Does it bother you that people fuck dogs?
Nope. Not one bit. I'm not going to seek it out, but more power to 'em! When freedom of speech is censored because someone finds the speech (or picture, or video, etc.) offensive, that censorship is wrong.
Good luck convincing me that A) a kid who isn't looking for it will accidentally stumble upon it (what's he gonna type, "dogs fucking women" into google.com?) and B) a kid who does "stumble" upon something like that wasn't really seeking it out (or will find a way to see it elsewhere).
Woah there, hold it a second. You're saying I should have "just ignored it" when the abuse (verbal and physical) hit me in high school? Cool! You must have been one of the counsellors I used to ask for help!
You're right in one regard, though: some people manage to get through it. Y'know what I did? I got sick of high school really fast. Two years of it was enough. At fifteen, I pushed really hard to get on the roster of students that the school district would pay (small) scholarships for to go to college.
Here I sit, 23 years old, firmly upper middle class (for a full three years now, we've been in the black, instead of hemorrhaging money like my abusive "classmates" back in high school are now), quickly ascending the "corporate ladder", and in a much better position than I'm sure most of the loser jock and preppy assholes I attended school with are.
Feels good. Not everyone can accomplish this though, and whether "it happens all the time" or not, it's not right. I went to school to learn certain things; I had expected "how to beg your way out of being bludgeoned with an engineer's scale," or "how to hold it in and show no emotion when the teasing got so bad you could just, well, kill your classmates" NOT to be on the roster of "things my high school will teach me."
Yes, I really did want my classmates to die. I wished I could hurt them back. I lacked the physical strength, size, or agility to hurt them physically. I lacked the wit and clever retorts I needed to stand up for myself in the verbal assaults. I sometimes lacked the sheer will not to break down in front of them (which, I promise you, they revelled in). I truly relished the news that one of the pricks who'd been particularly cruel to me had been killed on a four-wheeler. Yes, I think it served him right. I earned some respect (or fear) that day at school by being in the best mood I'd ever been in there.
I hope you don't get nailed by an American moderator, ad nauseum. More people are needed to shred your arguments to pieces as they so richly deserve.
Yes, I survived the horrific experience that is high school. No, I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. And to anyone from Thompson Valley High School who might be reading this: fuck you.
Why has it no educational value? In many cases it's far more educational than the "abstinence" crap they preach in schools as opposed to explaining how things work (like conception, contraceptives, etc.).
Inappropriate on a school's pipe? I dunno. It doesn't strike me as much different than a couple of 12 year old boys stumbling across dad's stack of Playboys.
Maybe you're right. Perhaps we should put the smack down on our kids for *daring* to think about sex. The little worms, allowing puberty to cloud their judgement. [end-sarcasm]
So aside from that evil nasty porn, what else shouldn't kids get to see in their schools? What else would you have them not learn about?
Not quite true. I just installed a Woody distribution straight from potato disks a few days ago. It was amusing:)
You start with the reiserfs+debian disks (which also include GRUB, and kick lots of ass!), then when you get to the point where you're adding or modifying the sources.list file for apt, you choose to edit it by hand, and replace the "stable" references with "unstable". Hell, add Helix Gnome's debian source entries if you want. Add the sourcecode links too.
When you save and quit, then tell dbootstrap to get to it, it sources and downloads the lists just fine, gets the right task lists from the latest unstable, and even the "simple" option of package selection reflects the new content. It gets the dependencies right, and installs just fine off the 'net right outta the box.
I was impressed, to say the least.:)
There's a reason they want you jumping through hoops to get the ISO images. Bandwidth isn't free. You're got two ways to get a Debian CD set -- download the ISO images or use the tools they provide to download the binaries and construct the ISOs yourself. Now which is more likely to succeed -- transferring a 650MB file you hope will make it through in one piece, trusting your transfer agent not to screw it up (and to be able to resume if it can), or downloading a buncha littler pieces (that can be more easily recovered)?
apt-get isn't great. It's WONDERFUL. It has quirks like everything else (ever installed a Windows product?:), but it kicks ass.
And we *have* given it some time, the other distros *aren't* doing it. apt-get has been around for coming up *two* years now. dpkg (which understands, but doesn't presume to fix, dependencies and conflicts) has been around even longer. Nothing else has come close.
What's scary is that they're already talking about kicking off 2.5!
What's scary about this? Odd-numbered series are for new development, experiments, and Kernels Guaranteed To Mess With Newbie Heads(tm).
Even-numbered releases are "supposed" to be stable; that's what the two development branches take care of. 2.4.x kernel releases now will (supposedly) only fix bugs or make very incremental improvements, not introduce big hairy new bits.:)
If things are broken in 2.4, they'll get fixed. Have patience. Just don't scream for new features in an even-numbered series; while I know there have been exceptions, the "norm" is not to include them.
Fucking hell people like to fly off the handle, don't they? Nobody dared to diminish or minimize the claim (that I've noticed). I'm not about to claim the Holocaust didn't happen, but damned if I'm not going to argue that it wasn't a religion-motiviated activity.
You don't think Hitler was pushing his own religious agenda? He was trying to squelsh the Jewish faith, plain and simple. Granted, he had that whole world-domination thing going on and loads of nasty people took advantage of it, but the whole thing began because of an intense hatred of the Jewish faith.
It sucked ass, but telling people "you don't have the right to make that comparison!" or "don't you dare" isn't going to make anyone appreciate or understand it any better. What your family (and many others' families) endured was horrible, but that doesn't instantly make the topic immune to discussion.
So blow me, I dare to exercise my right to make the comparison, because I too think it's a valid one. Look in your precious bible for the tale of Sodom. Shall we discuss massacres again, please, once you've finished your homework?
Heh! That can't be correct: I'm agnostic, thus I don't believe in God. But, I also don't believe the sentence you just quoted either.
Thanks for the good chuckle though.:)
How is one small recycled paper box wasting more resources then the infinite amount of plastic manufactured on CD jewel cases, that break and then are discarded?
Uh, floppies are *made* of plastic. Don't forget that the spinning media is just a part of the packaging.
I don't buy jewel cases anymore for CDs, in case you were wondering. I buy CDRs in spindles of 100, and stuff burned CDs into those nifty sleeve books (like the ones Case Logic and others make). Not wasting nearly as much stuff:)
Yes, I would much rather go to court. Several reasons.
It costs them more money than it's worth. Most (not all -- 105 in a 65 is probably dangerous in most instances because it's usually an idiot driving:) speeding tickets are issued as a means to increase revenue to the city, county, or state.
It works because people just sigh, pay it, and get on with life. If you actually go to court, plead "not guilty," and insist on a trial, you drag the cop off the streets for a few hours (stopping him writing more speeding tickets), force the judge and prosecutors to realize you're supposed to be innocent until proven guilty, and best, force the cop to actually prove you were speeding. Doesn't matter if you were speeding or not; make them prove you were, and never let them make you prove you weren't. This costs them way more than the ticket is worth.
Yes, there's a risk that they'll still find you guilty, but it's not an offense that can put you in jail. Take the points and pay the fine, and know you've made it a real pain in their asses.
Remember that if you're found innocent, you don't pay a cent (neither court fees nor the original ticket). You've burned up a few hours, but you've also just legally told the "system" where it can shove it.
People take tickets far too lightly. It's always disturbed me. Why sign the "guilty" line on the ticket and take the automatic plea bargain? Doesn't anyone have a problem with a system that's designed, right down to the citations issued by it, to assume you're guilty?
You can kill somebody and get a better defense (and have a better chance of an "innocent" verdict) than for some traffic infractions. It's rediculous, and it needs to stop.
Hey, neat! How'd you get your head that far up there?!?! Would a glass stomach help?:)
Windows NT, up to and including 4.0 SP6.1a, does *NOT* support PCMCIA hot swapping.
Linux, as far back as my experience goes (three years on notebooks), has supported PCMCIA hot swapping rather nicely. It's incredibly useful to, say, pop out a SCSI card to add another device to the bus and pop it back in. No reboot. No Windows warnings about "You shouldn't do that!" It just works.
Blow.
Doing this is so satisfying. I've done it, a couple of times. There's a problem with this, though --
The bastards usually hang up!
Since caller ID is useless ("OUT OF AREA/OUT OF AREA", always), how does one actually track these buggers down and pursue the $500 remedy they're supposed to pay?
It's so frustrating to have Junkbuster's telemarketing script lined up and ready to go only to have the jerks hang up on you the instant you start asking nosy questions (a bit rude, ain't it?:)
Sure, they could point fingers and blame that big nasty 'net, or they could just fix or replace their ailing, aging power plants, couldn't they?
A storm (granted, a nifty big nasty one) actually managed to take down a nuclear power plant? Well that says a lot (of good things) for the safety systems there, but not a whole lot for the plant's design or operation. Why not fix what broke, work out how to prevent that failure from occuring again, implement that fix, then build more nuclear plants to retire the aging systems currently powering the state?
At least they're getting threats of power loss in a state that doesn't have horrendous temperature extremes (back off, I know about Tahoe:). Last year we (in Colorado) got to listen to Texans whine about power failures (that actually happened, and weren't just threats)... the main cause was all their precious air conditioning.
Remember, folks, that stupid little A/C compressor chews up much more energy than your computers do. Hell, even in the production lab where I work the cooling systems use more electricity than our servers do.
I can articulate why that sounds horrendous in two words: "Off key":)
The point is, I shouldn't have to be making these choices. A professional graphic designer should be.
And that professional graphic designer should inherently know what exactly you expect and had damned well better get it done right the first time, right?
You ask the impossible. Don't worry, someone will get around to doing it eventually, but I still think it's insane to bitch about something when you can't specify what's wrong with it.
So you can criticize and admit it's been awhile since you've used it, all in the same sentence? Wow.
Control panel's there. Why should your desktop environment handle your system's printing, btw? Shouldn't that be the print daemon's job? If you're that bent-out-of-shape about editing files, install Debian, and use CUPS for your print daemon.
Last time I checked, drag and drop works. Then again, "it's been awhile since I looked at [it]" and I've always considered drag and drop to be a pain in the... you get the idea:)
And I've *never* invested more than half an hour on installing a Linux box. When I started rolling out Linux workstations here to replace the daily-reboot Win98 boxes, a simple tarball (with Debian's *default* (i.e. unmodified) boot disk) was all I needed to drop Linux on a box in 10 minutes.
I'd hazard a guess why you reformatted, but you'd probably take offense;)
(In case you can't tell, I'm really not trying to be inflamatory towards these people. Don't the !@#$ing smileys say anything?!?! Hell, people, take criticism with grace. Ignore it if you want, but if you let it bend you out of shape, you've already lost.)
I can know that the user interface sucks, even though I can't articulate exactly what is wrong with it.
Why can't you articulate it? It's the same with music -- you don't need to know squat about "music theory" to know you dislike something and why. I know I don't like most rap music. I know I don't like it because I can't stand the systematic butchering of real music by sampling on top of repetitive drum loops with an incoherent rambling buffoon talking over all of it.
In the same way as music, there's only so much an interface can be made of. There's color, shape, speed, and behavior. So what about it don't you like? The colors are wrong? Change them. The button shapes and/or placement is weird to you? Change it! Don't think it's fast enough? Turn off special features, animations, and transition effects. If you don't like what happens when you left-click a window border, change it!
My point is that if you seriously can't put a finger on what you dislike about an interface (or a piece of music), how can you seriously expect anyone to take your complaints seriously?
Heh. I hate to agree with the anonymous coward, but he's right... you don't use either one, nor do you know enough about UI design to make constructive criticisms, but you can tell us that without a doubt it feels horrid to you.
I'm not trying to flame. I really want to know what feels horrid! How do you expect it to get any better if you can only whine about it?
And if you're actually weak-minded enough to pick up behavioral challenges from Slashdot, I can't wait to see what you can pick up from an episode of Jerry Springer;)
Yes. I have no alphabet soup behind my name either, and don't need it. They've been bugging me for months to go get Sun's precious "Sun Certified Solaris Administrator" badge, but I've got better things to do with my tim.
If you can get an NT environment to be stable, good for you! But "guess what"? The only stable NT platform I've ever seen is when someone uses a PC as a stepping stool.
You can claim reliability, but let's talk uptime. How long did it take you to install each NT box? How many reboots did the installation take? How many patches before you had a TCP/IP stack that could withstand more than a newbie script kiddie's first tries? My mail server snickered as Melissa and ILOVEYOU trounced all over NT networks. And even forgiving NT's love affair with reboots and low uptimes, how about functionality? How do you remotely manage the box? VNC? Great. Hope you never need to unstuff a full event log over a modem.
Sorry to flame so hard about NT, but it's experience talking. I've heard that clever argument before that "if you know what you're doing, NT is just as stable as Unix." For those of you who buy this, I've got some awesome swamp land in Florida to sell you with *great* retail potential!
Sure, experience can go a long way in keeping any box going, we're comparing apples to oranges methinks. Sure, you might coax a one month uptime out of an NT box (but not a freshly-installed Windows 98 box:), but with only moderate skill you can coax uptimes of *YEARS* out of just about any unix box.
Plenty of Linux experience. Plenty of Solaris experience. Plenty of HP-UX experience. Plenty of NT experience (shock:) (Plenty is defined here as "more than five years' worth in a work environment, not just dabbling at home, in each of these environments."
The production systems are Solaris (with a few Linux boxes mixed in -- I never said it was a Linux network;) and the network is mostly Cabletron (*shudder*) and a bit of Cisco. I didn't get there in time to influence the hardware purchasing decisions;)
Most of my experience is on the systems side. But there's no way you can avoid dabbling in the network side of things either; what happens when all your systems are running but a router's puked and your network admin's gone? Time to crack open the books and put on a new hat. Nothing teaches faster than trial by fire.:)
Aren't there are few pieces of "misinformation" about the world o' networking in the MCSE training materials? I wish I could remember the specific things they said in "Networking Essentials" that were complete bunk, but I never bothered trying for MCSE myself (I just remember seeing lots of, er, "less-than-glowing" reviews of M$'s curriculum).
MCSE helps close the gap, *only* in the Windows world. You drop an MCSE into a Unix environment, and you might as well start a dead pool on him or his systems.
No they don't, but it's amazing how fast they take notice when things improve as you migrate things off NT.
As the senior system administrator of a network environment that hasn't gone down in over a year, I know people listen to me.
I suppose the real question is "if it's undergone professional usability testing, what professionals tested it who didn't kick and scream about the single-mouse-button issue?" These "professionals" obviously don't have the same ideas I do.
*grin*
I honestly don't care one way or the other which OS pummels Windoze. I just want at least one of them to do it.
Why do people insist on pointless bitching, btw, about KDE and Gnome generally sucking? Why not instead suggest improvements in a non-flamebait way? Instead of saying "Well for one thing you could catch up with Windows!" why not explain what the !@#$ you actually mean? Are you complaining that Gnome and KDE don't look exactly like Windows? Are you complaining that they don't have a "Start" button (I know they have their own equivalents -- I mean the word "Start" which apparently some people can't live without:)? Do you dislike the way the window manager behaves? Choice is a wonderful thing, particularly when it goes beyond picking a theme.
Of course, you could change window managers. Or try configuring the window manager. Or switch to the other environment (KDE -> Gnome or Gnome -> to KDE). Or you could just ditch both and run Enlightenment standalone (hehehe), where you can literally alter how everything looks (or whether it even appears) and how everything behaves.
The Mac is built on some wonderful hardware. Expensive, but wonderful stuff. But bloody hell, can we PLEASE get past this one-button fixation? Sure, you can stick on a different mouse, but what do you do with a notebook? I'm not about to whip out an external mouse on a bus ride:)
Slashdot Mirror
They must not sell raincoats where you live, then. :)
Does it bother you that people fuck dogs? Nope. Not one bit. I'm not going to seek it out, but more power to 'em! When freedom of speech is censored because someone finds the speech (or picture, or video, etc.) offensive, that censorship is wrong. Good luck convincing me that A) a kid who isn't looking for it will accidentally stumble upon it (what's he gonna type, "dogs fucking women" into google.com?) and B) a kid who does "stumble" upon something like that wasn't really seeking it out (or will find a way to see it elsewhere).
Woah there, hold it a second. You're saying I should have "just ignored it" when the abuse (verbal and physical) hit me in high school? Cool! You must have been one of the counsellors I used to ask for help! You're right in one regard, though: some people manage to get through it. Y'know what I did? I got sick of high school really fast. Two years of it was enough. At fifteen, I pushed really hard to get on the roster of students that the school district would pay (small) scholarships for to go to college. Here I sit, 23 years old, firmly upper middle class (for a full three years now, we've been in the black, instead of hemorrhaging money like my abusive "classmates" back in high school are now), quickly ascending the "corporate ladder", and in a much better position than I'm sure most of the loser jock and preppy assholes I attended school with are. Feels good. Not everyone can accomplish this though, and whether "it happens all the time" or not, it's not right. I went to school to learn certain things; I had expected "how to beg your way out of being bludgeoned with an engineer's scale," or "how to hold it in and show no emotion when the teasing got so bad you could just, well, kill your classmates" NOT to be on the roster of "things my high school will teach me." Yes, I really did want my classmates to die. I wished I could hurt them back. I lacked the physical strength, size, or agility to hurt them physically. I lacked the wit and clever retorts I needed to stand up for myself in the verbal assaults. I sometimes lacked the sheer will not to break down in front of them (which, I promise you, they revelled in). I truly relished the news that one of the pricks who'd been particularly cruel to me had been killed on a four-wheeler. Yes, I think it served him right. I earned some respect (or fear) that day at school by being in the best mood I'd ever been in there. I hope you don't get nailed by an American moderator, ad nauseum. More people are needed to shred your arguments to pieces as they so richly deserve. Yes, I survived the horrific experience that is high school. No, I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. And to anyone from Thompson Valley High School who might be reading this: fuck you.
Why has it no educational value? In many cases it's far more educational than the "abstinence" crap they preach in schools as opposed to explaining how things work (like conception, contraceptives, etc.). Inappropriate on a school's pipe? I dunno. It doesn't strike me as much different than a couple of 12 year old boys stumbling across dad's stack of Playboys. Maybe you're right. Perhaps we should put the smack down on our kids for *daring* to think about sex. The little worms, allowing puberty to cloud their judgement. [end-sarcasm] So aside from that evil nasty porn, what else shouldn't kids get to see in their schools? What else would you have them not learn about?
Not quite true. I just installed a Woody distribution straight from potato disks a few days ago. It was amusing :)
You start with the reiserfs+debian disks (which also include GRUB, and kick lots of ass!), then when you get to the point where you're adding or modifying the sources.list file for apt, you choose to edit it by hand, and replace the "stable" references with "unstable". Hell, add Helix Gnome's debian source entries if you want. Add the sourcecode links too.
When you save and quit, then tell dbootstrap to get to it, it sources and downloads the lists just fine, gets the right task lists from the latest unstable, and even the "simple" option of package selection reflects the new content. It gets the dependencies right, and installs just fine off the 'net right outta the box.
I was impressed, to say the least. :)
There's a reason they want you jumping through hoops to get the ISO images. Bandwidth isn't free. You're got two ways to get a Debian CD set -- download the ISO images or use the tools they provide to download the binaries and construct the ISOs yourself. Now which is more likely to succeed -- transferring a 650MB file you hope will make it through in one piece, trusting your transfer agent not to screw it up (and to be able to resume if it can), or downloading a buncha littler pieces (that can be more easily recovered)? apt-get isn't great. It's WONDERFUL. It has quirks like everything else (ever installed a Windows product? :), but it kicks ass.
And we *have* given it some time, the other distros *aren't* doing it. apt-get has been around for coming up *two* years now. dpkg (which understands, but doesn't presume to fix, dependencies and conflicts) has been around even longer. Nothing else has come close.
What's scary is that they're already talking about kicking off 2.5! What's scary about this? Odd-numbered series are for new development, experiments, and Kernels Guaranteed To Mess With Newbie Heads(tm). Even-numbered releases are "supposed" to be stable; that's what the two development branches take care of. 2.4.x kernel releases now will (supposedly) only fix bugs or make very incremental improvements, not introduce big hairy new bits. :)
If things are broken in 2.4, they'll get fixed. Have patience. Just don't scream for new features in an even-numbered series; while I know there have been exceptions, the "norm" is not to include them.
Fucking hell people like to fly off the handle, don't they? Nobody dared to diminish or minimize the claim (that I've noticed). I'm not about to claim the Holocaust didn't happen, but damned if I'm not going to argue that it wasn't a religion-motiviated activity. You don't think Hitler was pushing his own religious agenda? He was trying to squelsh the Jewish faith, plain and simple. Granted, he had that whole world-domination thing going on and loads of nasty people took advantage of it, but the whole thing began because of an intense hatred of the Jewish faith. It sucked ass, but telling people "you don't have the right to make that comparison!" or "don't you dare" isn't going to make anyone appreciate or understand it any better. What your family (and many others' families) endured was horrible, but that doesn't instantly make the topic immune to discussion. So blow me, I dare to exercise my right to make the comparison, because I too think it's a valid one. Look in your precious bible for the tale of Sodom. Shall we discuss massacres again, please, once you've finished your homework?
Heh! That can't be correct: I'm agnostic, thus I don't believe in God. But, I also don't believe the sentence you just quoted either. Thanks for the good chuckle though. :)
How is one small recycled paper box wasting more resources then the infinite amount of plastic manufactured on CD jewel cases, that break and then are discarded? Uh, floppies are *made* of plastic. Don't forget that the spinning media is just a part of the packaging. I don't buy jewel cases anymore for CDs, in case you were wondering. I buy CDRs in spindles of 100, and stuff burned CDs into those nifty sleeve books (like the ones Case Logic and others make). Not wasting nearly as much stuff :)
Yes, I would much rather go to court. Several reasons. It costs them more money than it's worth. Most (not all -- 105 in a 65 is probably dangerous in most instances because it's usually an idiot driving :) speeding tickets are issued as a means to increase revenue to the city, county, or state.
It works because people just sigh, pay it, and get on with life. If you actually go to court, plead "not guilty," and insist on a trial, you drag the cop off the streets for a few hours (stopping him writing more speeding tickets), force the judge and prosecutors to realize you're supposed to be innocent until proven guilty, and best, force the cop to actually prove you were speeding. Doesn't matter if you were speeding or not; make them prove you were, and never let them make you prove you weren't. This costs them way more than the ticket is worth.
Yes, there's a risk that they'll still find you guilty, but it's not an offense that can put you in jail. Take the points and pay the fine, and know you've made it a real pain in their asses.
Remember that if you're found innocent, you don't pay a cent (neither court fees nor the original ticket). You've burned up a few hours, but you've also just legally told the "system" where it can shove it.
People take tickets far too lightly. It's always disturbed me. Why sign the "guilty" line on the ticket and take the automatic plea bargain? Doesn't anyone have a problem with a system that's designed, right down to the citations issued by it, to assume you're guilty?
You can kill somebody and get a better defense (and have a better chance of an "innocent" verdict) than for some traffic infractions. It's rediculous, and it needs to stop.
Hey, neat! How'd you get your head that far up there?!?! Would a glass stomach help? :)
Windows NT, up to and including 4.0 SP6.1a, does *NOT* support PCMCIA hot swapping.
Linux, as far back as my experience goes (three years on notebooks), has supported PCMCIA hot swapping rather nicely. It's incredibly useful to, say, pop out a SCSI card to add another device to the bus and pop it back in. No reboot. No Windows warnings about "You shouldn't do that!" It just works.
Blow.
Dude, it's been *ages* since I've seen a postage-paid envelope to send payments with. Those days are over, welcome to 2001 :)
Doing this is so satisfying. I've done it, a couple of times. There's a problem with this, though -- The bastards usually hang up! Since caller ID is useless ("OUT OF AREA/OUT OF AREA", always), how does one actually track these buggers down and pursue the $500 remedy they're supposed to pay? It's so frustrating to have Junkbuster's telemarketing script lined up and ready to go only to have the jerks hang up on you the instant you start asking nosy questions (a bit rude, ain't it? :)
Sure, they could point fingers and blame that big nasty 'net, or they could just fix or replace their ailing, aging power plants, couldn't they? A storm (granted, a nifty big nasty one) actually managed to take down a nuclear power plant? Well that says a lot (of good things) for the safety systems there, but not a whole lot for the plant's design or operation. Why not fix what broke, work out how to prevent that failure from occuring again, implement that fix, then build more nuclear plants to retire the aging systems currently powering the state? At least they're getting threats of power loss in a state that doesn't have horrendous temperature extremes (back off, I know about Tahoe :). Last year we (in Colorado) got to listen to Texans whine about power failures (that actually happened, and weren't just threats) ... the main cause was all their precious air conditioning.
Remember, folks, that stupid little A/C compressor chews up much more energy than your computers do. Hell, even in the production lab where I work the cooling systems use more electricity than our servers do.
Silly. The real ones use D-cell batteries :)
It's just the sex, isn't it? Hehehe of course it is! It just wouldn't be right any other way ;)
I can articulate why that sounds horrendous in two words: "Off key" :)
The point is, I shouldn't have to be making these choices. A professional graphic designer should be.
And that professional graphic designer should inherently know what exactly you expect and had damned well better get it done right the first time, right?
You ask the impossible. Don't worry, someone will get around to doing it eventually, but I still think it's insane to bitch about something when you can't specify what's wrong with it.
So you can criticize and admit it's been awhile since you've used it, all in the same sentence? Wow. Control panel's there. Why should your desktop environment handle your system's printing, btw? Shouldn't that be the print daemon's job? If you're that bent-out-of-shape about editing files, install Debian, and use CUPS for your print daemon. Last time I checked, drag and drop works. Then again, "it's been awhile since I looked at [it]" and I've always considered drag and drop to be a pain in the ... you get the idea :)
And I've *never* invested more than half an hour on installing a Linux box. When I started rolling out Linux workstations here to replace the daily-reboot Win98 boxes, a simple tarball (with Debian's *default* (i.e. unmodified) boot disk) was all I needed to drop Linux on a box in 10 minutes.
I'd hazard a guess why you reformatted, but you'd probably take offense ;)
(In case you can't tell, I'm really not trying to be inflamatory towards these people. Don't the !@#$ing smileys say anything?!?! Hell, people, take criticism with grace. Ignore it if you want, but if you let it bend you out of shape, you've already lost.)
I can know that the user interface sucks, even though I can't articulate exactly what is wrong with it. Why can't you articulate it? It's the same with music -- you don't need to know squat about "music theory" to know you dislike something and why. I know I don't like most rap music. I know I don't like it because I can't stand the systematic butchering of real music by sampling on top of repetitive drum loops with an incoherent rambling buffoon talking over all of it. In the same way as music, there's only so much an interface can be made of. There's color, shape, speed, and behavior. So what about it don't you like? The colors are wrong? Change them. The button shapes and/or placement is weird to you? Change it! Don't think it's fast enough? Turn off special features, animations, and transition effects. If you don't like what happens when you left-click a window border, change it! My point is that if you seriously can't put a finger on what you dislike about an interface (or a piece of music), how can you seriously expect anyone to take your complaints seriously?
Heh. I hate to agree with the anonymous coward, but he's right ... you don't use either one, nor do you know enough about UI design to make constructive criticisms, but you can tell us that without a doubt it feels horrid to you.
I'm not trying to flame. I really want to know what feels horrid! How do you expect it to get any better if you can only whine about it?
And if you're actually weak-minded enough to pick up behavioral challenges from Slashdot, I can't wait to see what you can pick up from an episode of Jerry Springer ;)
Yes. I have no alphabet soup behind my name either, and don't need it. They've been bugging me for months to go get Sun's precious "Sun Certified Solaris Administrator" badge, but I've got better things to do with my tim. If you can get an NT environment to be stable, good for you! But "guess what"? The only stable NT platform I've ever seen is when someone uses a PC as a stepping stool. You can claim reliability, but let's talk uptime. How long did it take you to install each NT box? How many reboots did the installation take? How many patches before you had a TCP/IP stack that could withstand more than a newbie script kiddie's first tries? My mail server snickered as Melissa and ILOVEYOU trounced all over NT networks. And even forgiving NT's love affair with reboots and low uptimes, how about functionality? How do you remotely manage the box? VNC? Great. Hope you never need to unstuff a full event log over a modem. Sorry to flame so hard about NT, but it's experience talking. I've heard that clever argument before that "if you know what you're doing, NT is just as stable as Unix." For those of you who buy this, I've got some awesome swamp land in Florida to sell you with *great* retail potential! Sure, experience can go a long way in keeping any box going, we're comparing apples to oranges methinks. Sure, you might coax a one month uptime out of an NT box (but not a freshly-installed Windows 98 box :), but with only moderate skill you can coax uptimes of *YEARS* out of just about any unix box.
Plenty of Linux experience. Plenty of Solaris experience. Plenty of HP-UX experience. Plenty of NT experience (shock :) (Plenty is defined here as "more than five years' worth in a work environment, not just dabbling at home, in each of these environments."
The production systems are Solaris (with a few Linux boxes mixed in -- I never said it was a Linux network ;) and the network is mostly Cabletron (*shudder*) and a bit of Cisco. I didn't get there in time to influence the hardware purchasing decisions ;)
Most of my experience is on the systems side. But there's no way you can avoid dabbling in the network side of things either; what happens when all your systems are running but a router's puked and your network admin's gone? Time to crack open the books and put on a new hat. Nothing teaches faster than trial by fire. :)
Aren't there are few pieces of "misinformation" about the world o' networking in the MCSE training materials? I wish I could remember the specific things they said in "Networking Essentials" that were complete bunk, but I never bothered trying for MCSE myself (I just remember seeing lots of, er, "less-than-glowing" reviews of M$'s curriculum).
MCSE helps close the gap, *only* in the Windows world. You drop an MCSE into a Unix environment, and you might as well start a dead pool on him or his systems.
No they don't, but it's amazing how fast they take notice when things improve as you migrate things off NT. As the senior system administrator of a network environment that hasn't gone down in over a year, I know people listen to me.
I suppose the real question is "if it's undergone professional usability testing, what professionals tested it who didn't kick and scream about the single-mouse-button issue?" These "professionals" obviously don't have the same ideas I do. *grin* I honestly don't care one way or the other which OS pummels Windoze. I just want at least one of them to do it. Why do people insist on pointless bitching, btw, about KDE and Gnome generally sucking? Why not instead suggest improvements in a non-flamebait way? Instead of saying "Well for one thing you could catch up with Windows!" why not explain what the !@#$ you actually mean? Are you complaining that Gnome and KDE don't look exactly like Windows? Are you complaining that they don't have a "Start" button (I know they have their own equivalents -- I mean the word "Start" which apparently some people can't live without :)? Do you dislike the way the window manager behaves? Choice is a wonderful thing, particularly when it goes beyond picking a theme.
Of course, you could change window managers. Or try configuring the window manager. Or switch to the other environment (KDE -> Gnome or Gnome -> to KDE). Or you could just ditch both and run Enlightenment standalone (hehehe), where you can literally alter how everything looks (or whether it even appears) and how everything behaves.
The Mac is built on some wonderful hardware. Expensive, but wonderful stuff. But bloody hell, can we PLEASE get past this one-button fixation? Sure, you can stick on a different mouse, but what do you do with a notebook? I'm not about to whip out an external mouse on a bus ride :)