This brainless, angry retort might explain why you appear to have no working knowledge about anything at all.
For example, let's take this comment in which you intimate that "scripting" is a problem for "all GNU/LINUX" distributions.
Now, I'm not entirely sure what that means since pretty much every distro let's you customize things to your liking by manually choosing which packages you do/don't want. If it's in reference to tcsh scripting, or sh scripting, I'd be fascinated in hearing what, exactly, the killer difference is between the shells distributed in Slackware and, say, Red Hat?
Or, did you just think talking about "manually editing init scripts" would make you sound smart, despite the fact that starting up your daemons from init is a trivial matter for most REAL Unix users anyway?
I'm also keen on this comment, which indicates your utter lack of real-world experience with production-level systems. Were this not the case, you'd be clued-in to the fact that it's not uncommon in the least to wind up working in an unfamiliar environment on unfamiliar machines. This is particularly true if you're good at your job (I guess you're probably good at your job too, but handing ice cream cones out the window can't be that hard) and wind up getting sent around to different company sites to fix other people's problems.
But, of course, your crowning achievement thus far has been your own self-outing as the communist lunatic you really are. What really fascinates me is how you managed to tie Richard Stalin to Che Guevera and Fidel Castro, that was really great. I also had to chuckle when you compared the educated classes - highly liberal - to right-wingers. That was great too.
In conclusion:
1. You clearly know nothing of significance about UNIX environments. 2. You clearly know nothing of significance about the real world. 3. You clearly know nothing of significance about the English language. 4. You clearly know nothing of significance about pretty much anything.
If you spent a little more time enlightening yourself and a little less time pretending you knew something about the computing world, you'd have learned about the 'ver' command about.. oh.. fifteen years ago.
Do you have to train to be this clueless, or does it come naturally to Linux users?
This is what slashdot's previous iteration of a captcha looked like in an in-memory associative array after the intersecting lines had been removed and a de-skewing algorithm applied. There was actually a version of the code after that which properly picked out where the lines actually intersected the letters and didn't erase the intersecting section to create those gaps.
Before they switched to the newest CAPTCHA system, I was breaking their CAPTCHAs with a modified SS.pl script with almost 100% accuracy (it had a little trouble properly splitting up the text when a j or other similar character wrapped partially under another letter).
Of course, the new CAPTCHAs are much harder. I can't even read some of them myself, but the point is that breaking CAPTCHA that people can easily read usually isn't really that hard.
A need for "tolerance" would imply that the behavior being characterized were legitimate and not harmful, only different. Since the behavior of these backwards morons who are trying to push lies in science classes is no more legitimate than a drunken sop preaching the gospel to children outside a charnel house he just visited, there is no need for "tolerance".
If you want to be tolerated, stay in your stupid little glass house and lie to yourself. I don't bug you morons and try to tell you what to preach to your ignorant, sheepish followers, so do me a the same pleasure and stay the hell out of science classes. The religious liars are the ones who came pounding on MY door screaming that they want to be allowed to lie to MY kids. So you can take your "tolerance" and corkscrew it right up your fat ass.
That's because people like swamii are mentally stunted and require the safety blanket that illogical perceptions of "absolute truth" provide. In reality, there is no way to ever know you know anything for sure, so the solution to people who are mentally lacking and find this situation uncomfortable is to simply remove themselves from reality.
I used to have an aunt who would become exceptionally agitated if you mentioned the vastness of the universe to her, because the enormous volumes involved are pretty much unfathomable to the typical human mind due to a complete and utter lack of relevant context. She would simply choose not to think about it because she became uncomfortable.
Similarly, religion shuts down the brain in order to provide a comforting idea of solidity that, of course, probably doesn't exist. I mean, let's face it. When it comes right down to it, most people are only capable of thinking to the extent that it keeps them alive in their own little world. Few people are gifted with the ability to think out the advancement of the human race. When you consider how dumb most people are compared to the tiny number of exceptionally intelligent people who move society forward, it's really no surprise that religion is so prevelant. This is why intelligent, rational discussion doesn't work when highly religious people push agendas: they're not intelligent or rational enough. Granted, these are usually only the religious people who are obscenely stupid, but they get the support of the 'normals' just because they play the solidarity card (e.g. "science / liberals / reality is out to get me and therefore you too").
Or, to wrap all that up in one nice package: religion exists because most people are too dumb to understand their own reality and get wrapped up in false allegiances with some really stupid people.
I'm going to put this in the simplest way possible in the hopes that your tiny, underdeveloped brain can manage it:
You. Are. An. Idiot.
Now, dance for me dancing monkey, and try to make a case that I'm against gun ownership. Maybe you could start here and work your way back through the numerous "anti-gun-ownership" comments I've made, including several in which I've indicated an interest in purchasing various firearms and training classes.
And, here's the thing about "striking back". Unless you're an inbred fucktard, like yourself and the other poster, you're probably smart enough to understand the concept of a measured response.
Try upgrading your maturity level a few points before you get some innocent bystander killed with your faux machismo while you're waving your gun around the general direction of some guy who stole your pocket change. Irresponsible cockblockers like you are the ones that create the image of some bucktoothed "gun nut" and give the rest of us a bad name.
I don't think so. See, I'm smart enough to recognize that shooting somebody for taking your watch and shooting somebody for pulling a gun on you are two different things. Your equation of theft and threat of bodily harm betrays your ignorance. I suspect you'll shoot yourself in the eye cleaning your gun before you shoot anyone else who deserves it, but since people like you who deserve it never seem to get it, I may be wrong.
You are an irresponsible person, and you shouldn't be allowed to own a firearm. I only hope that if you shoot anyone, it's yourself or a family member, because it's far more likely you'll shoot someone else's loved ones than an actual criminal given your pathetic attitude.
I think the only gun laws that should exist, should exist to keep guns out of the hands of people like you. The fact that you value inanimate objects over human life is evidence enough that you're too immature to hold one.
So you're theory here is that a tow-truck driver's life is worth less than a vehicle he's towing? Because, you know, a normal human being would have sued the guy or called the police, not murdered him.
Laugh it up, funny boy. This is a prime example of why open source software can't be trusted on government computers until there's a reasonably centralized organization heading up the whole thing.
First of all, there's lots of transparency in the code, but no accountability in the coders. If somebody exploits some random firefox hole and nukes a town with our own weapons, was it worthwhile just to push some silly philosophy?
Second, you can't trust the government to upgrade its systems because, for the most part, it's full of incompetents and generally doesn't pay well enough to hire anything better from the private sector contractors it digs into. I mean, granted, this GM update will (stupidly) force an install on your computer (gleefully breaking all sorts of things in the process), but most software devs are responsible enough not to do that, and won't.
I think you meant that "idiots" like me who get firstpost trolls that generate three times the comments that your silly responses do are what drive this site.
Face it. It's people like me who are just here to try and aggravate people like you that drive the most discussion among these idiots. If everybody was providing informed responses all the time, 90% of the morons that visit this site wouldn't ever post. If it weren't for me and like-minded individuals trying to stir them up for own amusement, this site would be dead as, well, K5.
My general take on Linux, take it or leave it or try to convince me why I should change my outlook.
Linux is not a bad system, it just doesn't have anything to offer that its competitors don't already do as well or better.
The problem with Linux is not that it's not production ready, it's that it's a system that doesn't have anything special to offer and has nowhere new left to go. It has taken a large chunk of the market share away from the old, cumbersome UNIX systems, with their painful licensing models and lackluster support, but now it has no more market share to chip at because the supermajority of disk space that is left is in the form of desktops.
And Linux is just nothing special in that realm.
I speak authoritatively on the subject because my experience with Linux begins many moons ago with an old system called Linux Mandrake, now called Mandriva Linux. It started with version 5.2, a system forked from the Red Hat 5.2 release. I have since used Mandrake 6.0, Red Hat 7.0 and 7.3, 8.0, 9.0, Fedora Core 2, and variations from SuSE.
The first version I used was painful. It was a horrible system with a horrible interface and horrible documentation. Managing it was excruciating, and it wasn't uncommon for a seemingly simple change to break numerous systems in unrelated modules and drivers. The GUI was weak, disorganized, and difficult to manipulate. The desktop was hard to customize, and the interfaces were slow and cumbersome. Installing and uninstalling was nearly impossible because packages scattered files across a confusing, oblique filesystem, and it was a very common occurrence to find rpm entries had been corrupted and left unusable.
These problems I experienced were not uncommon and plagued Linux for years, leaving astute IT professionals shaking their heads, and young, energetic, and idealistic kids suffering under a burdensome system. I think it is fair to say that the rise in Linux use during the IT bubble and the subsequent pop of that bubble is not a completely coincidental correlation. Literally millions of man hours were lost in this time to troublesome Linux boxes and that sort of loss can hit new IPOs hard when it comes time to pay the piper.
It took many, many years and thousands of developers, but the system finally began to shed its inadequacies and "quirks" and develop into a full-fledged corporate workhorse. The managers who had been shaking their heads warily approached new versions and their confidence was bolstered as the GUIs began to fill out, the quirks began to shrink to the background, and more application support became the norm on new releases.
Now, Linux is a force to be reckoned with in backoffices and server racks. It is not, however, any closer to dethroning Windows as the supreme ruler of meatspace userland.
There is a very simple reason for this: it sucks.
I know, I know, I just finished zipping up the body bag on the "Linux isn't production ready" myth, but we've moved to a whole new realm here. We've gone from the terminology of fsck to frag. From SMP to MMORPG.
The problem is that everyone knows Windows and everyone's applications already run on Windows. There is no purpose in learning a new system because Windows is now polished and stable, and maintains its original attractiveness through its continued ease-of-use. Like Linux, it has shed its inadequacies and become a competent and powerful system in its own right.
So, in effect, we have the Windows system which has provided a consistent and simple interface for a decade now, and the Linux system which is an alien world to most people. Both function competently, though Linux still suffers a bit from the problem of glut thanks to its monolothic structure, and neither really offers a serious bnenefit over the other. As Joe Sixpack sitting in my cubicle, I have to think "Well, then why should I switch?" As the IT manager evaluating the cost of switching, I have to ask, "Well, how can you justify the tens of thousands I'll need to spe
There's a difference between being smart and being skilled, and the water is muddied around compensation by the fact that neither actually gets you the big bucks (though the latter tends to get more than the former, hence plumbers with a pliable trade making more than abstract thinking brainiacs).
Witness how much MBAs make, despite their utter lack of any useful skill at all, or any apparent driving intelligence, as evidence.
Here's something I never understood about the liberals on this site. They're all for making technological advancements that improve productivity and make things faster and easier for everyone, but then they complain when the feds wants to use this technology to make THEIR jobs faster and easier.
Why is it such a bad thing that they should be able to go to a court and get wiretapping authorization, then be able to do the tap in less than 10 minutes? I'm sure there will be lots of "big brother is after me" comments in this story, but why? Is the FBI supposed to just sit back and chisel everything in stone?
Call me crazy, but if the FBI needs 10 minute wiretapping on a WIFI setup to keep my plane from being blown up by a bunch of Islamic radicals, then so be it. It's better to be a live chump who's email was intercepted by the feds than a dead one who's viagra spam remained a secret.
Of course, this apparently has not stopped you from sharing your opinion with the rest of us, despite the fact that it has nothing at all to do with the subject of this story, and adds nothing of value to the comments. In fact, it even fails as a troll, because you took it too far and tossed tact right out the window.
Please grab a notepad and write this down for future reference: if anybody gives half a shit about your opinion, they'll ask you for it.
Am I supposed to think more... or less... of you since you lifted that entire midsection verbatim, without citation, from the Herald Sun?
Not only that, you, of course, didn't answer the question. Go reread it and try again, but I'm not going to hang around holding my breath on the offchance that you actually bother to answer it.
Here, I'll help by stripping out all the extra text which is maybe confusing you. Here's the meat you need to focus on:
...quote, directly, the majority of known terrorist leaders giving an ironclad statement that they have perpetrated X Y and Z attacks simply over religious intolerance...
You got proof that the reason "they" are after us is about religious differences?
In other words, given your apparent position, you can now quote, directly, the majority of known terrorist leaders giving an ironclad statement that they have perpetrated X Y and Z attacks simply over religious intolerance? Right?
It was still a tremedous delay, even with traffic moving at the posted maximum speed
What part of the post did not sink in? That kind of congestion occurs because you have a forumla:
3000 speeding morons + 2 people driving like normal, intelligent, reasonably well-adjusted individuals.
If all 3002 people had been doing what those two were doing, it wouldn't have happened.
I will illustrate the point further for you, on a smaller scale, using an anecdote.
Just today, 15 southbound in central PA between Harrisburg and the Maryland border, I was passed by SEVEN morons from Maryland who thought it would be a great idea to go ripping through at a good 20 over the posted limit. What happened?
I shit you not, 1.5 miles later, doing 4 mph over the speed limit, I caught up with EVERY ONE OF THEM at a red light. ALL SEVEN of those fuckers got clogged up at one light because they were stunted, paint-chip-eating morons who don't understand the ramifications of random delays in the d = rt formula. I had passed all but one of them by the time I turned off the road because the dumbasses got stuck in one lane behind a semi and got stuck at the next light. One of them had been in the other lane and got through ahead of me.
There is no reasonable excuse for driving over 65 on most highways on most common trips. The people that go ripping around, and all these slashdotters making excuses are, in fact, self-absorbed assholes who are too stupid to understand even the most rudimentary trappings of this discussion. End of story.
Maybe in your vernacular, but a fundamentalist in the real world is just any individual with a philosophy of Fundamentalism on a given subject. For example, I follow the fundamentalist automotive performance philosophy that's usually summed up in "No replacement for displacement".
In fact, I rarely, if ever, hear the term fundamentalist used without some sort of qualifier such as "Chrsitian" or "Muslim" or "Right wing". The only time it would even work in intelligent conversation is if the qualifier is implied based on some other part of the conversation that's already passed.
There's a difference between being "difficult" and being "accurate". This is accurate, you're just being confusing.
You're not real clued in to how criminal investigations work, huh?
When the police find something "suspicious", you don't just say "oh, I have this perfectly plausible excuse which sounds highly improbable to technical incompetents like you" and walk away. Trust me, I know. I had to jump through some pretty ridiculous hoops with a detective once just to prove that it was not, in fact, uncommon for a brand-spanking new hard drive to appear "wiped".
The justice system is a misnomer. It's not a "justice" system, it's a "legal" system. Justice would imply that all parties are acting in an informed, responsible, and full-capacity manner, which is probably the sickest joke one could make about our incompetent, bungling court system.
Chip Salzenberg is fucked. You would be fucked if you tried to right off your little hidden system with that excuse, and you'd probably get charged for trying to interfere with the investigation and giving false information to the police if you used it.
Because it can't even run right on a regular PC? Because the kernel is about as stable as a ladder made of lincoln logs? Because it's large, unwieldy, difficult to maintain, and spreads itself across hard drives like a plague?
Now, if you had been talking about putting an actual production system like NetBSD onto the DS....
Slashdot requires you to wait between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment.
It's been 4 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
Speaking of Linux.... slashdot must be running it...
from the hold-your-breath-if-you're-surprised dept.
If I held my breath every time I was surprised by the abusive use of the abusive DMCA, I'd.... oh wait, I'd be breathing perfectly normally because it doesn't surprise me in the least that companies - which exist in a capitalist system for the sole purpose of taking money from people - are stomping all over people's rights for the purpose of fattening their wallets.
Of course, many of the people responsible for the passage of the DMCA were re-elected, and few, if any, people raked Clinton over the coals for signing the damned thing. What amazes me most about all this is not that companies are using this +5 Tool of Corruption, but that nobody outside the technical circle seems to care.
So fuck 'em. I say let the little bastard consumers wallow in their own shit until they're paying $11 every single time they want to watch the newest shitty hollywood flick that they can no longer obtain through any means but 24-hour-per-use download.
Cracking this garbage isn't going to get rid of it, it's just going to get people dragged into court. If you want it gone, let them piss consumers off enough that there's a backlash and the distributors and producers have no choice but to strike a reasonable compromise between fair use and protection against theivery.
Slashdot Mirror
This brainless, angry retort might explain why you appear to have no working knowledge about anything at all.
For example, let's take this comment in which you intimate that "scripting" is a problem for "all GNU/LINUX" distributions.
Now, I'm not entirely sure what that means since pretty much every distro let's you customize things to your liking by manually choosing which packages you do/don't want. If it's in reference to tcsh scripting, or sh scripting, I'd be fascinated in hearing what, exactly, the killer difference is between the shells distributed in Slackware and, say, Red Hat?
Or, did you just think talking about "manually editing init scripts" would make you sound smart, despite the fact that starting up your daemons from init is a trivial matter for most REAL Unix users anyway?
I'm also keen on this comment, which indicates your utter lack of real-world experience with production-level systems. Were this not the case, you'd be clued-in to the fact that it's not uncommon in the least to wind up working in an unfamiliar environment on unfamiliar machines. This is particularly true if you're good at your job (I guess you're probably good at your job too, but handing ice cream cones out the window can't be that hard) and wind up getting sent around to different company sites to fix other people's problems.
But, of course, your crowning achievement thus far has been your own self-outing as the communist lunatic you really are. What really fascinates me is how you managed to tie Richard Stalin to Che Guevera and Fidel Castro, that was really great. I also had to chuckle when you compared the educated classes - highly liberal - to right-wingers. That was great too.
In conclusion:
1. You clearly know nothing of significance about UNIX environments.
2. You clearly know nothing of significance about the real world.
3. You clearly know nothing of significance about the English language.
4. You clearly know nothing of significance about pretty much anything.
Toodles.
If you spent a little more time enlightening yourself and a little less time pretending you knew something about the computing world, you'd have learned about the 'ver' command about.. oh.. fifteen years ago.
Do you have to train to be this clueless, or does it come naturally to Linux users?
http://www.gh-sts.com/captcha.txt
This is what slashdot's previous iteration of a captcha looked like in an in-memory associative array after the intersecting lines had been removed and a de-skewing algorithm applied. There was actually a version of the code after that which properly picked out where the lines actually intersected the letters and didn't erase the intersecting section to create those gaps.
Before they switched to the newest CAPTCHA system, I was breaking their CAPTCHAs with a modified SS.pl script with almost 100% accuracy (it had a little trouble properly splitting up the text when a j or other similar character wrapped partially under another letter).
Of course, the new CAPTCHAs are much harder. I can't even read some of them myself, but the point is that breaking CAPTCHA that people can easily read usually isn't really that hard.
Yes, I used ImageMagick's Perlmagick library.
Slashdot fails
A need for "tolerance" would imply that the behavior being characterized were legitimate and not harmful, only different. Since the behavior of these backwards morons who are trying to push lies in science classes is no more legitimate than a drunken sop preaching the gospel to children outside a charnel house he just visited, there is no need for "tolerance".
If you want to be tolerated, stay in your stupid little glass house and lie to yourself. I don't bug you morons and try to tell you what to preach to your ignorant, sheepish followers, so do me a the same pleasure and stay the hell out of science classes. The religious liars are the ones who came pounding on MY door screaming that they want to be allowed to lie to MY kids. So you can take your "tolerance" and corkscrew it right up your fat ass.
That's because people like swamii are mentally stunted and require the safety blanket that illogical perceptions of "absolute truth" provide. In reality, there is no way to ever know you know anything for sure, so the solution to people who are mentally lacking and find this situation uncomfortable is to simply remove themselves from reality.
I used to have an aunt who would become exceptionally agitated if you mentioned the vastness of the universe to her, because the enormous volumes involved are pretty much unfathomable to the typical human mind due to a complete and utter lack of relevant context. She would simply choose not to think about it because she became uncomfortable.
Similarly, religion shuts down the brain in order to provide a comforting idea of solidity that, of course, probably doesn't exist. I mean, let's face it. When it comes right down to it, most people are only capable of thinking to the extent that it keeps them alive in their own little world. Few people are gifted with the ability to think out the advancement of the human race. When you consider how dumb most people are compared to the tiny number of exceptionally intelligent people who move society forward, it's really no surprise that religion is so prevelant. This is why intelligent, rational discussion doesn't work when highly religious people push agendas: they're not intelligent or rational enough. Granted, these are usually only the religious people who are obscenely stupid, but they get the support of the 'normals' just because they play the solidarity card (e.g. "science / liberals / reality is out to get me and therefore you too").
Or, to wrap all that up in one nice package: religion exists because most people are too dumb to understand their own reality and get wrapped up in false allegiances with some really stupid people.
I'm going to put this in the simplest way possible in the hopes that your tiny, underdeveloped brain can manage it:
You. Are. An. Idiot.
Now, dance for me dancing monkey, and try to make a case that I'm against gun ownership. Maybe you could start here and work your way back through the numerous "anti-gun-ownership" comments I've made, including several in which I've indicated an interest in purchasing various firearms and training classes.
And, here's the thing about "striking back". Unless you're an inbred fucktard, like yourself and the other poster, you're probably smart enough to understand the concept of a measured response.
Try upgrading your maturity level a few points before you get some innocent bystander killed with your faux machismo while you're waving your gun around the general direction of some guy who stole your pocket change. Irresponsible cockblockers like you are the ones that create the image of some bucktoothed "gun nut" and give the rest of us a bad name.
I don't think so. See, I'm smart enough to recognize that shooting somebody for taking your watch and shooting somebody for pulling a gun on you are two different things. Your equation of theft and threat of bodily harm betrays your ignorance. I suspect you'll shoot yourself in the eye cleaning your gun before you shoot anyone else who deserves it, but since people like you who deserve it never seem to get it, I may be wrong.
You are an irresponsible person, and you shouldn't be allowed to own a firearm. I only hope that if you shoot anyone, it's yourself or a family member, because it's far more likely you'll shoot someone else's loved ones than an actual criminal given your pathetic attitude.
I think the only gun laws that should exist, should exist to keep guns out of the hands of people like you. The fact that you value inanimate objects over human life is evidence enough that you're too immature to hold one.
So you're theory here is that a tow-truck driver's life is worth less than a vehicle he's towing? Because, you know, a normal human being would have sued the guy or called the police, not murdered him.
Laugh it up, funny boy. This is a prime example of why open source software can't be trusted on government computers until there's a reasonably centralized organization heading up the whole thing.
First of all, there's lots of transparency in the code, but no accountability in the coders. If somebody exploits some random firefox hole and nukes a town with our own weapons, was it worthwhile just to push some silly philosophy?
Second, you can't trust the government to upgrade its systems because, for the most part, it's full of incompetents and generally doesn't pay well enough to hire anything better from the private sector contractors it digs into. I mean, granted, this GM update will (stupidly) force an install on your computer (gleefully breaking all sorts of things in the process), but most software devs are responsible enough not to do that, and won't.
Yea, right.
I think you meant that "idiots" like me who get first post trolls that generate three times the comments that your silly responses do are what drive this site.
Face it. It's people like me who are just here to try and aggravate people like you that drive the most discussion among these idiots. If everybody was providing informed responses all the time, 90% of the morons that visit this site wouldn't ever post. If it weren't for me and like-minded individuals trying to stir them up for own amusement, this site would be dead as, well, K5.
My general take on Linux, take it or leave it or try to convince me why I should change my outlook.
Linux is not a bad system, it just doesn't have anything to offer that its competitors don't already do as well or better.
The problem with Linux is not that it's not production ready, it's that it's a system that doesn't have anything special to offer and has nowhere new left to go. It has taken a large chunk of the market share away from the old, cumbersome UNIX systems, with their painful licensing models and lackluster support, but now it has no more market share to chip at because the supermajority of disk space that is left is in the form of desktops.
And Linux is just nothing special in that realm.
I speak authoritatively on the subject because my experience with Linux begins many moons ago with an old system called Linux Mandrake, now called Mandriva Linux. It started with version 5.2, a system forked from the Red Hat 5.2 release. I have since used Mandrake 6.0, Red Hat 7.0 and 7.3, 8.0, 9.0, Fedora Core 2, and variations from SuSE.
The first version I used was painful. It was a horrible system with a horrible interface and horrible documentation. Managing it was excruciating, and it wasn't uncommon for a seemingly simple change to break numerous systems in unrelated modules and drivers. The GUI was weak, disorganized, and difficult to manipulate. The desktop was hard to customize, and the interfaces were slow and cumbersome. Installing and uninstalling was nearly impossible because packages scattered files across a confusing, oblique filesystem, and it was a very common occurrence to find rpm entries had been corrupted and left unusable.
These problems I experienced were not uncommon and plagued Linux for years, leaving astute IT professionals shaking their heads, and young, energetic, and idealistic kids suffering under a burdensome system. I think it is fair to say that the rise in Linux use during the IT bubble and the subsequent pop of that bubble is not a completely coincidental correlation. Literally millions of man hours were lost in this time to troublesome Linux boxes and that sort of loss can hit new IPOs hard when it comes time to pay the piper.
It took many, many years and thousands of developers, but the system finally began to shed its inadequacies and "quirks" and develop into a full-fledged corporate workhorse. The managers who had been shaking their heads warily approached new versions and their confidence was bolstered as the GUIs began to fill out, the quirks began to shrink to the background, and more application support became the norm on new releases.
Now, Linux is a force to be reckoned with in backoffices and server racks. It is not, however, any closer to dethroning Windows as the supreme ruler of meatspace userland.
There is a very simple reason for this: it sucks.
I know, I know, I just finished zipping up the body bag on the "Linux isn't production ready" myth, but we've moved to a whole new realm here. We've gone from the terminology of fsck to frag. From SMP to MMORPG.
The problem is that everyone knows Windows and everyone's applications already run on Windows. There is no purpose in learning a new system because Windows is now polished and stable, and maintains its original attractiveness through its continued ease-of-use. Like Linux, it has shed its inadequacies and become a competent and powerful system in its own right.
So, in effect, we have the Windows system which has provided a consistent and simple interface for a decade now, and the Linux system which is an alien world to most people. Both function competently, though Linux still suffers a bit from the problem of glut thanks to its monolothic structure, and neither really offers a serious bnenefit over the other. As Joe Sixpack sitting in my cubicle, I have to think "Well, then why should I switch?" As the IT manager evaluating the cost of switching, I have to ask, "Well, how can you justify the tens of thousands I'll need to spe
There's a difference between being smart and being skilled, and the water is muddied around compensation by the fact that neither actually gets you the big bucks (though the latter tends to get more than the former, hence plumbers with a pliable trade making more than abstract thinking brainiacs).
Witness how much MBAs make, despite their utter lack of any useful skill at all, or any apparent driving intelligence, as evidence.
Here's something I never understood about the liberals on this site. They're all for making technological advancements that improve productivity and make things faster and easier for everyone, but then they complain when the feds wants to use this technology to make THEIR jobs faster and easier.
Why is it such a bad thing that they should be able to go to a court and get wiretapping authorization, then be able to do the tap in less than 10 minutes? I'm sure there will be lots of "big brother is after me" comments in this story, but why? Is the FBI supposed to just sit back and chisel everything in stone?
Call me crazy, but if the FBI needs 10 minute wiretapping on a WIFI setup to keep my plane from being blown up by a bunch of Islamic radicals, then so be it. It's better to be a live chump who's email was intercepted by the feds than a dead one who's viagra spam remained a secret.
Yea, I'll bet that would work great with all the systems out there running webservers, huh?
Fortunately, nobody asked you.
Of course, this apparently has not stopped you from sharing your opinion with the rest of us, despite the fact that it has nothing at all to do with the subject of this story, and adds nothing of value to the comments. In fact, it even fails as a troll, because you took it too far and tossed tact right out the window.
Please grab a notepad and write this down for future reference: if anybody gives half a shit about your opinion, they'll ask you for it.
Not only that, you, of course, didn't answer the question. Go reread it and try again, but I'm not going to hang around holding my breath on the offchance that you actually bother to answer it.
Here, I'll help by stripping out all the extra text which is maybe confusing you. Here's the meat you need to focus on:
You got proof that the reason "they" are after us is about religious differences?
In other words, given your apparent position, you can now quote, directly, the majority of known terrorist leaders giving an ironclad statement that they have perpetrated X Y and Z attacks simply over religious intolerance? Right?
It was still a tremedous delay, even with traffic moving at the posted maximum speed
What part of the post did not sink in? That kind of congestion occurs because you have a forumla:
3000 speeding morons + 2 people driving like normal, intelligent, reasonably well-adjusted individuals.
If all 3002 people had been doing what those two were doing, it wouldn't have happened.
I will illustrate the point further for you, on a smaller scale, using an anecdote.
Just today, 15 southbound in central PA between Harrisburg and the Maryland border, I was passed by SEVEN morons from Maryland who thought it would be a great idea to go ripping through at a good 20 over the posted limit. What happened?
I shit you not, 1.5 miles later, doing 4 mph over the speed limit, I caught up with EVERY ONE OF THEM at a red light. ALL SEVEN of those fuckers got clogged up at one light because they were stunted, paint-chip-eating morons who don't understand the ramifications of random delays in the d = rt formula. I had passed all but one of them by the time I turned off the road because the dumbasses got stuck in one lane behind a semi and got stuck at the next light. One of them had been in the other lane and got through ahead of me.
There is no reasonable excuse for driving over 65 on most highways on most common trips. The people that go ripping around, and all these slashdotters making excuses are, in fact, self-absorbed assholes who are too stupid to understand even the most rudimentary trappings of this discussion. End of story.
Maybe in your vernacular, but a fundamentalist in the real world is just any individual with a philosophy of Fundamentalism on a given subject. For example, I follow the fundamentalist automotive performance philosophy that's usually summed up in "No replacement for displacement".
In fact, I rarely, if ever, hear the term fundamentalist used without some sort of qualifier such as "Chrsitian" or "Muslim" or "Right wing". The only time it would even work in intelligent conversation is if the qualifier is implied based on some other part of the conversation that's already passed.
There's a difference between being "difficult" and being "accurate". This is accurate, you're just being confusing.
You're not real clued in to how criminal investigations work, huh?
When the police find something "suspicious", you don't just say "oh, I have this perfectly plausible excuse which sounds highly improbable to technical incompetents like you" and walk away. Trust me, I know. I had to jump through some pretty ridiculous hoops with a detective once just to prove that it was not, in fact, uncommon for a brand-spanking new hard drive to appear "wiped".
The justice system is a misnomer. It's not a "justice" system, it's a "legal" system. Justice would imply that all parties are acting in an informed, responsible, and full-capacity manner, which is probably the sickest joke one could make about our incompetent, bungling court system.
Chip Salzenberg is fucked. You would be fucked if you tried to right off your little hidden system with that excuse, and you'd probably get charged for trying to interfere with the investigation and giving false information to the police if you used it.
Because it can't even run right on a regular PC? Because the kernel is about as stable as a ladder made of lincoln logs? Because it's large, unwieldy, difficult to maintain, and spreads itself across hard drives like a plague?
Now, if you had been talking about putting an actual production system like NetBSD onto the DS....
Speaking of Linux.... slashdot must be running it...
I already do the former, I refuse to review my position on the latter.
Besides, I could also just spend all my time attacking Zonk now. I was getting lonely without Sims to kick around anymore.
from the hold-your-breath-if-you're-surprised dept.
If I held my breath every time I was surprised by the abusive use of the abusive DMCA, I'd.... oh wait, I'd be breathing perfectly normally because it doesn't surprise me in the least that companies - which exist in a capitalist system for the sole purpose of taking money from people - are stomping all over people's rights for the purpose of fattening their wallets.
Of course, many of the people responsible for the passage of the DMCA were re-elected, and few, if any, people raked Clinton over the coals for signing the damned thing. What amazes me most about all this is not that companies are using this +5 Tool of Corruption, but that nobody outside the technical circle seems to care.
So fuck 'em. I say let the little bastard consumers wallow in their own shit until they're paying $11 every single time they want to watch the newest shitty hollywood flick that they can no longer obtain through any means but 24-hour-per-use download.
Cracking this garbage isn't going to get rid of it, it's just going to get people dragged into court. If you want it gone, let them piss consumers off enough that there's a backlash and the distributors and producers have no choice but to strike a reasonable compromise between fair use and protection against theivery.