If you're finding your own meaning and purpose, essentially you're creating your own religion, because there's no scientific basis for "meaning".
"Religion" is not the same thing as "something which has no scientific basis."
For example, many of us have certain tastes. I don't like avocados. That's a choice. However, I recognize and acknowledge that other people do like avocados.
Religion isn't about likes and dislikes. Every religion I've ever seen claims to have some fundamental "truth" for people to believe in. The more enlightened religious people might allow that belonging to another religion doesn't necessarily make you a bad person, or even that other religions may be as valid and as true as their own -- in other words, they're semi-Unitarian. But it still comes down to a fundamental belief in something like a god.
No religious person says "I suppose God might exist, and might not, and I act like I believe in Him because it makes me a better person." They say "I believe in God. I have faith."
Now, I have seen people who have faith, and who are also good and kind to others, without thinking to themselves "That person doesn't believe in Christ. He's going to Hell." But that's a quality of the person, not the religion. And even if it was a quality of the religion, you don't need to have a mythology to be nice to other people, beyond, say, "I want to be nice to other people."
Inevitably, they miss the worst possible things you could say, because filtering words like "fuck" just means you have to get creative.
I mean, usually "anus" would be filtered, but it's not as if it'd be hard... try "necrophiliac", I bet it's there. Also, slang is, by definition, not really filterable -- "Dick" is also short for "Richard".
Um, explain Progressive Americans stance on abortion? 2nd amendment? Where does it say TERMINATING a child is in there? Where does it say Free Healthcare?
I see you're not a fan of loose interpretation, then.
First off, I refuse to dignify your abortion bit with a response. Try again with the word "fetus" substituted for "child".
And next: What we don't like about what's been done lately isn't just that it wasn't explicitly mentioned in the constitution. It's that legislation is being passed which is explicitly forbidden by the constitution.
This may also be harmful. Consider people who have faith that they will be rewarded in afterlife for killing certain other people.
That's category 2, actually.
Consider the people who get themselves frozen immediately upon death. Suppose that there is eventually the technology needed to revive them and cure whatever was wrong with them. At this point, these people would have had a chance to observe death, if there is an afterlife.
Of course, the trouble with things like these is that very often, people will shift the definition to match what they observe. For example, Heaven used to be defined as actually physically there in the clouds, but now we believe it to be somewhere else, somewhere unknowable, because people actually can and do fly through the clouds (in planes), and there's no floating world of angels and harps. I'm sure someone would define "death" as the point at which someone can no longer be revived, meaning you can't get to Heaven until the worms eat through a sufficient portion of your brain, if medical science were to advance that much.
Gravity isn't a fact. It's a theory. It's "just" a theory, in the same sense that Evolution is, by the way.
Let me explain: Some things are mathematical facts. 2+2=4, and always will. However, gravity is just some equations, or a concept, that matches our observations. Here's a quote for you: "Hume teaches us that no matter how many times you drop a stone, you can never be sure what will happen the next time you drop it. It might fall to the floor, but it might just as easily float to the ceiling."
Not everything that's consistent with our observations is true. For example, for thousands of years, we believed the world was flat. This was consistent with our observations. Then, one day, someone made some observations that weren't consistent with a flat earth -- someone sailed around the world, and before that, someone probably noticed how ships at the edge of the horizon do actually seem to be swallowed up by it.
And, for awhile, Newtonian gravity was consistent with our observations -- except Mercury. Then Einstein published General Relativity.
But for all we know, there could be some exception that none of us know about, and the world might split in half, or people might start flying, or anything could happen.
Most scientists have a faith that the world makes sense, and that the worst that might happen is that our laws weren't specific enough (like gravity).
I also believe that, but only because such a belief continues to be useful. I'd much rather just walk around than have to put suction cups on my feet because I'm paranoid of falling into the sky or something equally bizarre.
So, is your faith in religion -- "freeing" as it may be -- is it actually useful to you in some way?
Would you rather live in a world that has meaning and purpose, and a moral absolute, or would you rather live in a world where nothing you does ever matters and the only purpose of existence is for you to feel good about yourself enough to continue to procreate?
If the latter is true, then yes.
Would you rather live in a world that's flat, or a world that's round? A flat world would probably have some interesting properties. It would be easier to draw a map, for one thing. It'd also be easier to define where God goes in this world -- in the sky, of course.
But the world isn't flat. It's round. So if I really wanted to, I could live in a delusion of a flat world -- there's even a "flat earth society" that was started as a joke, but now has a loyal following. But it would be a delusion.
Now, as it is, people keep shifting the definition of God and religion so that a God could always exist, so I can't conclusively say that you're wrong, and that there is no God. However, I do find it kind of silly that you continue to believe in one.
But there are a substantial number of people who would rather live in the world that has meaning and purpose, hence religion.
Oh, false dichotomy, by the way. You can have a world of meaning and purpose without religion. You can make up your own meaning and purpose, if you like, one that's not based on a fantasy.
It's easier to believe in an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent being -- a logical impossibility, by the way -- an all-powerful sky-deity that can have a mortal son, and then kill him and call it "mercy"...
Easier to believe that than to believe the Universe came into existence on its own? Or that it always existed? What's hard to believe about that?
Here's another one for you: If it's hard to believe something could come into existence on its own, how did God come into existence? Sounds like God is still a lot harder to believe in here.
Look, believe whatever you want, but if you try to justify it logically, you will lose, and you'll look quite foolish doing it. Every philosophical argument for the existence of a deity has basically ended up being wishful thinking -- that you want to believe, and then you go look for evidence to back it up.
Never good philosophy.
on
Why Myths Persist
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
There have been philosophical arguments for God's existence, and all of them are really horrible. Things like "Every event must have a cause, and there must have been a first cause." Obviously from someone who has no concept of eternity.
There are also plenty of sound philosophical arguments against God, as he's frequently defined. For example: God is omniscient, omnibenevolent, and omnipotent. Yet there is evil in the world. Therefore, God cannot be all three of these -- pick two.
There's another argument that says heaven cannot possibly exist, even if it was possible to have a God with these properties.
Now, that doesn't mean philosophy can't talk about God. It just means that you're not going to find a philosophical argument that will convince someone to be religious. The closest you could come is Pascal's wager, which doesn't account for multiple religions.
So it is safe to assume that you are also skeptical about Nelson Mandela. Because it is pretty unlikely that Nelson Mandela will ever walk into your living room and shake your hand - there's no reason for him to do so.
Nelson Mandela, we actually have photographic evidence of. He also doesn't claim to be master of the known universe, he's just a man, and men I already do believe in.
the deity has no obligation toward you, and you haven't demonstrated a basis whereby the deity ought to act in the fashion you describe.
In that case, I certainly have no obligation to believe in the deity.
The parent poster in question didn't say that. He/She said that believing in God was wishful thinking.
Which is still true, as we have no evidence that a deity exists, and significant evidence that no God, as described by major religions, exists.
Therefore, believing that a deity does exist is wishful thinking, even if I'm eventually shown wrong and it's conclusively shown that a deity exists. Wishful thinking is sometimes vindicated. I don't think that makes it any less silly to believe it before you find evidence.
Karl Marx made that analogy quite awhile ago, too.
Of course, the now great-grandparent poster wasn't saying that -- it looks like they were just illustrating that "making you feel good inside" isn't enough to make faith a good thing, unless you also wish to declare heroin a good thing.
Google for windows shared source. First result is this page, which seems to suggest that, while you need to be a certain type of entity to qualify, at least this type of entity can be bought outright by having 1500 Windows licenses.
Or something like that; point is, they're not going to refuse the Chinese government just because they're the Chinese government; in fact, they have a program specifically for governments, as well.
Of the people who can't use computers, I'd sort them into three categories: Those who actually have mental/psychological problems, those who are inexperienced but willing to learn, and those who have an attitude problem. And combinations of these.
The ones who have mental/psychological problems are pretty rare, outside of a nursing home. These are the people who either lack the mental capacity to learn -- and with respect, the truly elderly, intelligent and wise though they may be, are not good at learning new things. I have a... 90-year-old (I think) grandmother who uses email, but can't learn things like selecting something to delete, or even holding down the backspace key, versus just pressing backspace -- one character at a time -- until she's deleted whatever she needs.
Like I said, there are people outside of a nursing home with these limitations, and I know at least one of them, but they're rare.
The ones who are inexperienced, but willing to learn, are actually often easier to support than the smart ones. They're willing to do what you tell them, without arguing with you about it, and it may take a couple of tries, but they will remember the next time. Over time, they get more and more self-sufficient. They may never approach your own skill, but they'll at least get to where they can get their job done without calling you every two seconds. The really smart ones will also know when they should call you, even if they can do it on their own -- they manage to be smart enough to be dangerous, without actually being dangerous.
The third group is basically identical to the second group in skills, education, intelligence, sometimes even social skills, but for some reason or other, they refuse to learn. For example, at first glance, a teenager may seem like they can't actually grasp new (to them) concepts, like using email instead of Myspace to communicate. The truth is, they just don't give a fuck.
The absolutely #1 most common reason here is the businessperson who has an attitude of "It's not my problem." They do 90% of their work on a computer, and yet, they somehow think that it's not their job to be computer-literate. These are generally the people who are just smart enough to be dangerous -- they have big, important things to do, so they don't have time to actually read a single fucking dialog, they'll just click "OK" or "Accept" or "Allow" or whatever makes it go away. Then, when this causes problems, even if there's some very simple instructions on their screen at the moment, they'll call someone else in to fix it.
These people are the most difficult to work with, because I know of no actual solution other than, say, a dialog box that says "Click OK to receive a painful electric shock," wired to an electrode in their mouse.
I say this because the actually incapable people can at least be trained and/or restricted to areas where they can't hurt themselves -- they generally don't know enough to be dangerous, or to be picky about their environment, so many of them would probably be fine with a Linux kiosk, in the worst-case-scenario. The independent ones will learn on their own, and while they'll make mistakes, those mistakes will at least be interesting, entertaining, and less frequent than the "My computer won't turn on" when they just forgot to turn on their monitor.
It's only when they have an attitude problem that they really start to be a problem, especially when combined with one or both of the above. The classic example is Jerry Taylor -- normally, I don't go after individual people, but this fucker deserved it. After being repeatedly corrected, in simple terms which he obviously could understand (considering he eventually did), the problem is entirely an attitude problem, as evidenced by the fact that he still hasn't apologized for it.
It occurs to me that in this case, open source leads to its own problems, like trying to get code you know is insecure in a very hard to detect manner inserted into an OS. It's not practical for the common assholes who exploit Windows vulnerabilities to do, but the resources of the Chinese just might cook up something nasty to be exploited at a later date.
Which they could also do with Shared Source.
Of course, the DoD should be capable of it's own very sophisticated analysis of any open source code that they use, which would probably be enough to help counter this possibilty, and for that matter, any security vulnerability present.
Which they could also do with Shared Source, if the license allows it.
Don't get me wrong, the "many eyes" theory probably makes the most sense here, but what bothers me is roughly 80% of what people are saying about this issue is pure bullshit, where you can literally replace "open source" with "shared source" or vice versa and make the argument work for the other side.
I know Shared Source has some scary licenses, and Microsoft is not to be trusted, and I say that without sarcasm (think OOXML, Java, etc). I know open source is often better simply by being open source and moderately popular, and I generally will choose a slightly worse open source product simply because it's open source, ignoring price.
But let's not throw all rational thought out the window at the mere mention of Microsoft...
...but I must be new here:
We don't pout up with civilian grade anywhere else in the military, so why the hell are the computer's all Dell's running Windows?
Alright, you want a cache. And you probably want Firefox, although honestly, any browser that you can put into a "kiosk mode" will work -- I'll bet Konqueror can be coerced into that.
But short of that, the way to make it truly bulletproof is to make absolutely nothing writable that doesn't have to be. That way, even if someone manages to find a way to download something, they won't be able to do anything with it. A "noexec" flag on that partition might help.
This does NOT mean a LiveCD environment -- you want to get updates. LiveCDs are writable now, until you reboot, so you could become a zombie for a short amount of time, if Linux ever gets targeted for that. Many are also configured to make it easy for you to become root, and as root, they could theoretically find a way to flash the BIOS or something. And it means you don't get a persistent cache, which is a nice thing to have.
There are also other reasons to want updates. As an example, Firefox 2.0 has spellchecking in textareas -- for example, this Slashdot comment (even if I'm writing it in Konq). If you had them on a LiveCD made before Firefox 2...
If it was just that it's a communal computer that might get messed up by other people, I'd suggest creating user accounts, and offering to backup/restore said accounts in case they screw anything up -- possibly with something like ZFS snapshots. That would let them save passwords, for example. But who's going to remember to log out properly, or, when faced with someone else's account, who's going to remember to log them out and then log in? And who's going to remember a password, anyway?
There are already thousands of.docx and.xlsx files out there, and MS can't abandon compatibility for them
The hell they can't..docx and.xlsx already break compatibility with.doc, which has broken compatibility with itself several times now.
All they have to do is stick a version string on it and release a patch for any MS Office supporting OOXML. If they've done it right so far (doubtful), opening a file with a newer version of the standard would pop up a dialog prompting the user to upgrade, or at least fetch their critical Windows Updates.
First, I believe Microsoft actually sponsored some work on the converter you link to. They aren't actually against a converter, they're just against one which works as simply and easily as saving OOXML docs.
In fact, I should say, they aren't so much against a converter as actually supporting the format, the way they do, say, RTF. You can, from the same Save dialog that lets you choose.doc or.docx, choose to save as.rtf. In office suites other than Microsoft's, you can often change the default format.
A "converter" isn't really a threat to them. Hell, we have one already -- save as.doc, open in OpenOffice. What would be a problem is if they had an official converter, that could be set as the default, that they had to develop by themself. And that will never happen.
I'm betting that the merchant saw the payment not happening, and canceled it from their end, probably fairly automatically. However, it's the second time this particular subscription has been canceled, and it bothers me, especially because there are perks to it lasting longer.
I haven't tried it, because I no longer have a functioning headset for my computer. But a quick Google search, and: here it is.
It's not in a usable state yet, apparently, at least not with the Gtalk people -- although there are plenty of other ways to voice chat on Linux. My personal favorite, if I ever bother to setup a server, is mumble, which really should be killing Ventrilo (but somehow isn't).
I've generally found Kopete to have all the features I want, and then some. It also has some issues with its protocol support, compared to Pidgin -- it seems to disconnect every few hours, which isn't a huge deal, because it reconnects automatically, and the conversation window is still open. And it occasionally crashes for no apparent reason -- I'm on amd64, but that shouldn't matter.
But, other than that, it's been great. Even the crash isn't a big deal, because it takes something like three seconds to open again, and it connects to KDE Wallet for passwords, so I don't have to enter a password the second time.
Basically, first I searched for a KDE variant of Beagle, since I run Kubuntu. I found Kerry.
Then, installed one app from the package manager, and done. It grabbed Mono and set everything else up fine, I was already on XFS, so extended attributes were supported, and it just worked (well, once it had indexed everything).
However, recently, I was a complete moron and lost ALL of my data, so this time around, no desktop search at all. No point -- I have maybe ten or twenty note files, all text, and grepping through them is lightning-fast. That's really what I want out of a desktop search, by the way -- let it provide an optimized version of grep.
Otherwise, they pack their own version of Wine, and it can conflict with a version of Wine a user already has installed.
Only if they have done a really stupid job of it.
I currently have at least three versions of Wine installed: Cedega, the latest Wine from WineHQ, and an older Wine for an older app that doesn't work with the newer ones.
All you need to do is set some environment variables: Where to look for the other Wine executables, and where to look for the Wine home directory (~/.wine). Not easy for an end-user to do, but it really makes it easy to ship software with a known-working version of Wine bundled.
In fact, Cedega itself has a really slick GUI for this, although I still avoid it when I can (WineHQ is so much better now at actually running the apps). It basically saves old versions of the Cedega engine (basically a proprietary Wine), and makes that a configurable option for each program -- which version of Cedega to use, right next to which version of Windows to emulate.
This same GUI also makes it possible, even easy, to set up multiple.wine directories (fake Windows installations). It calls them "game folders" or somesuch. The idea is, some Windows apps don't like being installed in the same place, and it also makes it much easier to debug things, since you can basically start with a clean Windows install for every game -- so that if there's a bug, you know it's that app and that version of Cedega, and not some other issue.
I've discovered that Wine 0.9.40, but no later, will run this old DirectX game better than Cedega ever has, so I've been trying to duplicate the features of that interface, but on the commandline...
Anyway.
Got a bit carried away there, but the point is: There's absolutely NO way Wine versions can conflict, unless you neglect to set one of two environment variables, documented right there in the Wine manpage. And libwine is a different story entirely, anyway, although I seem to remember that Picasa bundles Wine, rather than linking against libwine.
Slashdot Mirror
"Religion" is not the same thing as "something which has no scientific basis."
For example, many of us have certain tastes. I don't like avocados. That's a choice. However, I recognize and acknowledge that other people do like avocados.
Religion isn't about likes and dislikes. Every religion I've ever seen claims to have some fundamental "truth" for people to believe in. The more enlightened religious people might allow that belonging to another religion doesn't necessarily make you a bad person, or even that other religions may be as valid and as true as their own -- in other words, they're semi-Unitarian. But it still comes down to a fundamental belief in something like a god.
No religious person says "I suppose God might exist, and might not, and I act like I believe in Him because it makes me a better person." They say "I believe in God. I have faith."
Now, I have seen people who have faith, and who are also good and kind to others, without thinking to themselves "That person doesn't believe in Christ. He's going to Hell." But that's a quality of the person, not the religion. And even if it was a quality of the religion, you don't need to have a mythology to be nice to other people, beyond, say, "I want to be nice to other people."
Inevitably, they miss the worst possible things you could say, because filtering words like "fuck" just means you have to get creative.
I mean, usually "anus" would be filtered, but it's not as if it'd be hard... try "necrophiliac", I bet it's there. Also, slang is, by definition, not really filterable -- "Dick" is also short for "Richard".
I see you're not a fan of loose interpretation, then.
First off, I refuse to dignify your abortion bit with a response. Try again with the word "fetus" substituted for "child".
And next: What we don't like about what's been done lately isn't just that it wasn't explicitly mentioned in the constitution. It's that legislation is being passed which is explicitly forbidden by the constitution.
Consider the people who get themselves frozen immediately upon death. Suppose that there is eventually the technology needed to revive them and cure whatever was wrong with them. At this point, these people would have had a chance to observe death, if there is an afterlife.
Of course, the trouble with things like these is that very often, people will shift the definition to match what they observe. For example, Heaven used to be defined as actually physically there in the clouds, but now we believe it to be somewhere else, somewhere unknowable, because people actually can and do fly through the clouds (in planes), and there's no floating world of angels and harps. I'm sure someone would define "death" as the point at which someone can no longer be revived, meaning you can't get to Heaven until the worms eat through a sufficient portion of your brain, if medical science were to advance that much.
Gravity isn't a fact. It's a theory. It's "just" a theory, in the same sense that Evolution is, by the way.
Let me explain: Some things are mathematical facts. 2+2=4, and always will. However, gravity is just some equations, or a concept, that matches our observations. Here's a quote for you: "Hume teaches us that no matter how many times you drop a stone, you can never be sure what will happen the next time you drop it. It might fall to the floor, but it might just as easily float to the ceiling."
Not everything that's consistent with our observations is true. For example, for thousands of years, we believed the world was flat. This was consistent with our observations. Then, one day, someone made some observations that weren't consistent with a flat earth -- someone sailed around the world, and before that, someone probably noticed how ships at the edge of the horizon do actually seem to be swallowed up by it.
And, for awhile, Newtonian gravity was consistent with our observations -- except Mercury. Then Einstein published General Relativity.
But for all we know, there could be some exception that none of us know about, and the world might split in half, or people might start flying, or anything could happen.
Most scientists have a faith that the world makes sense, and that the worst that might happen is that our laws weren't specific enough (like gravity).
I also believe that, but only because such a belief continues to be useful. I'd much rather just walk around than have to put suction cups on my feet because I'm paranoid of falling into the sky or something equally bizarre.
So, is your faith in religion -- "freeing" as it may be -- is it actually useful to you in some way?
If the latter is true, then yes.
Would you rather live in a world that's flat, or a world that's round? A flat world would probably have some interesting properties. It would be easier to draw a map, for one thing. It'd also be easier to define where God goes in this world -- in the sky, of course.
But the world isn't flat. It's round. So if I really wanted to, I could live in a delusion of a flat world -- there's even a "flat earth society" that was started as a joke, but now has a loyal following. But it would be a delusion.
Now, as it is, people keep shifting the definition of God and religion so that a God could always exist, so I can't conclusively say that you're wrong, and that there is no God. However, I do find it kind of silly that you continue to believe in one.
Oh, false dichotomy, by the way. You can have a world of meaning and purpose without religion. You can make up your own meaning and purpose, if you like, one that's not based on a fantasy.
It's easier to believe in an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent being -- a logical impossibility, by the way -- an all-powerful sky-deity that can have a mortal son, and then kill him and call it "mercy"...
Easier to believe that than to believe the Universe came into existence on its own? Or that it always existed? What's hard to believe about that?
Here's another one for you: If it's hard to believe something could come into existence on its own, how did God come into existence? Sounds like God is still a lot harder to believe in here.
Look, believe whatever you want, but if you try to justify it logically, you will lose, and you'll look quite foolish doing it. Every philosophical argument for the existence of a deity has basically ended up being wishful thinking -- that you want to believe, and then you go look for evidence to back it up.
There have been philosophical arguments for God's existence, and all of them are really horrible. Things like "Every event must have a cause, and there must have been a first cause." Obviously from someone who has no concept of eternity.
There are also plenty of sound philosophical arguments against God, as he's frequently defined. For example: God is omniscient, omnibenevolent, and omnipotent. Yet there is evil in the world. Therefore, God cannot be all three of these -- pick two.
There's another argument that says heaven cannot possibly exist, even if it was possible to have a God with these properties.
Now, that doesn't mean philosophy can't talk about God. It just means that you're not going to find a philosophical argument that will convince someone to be religious. The closest you could come is Pascal's wager, which doesn't account for multiple religions.
Nelson Mandela, we actually have photographic evidence of. He also doesn't claim to be master of the known universe, he's just a man, and men I already do believe in.
In that case, I certainly have no obligation to believe in the deity.
Which is still true, as we have no evidence that a deity exists, and significant evidence that no God, as described by major religions, exists.
Therefore, believing that a deity does exist is wishful thinking, even if I'm eventually shown wrong and it's conclusively shown that a deity exists. Wishful thinking is sometimes vindicated. I don't think that makes it any less silly to believe it before you find evidence.
Karl Marx made that analogy quite awhile ago, too.
Of course, the now great-grandparent poster wasn't saying that -- it looks like they were just illustrating that "making you feel good inside" isn't enough to make faith a good thing, unless you also wish to declare heroin a good thing.
Google for windows shared source. First result is this page, which seems to suggest that, while you need to be a certain type of entity to qualify, at least this type of entity can be bought outright by having 1500 Windows licenses.
Or something like that; point is, they're not going to refuse the Chinese government just because they're the Chinese government; in fact, they have a program specifically for governments, as well.
More information can be found here.
The one in which I said basically exactly what you just did -- that the "save as" isn't there to make it as easy as OOXML?
Or the statement where I said that "save as" is there and does work correctly -- for RTF?
Of the people who can't use computers, I'd sort them into three categories: Those who actually have mental/psychological problems, those who are inexperienced but willing to learn, and those who have an attitude problem. And combinations of these.
The ones who have mental/psychological problems are pretty rare, outside of a nursing home. These are the people who either lack the mental capacity to learn -- and with respect, the truly elderly, intelligent and wise though they may be, are not good at learning new things. I have a... 90-year-old (I think) grandmother who uses email, but can't learn things like selecting something to delete, or even holding down the backspace key, versus just pressing backspace -- one character at a time -- until she's deleted whatever she needs.
Like I said, there are people outside of a nursing home with these limitations, and I know at least one of them, but they're rare.
The ones who are inexperienced, but willing to learn, are actually often easier to support than the smart ones. They're willing to do what you tell them, without arguing with you about it, and it may take a couple of tries, but they will remember the next time. Over time, they get more and more self-sufficient. They may never approach your own skill, but they'll at least get to where they can get their job done without calling you every two seconds. The really smart ones will also know when they should call you, even if they can do it on their own -- they manage to be smart enough to be dangerous, without actually being dangerous.
The third group is basically identical to the second group in skills, education, intelligence, sometimes even social skills, but for some reason or other, they refuse to learn. For example, at first glance, a teenager may seem like they can't actually grasp new (to them) concepts, like using email instead of Myspace to communicate. The truth is, they just don't give a fuck.
The absolutely #1 most common reason here is the businessperson who has an attitude of "It's not my problem." They do 90% of their work on a computer, and yet, they somehow think that it's not their job to be computer-literate. These are generally the people who are just smart enough to be dangerous -- they have big, important things to do, so they don't have time to actually read a single fucking dialog, they'll just click "OK" or "Accept" or "Allow" or whatever makes it go away. Then, when this causes problems, even if there's some very simple instructions on their screen at the moment, they'll call someone else in to fix it.
These people are the most difficult to work with, because I know of no actual solution other than, say, a dialog box that says "Click OK to receive a painful electric shock," wired to an electrode in their mouse.
I say this because the actually incapable people can at least be trained and/or restricted to areas where they can't hurt themselves -- they generally don't know enough to be dangerous, or to be picky about their environment, so many of them would probably be fine with a Linux kiosk, in the worst-case-scenario. The independent ones will learn on their own, and while they'll make mistakes, those mistakes will at least be interesting, entertaining, and less frequent than the "My computer won't turn on" when they just forgot to turn on their monitor.
It's only when they have an attitude problem that they really start to be a problem, especially when combined with one or both of the above. The classic example is Jerry Taylor -- normally, I don't go after individual people, but this fucker deserved it. After being repeatedly corrected, in simple terms which he obviously could understand (considering he eventually did), the problem is entirely an attitude problem, as evidenced by the fact that he still hasn't apologized for it.
Which they could also do with Shared Source.
Which they could also do with Shared Source, if the license allows it.
Don't get me wrong, the "many eyes" theory probably makes the most sense here, but what bothers me is roughly 80% of what people are saying about this issue is pure bullshit, where you can literally replace "open source" with "shared source" or vice versa and make the argument work for the other side.
I know Shared Source has some scary licenses, and Microsoft is not to be trusted, and I say that without sarcasm (think OOXML, Java, etc). I know open source is often better simply by being open source and moderately popular, and I generally will choose a slightly worse open source product simply because it's open source, ignoring price.
But let's not throw all rational thought out the window at the mere mention of Microsoft...
...but I must be new here:
PNAS! Come on!
I know we've done it before, but that doesn't stop us. Allow me to demonstrate:
In Soviet Russia, us stops that! Frist psot! Reductium Ad Hitler.
Alright, you want a cache. And you probably want Firefox, although honestly, any browser that you can put into a "kiosk mode" will work -- I'll bet Konqueror can be coerced into that.
But short of that, the way to make it truly bulletproof is to make absolutely nothing writable that doesn't have to be. That way, even if someone manages to find a way to download something, they won't be able to do anything with it. A "noexec" flag on that partition might help.
This does NOT mean a LiveCD environment -- you want to get updates. LiveCDs are writable now, until you reboot, so you could become a zombie for a short amount of time, if Linux ever gets targeted for that. Many are also configured to make it easy for you to become root, and as root, they could theoretically find a way to flash the BIOS or something. And it means you don't get a persistent cache, which is a nice thing to have.
There are also other reasons to want updates. As an example, Firefox 2.0 has spellchecking in textareas -- for example, this Slashdot comment (even if I'm writing it in Konq). If you had them on a LiveCD made before Firefox 2...
If it was just that it's a communal computer that might get messed up by other people, I'd suggest creating user accounts, and offering to backup/restore said accounts in case they screw anything up -- possibly with something like ZFS snapshots. That would let them save passwords, for example. But who's going to remember to log out properly, or, when faced with someone else's account, who's going to remember to log them out and then log in? And who's going to remember a password, anyway?
He works inside Sony.
Perhaps someone inside Sony who actually knows about it said something to him?
Or, he's talking out his ass. But then, so are you.
Ok, I use Linux, but that doesn't make a lot of sense...
Why is Windows Shared Source more vulnerable to this type of attack than Linux and other Open Source things?
The hell they can't. .docx and .xlsx already break compatibility with .doc, which has broken compatibility with itself several times now.
All they have to do is stick a version string on it and release a patch for any MS Office supporting OOXML. If they've done it right so far (doubtful), opening a file with a newer version of the standard would pop up a dialog prompting the user to upgrade, or at least fetch their critical Windows Updates.
First, I believe Microsoft actually sponsored some work on the converter you link to. They aren't actually against a converter, they're just against one which works as simply and easily as saving OOXML docs.
.doc or .docx, choose to save as .rtf. In office suites other than Microsoft's, you can often change the default format.
.doc, open in OpenOffice. What would be a problem is if they had an official converter, that could be set as the default, that they had to develop by themself. And that will never happen.
In fact, I should say, they aren't so much against a converter as actually supporting the format, the way they do, say, RTF. You can, from the same Save dialog that lets you choose
A "converter" isn't really a threat to them. Hell, we have one already -- save as
Mine got outright canceled.
I'm betting that the merchant saw the payment not happening, and canceled it from their end, probably fairly automatically. However, it's the second time this particular subscription has been canceled, and it bothers me, especially because there are perks to it lasting longer.
I haven't tried it, because I no longer have a functioning headset for my computer. But a quick Google search, and: here it is.
It's not in a usable state yet, apparently, at least not with the Gtalk people -- although there are plenty of other ways to voice chat on Linux. My personal favorite, if I ever bother to setup a server, is mumble, which really should be killing Ventrilo (but somehow isn't).
I've generally found Kopete to have all the features I want, and then some. It also has some issues with its protocol support, compared to Pidgin -- it seems to disconnect every few hours, which isn't a huge deal, because it reconnects automatically, and the conversation window is still open. And it occasionally crashes for no apparent reason -- I'm on amd64, but that shouldn't matter.
But, other than that, it's been great. Even the crash isn't a big deal, because it takes something like three seconds to open again, and it connects to KDE Wallet for passwords, so I don't have to enter a password the second time.
Basically, first I searched for a KDE variant of Beagle, since I run Kubuntu. I found Kerry.
Then, installed one app from the package manager, and done. It grabbed Mono and set everything else up fine, I was already on XFS, so extended attributes were supported, and it just worked (well, once it had indexed everything).
However, recently, I was a complete moron and lost ALL of my data, so this time around, no desktop search at all. No point -- I have maybe ten or twenty note files, all text, and grepping through them is lightning-fast. That's really what I want out of a desktop search, by the way -- let it provide an optimized version of grep.
Only if they have done a really stupid job of it.
I currently have at least three versions of Wine installed: Cedega, the latest Wine from WineHQ, and an older Wine for an older app that doesn't work with the newer ones.
All you need to do is set some environment variables: Where to look for the other Wine executables, and where to look for the Wine home directory (~/.wine). Not easy for an end-user to do, but it really makes it easy to ship software with a known-working version of Wine bundled.
In fact, Cedega itself has a really slick GUI for this, although I still avoid it when I can (WineHQ is so much better now at actually running the apps). It basically saves old versions of the Cedega engine (basically a proprietary Wine), and makes that a configurable option for each program -- which version of Cedega to use, right next to which version of Windows to emulate.
This same GUI also makes it possible, even easy, to set up multiple .wine directories (fake Windows installations). It calls them "game folders" or somesuch. The idea is, some Windows apps don't like being installed in the same place, and it also makes it much easier to debug things, since you can basically start with a clean Windows install for every game -- so that if there's a bug, you know it's that app and that version of Cedega, and not some other issue.
I've discovered that Wine 0.9.40, but no later, will run this old DirectX game better than Cedega ever has, so I've been trying to duplicate the features of that interface, but on the commandline...
Anyway.
Got a bit carried away there, but the point is: There's absolutely NO way Wine versions can conflict, unless you neglect to set one of two environment variables, documented right there in the Wine manpage. And libwine is a different story entirely, anyway, although I seem to remember that Picasa bundles Wine, rather than linking against libwine.
Yeah, you're right. I know what it does, I just should have written to 10% instead of by 10%...