this is going to happen.
6)It has been within the last 12 months that Opterons have become the obvious choice for servers.
7)Last week Michael Dell publicly said using AMD was a distinct possibility.
I would like to know whether anyone can recall an analyst having predicted this before, and what evidence they cited at that time. Because I've been following AMD and Dell both for quite some time (from an investor's point of view; I have owned shares of both from time to time, and yes, I currently own some AMD) and I can't say I saw that.
But whether this will all come to pass is not exactly the point. The point is, stock analysts base their predictions on actual data...that's their job. They give their employers amazingly exhaustive reports about this sort of thing. So when you just go shooting off your mouth about how this guy has "no data" and is just trying to pump a stock for personal gain (something he can go to jail for) you sound like an idiot. Particularly when you yourself have absolutely no evidence for your own position.
Oh, and as it happens, I came across this other story this morning, here which contains this paragraph:
According to Santiago, AMD chips are likely to be incorporated into 10% of Dell's servers, 5% of its desktops and 3% of its notebooks by the end of 2006. AMD will have processors in 20% of Dell's servers in 2007. (Santiago doesn't own AMD shares.)
So I guess that pretty much eviscerates your whole completely unfounded argument. Not that I hadn't already done that anyway...
No joke, did anyone even do a check on this analist? A 4 percent increase in AMD stock could be worth some money to someone with enough AMD stock. It's not likely a plot, but there isn't really any other reason this guy would have a professional opinion.
Er...well, the other reason he would have a professional opinion is that his profession is having an opinion on the future activities of the companies he analyzes.
Seriously, your comment shows complete ignorance of what a stock analyst does. The people he works for are paying him to guess at the future performance of a company, which is to say that it's his job to speculate whether or not Dell might buy AMD processors, and what impact that is likely to have on share price.
Oh yeah, and it's also extremely illegal for paid/licensed analysts to pump stocks they own. If he owns a bunch of AMD and sells it tomorrow he's in some serious shit with the SEC. So I wouldn't go flipping out over the obvious self-interest conspiracy.
...I went ahead and drilled down 5 or 6 levels here just to make sure.
Yep.
This guy is a fucking idiot.
First he says it's so terrible that so many things depend on Python (gee...turns out people *wrote* some shit in Python) and neglects the fact that *Portage* was written in Python. When everyone jumps him about this he replies with completely unfounded hatred of Python for no adequately explained reason, and therefore concludes that nothing should be written in Python and certainly not Portage, because Python "sucks."
His suggestion appears to be that everyone should always write everything in C. I can only assume this is due to his never having written an application in C.
Nothing to see here....move along.
With the myriad of real Windows security problems he focuses on the Messenger service???
Hey clueless, maybe the security problem is not having a firewall.
Er...doesn't the Windows firewall let Messenger traffic through? So, wouldn't a remote vulnerability in Messenger still be a problem even if you had the firewall on?
Or are you saying we should all have seperate network devices as firewalls, and not allow messenger traffic out? Which is another way of saying, "Hey clueless, maybe the security problem is not having purchased a second computer running something other than Windows to protect your first computer because it's running Windows."
Right? I mean, your linksys box is just a linux or bsd computer...
Don't get me wrong, I've got my only Windows box behind a firewall. But I don't share your "blame the user" mentality; I see no reason to excuse the system manufacturer from making a product so poor as to require the user to buy some other system to serve the sole purpose of protecting it. Any manufacturer that sets up that situation on a "living-room" device like home PCs clearly deserves to be pissing the public off.
I disagree. I've been carrying samsung flip phones for 4 years now, all with outside buttons, always in my pocket with other stuff, and I don't think it adds significantly to the missed calls. Pressing the outside buttons just silences the ringer, it doesn't immediately go to voicemail...so you nearly always hear it before you push the button, even if you push it accidentally.
On the other hand, the camera button of my latest phone being on the outside is quite annoying; I have a growing collection of pictures of the inside of my pocket.
guess it's time to switch jobs ;-)
Yeah, I'm with soapy; you got any pics or anything? I've got a pretty decent spot I could throw one of these up...your description gives me enough that maybe I could get something together on my own, but I'm very interested in any elaboration you might be able to give on the overall structure, coil design, hookups, etc.
Sounds neat...
That's not accurate. Lots of tier 2 and lower providers own their infrastructure. The important qualification of being a tier 1 ISP is that they don't pay anyone else to exchange traffic with them. The tier 1 guys are all predicated on the idea that they are huge enough that none of the others of them can afford to not have good and direct peering with them. Level3 can't afford to not be peered with MCI, and MCI can't afford to not be peered with AT&T, etc. So they all peer for free with each other. The tier 2 providers pay somebody to exchange traffic.
Also, the description of this story is probably also wrong; cogent isn't a tier 1 provider. Most sources seem to think (although the contract negotiations are confidential) that cogent was already paying Level3 for their peering, but that Level3 decided they wanted more money, based on the amount of traffic they were moving and which direction it was going.
But anyhow, your description doesn't work...the ISP that I used to work for that had 2000 customers would have qualified as tier 1 by your definition.
Nope, sorry; your argument, while grounded in correct facts, is based on an unlike analogy and doesn't correctly treat the issue of squatters.
Your hypothetical, the ford.com site about river crossings, would indeed be acceptable under normal trademark policy. However, that's not what a squatter does. We are not talking about people who bought domain names that happened to be trademarks and used them for unrelated purposes. We are talking about people who bought domain names for no reason other than to sell them to the trademark owners. In that instance, when you are talking about someone buying ford.com and trying to sell it to Ford Motor Company, obviously the commercial interest of the domain squatter is "in the same market" as Ford Motor Company. They are selling the domain to deal with the business of selling cars.
If someone buys a domain that happens to be a registered trademark, and uses it for unrelated purposes, this is acceptable. If someone buys a domain name that's a registered trademark for the sole purpose of selling it to the trademark holder, then by definition they are interacting in the same market and it qualifies as trademark infringement.
Thanks for bringing this up, because it does allow me to clarify this part of the issue, which I didn't mention in the first post. But do note that not only do you disagree with me, but you also disagree with the very well-documented views of court systems in many, many nations. Everyone who matters (a group that doesn't include either of us) has already decided that I'm right about this.
Mostly this article seems well reasoned. But his treatment of domain name squatters and "large corporations making ugly noises about owning trademarks" is just plain wrong.
His version of this is that savvy individuals went and bought up domains like "ford.com" and waited for companies like Ford to come looking for them, and then charged a lot of money for the transfer. This much is (rather obviously) correct. But he seems to think that it was completely wrong and unjust for these companies to sue these squatters, calling it the normal workings of the free market.
Well, I've got news for this guy....he needs to take "Trademarks 101" or something similar, and spend just a minute or two thinking of just what the fuck a trademark is good for anyway. Because the whole point of a trademark is to restrict other people from using a name for commercial gain. The idea is that the owner of the trademark has invested time and money in popularizing that trademark, thus giving the name itself value. So, if someone other than the owner of the trademark uses the same name for its own gain (without permission), that someone is basically "stealing" this value from the owner.
So, yes, the squatters were operating in a "free market." But they were also trying to make money by selling an address that contained a registered trademark. That's just as ridiculous as me opening my own restaurant called "Burger King" and trying to force the real chain to buy me out. It wasn't legal from day one, and it's standard trademark policy.
But I guess that doesn't fit well with the overall feel that this guy wants the piece to have....that huge corporations and governments have screwed up (and are screwing up) the Internet for us all. Nevermind that they gave it to us in the first place.
Not all Linux computers are webservers.
Jesus fucking Christ. This has got to be the worst number doctoring all day long. From TFA:
There is one caveat: Symantec counts only those security flaws that have been confirmed by the vendor. According to security monitoring company Secunia, there are 19 security issues that Microsoft still has to deal with for Internet Explorer, while there are only three for Firefox.
Oh, well that's just a minor fucking nuclear bomb. Doesn't that make the count 28 to 32? For fuck's sake....the 19 vulnerabilities that Microsoft simply hasn't acknowledged just don't count? This new revelation should make it much cheaper to make secure software...after all, I'm sure it takes far fewer man-hours to do nothing then it does to fix something, and according to Symantec, it produces better results, too!
Firefox does indeed make patches available. Look at Gentoo Linux - it is currently at Firefox v1.0.6_r7.
A Gentoo -rx version number does not indicate a new version of a piece of software; it indicates a new ebuild version using the same source code as the previous -rx-1. If the source's version is bumped, the Gentoo version will change the number before the -r, and drop the -r until such time as another revision of the ebuild based on that new code is available, when said new revision will be -r1.
If you have a Gentoo system, you can take a look at /usr/portage/www-client/mozilla-firefox/ChangeLog if you'd like to know what changed in the Gentoo ebuild to require the -rx version bumps. Mostly they were responses to GLSA's.
The Enter key being a different shape and the pipe/backslash moving is simply because you are comparing keyboards for different countries... in your case probably US vs UK.
I doubt it. That should be easy enough to tell by the presence/absence of the pound (the money, not the hash) symbol and euro symbol. I know I've shaken my fist in anger at these differences, and I know that I was using different US keyboards.
I believe keyboards should have the pipe/backslash above the enter key (beside the ] key), which should be a simple rectangle two normal keys in width. But some keyboards I use frequently now have inverted-L enter keys, which effectively take up the room the pipe would use. Then they either a)make the backspace key normal size instead of double-width and put the pipe beside it (which mean's I'm constantly pressing \ when I want to back up) or put it down between the righthand ctrl and alt keys (which means I can't find it).
Of course, none of this compares to the anguish of using a Sun keyboard, which basically just rearranges the whole world....but I don't do that often enough to really irk me.
Anyway, I just wanted to let you know that you're full of it; keyboards from within the same country (at least if that country is the US) definitely do have major differences, and that sucks.
That said, the rest of this guy's points are downright ridiculous. Having a preference for mechanical mice over optical ones is as foolish as prefering carburated engines over fuel-injection. And scroll wheels are awesome. Now if he wanted to bitch/moan about the passing of the mechanical keyboards, I could understand, but these complaints are downright silly.
This reminds me of someone's farsical description of a "Microsoft Toaster." The part that sticks out in my memory was that it would use a quad xeon controller....one processor for each side of each piece of toast.
May be by area, but since places like India drive on the left that's rather a lot of population.
You did see that the Chinese are left-drivers, right? Also, what percentage of these populations are actually drivers anyway? Something tells me there are more cars in the US than in either of those places.
(Note, that's just a guess. I could easily be wrong, but it is worth noting that there are far more cars in the US than people.)
Hehe. That's pretty funny...you got modded Troll for pointing out your own typo ;-)
One thing Microsoft knows well is the art of 'co-opetition' - competing and also cooperating.
Maybe it's just me, but I'm having a hard time reconciling this statement with internal emails that say things like "cut off their air supply."
Oh, I forgot to mention....this is no longer speculation. I'm holding the FCC press release spelling my doom right now. It's official.
Would another company be allowed to build poles and run lines right next the current lines? If not, it seems that the phone companies should have to share/lease them out at a fair price.
This isn't about the poles or the lines. It's about the DSLAM. But the answer is yes and yes...as long as the other company is a CLEC. They can lease the lines as unbundled network elements, and then they can install their own DSLAM and provide ADSL.
That said, it's outrageously expensive for any CLEC to try to put their own equipment in right alongside the ILEC's, and they'll be starting from way, way, way behind if they do. I don't think there's any question here that this just murdered every small ADSL provider overnight. Including the one I work for.
Mandrake hasn't been based on RedHat since like the 6.x series. It's LSB compliant too. And though it did start out as RH+KDE, the automatic dependency checking/resolving was its important contribution.
That said, has anybody used recent Mandriva? Is it any good? I thought Mandrake was the best (binary) distro going until about 9.2, when I saw the release lose a lot of polish (vs. 9.1, which for its time I thought was really solid) and start having stupid things break. I haven't used anything later than 10.x, using gentoo and going through a bunch of debian-based distros since.
Umm you don't need a telco for Internet.
Umm, yes you do. You're an idiot. And you also didn't bother to read my whole post, because the last line was:
Your cable company is connected to the Internet on services provided by a telco. So is your wireless provider.
Did I mention you're an idiot?
Community to Microsoft: We can make up numbers too!
Now that is funny. mkdosfs is just a symlink to mkfs.vfat on my box...so the directions I gave could be used as easily with that command in its place. But the link you give is to a port of the Linux code to Windows. So, it's code written for Linux to emulate the behavior of a Windows program, which was then ported back to Windows because it was more functional.
Now if they could just port iptables....