Yes, the corporate desktop and the home desktop are different, and that's what I'm talking about. Just because Linux isn't ready to take over the corporate world doesn't mean it's not ready for the average home user.
Granted, not every Aunt Minnie has a family geek to set up her computer. So what? Those that do can (if they want) use Linux now, those that don't, or don't want to can stay with Windows. The point is that Linux is ready if as and when Aunt Minnie decides to try it. Or, if her in-house geek sets her first computer up with Linux, it will do everything she needs.
As far as computers coming with Linux pre-installed, I seem to remember a number of recent articles about varous companies such as (I think) Dell making that an option. The more I read of your posts, the more I get the impression that you don't believe Linux is ready and no matter what I or anybody else says, you're not going to change your mind. I use both Windows and Linux at home, and would be just as happy with either one in a corporate environment. Which do you use? (Not a challenge, just curious.)
But she *can't* learn Linux because nobody is going to set it up for her. You can't be there for every mythical Aunt Minnie. You and people like you can't even be there for enough Aunt Minnies to make a statistical impact on the number of home desktop OS installations.
If you get Aunt Minnie a PC with Windows on it, (or she gets one and asks you for help) you set it up, you install whatever software's needed and you teach her how to use it. Same thing with Linux. If it's her first computer, there's not even anything to unlearn. As far as making a statistical impact, whoever said I was trying to do that? I'm just pointing out that Linux, as it is now, is good enough for Aunt Minnie. It may not be what a dedicated gamer wants, because even with Wine, it may not be able to handle the games he/she wants, but that's not what Aunt Minnie wants. She wants to surf the net, send/receive email and read documents her friends send her. Linux can do all of that, especially if you make sure she has OpenOffice.org installed because it understands all the MSOffice formats.
There's one good reason Linux isn't all over the home desktop: most people buy computers with the OS installed, and most places only install Windows. That's all people get and most customers don't even know they have a choice. Once people learn that they not only have a choice, but that they're not locked out of sharing files with their friends because of proprietary formats, people will gradually start buying Linux as an experiment in secondary computers. Once that happens, and they see how easy they are, a few of them will make the switch completely. It won't be fast, but I think that given time it will happen.
You said that it isn't ready for home use because there aren't the corporate distribution channels for business software. I disagree. Not only are there business packages for Linux, the software the average home user needs is different than what a corporation might want. You're comparing apples and oranges here, in my opinion.
Vicodin also works for me. I take one, in about fifteen minutes or less I fall asleep and stay that way for at least four hours, if not longer. As long as I'm asleep, I feel no pain.
Aunt Minnie isn't going to install an OS, no matter how easy you make it. An OS isn't 'ready' for her desktop until the top 3 computer manufacturer of her choice sells it to her pre-installed.
That's your definition of "ready." It's not mine. Linux is ready for Aunt Minnie by my definition because she can learn to use Linux for what she needs just as easily as she can Windows and it will do everything she needs. She won't care if it comes from the store preinstalled or if you buy a computer, install Linux and then set it up for her; there won't be any difference in what she sees. I'm not going to argue which definition is right because it's a matter of opinion and you're welcome to yours.
Linux *isn't* ready for the desktop right now, because the corporate desktop comes first...
However, the corporate desktop isn't the only market. It is ready for the home desktop, and it's just as ready as Windows is for Aunt Minnie. Just because corporations aren't flocking to switch to Linux doesn't mean it's not ready for anybody's desktop.
Until then, I guess we'll keep seeing "XXXX app is what linux needs to be on the desktop" articles...
Even more to the point, as long as there's even one app running on MS or Mac that isn't on Linux, the naysayers and fanbois will claim that Linux isn't ready for the desktop because of that one app. No matter how good Linux is, how much better its stability and security, how many apps there are for it, as long as the fanbois can point to one thing that isn't duplicated to their satisfaction, they'll continue to claim it's not ready yet.
Linux is ready for the desktop, right now. It's ready for Aunt Minnie because Aunt Minnie isn't going to be installing her own software on Linux anymore than she is on Windows. What it isn't ready for is the MS/Mac zealots, but then, it never will be because they have no desire to change, nor to admit there even is a viable alternative to their favorite OS.
Paper is a friggin' waste to recycle. It's biodegradable for one.
Yes, paper is biodegradable. However, if you seal it in a plastic trash bag and dump it in a land-fill, that's not going to do anybody any good, is it? Recycling paper may cost just as much energy as it did to create it in the first place, but that's better than locking it away from the environment forever.
Basically, he's announcing a tomb that hasn't been discovered, which might not be a tomb at all, on the off-chance that, should it actually *be* a tomb, he'll get the credit for it.
If you'd bothered to RTFA (Yeah, yeah, I know this is Slashdot; people never RTFA before posting.) you'd have seen two things. First, he's not saying it is a new tomb but that it might be. Second, he gives credit for the discovery of the other new tomb to the person who excavated it, even thought it had been found earlier in the radar survey.
We had a similar case once with an obstreperous customer. Finally, he sent us an email threatening to sue us. The appropriate person read the message and called the customer's office. Said customer wasn't in, but his personal assistant was. She left a message telling him that either he called back within one hour to discuss the threat or she'd cancel his account. He didn't and she did. When the word got out, tech support gave her a standing ovation for getting rid of a troublemaker that every tech had learned to hate.
I worked for an ISP for a number of years, doing tech support. Of course we had our share of customers who'd complain about every tech they spoke with and expected the impossible. No matter how good their connection was it wasn't fast enough or clear enough. Every little hickup on their side was blamed on us. When we identified a customer as impossible to satisfy, we'd regretfully send them this letter:
Dear customer:
We have been examining the history of your account with us and seen a large number of problems, issues and complaints. Apparantly, we are unable to provide you with a level of service you find acceptable. Therefore, we are going to maintain your account for 30 days to let you find another providor then terminate the service. We wish you the best of luck with your new service and hope you find them more acceptable.
This was a win-win situation. We got rid of the troublemaker, somebody else had to deal with them and the troublemaker couldn't even complain that we'd not given them a chance because we'd started out by accepting responsibility. (Note, however, that we never admitted that the customer's expectations were reasonable.)
Re:This requires not storing in insulators?
on
Halving Half Lives
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· Score: 4, Informative
Insulators block electricity, not radiation. An insulator might help keep in beta-particles as they're just electrons, but not alpha. Remember, an alpha-particle is just a helium nucleus and (if memory serves) can be stopped by tissue paper. Gammas, of course, are the real nasty ones and need lead or something similar.
Have you ever read the story Convergent Series? He claims it's the only time he ever used his math in a story.
Aside from that, I agree with you. My point was that you can make almost anything you want out of a degree. I have a friend who has a Masters in Musicology and works as a web designer. Again, there's no obvious connection, but he made it work.
Don't laugh. Larry Niven's degree is in math with a psych minor. The way he tells it (and he should know) is that he spent two years taking required clases and whatever looked interesting then worked out a major that would fit.
Now we know why the hardware requirements are so high, especially the disk requirements. Not only will it be full of bloated code and eye candy, it's expected to keep every version of every file you ever work on. Forever. Expect to be buying bigger and bigger hard disks as they fill up with redundant copies of things you don't want anymore. Thanks NanoLimp for forcing your customers to keep upgrading, even if they don't want to.
Everything strikes you as a copy of something you've already seen.
Not everything is a copy of something I've already seen, but damned near because the great goal in Hollywood is to be the first person to be the second to do something. Being original is risky, copying what's already worked is safe. Of course, most of the time the copycat doesn't have a clue about what made the original good, so the copy's crap, but they don't care about that.
Some people have been recomending giving wrong answers, but there's a problem with that: unless you give the same wrong answer every time, it's no good. A friend of mine came up with a much better way to make his answers hard to guess but easy to remember. Whenever he can, he picks the question about his pet's name. Instead of just saying (Let's say for example) Rover, he ansers with this: mypetsnameisrover. Just as easy to remember, but no scammer's going to get it right even if they guess the right name.
Yes, it does. It sucks bowling balls through garden hoses. However, its suckyness doesn't hold a candle to that of IE5, which sucked asteroids through pipettes. Just to give you a single example of how bad it was, if the upgrade from IE4 failed in Just The Right Way, you'd end up booting to a blank desktop. You'd have your wallpaper and nothing else. No start button, no icons. All you could do is bring up End Task and shut down. Even Safe Mode didn't work. Unless you knew (or found a tech who knew) exactly how to recover by booting into DOS and editing SYSTEM.INI to allow you to get into Control Panel and revert to the earlier version, your only hope was reinstalling Windows. I probably talked hundreds of people through recovering from this when I did tech support, so I know what I'm talking about. Pity the poor people who didn't have a tech to call when that happened! There's not a single, damned thing wrong with IE6 that comes close to being that bad, not even the endless security holes. IE6 is bad, yes. Very bad, but it's never been as destructive, in my opinion, as IE5 was.
Why do they measure fruit in bushels? It's simple: that's the traditional measurement in the US, and the article was written in the US for the US market.
I remember in the '80s, back at JPL, they were talking about connecting a number of computers into a hypercube. One node would be for I/O, and it would communicate with the others along the edges of a hypercube.
Two computers make a 1 dimensional "cube." Four, in a round-robin make a square. Six, properly connected, make a regular cube and so-on. Does anybody out there know if they still connect clusters this way and if not, why?
If I designed a city you couldn't see it from the air. The trees would be all in the way and shit.
I live in Los Angeles. When I take Sepulvida Pass into the San Fernando Valley by day, what I see is occasional large buildings rising up through the trees, and the bigger streets. I'm sure there are many other cities like that. The only reason you see the buildings from an airplane is that the trees don't, in general, cover the roofs.
Testing your spam against SpamAsassin with the default settings is a good way to make sure your spam will get through the default settings. If you keep training it on whatever gets through, it just gets more and more accurate as time goes by.
I don't know what you did, but I know what I would have done: I'd have gone away for a while, then brought his disk back and told him that my scanners had detected viruses on it. That way, there's no way whatever was on his disk could have infected my machine and he's left with the impression that his viruses were as useless as resistance to a Vogon.
TFA claims that AV software doesn't work because malware writers testing their code on the most popular anti-virus software before release. All that really means is that they make sure that the AV programs can't already spot it. Once their malware's out in the wild, it will get spotted, analized, and the definitions rapidly updated to deal with it. All TFA actually says is that no AV softaere is going to spot/remove a new piece of malware on the first day. No fooling.
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Granted, not every Aunt Minnie has a family geek to set up her computer. So what? Those that do can (if they want) use Linux now, those that don't, or don't want to can stay with Windows. The point is that Linux is ready if as and when Aunt Minnie decides to try it. Or, if her in-house geek sets her first computer up with Linux, it will do everything she needs.
As far as computers coming with Linux pre-installed, I seem to remember a number of recent articles about varous companies such as (I think) Dell making that an option. The more I read of your posts, the more I get the impression that you don't believe Linux is ready and no matter what I or anybody else says, you're not going to change your mind. I use both Windows and Linux at home, and would be just as happy with either one in a corporate environment. Which do you use? (Not a challenge, just curious.)
If you get Aunt Minnie a PC with Windows on it, (or she gets one and asks you for help) you set it up, you install whatever software's needed and you teach her how to use it. Same thing with Linux. If it's her first computer, there's not even anything to unlearn. As far as making a statistical impact, whoever said I was trying to do that? I'm just pointing out that Linux, as it is now, is good enough for Aunt Minnie. It may not be what a dedicated gamer wants, because even with Wine, it may not be able to handle the games he/she wants, but that's not what Aunt Minnie wants. She wants to surf the net, send/receive email and read documents her friends send her. Linux can do all of that, especially if you make sure she has OpenOffice.org installed because it understands all the MSOffice formats.
There's one good reason Linux isn't all over the home desktop: most people buy computers with the OS installed, and most places only install Windows. That's all people get and most customers don't even know they have a choice. Once people learn that they not only have a choice, but that they're not locked out of sharing files with their friends because of proprietary formats, people will gradually start buying Linux as an experiment in secondary computers. Once that happens, and they see how easy they are, a few of them will make the switch completely. It won't be fast, but I think that given time it will happen.
You said that it isn't ready for home use because there aren't the corporate distribution channels for business software. I disagree. Not only are there business packages for Linux, the software the average home user needs is different than what a corporation might want. You're comparing apples and oranges here, in my opinion.
Vicodin also works for me. I take one, in about fifteen minutes or less I fall asleep and stay that way for at least four hours, if not longer. As long as I'm asleep, I feel no pain.
Aunt Minnie isn't going to install an OS, no matter how easy you make it. An OS isn't 'ready' for her desktop until the top 3 computer manufacturer of her choice sells it to her pre-installed.
That's your definition of "ready." It's not mine. Linux is ready for Aunt Minnie by my definition because she can learn to use Linux for what she needs just as easily as she can Windows and it will do everything she needs. She won't care if it comes from the store preinstalled or if you buy a computer, install Linux and then set it up for her; there won't be any difference in what she sees. I'm not going to argue which definition is right because it's a matter of opinion and you're welcome to yours.
However, the corporate desktop isn't the only market. It is ready for the home desktop, and it's just as ready as Windows is for Aunt Minnie. Just because corporations aren't flocking to switch to Linux doesn't mean it's not ready for anybody's desktop.
Even more to the point, as long as there's even one app running on MS or Mac that isn't on Linux, the naysayers and fanbois will claim that Linux isn't ready for the desktop because of that one app. No matter how good Linux is, how much better its stability and security, how many apps there are for it, as long as the fanbois can point to one thing that isn't duplicated to their satisfaction, they'll continue to claim it's not ready yet.
Linux is ready for the desktop, right now. It's ready for Aunt Minnie because Aunt Minnie isn't going to be installing her own software on Linux anymore than she is on Windows. What it isn't ready for is the MS/Mac zealots, but then, it never will be because they have no desire to change, nor to admit there even is a viable alternative to their favorite OS.
Yes, paper is biodegradable. However, if you seal it in a plastic trash bag and dump it in a land-fill, that's not going to do anybody any good, is it? Recycling paper may cost just as much energy as it did to create it in the first place, but that's better than locking it away from the environment forever.
You only need one hand? I feel sorry for your girlfriend. If, that is, you've managed to get one.
If you'd bothered to RTFA (Yeah, yeah, I know this is Slashdot; people never RTFA before posting.) you'd have seen two things. First, he's not saying it is a new tomb but that it might be. Second, he gives credit for the discovery of the other new tomb to the person who excavated it, even thought it had been found earlier in the radar survey.
We had a similar case once with an obstreperous customer. Finally, he sent us an email threatening to sue us. The appropriate person read the message and called the customer's office. Said customer wasn't in, but his personal assistant was. She left a message telling him that either he called back within one hour to discuss the threat or she'd cancel his account. He didn't and she did. When the word got out, tech support gave her a standing ovation for getting rid of a troublemaker that every tech had learned to hate.
Dear customer:
We have been examining the history of your account with us and seen a large number of problems, issues and complaints. Apparantly, we are unable to provide you with a level of service you find acceptable. Therefore, we are going to maintain your account for 30 days to let you find another providor then terminate the service. We wish you the best of luck with your new service and hope you find them more acceptable.
This was a win-win situation. We got rid of the troublemaker, somebody else had to deal with them and the troublemaker couldn't even complain that we'd not given them a chance because we'd started out by accepting responsibility. (Note, however, that we never admitted that the customer's expectations were reasonable.)
Insulators block electricity, not radiation. An insulator might help keep in beta-particles as they're just electrons, but not alpha. Remember, an alpha-particle is just a helium nucleus and (if memory serves) can be stopped by tissue paper. Gammas, of course, are the real nasty ones and need lead or something similar.
Aside from that, I agree with you. My point was that you can make almost anything you want out of a degree. I have a friend who has a Masters in Musicology and works as a web designer. Again, there's no obvious connection, but he made it work.
Don't laugh. Larry Niven's degree is in math with a psych minor. The way he tells it (and he should know) is that he spent two years taking required clases and whatever looked interesting then worked out a major that would fit.
Now we know why the hardware requirements are so high, especially the disk requirements. Not only will it be full of bloated code and eye candy, it's expected to keep every version of every file you ever work on. Forever. Expect to be buying bigger and bigger hard disks as they fill up with redundant copies of things you don't want anymore. Thanks NanoLimp for forcing your customers to keep upgrading, even if they don't want to.
Not everything is a copy of something I've already seen, but damned near because the great goal in Hollywood is to be the first person to be the second to do something. Being original is risky, copying what's already worked is safe. Of course, most of the time the copycat doesn't have a clue about what made the original good, so the copy's crap, but they don't care about that.
Some people have been recomending giving wrong answers, but there's a problem with that: unless you give the same wrong answer every time, it's no good. A friend of mine came up with a much better way to make his answers hard to guess but easy to remember. Whenever he can, he picks the question about his pet's name. Instead of just saying (Let's say for example) Rover, he ansers with this: mypetsnameisrover. Just as easy to remember, but no scammer's going to get it right even if they guess the right name.
Yes, it does. It sucks bowling balls through garden hoses. However, its suckyness doesn't hold a candle to that of IE5, which sucked asteroids through pipettes. Just to give you a single example of how bad it was, if the upgrade from IE4 failed in Just The Right Way, you'd end up booting to a blank desktop. You'd have your wallpaper and nothing else. No start button, no icons. All you could do is bring up End Task and shut down. Even Safe Mode didn't work. Unless you knew (or found a tech who knew) exactly how to recover by booting into DOS and editing SYSTEM.INI to allow you to get into Control Panel and revert to the earlier version, your only hope was reinstalling Windows. I probably talked hundreds of people through recovering from this when I did tech support, so I know what I'm talking about. Pity the poor people who didn't have a tech to call when that happened! There's not a single, damned thing wrong with IE6 that comes close to being that bad, not even the endless security holes. IE6 is bad, yes. Very bad, but it's never been as destructive, in my opinion, as IE5 was.
Why do they measure fruit in bushels? It's simple: that's the traditional measurement in the US, and the article was written in the US for the US market.
Two computers make a 1 dimensional "cube." Four, in a round-robin make a square. Six, properly connected, make a regular cube and so-on. Does anybody out there know if they still connect clusters this way and if not, why?
No, no, no! If you want to do the redneck thing right, the correct quote is, "Hey guys! Hold my beer a moment while I show you something cool!"
I live in Los Angeles. When I take Sepulvida Pass into the San Fernando Valley by day, what I see is occasional large buildings rising up through the trees, and the bigger streets. I'm sure there are many other cities like that. The only reason you see the buildings from an airplane is that the trees don't, in general, cover the roofs.
Testing your spam against SpamAsassin with the default settings is a good way to make sure your spam will get through the default settings. If you keep training it on whatever gets through, it just gets more and more accurate as time goes by.
I don't know what you did, but I know what I would have done: I'd have gone away for a while, then brought his disk back and told him that my scanners had detected viruses on it. That way, there's no way whatever was on his disk could have infected my machine and he's left with the impression that his viruses were as useless as resistance to a Vogon.
TFA claims that AV software doesn't work because malware writers testing their code on the most popular anti-virus software before release. All that really means is that they make sure that the AV programs can't already spot it. Once their malware's out in the wild, it will get spotted, analized, and the definitions rapidly updated to deal with it. All TFA actually says is that no AV softaere is going to spot/remove a new piece of malware on the first day. No fooling.