As a non Linux guy, I've been interested in installing Linux several times but the community has turned me off.
As a Linux guy, I've been interested in installing Windows several times but the support for problems has turned me off. Whenever I search for solutions to problems, most of the pages consist of people asking the same question as me, with no replies, then a very high percentage of the results consist of: "I had this problem too", or the replies are locked away behind registration walls, or there are replies with a series of instructions, most of which obviously have nothing to do with the problem and if I follow them, they don't actually work.
I am being serious here -- I find that for any given problem, it is much easier to Google a solution if it is a Linux problem than if it is a Windows problem.
Re:Let me be the first critic
on
Linux Needs Critics
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Now, I recognize that ATi hasn't been as "forthcoming" with driver source / documentation as some other companies. This is where the Linux folks can say it's "not my fault." The reality, though, is that it is a barrier to entry, and therefore it is their problem.
Sometimes it is not clear where the problem lies and hence it is not clear how a problem should be solved
An example: try using Kino to control and download video off a camcorder using Firewire under Ubuntu. There is at least one closed bug about this, yet the problem remains. The Ubuntu team set the raw1394 device to have 600 permissions, so only root can use it (or maybe it is 644, so only root can write to it) because anything else is a security risk. Kino uses the raw1394 device. Where does the problem lie? Is it in Kino for using raw1394? Is it in the kernel for not providing a more suitable 1394 interface that can be used by Kino yet be secure if non-root users can write to it? Or is it in the Ubuntu team for the permissions of/dev/raw1394?
The bottom line for this is that Kino can't be used for a critical task by anyone except a skilled Unix user who is prepared to either use chmod or change the UDEV rules.
I see a couple of banner ads on/. that one might think are April Fools jokes: T. Boone Pickens on the stimulus plan and the BSA. I don't believe the T. Boone Pickens ads are April Fools because I started seeing them yesterday, or earlier. But BSA ads? Can anyone think of a less receptive audience than/. for the BSA?
This April Fool's is nothing compared to the
Grauniad's 1977 April fool. In 1977, they published a 7 page supplement (7 full-size pages, not tabloid size) and the island of San Seriffe. It was hilarious and full of jokes, puns, etc. and must have taken significant effort to write and convince the management to publish it.
As near as I can figure, every email address with my actual name in it has gotten about 500 spam / month after just a few weeks of existence
I have a domain name that I registered in the "EU" TLD. I was the first registrant of this domain name, and I use it very infrequently, yet it gets emails to the most unlikely addresses -- adresses that I can say without a shadow of doubt have never been used. These addresses are not words or names, so it is not a dictionary attack -- in fact, I see emails to the same small number of addresses over and over again.
HOWEVER in the ad, Lauren wants a machine with a certain amount of raw horsepower, a keyboard she likes (which, with Apple, is either entirely true or entirely not) and a 17" screen.
Lauren wants.... ? Or was she told to buy a certain configuration, either directly or indirectly? For example, they might have shown her example laptops and discussed their merits in ways that would strongly influence what she wanted to buy. She is an actress who lists her her "special skills" as cheerleading, hula-hoop, etc., so I rather doubt she is very knowledgeable about technology and hence much more likely to be easy to influence. Or they might just have said 'Here's a grand, go buy a 17" laptop'.
So far so good. But how does google news decide which agency stories to place on their front page? For that, they use the story placement on the various news sites they're aggregating, and this is where it becomes unfair because this work is an essential part of running a news web site
That argument is exactly the same value proposition claimed by music labels -- that they are sorting the wheat from the chaff and presenting only interesting music/news/whatever.
The problem is that the web has much more effective sorting mechanisms -- using thousands or millions of individual ratings to assemble a ranking that reflects popular interest, not just some manager's idea of what constitutes popular interest.
Facts are cheap. Investigative journalism is expensive but has value. There have been many recent articles about the impending death of investigative journalism in the USA, but IMHO, that has its roots in the highly fractured nature of the newspaper business in the USA. For example, how many newspapers does the San Francisco Bay Area have today, and how many does it really need? There is a massive waste of resources involved in putting the same syndicated stories on different pages and that is why newspapers "can't afford" to create the one real value proposition that they have today.
Are you saying that the 30-50% tax rates that most European countries pay are somehow less than the $400/month I pay to insure a family of three?
But how typical is that $400/month? Try insuring a family after some of the family members have had significant health issues and includes family members over 45. You will find that $1000/month is not enough for coverage and probably $1500-$2000/month is a more realistic figure. Many older people who buy their own insurance have little option except to buy "catastrophic" coverage -- which won't pay out a dime in most years.
Also, is $400/month all that you pay, or do you also have deductables, co-pays, etc.?
Is it really a journalists job to state as fact that Sarah Palin wasn't prepared to run for VP? Regardless of your "opinion" of Sarah Palin, it's just that, an OPINION, and JOURNALISTS shouldn't be spouting theirs. It's not their job.
I think you are confusing news reporting with interviewing. It is the responsibility of interviewers to probe the interviewees. If that requires making statements to prompt a response from the interviewee, then so be it. Let me suggest that you watch the ORIGINAL Frost/Nixon interviews and imagine what they would be like if Frost had not challenged Nixon by offering his (Frost's) own interpretation of events.
The role of journalists is to report and interpret events. Interpretation can't happen in a vacuum and will naturally be affected by journalists' pre-conceived notions. I think it is only in the USA where there is the fiction of the unbiased newsroom. Other countries expect some level of bias and think it more important to understand the reporters' biases.
I don't know. I am torn by this because I hate to make blanket statements. But it does seem to be that kids who are home-schooled are just very odd.
How do you know this? Perhaps because you know some odd people and they were homeschooled? You probably meet homeschooled people all the time, but because they don't strike you as odd, you never realize that they were homeschooled.
Well, they might not stop the current lawsuits until then, but as we already learned (http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/12/19/131227&tid=123), there will be no more new lawsuits.
Please keep up. There are new lawsuits since that announcement.
When will the RIAA stop wasting money on these cases?
From the RIAA's point of veiw, they are not "wasting money". The organization makes a profit from these lawsuits (and the associated settlements). It's only when either:
1. The lawyers are likely to lose their licenses or:
2. The lawsuit/settlement program stops being profitable.
that they will stop the lawsuits.
I suggest you look up what "school refusal" is. Hint: it has nothing to do with homeschooling.
Also, I suggest a little critical thinking with respect to the study -- 17 kids? How representative is that? And perhaps the reason they were refusing school was because they already had poor coping skills?
As the parent of 3 homeschooled children, I can tell you that such a generic statement is complete rubbish.
Yes, if the kids a locked away and never socialize, they probably won't have good social skills.
That situation does not represent the experience of many homeschooled kids. In any area where there are significant groups of homeschooled children, there will be organizations through which these children can socialize, and there will be many, many other venues that can be found to meet other kids and socialize.
On the other hand, I expect that being strip-searched probably messes up social and other skills. While this is an unusual case, for far too many kids, being the recipient of bullying also messes up their social skills.
Posession of an over the counter medication is NOT by any means probably cause for a strip search.
She did not have any drugs in her posession. All the school officials had as reason was the accusation of another girl who had been caught and was trying to shift blame.
But their attitude was clearly "guilty until proven innocent":
The school district does not contest that Ms. Redding had no disciplinary record, but says that is irrelevant.
"Her assertion should not be misread to infer that she never broke school rules," the district said of Ms. Redding in a brief, "only that she was never caught."
That's definitely the best idea I've heard. Regulate the timings on traffic lights, specifically the minimum time a light stays yellow based on the maximum speed of the road.
It's not going to happen. Just because those backwoods Europeans have been doing just the same for decades, and everyone knows that they can't get anything right.
Apple systems run about 20-30% more than average. Sony laptops cost about 20-30% more than average. Apple is right in line with other "premium" vendors
IMHO, anyone who pays a premium for Sony hardware these days is just throwing their money away. There was a time when Sony hardware was better than other brands, but that time is long past.
Actually, all kidding aside, yeah he is (wrong). Amusing, possibly. But wrong, definately.
He did the work under contract. Just as the work I do under contract isn't mine, neither was his.
You assume that his contract is like yours. That's a bad assumption. Often, writers' contracts include provisions for "residuals". These residuals have been the subject of a certain amount of arguments and litigation -- where the studio was able to extract more value from a writer's work in a manner not anticipated by the contract.
It doesn't matter that he doesn't own the work. Imagine if your contract included bonuses if certain events take place, those events happen and you didn't get your bonus. That's the essence of what he is claiming.
Umm nope. I'd rather have a frontal lobotomy. The words nice, Clean, and Microsoft just don't belong in the same sentence. And why sully a nice, clean Linux installation by letting anything from Microsoft come into contact with it? I'll stick with OpenOffice thanks.
[Quickly pulls numbers out of thin air] I strongly suspect that the number of people who need features present in Office 2007 but not in OOo 3.x is a lot less than the number of people locked into WIndows because of Quickbooks.
Ah. You're using XP Home. You have the fine grained options under XP Pro.
Uh, no. I just checked on an XP Pro machine and under the "User Accounts" option from the Control Panel, I select "Change Account Type" and the only options there are "Limited User" and "Administrator".
Note that I did not say that more fine-grained permissions are not available, it's just that they are difficult to find (for the average user). Another person replied to your post and confirmed what I had written.
Even if this were only XP Home, what of it? If MS makes it difficult for users to configure a user account so that it has the necessary permissions without the account being an Administrator, is is surprising that users set their accounts to be Administrator? If MS does all manner of things in the name of making it easier for the user. In this case, MS has made it difficult for the user to configure a secure and useful user account.
Meanwhile.... I'll probably be modded down to "Troll" again for pointing out the truth -- just because the truth happens to paint MS in a bad light. Are people paid to support MS on/. or do they just do it because they love MS?
Maybe throw in a dash of OEMs setting people to administrator by default,
This is not an OEM issue -- MS does this also. If you get an MS XP installation disk, install it and add users, the users will be Administrators. In fact, MS has made things more difficult since WIn2k -- under XP, the only options under the Contol Panel "Users" dialog are "Limited User" or "Administrator". Finding the option to exercise a more fine-grained control over user permissions is difficult -- most users won't find it at all. Since "Limited Users" can't control the network, a "Limited User" can't connect the wireless in a laptop to a new AP, which pretty much 100% of laptop users want to be able to do.
Under Windows 2000 (IIRC) more fine-grained options were much easier to find.
Summary: don't blame OEMs -- this is a problem that is 100% MS's making.
But another point I'd like to bring up is: why would a person be at risk of losing their house or savings in the first place? Shouldn't those assets be held separately from high-risk endeavors like investment banking? If these folks who got scammed lost more than a small percentage of their income, then they were morons. I'm not saying they deserved to get bilked, but still, they got screwed because they let greed trump common sense.
You bring up a very interesting point. There was a story of one woman who was likely to lose her house because she could no longer pay the mortgage. Presumably she had mortgaged the house in order to "invest" with Madoff. That's called arbitrage and is a sophisticated and risky technique.
Anyway, back to the relative guilt according to the actions of the victims. If I use an ATM late at night and get robbed, do I deserve to lose my money (I should have known that it was a stupid place and time to use an ATM). Was it a lesser offense to attack and rape the girl in the short skirt in the bad part of town than if the attack had taken place in a better part of town? Once you start assessing the nature of the crime according to how "risky" the behavior of the victims was, you start going down a difficult road.
If you had read my posting carefully, you would have noted that I also stated that the risk of being prosecuted has to be significant for there to be a deterrent effect. In recent times the SEC has clearly been ineffective and that risk has been close to zero.
As for the punishment fitting the crime, arguably Madoff has caused tremendous damage to people's lives. There are elderly people who will lose their houses and all their savings. Who knows what will happen to them? What about the people who would have benefited from the charities that now don't have the money to support their work. What consequences will that have?
Just because Madoff didn't use a gun or a knife to rob people doesn't mean that the consequences won't be dire for some of his victims.
Ask yourself this, if someone robbed you at knifepoint of the contents of your wallet, but did not actually harm you, is that worse or better than losing your house and all your savings?
Madoff probably wouldn't be "living in luxury" after paying reparations to his victims anyway. Even if he did have money left over afterwards there are plenty of laws which allow for the state to confiscate that.
Madoff may have no money at the end of this, but how much will his wife and family have? Will they kick him to the curb? I doubt it.
No, no, no, just because our country seems to think that all bad people should go to jail, doesn't mean that its right. Tell me, what is the purpose of jail? It is not a "time out" like our country seems to think it is, it is where you should put violent criminals so they no longer terrorize the street until they are reformed. Yes, as in, full civil rights, etc when they get out. We wonder why we have overcrowded prisons, well this is why.
Is what they are doing good? No. But put them on house arrest, forbid them for taking public money, make them pay reparations to those they have defrauded. Madoff is a bad person, I'm sure we can all agree on that, but is he a danger if he lives next door? Is your life or property in danger if he comes to your house? No. Therefore, he should not be sent to jail. Similarly tax fraud should be the same way, if they aren't a danger to the passerby then they should not be jailed, plain and simple.
Nice strawman, but not correct. People are also sent to jail as a deterrent. It's not enough to prevent Madoff from committing another swindle. You have to make other people think the consequences of getting caught are sufficiently bad that they don't want to take that risk. If the consequence to people like Madoff is living in luxury of the rest of your life other people won't be deterred. Hence jail is appropriate for some non-violent offenders. I think the distinction might be more useful if it were between victimless crimes and crimes with victims. There were many victims of Madoff's actions.
The other part of the risk/reward equation is the likelihood of being caught. That's where the SEC fell down badly. In the future people need to be convinced that there is both the likelihood of being caught and serious penalties when caught.
Slashdot Mirror
As a Linux guy, I've been interested in installing Windows several times but the support for problems has turned me off. Whenever I search for solutions to problems, most of the pages consist of people asking the same question as me, with no replies, then a very high percentage of the results consist of: "I had this problem too", or the replies are locked away behind registration walls, or there are replies with a series of instructions, most of which obviously have nothing to do with the problem and if I follow them, they don't actually work.
I am being serious here -- I find that for any given problem, it is much easier to Google a solution if it is a Linux problem than if it is a Windows problem.
Sometimes it is not clear where the problem lies and hence it is not clear how a problem should be solved
/dev/raw1394?
An example: try using Kino to control and download video off a camcorder using Firewire under Ubuntu. There is at least one closed bug about this, yet the problem remains. The Ubuntu team set the raw1394 device to have 600 permissions, so only root can use it (or maybe it is 644, so only root can write to it) because anything else is a security risk. Kino uses the raw1394 device. Where does the problem lie? Is it in Kino for using raw1394? Is it in the kernel for not providing a more suitable 1394 interface that can be used by Kino yet be secure if non-root users can write to it? Or is it in the Ubuntu team for the permissions of
The bottom line for this is that Kino can't be used for a critical task by anyone except a skilled Unix user who is prepared to either use chmod or change the UDEV rules.
I see a couple of banner ads on /. that one might think are April Fools jokes: T. Boone Pickens on the stimulus plan and the BSA. I don't believe the T. Boone Pickens ads are April Fools because I started seeing them yesterday, or earlier. But BSA ads? Can anyone think of a less receptive audience than /. for the BSA?
This April Fool's is nothing compared to the Grauniad's 1977 April fool. In 1977, they published a 7 page supplement (7 full-size pages, not tabloid size) and the island of San Seriffe. It was hilarious and full of jokes, puns, etc. and must have taken significant effort to write and convince the management to publish it.
I have a domain name that I registered in the "EU" TLD. I was the first registrant of this domain name, and I use it very infrequently, yet it gets emails to the most unlikely addresses -- adresses that I can say without a shadow of doubt have never been used. These addresses are not words or names, so it is not a dictionary attack -- in fact, I see emails to the same small number of addresses over and over again.
Lauren wants .... ? Or was she told to buy a certain configuration, either directly or indirectly? For example, they might have shown her example laptops and discussed their merits in ways that would strongly influence what she wanted to buy. She is an actress who lists her her "special skills" as cheerleading, hula-hoop, etc., so I rather doubt she is very knowledgeable about technology and hence much more likely to be easy to influence. Or they might just have said 'Here's a grand, go buy a 17" laptop'.
That argument is exactly the same value proposition claimed by music labels -- that they are sorting the wheat from the chaff and presenting only interesting music/news/whatever.
The problem is that the web has much more effective sorting mechanisms -- using thousands or millions of individual ratings to assemble a ranking that reflects popular interest, not just some manager's idea of what constitutes popular interest.
Facts are cheap. Investigative journalism is expensive but has value. There have been many recent articles about the impending death of investigative journalism in the USA, but IMHO, that has its roots in the highly fractured nature of the newspaper business in the USA. For example, how many newspapers does the San Francisco Bay Area have today, and how many does it really need? There is a massive waste of resources involved in putting the same syndicated stories on different pages and that is why newspapers "can't afford" to create the one real value proposition that they have today.
But how typical is that $400/month? Try insuring a family after some of the family members have had significant health issues and includes family members over 45. You will find that $1000/month is not enough for coverage and probably $1500-$2000/month is a more realistic figure. Many older people who buy their own insurance have little option except to buy "catastrophic" coverage -- which won't pay out a dime in most years.
Also, is $400/month all that you pay, or do you also have deductables, co-pays, etc.?
I think you are confusing news reporting with interviewing. It is the responsibility of interviewers to probe the interviewees. If that requires making statements to prompt a response from the interviewee, then so be it. Let me suggest that you watch the ORIGINAL Frost/Nixon interviews and imagine what they would be like if Frost had not challenged Nixon by offering his (Frost's) own interpretation of events.
The role of journalists is to report and interpret events. Interpretation can't happen in a vacuum and will naturally be affected by journalists' pre-conceived notions. I think it is only in the USA where there is the fiction of the unbiased newsroom. Other countries expect some level of bias and think it more important to understand the reporters' biases.
How do you know this? Perhaps because you know some odd people and they were homeschooled? You probably meet homeschooled people all the time, but because they don't strike you as odd, you never realize that they were homeschooled.
Please keep up. There are new lawsuits since that announcement.
From the RIAA's point of veiw, they are not "wasting money". The organization makes a profit from these lawsuits (and the associated settlements). It's only when either:
1. The lawyers are likely to lose their licenses or:
2. The lawsuit/settlement program stops being profitable.
that they will stop the lawsuits.
I suggest you look up what "school refusal" is. Hint: it has nothing to do with homeschooling.
Also, I suggest a little critical thinking with respect to the study -- 17 kids? How representative is that? And perhaps the reason they were refusing school was because they already had poor coping skills?
As the parent of 3 homeschooled children, I can tell you that such a generic statement is complete rubbish.
Yes, if the kids a locked away and never socialize, they probably won't have good social skills.
That situation does not represent the experience of many homeschooled kids. In any area where there are significant groups of homeschooled children, there will be organizations through which these children can socialize, and there will be many, many other venues that can be found to meet other kids and socialize.
On the other hand, I expect that being strip-searched probably messes up social and other skills. While this is an unusual case, for far too many kids, being the recipient of bullying also messes up their social skills.
She did not have any drugs in her posession. All the school officials had as reason was the accusation of another girl who had been caught and was trying to shift blame.
But their attitude was clearly "guilty until proven innocent":
California does this already.
IMHO, anyone who pays a premium for Sony hardware these days is just throwing their money away. There was a time when Sony hardware was better than other brands, but that time is long past.
You assume that his contract is like yours. That's a bad assumption. Often, writers' contracts include provisions for "residuals". These residuals have been the subject of a certain amount of arguments and litigation -- where the studio was able to extract more value from a writer's work in a manner not anticipated by the contract.
It doesn't matter that he doesn't own the work. Imagine if your contract included bonuses if certain events take place, those events happen and you didn't get your bonus. That's the essence of what he is claiming.
[Quickly pulls numbers out of thin air] I strongly suspect that the number of people who need features present in Office 2007 but not in OOo 3.x is a lot less than the number of people locked into WIndows because of Quickbooks.
Uh, no. I just checked on an XP Pro machine and under the "User Accounts" option from the Control Panel, I select "Change Account Type" and the only options there are "Limited User" and "Administrator".
.... I'll probably be modded down to "Troll" again for pointing out the truth -- just because the truth happens to paint MS in a bad light. Are people paid to support MS on /. or do they just do it because they love MS?
Note that I did not say that more fine-grained permissions are not available, it's just that they are difficult to find (for the average user). Another person replied to your post and confirmed what I had written.
Even if this were only XP Home, what of it? If MS makes it difficult for users to configure a user account so that it has the necessary permissions without the account being an Administrator, is is surprising that users set their accounts to be Administrator? If MS does all manner of things in the name of making it easier for the user. In this case, MS has made it difficult for the user to configure a secure and useful user account.
Meanwhile
This is not an OEM issue -- MS does this also. If you get an MS XP installation disk, install it and add users, the users will be Administrators. In fact, MS has made things more difficult since WIn2k -- under XP, the only options under the Contol Panel "Users" dialog are "Limited User" or "Administrator". Finding the option to exercise a more fine-grained control over user permissions is difficult -- most users won't find it at all. Since "Limited Users" can't control the network, a "Limited User" can't connect the wireless in a laptop to a new AP, which pretty much 100% of laptop users want to be able to do.
Under Windows 2000 (IIRC) more fine-grained options were much easier to find.
Summary: don't blame OEMs -- this is a problem that is 100% MS's making.
You bring up a very interesting point. There was a story of one woman who was likely to lose her house because she could no longer pay the mortgage. Presumably she had mortgaged the house in order to "invest" with Madoff. That's called arbitrage and is a sophisticated and risky technique.
Anyway, back to the relative guilt according to the actions of the victims. If I use an ATM late at night and get robbed, do I deserve to lose my money (I should have known that it was a stupid place and time to use an ATM). Was it a lesser offense to attack and rape the girl in the short skirt in the bad part of town than if the attack had taken place in a better part of town? Once you start assessing the nature of the crime according to how "risky" the behavior of the victims was, you start going down a difficult road.
If you had read my posting carefully, you would have noted that I also stated that the risk of being prosecuted has to be significant for there to be a deterrent effect. In recent times the SEC has clearly been ineffective and that risk has been close to zero.
As for the punishment fitting the crime, arguably Madoff has caused tremendous damage to people's lives. There are elderly people who will lose their houses and all their savings. Who knows what will happen to them? What about the people who would have benefited from the charities that now don't have the money to support their work. What consequences will that have?
Just because Madoff didn't use a gun or a knife to rob people doesn't mean that the consequences won't be dire for some of his victims.
Ask yourself this, if someone robbed you at knifepoint of the contents of your wallet, but did not actually harm you, is that worse or better than losing your house and all your savings?
Madoff may have no money at the end of this, but how much will his wife and family have? Will they kick him to the curb? I doubt it.
Nice strawman, but not correct. People are also sent to jail as a deterrent. It's not enough to prevent Madoff from committing another swindle. You have to make other people think the consequences of getting caught are sufficiently bad that they don't want to take that risk. If the consequence to people like Madoff is living in luxury of the rest of your life other people won't be deterred. Hence jail is appropriate for some non-violent offenders. I think the distinction might be more useful if it were between victimless crimes and crimes with victims. There were many victims of Madoff's actions.
The other part of the risk/reward equation is the likelihood of being caught. That's where the SEC fell down badly. In the future people need to be convinced that there is both the likelihood of being caught and serious penalties when caught.