I would buy Flash for linux. I won't buy it for windows, because I don't use windows.
I've bought games for linux; ironically, they are almost the only apps you can purchase for linux. Other than Star Office, but most Linux Distros include OpenOffice, so who will buy that?
I can't even think of software that I could buy for Linux that isn't game related. Is there any?
This isn't to disagree with the parent post; I guess I'm more or less echoing what he/she said, but I think that people would buy software for Linux, if it was better than the free versions already available. For instance, I don't know how many use GnuCash, but I bet that Quicken for Linux, or TurboTax, would have a market.
Not trying to slam Gates -- he did help write that version of it. But he didn't invent it.
As for MS "making" computers accessible and inexpensive, IMHO it was IBM, choosing to make the x86 an open architecture, who did that. The OS, back at that time, could have been anything; it would have become the de facto standard until something better/different/more popular had come along.
I bought a couple paperbacks from Amazon recently, old out-of-print books that I couldn't find anywhere. Good deal, altogether.
But for tech books, the best deal I've found (so far) is bookpool.com. They habitually have 30% discounts on their books, new (not used or two editions old), and sometimes higher: I bought a few OReilly books last year at 43% off. Not a bad discount. I like supporting my local brick-and-mortar bookstore, but it's kind of hard to ignore that sort of savings.
I guess I'll just have to buy coffee at the bookstore and my books online.:-)
This reminded me of my favorite line from the article (remember the article?):
As it [modding] continued to evolve though,
ascetics [emphasis added] seemed to come into play as a lot of people began doing their own home grown mods.
Ascetics, eh? For a moment I had visions of starving yellow-robed monks painstakingly hand-painting mandalas onto the sides of their over-clocked PCs...
I'd use Mozilla if I could shift+click and get a new browser window
With Firefox, at least, shift-click does open a new window, and ctrl-click (or the middle mouse button/wheel) opens the link in a new tab, which is preferrable to me.). It has done so for months and months, I don't even know how long.
Now, no one (I hope) is saying you have to use a different browser, but the reason given doesn't hold anymore.
...will be when Linspire does not get the profit margin they are hoping for, changes their name to the Save Linspire Operation, and then the SLO Group begins suing IBM, for having more money and being more successful with linux than they are.
Reminds me of when John Fogerty (orig of CCR) was sued by his old record company b/c they said one of his songs sounded too much like CCR. A bit about that here I like the line "Critics had a field day contending that Fantasy was suing John Fogerty for sounding like John Fogerty"
On another slant, all the Safari sites, like this one have, right beneath the search function on the left a box you can check to "Search for code fragments only".... Of course, these are published expressly for the purpose of educating, so there's nothing illegal about using snippets of code from technical books. I wonder how much actual production code contains code from O'Reilly (or insert other publisher) books in it?
I'd have to agree, though I haven't created an ebuild of my own yet.
I don't think I've installed more than one or two binary packages on my gentoo box -- but an ebuild is so nicely packaged that I don't feel typing "emerge -u foo" really qualifies as me building everything from source... Really, someone else did the "hard" stuff (working out dependencies and deciding which directories to save things in, for example) for me.
This is a step toward desktop acceptance of Linux. These type of programs are among those that get brought up when people say "But I work with music and Linux doesnt have xyz-tools....".
It being cross-platform is even better for Linux, because it means people who begin using it on Windows (for example) could easily switch to Linux at a later date.
Also, your mom will not need to be able to install Linux (IMHO) -- rather, she'll have to be able to go to Best Buy (or wherever) and say...
Your mom: I need a new computer.
Best Buy: Do you want Linux or Windows on that?
Your mom: What's the difference?
Best Buy: It's $50 cheaper with Linux.
Your mom: Can I still do [random sampling of standard PC activities/file opening/web browsing]?
Best Buy: Yup.
Your mom: Sure, why not.
Now, when that conversation can take place, then Linux on the desktop will have "arrived". IMHO. But then, I use it already.
I know this is slashdot and I'm not suppose to give a Gentoo advice
Yes you are. This is supposed to be "...Stuff that matters." Well, I read/. daily, and Gentoo information matters to me.
The only thing I can figure is that Gentoo has become kind of the "macintosh" of the linux world. Everyone(tm) has just started saying "Yes, we realize you love Gentoo, but STOP TELLING US ABOUT IT." Which is fine, I suppose; zealots can be annoying. But just plain news, statements about Gentoo, shouldn't be modded down any more than news about any other distro.
That being said, I think most of the Gentoo Howto should apply to any version of Linux; they would just have to download the kernel sources themselves instead of using "emerge", and compile it themselves rather than using "genkernel". Still a fine piece of documentation.
>>So now we're looking for anyone NOT named Andy, because even someone as stupid as a virus-writer wouldn't be so dumb as to put their real name on something this destructive.
>Truly, you have a dizzying intellect.
But he must have known that we were not stupid, either, and so clearly he knew we would look for someone NOT named Andy, which means that we cannot rule out anyone who IS named Andy, either.
But wait! I'm just getting started!
The first detection of the virus was in Russia, and as everybody knows, in Soviet Russia the noun verbs YOU, so we clearly cannot rule out anyone who happens to be named "Novarg" or, uh, "MyDoom"...
But Russia, as everybody knows, is entirely people by communists, and communists never do anything by themselves, but always as a group. So clearly we cannot rule out the entire nation of Russia working in concert to produce this virus.
But the virus writer, knowing we were not stupid, undoubtedly knew that we would deduce all these facts about Russia, and so we clearly cannot rule out any one in the population of the rest of the world.
Are we there yet? Not even close!
The vast majority of virus writers are never caught, which means they are very careful. Very careful people do not unwittingly reveal their names, so we clearly must presume that the writer did not think the inclusion of the name "andy" would be of any help to us in finding him (or her).
So then "andy" must have felt safe and secure amidst the worldwide sea of other andys, especially having not posted to/. in almost a year. Clearly the virus writer is andy.
This happens to be LOTR, but people have been pointing out trivial mistakes in movies for decades now. Some are not so trivial, and are quite funny -- like the map Indiana Jones flies over in the Raiders of the Lost Ark, which shows Israel, when Israel would not have existed until after the war.
If you couple the natural inclination to point out mistakes with a fanatical devotion to the books, well, you see what can happen:)
For the record, I thought the movies were great, but there were a few things I hated, and still hate: Arwen and Faramir top the list. To go on would be redundant. But they are still fantastic movies.
I don't think it's quite the same. If, as in the example, my wage + benefits costs my company $40/hr, then they pay that out no matter what, as long as I'm at work. If I lose, say, 5 hours over a week or a month due to viruses, that's five hours for which I was paid, but in which time I was not able to do the work I was being paid to do. The work will get done, of course -- just 5 or so hours later than it otherwise would have.
So the loss is maybe more of a time loss, but time has a dollar value on it -- the RIAA, on the other hand, isn't technically losing any money that I can tell. The bands need to pay for the album manufacturing out of their royalties, IIRC -- so the bands are technically "losing" that money. That's if you presume that all the music downloaders would have bought the album if filesharing didn't exist, which is hard to back up, IMHO.
I'm glad I'm not an accountant. My head is spinning just trying to figure out whether or not my company just lost money while I posted to/.
Completely off-topic, but it wouldn't be a bad idea to make a dead-tree copy of overcaffeinated to date and sell that. Unfortunately, that's quite a bit of investment up front, so maybe that's not too practical.
Writing programs is easy. Writing programs and also running a business in any direction other than straight into the ground is hard, and a lot of times the pressure of it will suck the fun out of programming for a lot of people.
I have to agree. I wouldn't call myself a hacker, but I have a lot of fun messing around in a variety of programming languages, and I enjoy exploring what can be done online with things like PHP, CSS, and javascript.
So when someone asked me to build them a website, for pay, I thought, "This is great! This isn't work, it's fun!"
Well, it beats roofing, but having to give yourself deadlines and using other people's ideas to design the pages... yeah. That's definitely a bit of a fun-sucker.
At least it pays (a little; I won't say what I'm charging, but I've since realized it's WAY too low. Live and learn:-)
Slashdot Mirror
I've bought games for linux; ironically, they are almost the only apps you can purchase for linux. Other than Star Office, but most Linux Distros include OpenOffice, so who will buy that?
I can't even think of software that I could buy for Linux that isn't game related. Is there any?
This isn't to disagree with the parent post; I guess I'm more or less echoing what he/she said, but I think that people would buy software for Linux, if it was better than the free versions already available. For instance, I don't know how many use GnuCash, but I bet that Quicken for Linux, or TurboTax, would have a market.
Gates co-wrote, with three others, a version of BASIC for the Altair 8800 in 1977.
This is just from wikipedia, here
Not trying to slam Gates -- he did help write that version of it. But he didn't invent it.
As for MS "making" computers accessible and inexpensive, IMHO it was IBM, choosing to make the x86 an open architecture, who did that. The OS, back at that time, could have been anything; it would have become the de facto standard until something better/different/more popular had come along.
But for tech books, the best deal I've found (so far) is bookpool.com. They habitually have 30% discounts on their books, new (not used or two editions old), and sometimes higher: I bought a few OReilly books last year at 43% off. Not a bad discount. I like supporting my local brick-and-mortar bookstore, but it's kind of hard to ignore that sort of savings.
I guess I'll just have to buy coffee at the bookstore and my books online. :-)
This reminded me of my favorite line from the article (remember the article?):
Ascetics, eh? For a moment I had visions of starving yellow-robed monks painstakingly hand-painting mandalas onto the sides of their over-clocked PCs...
With Firefox, at least, shift-click does open a new window, and ctrl-click (or the middle mouse button/wheel) opens the link in a new tab, which is preferrable to me.). It has done so for months and months, I don't even know how long.
Now, no one (I hope) is saying you have to use a different browser, but the reason given doesn't hold anymore.
Talk about packet loss.
On another slant, all the Safari sites, like this one have, right beneath the search function on the left a box you can check to "Search for code fragments only".... Of course, these are published expressly for the purpose of educating, so there's nothing illegal about using snippets of code from technical books. I wonder how much actual production code contains code from O'Reilly (or insert other publisher) books in it?
I don't think I've installed more than one or two binary packages on my gentoo box -- but an ebuild is so nicely packaged that I don't feel typing "emerge -u foo" really qualifies as me building everything from source... Really, someone else did the "hard" stuff (working out dependencies and deciding which directories to save things in, for example) for me.
I won't be, for $700, though... I'll wait until they flop and can be found on ebay for 50 bucks. :)
Oh, wait... do you want your boss to read it?
You may have already found this, but the article is also in the Linux Journal Archive, here: http://www.iar.unlp.edu.ar/~fede/revistas/lj/Magaz ines/LJ1/2736.html
It being cross-platform is even better for Linux, because it means people who begin using it on Windows (for example) could easily switch to Linux at a later date.
Also, your mom will not need to be able to install Linux (IMHO) -- rather, she'll have to be able to go to Best Buy (or wherever) and say...
Your mom: I need a new computer.
Best Buy: Do you want Linux or Windows on that?
Your mom: What's the difference?
Best Buy: It's $50 cheaper with Linux.
Your mom: Can I still do [random sampling of standard PC activities/file opening/web browsing]?
Best Buy: Yup.
Your mom: Sure, why not.
Now, when that conversation can take place, then Linux on the desktop will have "arrived". IMHO. But then, I use it already.
If you wanted to.
Yes you are. This is supposed to be "...Stuff that matters." Well, I read /. daily, and Gentoo information matters to me.
The only thing I can figure is that Gentoo has become kind of the "macintosh" of the linux world. Everyone(tm) has just started saying "Yes, we realize you love Gentoo, but STOP TELLING US ABOUT IT." Which is fine, I suppose; zealots can be annoying. But just plain news, statements about Gentoo, shouldn't be modded down any more than news about any other distro.
That being said, I think most of the Gentoo Howto should apply to any version of Linux; they would just have to download the kernel sources themselves instead of using "emerge", and compile it themselves rather than using "genkernel". Still a fine piece of documentation.
My $.02, I'm done.
Funny, all I ever see is Gentoo bashing. Are we reading the same sladhdot?
It's the browser formerly known as "firebird".
When I started writing the joke had just started. :-)
>Truly, you have a dizzying intellect.
But he must have known that we were not stupid, either, and so clearly he knew we would look for someone NOT named Andy, which means that we cannot rule out anyone who IS named Andy, either.
But wait! I'm just getting started!
The first detection of the virus was in Russia, and as everybody knows, in Soviet Russia the noun verbs YOU, so we clearly cannot rule out anyone who happens to be named "Novarg" or, uh, "MyDoom"...
But Russia, as everybody knows, is entirely people by communists, and communists never do anything by themselves, but always as a group. So clearly we cannot rule out the entire nation of Russia working in concert to produce this virus.
But the virus writer, knowing we were not stupid, undoubtedly knew that we would deduce all these facts about Russia, and so we clearly cannot rule out any one in the population of the rest of the world.
Are we there yet? Not even close!
The vast majority of virus writers are never caught, which means they are very careful. Very careful people do not unwittingly reveal their names, so we clearly must presume that the writer did not think the inclusion of the name "andy" would be of any help to us in finding him (or her).
So then "andy" must have felt safe and secure amidst the worldwide sea of other andys, especially having not posted to /. in almost a year. Clearly the virus writer is andy.
If you couple the natural inclination to point out mistakes with a fanatical devotion to the books, well, you see what can happen :)
For the record, I thought the movies were great, but there were a few things I hated, and still hate: Arwen and Faramir top the list. To go on would be redundant. But they are still fantastic movies.
So the loss is maybe more of a time loss, but time has a dollar value on it -- the RIAA, on the other hand, isn't technically losing any money that I can tell. The bands need to pay for the album manufacturing out of their royalties, IIRC -- so the bands are technically "losing" that money. That's if you presume that all the music downloaders would have bought the album if filesharing didn't exist, which is hard to back up, IMHO.
I'm glad I'm not an accountant. My head is spinning just trying to figure out whether or not my company just lost money while I posted to
That stinks.
Completely off-topic, but it wouldn't be a bad idea to make a dead-tree copy of overcaffeinated to date and sell that. Unfortunately, that's quite a bit of investment up front, so maybe that's not too practical.
Just a thought.
I have to agree. I wouldn't call myself a hacker, but I have a lot of fun messing around in a variety of programming languages, and I enjoy exploring what can be done online with things like PHP, CSS, and javascript.
So when someone asked me to build them a website, for pay, I thought, "This is great! This isn't work, it's fun!"
Well, it beats roofing, but having to give yourself deadlines and using other people's ideas to design the pages... yeah. That's definitely a bit of a fun-sucker.
At least it pays (a little; I won't say what I'm charging, but I've since realized it's WAY too low. Live and learn :-)
Or misspells his last name Ray r nond?
Even better, the troll added me to his friends list. Mod away, "friend". ;-)
At least this fellow has.