"especially since the media became operating arms of weapons manufacturers." AND, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democrat Party, which is a shell corporation for the Communist Party. https://youtu.be/PblVo9y735k?t...
It's exactly what the MNM did during the Obama administration to cover up its dozen scandals, and the exact opposite of what they are doing now to the Trump administration with fake news.
While there are occasional Prime sales with free shipping that are real, I've noticed that the price on many Prime sales that include "free" shipping were equal to the price of other vendors on Amazon, plus shipping. Why pay $12/mo for Prime unless you want to stream their movies?
My wife and I have used Stevia white powder extract for about the last 30 years. I'm 6'6", 250 lbs, 128/80, and my last blood panel two months ago had all the numbers centered in the acceptable ranges. EKG normal.
We eat out once a week or so with friends, usually on Sunday afternoon, and enjoy Panera, Culvers and DQ when we have some spare change.
I'm somewhat sedentary, spending 8-10 hours/day on the computer (KDE Neon User Edition with Btrfs running RAID1 on two 750Gb HDs), primarily on KubuntuForums.net and YT, and I average 2-4 cups of Green Tea a day.
on this thread reminded me of the great uptime wars 15 years ago. Linux users were claiming uptimes of 200, 300, 400 and more days, only to be countered by Windows users who claimed equal or longer uptimes.
The argument was settled abruptly and permanently when Microsoft announced the 32bit clock bug which automatically rebooted ALL Windows installations after an uptime of only 49.7 days. Any Windows user claiming 50 or more days of uptime was lying.
My longest uptime was 410 days (IIRC) on an in office PostgreSQL server running SuSE 6.3. I've been retired for nine years and I no longer need 24/7/365 access to my computers, all of which are laptops, so I turn them off every night.
Today I see in this comment sections lots of criticisms about the "usability" of KDE, Plasma, Gnome, Mint and other Linux DE's and it is obvious from the nature of the complaints that the complainers are less than truthful about their assertions. The more things change the more they remain the same!:D
Whaaaaat? I've been running Neon on top of Ubuntu 16.04 for two years and systemd has NEVER forced me to reboot. I'm also running my NVidia GT650M via nvidia-378 and it makes my secondary GPU, which cannot be set as the primary in the BIOS, act like the primary.
Remember the Nickel-Iron batteries? Edison developed them in 1902 and the last Ni-Fe plant was shut down in the 70's. (China is making them again, now, in response to solar power demands). Ni-Fe batteries worked between -30C and 60C. They were chargeable to 100% and dischargeable to 0% without damage. A 400 Ah Ni-Fe battery delivered the same power to the load as a 1000 Ah Lead acid battery. They are easy to repair and restore to service. There are Edison batteries (as they are called) in service today, nearly 40 years after the last one was made. You can pass your Edison batteries on to your great grand children. Nickle and Iron are common metals and do not pollute the environment like Lead and Sulfuric acid do. So, why would makers of other batteries work to eliminate the Ni-Fe battery?
To have continuing growth of sales either the product has to be continuously improved, or population of purchasers has to grow or, the product has to wear out, forcing the consumer to purchase another one, or all of the above. To increase service revenues the product has to be cheaply made and difficult for the user to service without special tools and knowledge, which are always proprietary trade secrets.
Making something to last decades, if not centuries, and still allow for improvements of the product may make the product too expensive to purchase for the average user. Imagine taking out a loan to pay $30,000 for an iPhone that would be modular and expandable to take into account future improvements. It would be the last smartphone you would buy, if you could afford it. Add to that the loans for cars, light bulbs, pencils, pens, computers, printers, TV sets, athletic and gaming equipment, etc....
Water flows down hill using the path of least resistance. So do products. All are restrained by the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, and so is product manufacturing, distribution and sales, with the profit motive determining the actual of many possible paths.
$72/yr used to be what Amazon charged for Prime until Bezos got greedy.
However, Prime isn't that good of a deal. "Free Shipping" isn't really free. When you compare prices of alternate suppliers linked to an item you find that their price for that time, plus their shipping charges, usually is close to or equals Amazon's Prime price for that item.
That leaves movies. Pay $10/mo to see movies you wouldn't walk across the street to see? No thanks. One can do that on NetFlix for $8/mo. But, no matter. What come out of Hollywood isn't worth watching.
"I'm going to laugh my ass off when a vulnerability like this is found on Linux and you smug bastards get exploited en masse. It's just a matter of time, and I can't wait until it happens. Yay!"
LOL! You obviously do not understand how Linux works. It doesn't have promiscuous "ActiveX" type controls..
Enjoy going through life without your posterior!:D
"And Linux users are not usually that much better than windows users at applying security updates, so, yes, a new Wannacry is quite possible."
Doubtful. All Ubuntu based distros had the patch pushed out yesterday. That would also include Mint and several others besides Kubuntu and KDE Neon (which is what I run). Linux users stupid enough to turn off their automatic updates (which is on by default) deserve what they get.
In the second week of my freshman year, 1960, I had an emergency appendicitis operation. The TOTAL bill (doctor, hospital and medicine) was $750.50, and BlueCross & BlueShield paid it all. The premiums were paid by the company where I had worked. The insurance companies competed to get the company's business.
Then Nixon listened to Halderman about Kaiser's HMO's and got government into healthcare, to "save the people money". Costs have been rising and coverage falling every since. The insurance companies stopped competing and started colluding on price. They also stopped using standard mortality tables and began dividing the population up into groups based on age and previous health.
Today an appendectomy will cost about $10K and the patient would pay anywhere between $100 copay to 50% of the total cost. Obamacare has pretty much set the premiums for a family of four living on $48K/yr at $1,200/mo or $14K/yr. The ACA amounts to a tax on employment. It penalizes those who work and funds those who become dependent on the government. Backdoor socialism, which was its main goal. The ACA will cost $2 TRILLION dollars over the next ten years. For that money we could have put a free clinic in every town in America.
@ShanghaiBill Exactly. Show me someone who has written an original sorting algorithm in the last 20 years, or made non-trivial improvements on a double linked btree list.
"Major Banks and Parts of Federal Gov't Still Rely On Cagey Programmers Who Never Write Decent Comments To Support Programs Instead Of Hiring People To Write Decent Comments."
It's not so much "cagey programmers" as it is over-worked programmers, especially at the State level, where computer illiterate legislators continue to dream up new legislation that puts pressure on coders to modify existing software to meet the legal demands. Except for management, most of whom are computer illiterates as well, State programmers are underpaid and over worked. Many States are having severe financial tax shortfalls, so there won't be new programmers being added to their teams any time soon. I wrote extensive documentation INSIDE my code to explain to any coder who took on my projects after I retired what I did and why I did it that way. Documentation for the users were rarely written because it was the users (clerks) whose functions I was computerizing who dictated what the GUI interface looked like and the underlying software did. If they weren't happy I wasn't happy. So, I didn't need to write documentation for them. They usually trained their replacements and the newbie clerks could ask their fellow clerks if they had questions.
The State Dept of Revenue in the midwest state where I worked have been using a mainframe running COBOL for almost 50 years. About a dozen years ago the suites decided to deploy Oracle as a "replacement". Now they have two database systems and Ellison lies awake nights thinking how to charge more for existing installations. Oracle has ended up costing more in the last decade than the COBOL system has in the last half century. Now they are stuck with Oracle and the taxpayers are stuck with the bill.
Are you a troll? Or, perhaps, one of James Plamondon's "Linux technical evangelists", a.k.a. digital terrorists, because of the postings they make on various computer or technical websites. Joe Baar wrote well of them with his article "SLIME".
I've been using Linux since May of 1998 with RH 5.0. I've experimented with lots of distros and spent time with Mandrake, Mandriva, PCLinuxOS, openSUSE and a few others. For its time RH 5.0 was marvelous, compared to Win95, and so it has been. The current Linux distro I was using was equal to or better than any version of Windows available at the time. From January of 2009 I used Kubuntu, until about 6 months ago when I moved to KDE Neon User Edition.
I've never had a "reliability" problem with any version of Linux I've used. My Acer V3-771 has an Intel HD Graphics primary and an NVidia GT650M secondary which cannot be set as primary in the BIOS. Despite that, when I installed the nvidia-370 driver it made my NVidia chip the primary and everything runs on it.
Next, you complain about not being able to do "real" work on Linux. Before I retired in 2008 I was using Linux (SUSE) to write in house client-server apps using Qt4's API. I used compiler defines to switch between PostgreSQL code on Linux and Oracle code on Windows during compilation. I used Linux because I could code, debug and compile 2-3X faster on Linux.
At first blush it appeared that Dell was using the same old tricks of 10 years ago. Clicking on the 5530 link I didn't see any reference to Ubuntu but I did see this:
Operating System (Dell recommends Windows 10 Pro.) Uh huh. That's how it was 10 years ago. But, I clicked on the "Customize & Buy" link and on the very next page I could select the Ubuntu OS. The price also dropped by $100 but the hardware stayed the same. THAT is different. Ten years ago Dell did the bait & switch, offering Linux on different configurations of their boxes to prevent comparisons. And, 10 years ago, the peripherals offered on the Linux boxes were very limited.
Maybe Dell means it this time and it isn't a ploy to negotiate lower per unit prices from Microsoft.
Why should I install Skype (one poster called it spyke) and allow MS to use "Legal Intercept" to spy on my communications, or give that privilege to some gov agent? https://www.forbes.com/sites/e...
It was bad enough when Skype's previous owners burgled Linux users CPU and bandwidth to act as P2P for others communications and left daemons remaining in memory after Skype was shut down! Were they spying too? MS changed the P2P feature to a Linux server farm on which they installed their patented "Legal Intercept" software. If you use Skype you might as well open your Window and shout to the outside while you talk.
I've moved on to other PRIVATE means of communication. One nice one that works well on my KDE Neon User Edition OS is "Wire".
Slashdot Mirror
Is Lexus discriminating against me because I can't afford their cars?
That contrary to its propaganda, Google does NOT like diversity of opinion.
??? Are YOU a plebe pouring out "crap"?
"especially since the media became operating arms of weapons manufacturers."
AND, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democrat Party, which is a shell corporation for the Communist Party.
https://youtu.be/PblVo9y735k?t...
It's exactly what the MNM did during the Obama administration to cover up its dozen scandals, and the exact opposite of what they are doing now to the Trump administration with fake news.
While there are occasional Prime sales with free shipping that are real, I've noticed that the price on many Prime sales that include "free" shipping were equal to the price of other vendors on Amazon, plus shipping. Why pay $12/mo for Prime unless you want to stream their movies?
My wife and I have used Stevia white powder extract for about the last 30 years. I'm 6'6", 250 lbs, 128/80, and my last blood panel two months ago had all the numbers centered in the acceptable ranges. EKG normal.
We eat out once a week or so with friends, usually on Sunday afternoon, and enjoy Panera, Culvers and DQ when we have some spare change.
I'm somewhat sedentary, spending 8-10 hours/day on the computer (KDE Neon User Edition with Btrfs running RAID1 on two 750Gb HDs), primarily on KubuntuForums.net and YT, and I average 2-4 cups of Green Tea a day.
Oh, I'll be 76 yrs old in three weeks.
on this thread reminded me of the great uptime wars 15 years ago. Linux users were claiming uptimes of 200, 300, 400 and more days, only to be countered by Windows users who claimed equal or longer uptimes.
The argument was settled abruptly and permanently when Microsoft announced the 32bit clock bug which automatically rebooted ALL Windows installations after an uptime of only 49.7 days. Any Windows user claiming 50 or more days of uptime was lying.
My longest uptime was 410 days (IIRC) on an in office PostgreSQL server running SuSE 6.3.
I've been retired for nine years and I no longer need 24/7/365 access to my computers, all of which are laptops, so I turn them off every night.
Today I see in this comment sections lots of criticisms about the "usability" of KDE, Plasma, Gnome, Mint and other Linux DE's and it is obvious from the nature of the complaints that the complainers are less than truthful about their assertions. The more things change the more they remain the same! :D
Whaaaaat?
I've been running Neon on top of Ubuntu 16.04 for two years and systemd has NEVER forced me to reboot. I'm also running my NVidia GT650M via nvidia-378 and it makes my secondary GPU, which cannot be set as the primary in the BIOS, act like the primary.
http://distrowatch.com/awstats...
Ubuntu is only 2.3% of the 14,445,000 hits running Linux this month. The rest of the name brand distros hoover around 0%.
The most popular distro is Unknown:
GNU Linux (Unknown or unspecified distribution) 12,446,745 44.4 %
Remember the Nickel-Iron batteries?
Edison developed them in 1902 and the last Ni-Fe plant was shut down in the 70's. (China is making them again, now, in response to solar power demands).
Ni-Fe batteries worked between -30C and 60C. They were chargeable to 100% and dischargeable to 0% without damage. A 400 Ah Ni-Fe battery delivered the same power to the load as a 1000 Ah Lead acid battery. They are easy to repair and restore to service. There are Edison batteries (as they are called) in service today, nearly 40 years after the last one was made. You can pass your Edison batteries on to your great grand children. Nickle and Iron are common metals and do not pollute the environment like Lead and Sulfuric acid do. So, why would makers of other batteries work to eliminate the Ni-Fe battery?
To have continuing growth of sales either the product has to be continuously improved, or population of purchasers has to grow or, the product has to wear out, forcing the consumer to purchase another one, or all of the above. To increase service revenues the product has to be cheaply made and difficult for the user to service without special tools and knowledge, which are always proprietary trade secrets.
Making something to last decades, if not centuries, and still allow for improvements of the product may make the product too expensive to purchase for the average user. Imagine taking out a loan to pay $30,000 for an iPhone that would be modular and expandable to take into account future improvements. It would be the last smartphone you would buy, if you could afford it. Add to that the loans for cars, light bulbs, pencils, pens, computers, printers, TV sets, athletic and gaming equipment, etc....
Water flows down hill using the path of least resistance. So do products. All are restrained by the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, and so is product manufacturing, distribution and sales, with the profit motive determining the actual of many possible paths.
Talk about a "nothing burger" ... this is one!
The fix? Merely a standard "sudo apt upgrade & sudo apt full-upgrade", something most users of Ubuntu & its derivatives do with automatic updates.
No, that's not it.
In every case (OOXML, OLPC, etc...) key players were bribed to favor MS.
$72/yr used to be what Amazon charged for Prime until Bezos got greedy.
However, Prime isn't that good of a deal. "Free Shipping" isn't really free. When you compare prices of alternate suppliers linked to an item you find that their price for that time, plus their shipping charges, usually is close to or equals Amazon's Prime price for that item.
That leaves movies. Pay $10/mo to see movies you wouldn't walk across the street to see? No thanks. One can do that on NetFlix for $8/mo. But, no matter. What come out of Hollywood isn't worth watching.
"I'm going to laugh my ass off when a vulnerability like this is found on Linux and you smug bastards get exploited en masse. It's just a matter of time, and I can't wait until it happens. Yay!"
LOL! You obviously do not understand how Linux works. It doesn't have promiscuous "ActiveX" type controls..
Enjoy going through life without your posterior! :D
"And Linux users are not usually that much better than windows users at applying security updates, so, yes, a new Wannacry is quite possible."
Doubtful. All Ubuntu based distros had the patch pushed out yesterday. That would also include Mint and several others besides Kubuntu and KDE Neon (which is what I run).
Linux users stupid enough to turn off their automatic updates (which is on by default) deserve what they get.
I DO!
@Hognoxious: "... but you can't have either without systemd."
Sure you can! Slackware, Gentoo, Devuan, LFS, and other lessor knowns
In the second week of my freshman year, 1960, I had an emergency appendicitis operation. The TOTAL bill (doctor, hospital and medicine) was $750.50, and BlueCross & BlueShield paid it all. The premiums were paid by the company where I had worked. The insurance companies competed to get the company's business.
Then Nixon listened to Halderman about Kaiser's HMO's and got government into healthcare, to "save the people money". Costs have been rising and coverage falling every since. The insurance companies stopped competing and started colluding on price. They also stopped using standard mortality tables and began dividing the population up into groups based on age and previous health.
Today an appendectomy will cost about $10K and the patient would pay anywhere between $100 copay to 50% of the total cost. Obamacare has pretty much set the premiums for a family of four living on $48K/yr at $1,200/mo or $14K/yr. The ACA amounts to a tax on employment. It penalizes those who work and funds those who become dependent on the government. Backdoor socialism, which was its main goal. The ACA will cost $2 TRILLION dollars over the next ten years. For that money we could have put a free clinic in every town in America.
@ShanghaiBill
Exactly.
Show me someone who has written an original sorting algorithm in the last 20 years, or made non-trivial improvements on a double linked btree list.
"Major Banks and Parts of Federal Gov't Still Rely On Cagey Programmers Who Never Write Decent Comments To Support Programs Instead Of Hiring People To Write Decent Comments."
It's not so much "cagey programmers" as it is over-worked programmers, especially at the State level, where computer illiterate legislators continue to dream up new legislation that puts pressure on coders to modify existing software to meet the legal demands. Except for management, most of whom are computer illiterates as well, State programmers are underpaid and over worked. Many States are having severe financial tax shortfalls, so there won't be new programmers being added to their teams any time soon. I wrote extensive documentation INSIDE my code to explain to any coder who took on my projects after I retired what I did and why I did it that way. Documentation for the users were rarely written because it was the users (clerks) whose functions I was computerizing who dictated what the GUI interface looked like and the underlying software did. If they weren't happy I wasn't happy. So, I didn't need to write documentation for them. They usually trained their replacements and the newbie clerks could ask their fellow clerks if they had questions.
The State Dept of Revenue in the midwest state where I worked have been using a mainframe running COBOL for almost 50 years. About a dozen years ago the suites decided to deploy Oracle as a "replacement". Now they have two database systems and Ellison lies awake nights thinking how to charge more for existing installations. Oracle has ended up costing more in the last decade than the COBOL system has in the last half century. Now they are stuck with Oracle and the taxpayers are stuck with the bill.
Been there, did that, but with VFP6, which is also a dead language.
Are you a troll? Or, perhaps, one of James Plamondon's "Linux technical evangelists", a.k.a. digital terrorists, because of the postings they make on various computer or technical websites. Joe Baar wrote well of them with his article "SLIME".
I've been using Linux since May of 1998 with RH 5.0. I've experimented with lots of distros and spent time with Mandrake, Mandriva, PCLinuxOS, openSUSE and a few others. For its time RH 5.0 was marvelous, compared to Win95, and so it has been. The current Linux distro I was using was equal to or better than any version of Windows available at the time. From January of 2009 I used Kubuntu, until about 6 months ago when I moved to KDE Neon User Edition.
I've never had a "reliability" problem with any version of Linux I've used. My Acer V3-771 has an Intel HD Graphics primary and an NVidia GT650M secondary which cannot be set as primary in the BIOS. Despite that, when I installed the nvidia-370 driver it made my NVidia chip the primary and everything runs on it.
Next, you complain about not being able to do "real" work on Linux. Before I retired in 2008 I was using Linux (SUSE) to write in house client-server apps using Qt4's API. I used compiler defines to switch between PostgreSQL code on Linux and Oracle code on Windows during compilation. I used Linux because I could code, debug and compile 2-3X faster on Linux.
It's a poor workman who blames his tools.
At first blush it appeared that Dell was using the same old tricks of 10 years ago. Clicking on the 5530 link I didn't see any reference to Ubuntu but I did see this:
Operating System (Dell recommends Windows 10 Pro.)
Uh huh. That's how it was 10 years ago.
But, I clicked on the "Customize & Buy" link and on the very next page I could select the Ubuntu OS. The price also dropped by $100 but the hardware stayed the same. THAT is different. Ten years ago Dell did the bait & switch, offering Linux on different configurations of their boxes to prevent comparisons. And, 10 years ago, the peripherals offered on the Linux boxes were very limited.
Maybe Dell means it this time and it isn't a ploy to negotiate lower per unit prices from Microsoft.
Why should I install Skype (one poster called it spyke) and allow MS to use "Legal Intercept" to spy on my communications, or give that privilege to some gov agent?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/e...
It was bad enough when Skype's previous owners burgled Linux users CPU and bandwidth to act as P2P for others communications and left daemons remaining in memory after Skype was shut down! Were they spying too? MS changed the P2P feature to a Linux server farm on which they installed their patented "Legal Intercept" software. If you use Skype you might as well open your Window and shout to the outside while you talk.
I've moved on to other PRIVATE means of communication. One nice one that works well on my KDE Neon User Edition OS is "Wire".