No such thing as a Linux beginner?
on
Linux Power Tools
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
The book's cover claims the target audience as intermediate to advanced users, but I think that beginner to intermediate would be more accurate. More advanced users may find Linux Power Tools a little beneath their level.
I think this might be considered fair marketing. If you're using Linux, you're probably not a "beginner" -- you've probably an expert on other OS's and have decided to take the next step.
I just got a $35 PII and installed Knoppix 3.3. It's my first Linux box after 15+ years in the DOS/Windows world, and I'm finding out just how little I know. But I can at least make some educated guesses about "hda5" and "eth0", and when the screen displays 4 penguins instead of 1 I know that it's a screen resolution problem, not a "it doesn't work" problem.
So I'm not sure there's such a thing as a "Linux Beginner"... at least not until Wal-Mart's Lindows PCs outsell the Windows/AOL equipped models. Those buyers are the true "beginners".
I'll only subscribe if I can blatantly troll and have unlimited karma! Oh, and a complimentary First Post to sweeten the deal!
I can't say that the trolling and karma will be affected, but I can testify that paying for a subscription will set you up at the all-you-can-eat buffet of on-topic First Postage. Creamy goodness with every post!
"The authorities here finally decided to bankrupt me over a tax debt and I have now had to give the missile to a friend for safe keeping."
You would think that people would learn. If you're going to skirt the edge of the legal system, always pay your taxes!
Remember, Al Capone was jailed for tax evasion, not organized criminal activity. His claim that "The government can't collect legal taxes from illegal money." (1) held no more water than Simpson's claim that the government is trying to "bankrupt" him.
And speaking of Simpsons...
Lisa: Bart. Bart! What are you doing? We've got to get out of here. Bart: Target sighted. Launching air-to-nerd missile!
[launches a missile model, hitting Lisa] Lisa: Owww! - Sideshow Bob's Last Gleaming
I got this one in M2. It's not a repost! Parent (grandparent, now) has an earlier timestamp than the AC copy. The big tipoff is when the AC includes the original's.sig. Duh!
* On further examination, the comment I've been asked to M2 is the brother of this post. It's not "Informative" 'cause it's wrong.
I bought myself a subscription basically because I read/. so often that I wanted to help out.
~50 posts, and this is the first one I've seen that isn't ringing the tired old "why pay for the cow when the milk is free" bell.
I'm happy to be a subscriber. The fact that I'm writing and you're reading means that Slashdot is of value to both of us. Do the trolls expect some angel to pay for Slashdot's bandwidth with manna from Heaven?
I, too, like the quality ads. I click more Slashdot ads than any other site's ads. Still not enough for a post-bust business model, though. $5 every few months is a small price to pay for this level of high-tech information/annoyance/entertainment.
reducing the value of spam to spammers. This can be done by reducing click-through, reducing traffic and filtering that traffic which is out there.
That points to an interesting idea. What if you left your relay open, but modified the messages slightly? Munge the URLs, kill the scripts and web-bug images, change all the phone numbers to 800-876-7060. You could even try to de-l33t the subject lines (turn V*1*A*3*R*A back into "viagra"), if possible.
Of course, you'd be violating any number of standards, plus you'd still get blackholed. So take it a step further... create a trojan that looks for open relays and turns them into spam-breaking open relays. Maybe you could then get someone to turn you in to Microsoft and split the reward.
My wife actually knows someone that drinks 'magnetic water' to remove various unnamed 'toxins' from her body. Weird.
Well, water does have magnetic properties... IIRC, it's a combination of H+ and OH- ions. Of course, since they come in pairs, the effect is neutralized, but at some level the water *is* "magnetic".
It could be worse. Her friend could have lived in the days of Crazy Water. In Mineral Wells, Texas, the local water had a more direct "cleansing" effect. The water's strength was directly measurable by the distance the "patient" could walk up the boardwalk to the nearby hilltop before making a mad dash back to the Crazy Water Hotel's facilities.
Perhaps this will help DARPA regain some of its cachet after the embarassingly stupid gaffe by Terror Bookie John Poindexter. Got to take the bad with the good, I guess... it's nice to be reminded that the Internet isn't all DARPA ever helped get off the ground.
What's surprised me is that I can often get in a quick arcade fix at the local quickie mart or laundromat for a quarter. Sure, anything reasonably new will be 50c, but a single quarter gets me as much fun as it did in 1985.
Wouldn't that be roughly the equivalent of playing Pac-Man for a 1980's dime?
As for this game, are they still planning to package it with QIX? That's one of the old school games I miss. That and my favorite game of all time, Mr. Do!. If anyone knows where a working Mr. Do! is within 100 miles of Dallas, lemme know and I'm there with a roll of quarters!
When cars that are supposed to protect their drivers in a collision instead drive the steering column through their chest, people do.
Actually, it was one person in particular who jump-started (pardon the pun) the consumer safety revolution. As I understand -- and please correct me if I'm wrong -- the car companies had very little interest in "expensive" safety modifications until activists like Ralph Nader shamed and sued them into submission.
People care. The owners of the Mom & Pop store on the corner care. Corporations, however, don't care about anything but return on shareholder investment.
Actually, the NASA scientists are all in a tizzy over twelve little pixels. If they actually got to see the whole potato, I think they'd break out the sour cream.
The psychological effects of terminal illness are probably not best handled with opiates anyway. Counselling and antidepressant medication would seem to be indicated--not doping patients into a blissful stupor.
Absolutely correct! How can a physician diagnose a patient's condition when the patient is in la-la land due to his/her meds?
That said, though -- and not to belittle the point at all -- I see this as something of a Godsend for straight-arrow geeks like myself. Never so much as took a single puff of a joint -- I was like that kid on the commercial who passes it on down the line without sampling it. Coke? LSD? You gotta be nuts. That crap voids the warranty.
Once I know my number is up, all bets are off. If I had my choice, I'd be sorely tempted to spend my last two or three months indulging heavily in all the vices I avoided during my "healthy" life for fear of harming myself. Nothing that would hurt anyone else, just a blissful slide into the abyss.
And now, no worrying about the opioids interacting with each other? Set the table, baby! One of each!
* Important Disclaimer: I reserve the right to change my mind at any time, and with my luck, I'll get hit by a bus anyway.
They checked the remaining vials of vaccine from the tests to see if they could identify HIV DNA or money DNA.
I got paid last week, but all the money is now missing. I guess I could submit my empty pockets to a testing lab, and see if anyone can recover the DNA of my missing cash. I suspect, though, that the incriminating evidence will be found in my wife's purse, instead.
"But of course, for that ending to work, you would have to ignore all the Simpson DNA evidence. [laughs] And that would be downright nutty."
- The Simpsons 138th Episode Spectacular
It's a mod fight to see if this is flamebait or informative. It's like watching a horserace.
Isn't it great? I don't think I've ever had a comment get modded all the way down to -1, Troll (~15 min after posting) and make it back up to +2, Funny (the current status). The +5 reply must have brought in some sympathetic moderators.
It really makes me miss the days when you could see how many mod points had been expended on a post's behalf. I originally created my Slashdot login for the horseraces, and I love bipolar moderation!
Still not convinced that cells in a rotating bio-reactor are a good model for cells in an in vivo micro-gravitational environment, but at least "modeled micro-graviity" makes sense now!
Actually, the whole thing is discussed on the NASA page.
My question is one of money and priorities. While they're concerned about the shear effects, which don't take place in "real" microgravity, it seems like there would be better uses for the ISS' mass budget than an experiment which can be replicated to a large extent on the ground.
On the other hand, with only two crew members, the ISS isn't doing much these days other than maintaining its attitude. I guess an experiment like this, with minimal crew attention required, is all we can hope to achieve.
I'm rooting for the Chinese space program to start a new space race... 'cause until someone finds (and deploys) a way to make real money from manned space, the only space exploration my kids will be part of is watching communications satellites fly overhead.
"It's not a ready product," [Microsoft attorney Jonathan Selvasegaram] said from Malaysia. "Even if it works for a while, I think it's very risky," to install on a home computer, he said.
So how does that make the pre-release "Longhorn" version any different from, say, Windows XP?
Longhorn promises new methods of storing files, tighter links to the Internet, greater security and fewer annoying reboots, Microsoft has said.
Now that's truth in adversising: New, improved Windows! Almost secure! Less annoying than ever! Wow, whoever came up with that marketing line should get a promotion... to the mail room.
(Hey, someone's going to get modded-up for taking cheap shots at Microsoft. May as well be me!)
This is big pharaceuticals leaning on them to try and limit the ability of people to shop...
I would call "tin-foil hat" on you if it weren't for Viagra. Once the big-name pharma companies decided to enter the it-must-be-lucrative p3ni5 enlargement market, a million spammers suddenly found themselves in the sights of Pfiser & co.
What's next? Big Oil sending me letters asking me to help them "TRANSFER 40 GAZILLION US DOLLERS CURRANTLY IN THE LAST NATIONEL BANQUE OF NIGERIA"?
The anonymous one wrote: What happened after 2000 was that the U.S. decided to behave more responsibly.
Actually, after 2000, Bush tried to pretend that the rest of the world didn't exist. Once he got reminded otherwise on September 11, he still didn't have a clue, so Cheney, Rumsfeld & co got free rein.
I won't get into a further discussion with an AC except to say this: I pray for my cousin, a Captain with the 4th ID in Iraq, every time I hear of another attack on our (undermanned) forces. And that's several times a day, now.
The lithium absorbs the neutrons to create tritium and or deuterium
I'm not a nuclear physicist, but I'm always curious about the processes involved. Wikipedia says that Li has two natural isotopes (6-Li and 7-Li), and that 8-Li (with the added neutron) has a half-life of less than a second.
The extra neutron in 8-Li gets converted to a proton plus a high-energy electron (a Beta Particle). That leaves you with 4 protons and 4 neutrons, which could simply remain 8-Be. Apparently, though, it's more likely to fly apart into a pair of Alpha particles -- which are just 4-He without any electrons.
But I don't see where we get the Deuterium and Tritium you mentioned. Do the Alpha particles interact with the Lithium to generate even more cool nucleotides?
Slashdot Mirror
The book's cover claims the target audience as intermediate to advanced users, but I think that beginner to intermediate would be more accurate. More advanced users may find Linux Power Tools a little beneath their level.
I think this might be considered fair marketing. If you're using Linux, you're probably not a "beginner" -- you've probably an expert on other OS's and have decided to take the next step.
I just got a $35 PII and installed Knoppix 3.3. It's my first Linux box after 15+ years in the DOS/Windows world, and I'm finding out just how little I know. But I can at least make some educated guesses about "hda5" and "eth0", and when the screen displays 4 penguins instead of 1 I know that it's a screen resolution problem, not a "it doesn't work" problem.
So I'm not sure there's such a thing as a "Linux Beginner"... at least not until Wal-Mart's Lindows PCs outsell the Windows/AOL equipped models. Those buyers are the true "beginners".
I'm not so sure you should brag about that +5 troll so much until that story gets archived.
.sig, the moderation had changed to +3, Flamebait, then to +4, Flamebait.
Well, I thought it was too late to care -- within a few hours of changing my
But now, fun-loving moderators have restored my +5, Troll! Too cool!
I'll take your advice now... I think I'll change my sig for the next week to something more innocuous.
I'll only subscribe if I can blatantly troll and have unlimited karma!
Oh, and a complimentary First Post to sweeten the deal!
I can't say that the trolling and karma will be affected, but I can testify that paying for a subscription will set you up at the all-you-can-eat buffet of on-topic First Postage. Creamy goodness with every post!
"The authorities here finally decided to bankrupt me over a tax debt and I have now had to give the missile to a friend for safe keeping."
You would think that people would learn. If you're going to skirt the edge of the legal system, always pay your taxes!
Remember, Al Capone was jailed for tax evasion, not organized criminal activity. His claim that "The government can't collect legal taxes from illegal money." (1) held no more water than Simpson's claim that the government is trying to "bankrupt" him.
And speaking of Simpsons...
Lisa: Bart. Bart! What are you doing? We've got to get out of here.
Bart: Target sighted. Launching air-to-nerd missile!
[launches a missile model, hitting Lisa]
Lisa: Owww!
- Sideshow Bob's Last Gleaming
I got this one in M2. It's not a repost! Parent (grandparent, now) has an earlier timestamp than the AC copy. The big tipoff is when the AC includes the original's .sig. Duh!
* On further examination, the comment I've been asked to M2 is the brother of this post. It's not "Informative" 'cause it's wrong.
I bought myself a subscription basically because I read /. so often that I wanted to help out.
~50 posts, and this is the first one I've seen that isn't ringing the tired old "why pay for the cow when the milk is free" bell.
I'm happy to be a subscriber. The fact that I'm writing and you're reading means that Slashdot is of value to both of us. Do the trolls expect some angel to pay for Slashdot's bandwidth with manna from Heaven?
I, too, like the quality ads. I click more Slashdot ads than any other site's ads. Still not enough for a post-bust business model, though. $5 every few months is a small price to pay for this level of high-tech information/annoyance/entertainment.
reducing the value of spam to spammers. This can be done by reducing click-through, reducing traffic and filtering that traffic which is out there.
That points to an interesting idea. What if you left your relay open, but modified the messages slightly? Munge the URLs, kill the scripts and web-bug images, change all the phone numbers to 800-876-7060. You could even try to de-l33t the subject lines (turn V*1*A*3*R*A back into "viagra"), if possible.
Of course, you'd be violating any number of standards, plus you'd still get blackholed. So take it a step further... create a trojan that looks for open relays and turns them into spam-breaking open relays. Maybe you could then get someone to turn you in to Microsoft and split the reward.
Surely Al Gore will try to claim credit for it, if it ever suceeds.
Yeah, I think this Internet thing is going to go the way of CB Radio any day now.
(Why do I keep replying to AC's?)
My wife actually knows someone that drinks 'magnetic water' to remove various unnamed 'toxins' from her body. Weird.
Well, water does have magnetic properties... IIRC, it's a combination of H+ and OH- ions. Of course, since they come in pairs, the effect is neutralized, but at some level the water *is* "magnetic".
It could be worse. Her friend could have lived in the days of Crazy Water. In Mineral Wells, Texas, the local water had a more direct "cleansing" effect. The water's strength was directly measurable by the distance the "patient" could walk up the boardwalk to the nearby hilltop before making a mad dash back to the Crazy Water Hotel's facilities.
At the end of the article was some interesting information:
The research is sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the U.S. Department of Energy.
Perhaps this will help DARPA regain some of its cachet after the embarassingly stupid gaffe by Terror Bookie John Poindexter. Got to take the bad with the good, I guess... it's nice to be reminded that the Internet isn't all DARPA ever helped get off the ground.
It'll probably turn out to be an alien goatse when they finally get it decoded.
SETI Scientist: Professor, we've decoded the image!
Prof: Let's see... oh, my stars! Is there a xenoproctologist in the house?!
There's a coffee house in Tucson with a tabletop Mr Do.
Where exactly would that be? I see a road trip in my future!
It would give me a chance to check out some interesting US Highway Ends! May well indulge two strange habits at once.
What's surprised me is that I can often get in a quick arcade fix at the local quickie mart or laundromat for a quarter. Sure, anything reasonably new will be 50c, but a single quarter gets me as much fun as it did in 1985.
Wouldn't that be roughly the equivalent of playing Pac-Man for a 1980's dime?
As for this game, are they still planning to package it with QIX? That's one of the old school games I miss. That and my favorite game of all time, Mr. Do!. If anyone knows where a working Mr. Do! is within 100 miles of Dallas, lemme know and I'm there with a roll of quarters!
Just out of curiousity, why was this posted here instead of under the latest SCO thread?
Possibly because he's a troll? And if he posted it on the SCO thread, he'd get laughed out of the building?
If I had time, I'd go prowling around the dark, wet, "-1" basement of Slashdot to see if there are other similar (or identical) off-topic posts.
Of course, if it were true, it would be way cool, wouldn't it?!
When cars that are supposed to protect their drivers in a collision instead drive the steering column through their chest, people do.
Actually, it was one person in particular who jump-started (pardon the pun) the consumer safety revolution. As I understand -- and please correct me if I'm wrong -- the car companies had very little interest in "expensive" safety modifications until activists like Ralph Nader shamed and sued them into submission.
People care. The owners of the Mom & Pop store on the corner care. Corporations, however, don't care about anything but return on shareholder investment.
for something that looks like this.
Actually, the NASA scientists are all in a tizzy over twelve little pixels. If they actually got to see the whole potato, I think they'd break out the sour cream.
The psychological effects of terminal illness are probably not best handled with opiates anyway. Counselling and antidepressant medication would seem to be indicated--not doping patients into a blissful stupor.
Absolutely correct! How can a physician diagnose a patient's condition when the patient is in la-la land due to his/her meds?
That said, though -- and not to belittle the point at all -- I see this as something of a Godsend for straight-arrow geeks like myself. Never so much as took a single puff of a joint -- I was like that kid on the commercial who passes it on down the line without sampling it. Coke? LSD? You gotta be nuts. That crap voids the warranty.
Once I know my number is up, all bets are off. If I had my choice, I'd be sorely tempted to spend my last two or three months indulging heavily in all the vices I avoided during my "healthy" life for fear of harming myself. Nothing that would hurt anyone else, just a blissful slide into the abyss.
And now, no worrying about the opioids interacting with each other? Set the table, baby! One of each!
* Important Disclaimer: I reserve the right to change my mind at any time, and with my luck, I'll get hit by a bus anyway.
Nobody's doing leeches as a recreational drug.
IN SOVIET RUSSIA, medicinal leeches get high on YOU!
Hey, I think there's a cool '80s song lyric in there, somewhere.
(There's nothing as dangerous as a bored programmer with Karma to burn...)
They checked the remaining vials of vaccine from the tests to see if they could identify HIV DNA or money DNA.
I got paid last week, but all the money is now missing. I guess I could submit my empty pockets to a testing lab, and see if anyone can recover the DNA of my missing cash. I suspect, though, that the incriminating evidence will be found in my wife's purse, instead.
"But of course, for that ending to work, you would have to ignore all the Simpson DNA evidence. [laughs] And that would be downright nutty."
- The Simpsons 138th Episode Spectacular
It's a mod fight to see if this is flamebait or informative. It's like watching a horserace.
Isn't it great? I don't think I've ever had a comment get modded all the way down to -1, Troll (~15 min after posting) and make it back up to +2, Funny (the current status). The +5 reply must have brought in some sympathetic moderators.
It really makes me miss the days when you could see how many mod points had been expended on a post's behalf. I originally created my Slashdot login for the horseraces, and I love bipolar moderation!
Still not convinced that cells in a rotating bio-reactor are a good model for cells in an in vivo micro-gravitational environment, but at least "modeled micro-graviity" makes sense now!
Actually, the whole thing is discussed on the NASA page.
My question is one of money and priorities. While they're concerned about the shear effects, which don't take place in "real" microgravity, it seems like there would be better uses for the ISS' mass budget than an experiment which can be replicated to a large extent on the ground.
On the other hand, with only two crew members, the ISS isn't doing much these days other than maintaining its attitude. I guess an experiment like this, with minimal crew attention required, is all we can hope to achieve.
I'm rooting for the Chinese space program to start a new space race... 'cause until someone finds (and deploys) a way to make real money from manned space, the only space exploration my kids will be part of is watching communications satellites fly overhead.
"It's not a ready product," [Microsoft attorney Jonathan Selvasegaram] said from Malaysia. "Even if it works for a while, I think it's very risky," to install on a home computer, he said.
So how does that make the pre-release "Longhorn" version any different from, say, Windows XP?
Longhorn promises new methods of storing files, tighter links to the Internet, greater security and fewer annoying reboots, Microsoft has said.
Now that's truth in adversising: New, improved Windows! Almost secure! Less annoying than ever! Wow, whoever came up with that marketing line should get a promotion... to the mail room.
(Hey, someone's going to get modded-up for taking cheap shots at Microsoft. May as well be me!)
This is big pharaceuticals leaning on them to try and limit the ability of people to shop...
I would call "tin-foil hat" on you if it weren't for Viagra. Once the big-name pharma companies decided to enter the it-must-be-lucrative p3ni5 enlargement market, a million spammers suddenly found themselves in the sights of Pfiser & co.
What's next? Big Oil sending me letters asking me to help them "TRANSFER 40 GAZILLION US DOLLERS CURRANTLY IN THE LAST NATIONEL BANQUE OF NIGERIA"?
The anonymous one wrote:
What happened after 2000 was that the U.S. decided to behave more responsibly.
Actually, after 2000, Bush tried to pretend that the rest of the world didn't exist. Once he got reminded otherwise on September 11, he still didn't have a clue, so Cheney, Rumsfeld & co got free rein.
I won't get into a further discussion with an AC except to say this: I pray for my cousin, a Captain with the 4th ID in Iraq, every time I hear of another attack on our (undermanned) forces. And that's several times a day, now.
The lithium absorbs the neutrons to create tritium and or deuterium
I'm not a nuclear physicist, but I'm always curious about the processes involved. Wikipedia says that Li has two natural isotopes (6-Li and 7-Li), and that 8-Li (with the added neutron) has a half-life of less than a second.
The extra neutron in 8-Li gets converted to a proton plus a high-energy electron (a Beta Particle). That leaves you with 4 protons and 4 neutrons, which could simply remain 8-Be. Apparently, though, it's more likely to fly apart into a pair of Alpha particles -- which are just 4-He without any electrons.
But I don't see where we get the Deuterium and Tritium you mentioned. Do the Alpha particles interact with the Lithium to generate even more cool nucleotides?