IAAP (I am a physicist.) From my home, I have only 56kdialup available. From the South Pole, I have more. Shouldn't we be discussing why in the mid-US this is the case?
As Winston Wolf would have said, "Move out of the sticks, fella."
Of course, we could also talk about how connectivity at the south pole is subsidized rather heavily at extreme cost to taxpayers of various nations, a privilege you're unlikely to get in South Nowhere, Iowa.
For me, it would not be so much about the $50 as about making sure the OS installed was 1)The one I want, not the one MS wants me to have. 2)A clean install, without tons of crapware. Of course, since I will have to spend a significant amount of my time to do a clean install, I figure I'm entitled to the $50 as partial compensation for the time I would have to spend to remove what Dell/MS forced on me and install what I truly want.
Except you're going to spend time doing the wipe/install THEN spend 10 hours on the phone for your $50. Personally, I'll just wipe it and install Slackware like I was going to do anyway.
No need to eat the extra.
1. Buy it with Vista.
2. Decline to accept the EULA on first boot - don't forget to take a digital photo.
3. Contact Dell and ask for the OEM price of Vista as a refund.
Bonus: Dell gets the headache of dealing with the license return.
Good luck - from the stories I've heard, you'll spend well over the $50 in your own labor trying to get the $50.
if you are even THINKING of wiping out an o/s - it begs the question of WHY even patronize a company that you have to fight with from day-1?
Because I'm looking for the cheapest tool to do the job, not a cause to fight for. Additionally, as I mentioned - I don't want Ubuntu anyway, so the wipe is going to happen. As such, I don't give a rat's ass whether the OS I just wiped was Windows or Linux. So long as the Linux version exists, and is sold on the same hardware so I know Linux will run on it, give me the cheaper one.
By telling people to just buy Vista, you are only allowing Microsoft's hold on the software industry to continue. This is all about free choice, and I for one am glad that there are people out there who are keeping an eye on these things and pointing them out to Dell and its customers.
I'm not eating $225 for 'free choice.' Incidentally, I don't want Ubuntu anyway. What I want is a laptop that I know will work with Linux. As long as the Windows and Linux versions have the same hardware, I'll buy either one since I'm going to wipe and reinstall anyway.
The point is that this gives Microsoft an unfair advantage over other OS providers and it must be dealt with.
Love the use of the passive voice there - who's doing the 'dealing'? Not sure what is 'fair' anyway. Do you mean it's a violation of Sherman anti-trust? If not, you're just whining.
If you want Vista, fine! But if you don't want it, you shouldn't have to buy it. It's that simple!
And I 'should' have a pony. Unfortunately, the world doesn't work on 'should.' The fact is, Dell does get a lot of revenue from pre-loaded crapware, cost savings by making essentially identical Windows computers in volume, etc. The best you have to hope for is the Linux version doesn't cost *more*, and I do agree $225 is excessive. However, the wipe/reinstall option is always available.
Government has much more capacity to do harm and no rational or constitutional (I'm also biased toward U.S. government in this discussion) justification to act differnetly between two individuals on the basis of "size of dildo" or some such.
Ah, but the thing is, I know I'm not doing anything illegal or immoral from a governmental standpoint, and I *still* don't want the clowns messing with my shit. That's the crux of killing their 'nothing to hide' argument. I don't trust that the materials my government finds in a search will remain confidential - ie, leaks abound, things get made public, get in public records, etc. Then it finds its way to my employer, newspapers, etc.
For that reason, though I may be doing nothing immoral, unethical, etc, I don't want anyone messing in my private life. Period.
Off-hand, the main problem with that argument is that it assumes that legal behavior and ethical/moral behavior are exactly the same.
You're still giving them too much credit. The argument also assumes that perfectly *legal, ethical and moral* behavior/characteristics could never be used to harm their owner. Counterexamples of things I wouldn't want my government/employer/friends/insurance to know about me that break no ethical, moral, or legal bounds:
There is no argument here, no discussion. Does Groklaw actually think that Microsofts Army of Layers knows less than they do about law or something?
It's not knowledge of the law that is at issue. Microsoft's Army of Lawyers thinks they can "win." That often has little to do with the actual facts of the case.
If [Web] 1.0 is full page refreshes for content, Web 2.0 is, "How do I minimize page views and deliver content more seamlessly?"'"
If 1.0 is surfing one handed while jerking off, Web 2.0 is having a USB pocket pussy connected to an interactive AJAX interface.
In all seriousness, can we dispense with the fucking Web 2.0 crap? It is today's "information superhighway". If you use the phrase without a hint of sarcasm, you are an idiot.
The first thing you do every morning is check the sev 1 problems that have occurred when you are out. Next off you look at the 24 hour report to see what is out of whack. Anything odd you follow up on. If everything is fine then you have a cup of strong coffee and wait for the first dumb question of the day.
Seriously. If our IT manager makes it from the door to his desk before being accosted, it's a damn good day for him. Poor bastard.
Can you really do computer science well without mathematics?
You can't do computer SCIENCE at all without the math. You might do some software engineering. Without understanding phenomena that underly the principles you're studying, there is no science. Namely, without any study of algorithms, what's left in the major that anyone would actually call science?
I honestly don't understand the whining. To get the ACM-approved CS major, you end up basically having to get a minor in math, which will generally require a few classes in Calc, a Linear Algebra course, a Discrete Math course, and maybe two others. It's really not that hard.
Well, your post is a bit disturbing because it shows that you either have never made a credit card purchase before or never read what you were signing. The purpose of the signature is to indicate your agreement to pay for the goods or services rendered to you and not decide to charge them back after you receive them and claim you did not purchase them.
No shit Sherlock, my point is that the signature is pointless as an authentication device regarding that selfsame authorization. I'd thought that would have been obvious, but if you sign your posts I'll use smaller words and state the obvious in the future.
But I really just got tired of having to compile things that I could not get with slackpkg or slapt
Often as not, converting.RPMs works fine.
Since I will probably quest to install Slack again someday, does anyone know if it comes with a GUI installer yet?
I don't think that's high on Pat's probability list (wasn't as of 11, doubt it's in this one). On the up side, it's probably the same as you remember, so it shouldn't cause you any problems.
Visa, for instance, doesn't require your signature for purchases at or below $25."
I think they've finally realized a simple truth: cashiers aren't handwriting analysts. Nor would they have sufficient sample (ie, 1, from the back of the card) to perform the analysis if one happened to be so trained.
The signature provides virtually no up-front protection. As far as I can see, the signature serves one purpose: to allow the card company/merchant to investigate, after the fact, whether purchases you are claiming are fraudulent were actually signed by you (and even that's tenuous). At best, it allows them to compare a signature in question to your past signatures to see if it matches. A signature might, at best, prevent cardholders from buying something, getting remorse, realizing they can't return it, and claiming fraud.
If I have a stolen card (and preferably a fake driver's license to accompany), and practice the signature on the back of the card 100 times, there is no way it'll get spotted at the counter.
MY IPHONE DOESNT WORK. I activated two yesterday, they both worked for 12 hours. This morning neither phone will make or receive calls; or browse on EDGE. The GSM/EDGE modem is BRICKED -- STAY FAR AWAY. Apple blames ATT, and ATT blames Apple. These guys are in way over their heads.
What's that? Buying a new Apple first-generation product at launch is a BAD IDEA??? Whodathunk it???
I'll get mine in a couple of years. Thanks for eating the early-adopter sticker shock and bugs though.
The final enzyme did work with real HIV in the lab. They identified a site in HIV similar to the cre binding motif, but which cre was not able to bind. They created intermediate sequences to bridge the gap between the cre binding site and this HIV sequence. Using directed evolution they could evolve cre to bind sites progressively more unlike the cre site and progressively more like the HIV site. The final outcome was an enzyme able to excise sequences flanked by the HIV specific pattern.
Ah! If that's the case then my mistake; I wasn't able to get that out of the damned Scientific American writeup. That makes a lot more sense. Thanks for the info.
Think of this as an initial proof-of-concept. Fiddling with DNA is extremely useful - correcting genetic diseases and curing all sorts of viruses that hang out in your cells comes to mind (e.g. herpes). You could even look at curing cancer, since that's typically due to genetic mutations that could be potentially removed, making cells non-cancerous again.
No doubt. I definitely think the technique stands on its own as far as coolness factor.
What I find slightly annoying is the perceived need to validate it by linking it to HIV, which seems completely irrelevant to the actual research since the DNA segment in question could have been anything. Worse yet, it doesn't even recognize HIV at all as the headlines claim - it simply recognizes anchor groups (which HIV does not possess) and removes whatever happens to be between them. Sure, it recognizes HIV that is artificially tagged with these groups, but it would find any DNA sequence tagged with the groups. So what does this research have to do with HIV? Absolutely nothing. Seems like name-dropping to me.
I realize much of this effect is due to the funding climate in academia, which makes it impossible to get money these days unless you're coat-tailing on a handful of high-profile buzzwords. But I still find over-aggressive promotion of one's results to be distasteful. Naturally, these guys aren't the first and won't be the last.
...began with the bacterial enzyme Cre recombinase, which exchanges any two pieces of DNA flanked on either end by a certain pattern of nucleotides (DNA subunits) known as loxP.
HIV does not naturally contain loxP sites, so the team created a hybrid of the two DNA molecules, which they used to select a series of mutated Cre enzymes that were increasingly able to recognize the combined DNA.
So...this technique won't work at all in the real world. It won't even work with actual HIV even in the lab.
It's interesting research for its own sake, but in this case it has absolutely nothing to do with HIV. They simply found an interesting way to remove an arbitrary snippet of DNA. In fact, to make it work with HIV, they had to cheat and add tags to the HIV sequence.
This is like saying I could break into a bank vault after I replaced the lock with one I knew the combination to. It says nothing about the bank, only that I possess the capability to manipulate locks.
Still, MS claims the failure rate is around 3%, so that's pretty fricking improbable assuming that they're not lying..
I bet that number's for new systems, and I bet they keep giving him refurbs which probably have a higher failure rate. This does seem extreme, but when you consider the possibility that they keep sending him junk and mixing in the ole' weak anthropic principle, it's not totally impossible.
Considering he keeps getting different malfunctions, seems like it would be tough to blame his power system. Unless his electrician routed the lightning rod to the main breaker box.;)
Cuba on the other hand, not so bad in recent times, but they only give us cigars so we keep the embargo.
On the contrary - I believe the main reason we still have the embargo is because of the agricultural lobby, particularly the rice lobby. Every time the possibility of lifting the embargo comes up, rice farmers in the Gulf Coast area scream bloody murder. What started as politics has become good old fashioned protectionism.
Should they develop the sort of industrial economy that China has, watch us lift the embargo. Since it'll happen after Casto's death, the US will be able to do it and save face.
WTF is a slack package?
Perhaps you mean "slack role" eh? Slack isn't a package manager.
What the hell are you talking about? Slackware comes with its own package manager which provides a utility for conversion from rpm. Which is what I did.
The article says it was "developed natively." So this is definitely not the win.exe version wrapped in Wine?
Nope. Runs for real, native stuff as far as I can tell. And, I might add, it runs in more than gnome and KDE as claimed - it parked in fluxbox right in the tray like a good boy. The RPM even converted to a Slack package just fine.
It hasn't indexed yet even though I've told it to, but I think it's waiting for idle time on my machine and I'm killing it this morning.
Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot == kdawson's political blog
I think he's the love child of michael and timothy. Is there any way we can send him where he belongs: digg.com?
IAAP (I am a physicist.) From my home, I have only 56kdialup available. From the South Pole, I have more. Shouldn't we be discussing why in the mid-US this is the case?
As Winston Wolf would have said, "Move out of the sticks, fella."
Of course, we could also talk about how connectivity at the south pole is subsidized rather heavily at extreme cost to taxpayers of various nations, a privilege you're unlikely to get in South Nowhere, Iowa.
For me, it would not be so much about the $50 as about making sure the OS installed was 1)The one I want, not the one MS wants me to have. 2)A clean install, without tons of crapware. Of course, since I will have to spend a significant amount of my time to do a clean install, I figure I'm entitled to the $50 as partial compensation for the time I would have to spend to remove what Dell/MS forced on me and install what I truly want.
Except you're going to spend time doing the wipe/install THEN spend 10 hours on the phone for your $50. Personally, I'll just wipe it and install Slackware like I was going to do anyway.
No need to eat the extra. 1. Buy it with Vista. 2. Decline to accept the EULA on first boot - don't forget to take a digital photo. 3. Contact Dell and ask for the OEM price of Vista as a refund. Bonus: Dell gets the headache of dealing with the license return.
Good luck - from the stories I've heard, you'll spend well over the $50 in your own labor trying to get the $50.
if you are even THINKING of wiping out an o/s - it begs the question of WHY even patronize a company that you have to fight with from day-1?
Because I'm looking for the cheapest tool to do the job, not a cause to fight for. Additionally, as I mentioned - I don't want Ubuntu anyway, so the wipe is going to happen. As such, I don't give a rat's ass whether the OS I just wiped was Windows or Linux. So long as the Linux version exists, and is sold on the same hardware so I know Linux will run on it, give me the cheaper one.
By telling people to just buy Vista, you are only allowing Microsoft's hold on the software industry to continue. This is all about free choice, and I for one am glad that there are people out there who are keeping an eye on these things and pointing them out to Dell and its customers.
I'm not eating $225 for 'free choice.' Incidentally, I don't want Ubuntu anyway. What I want is a laptop that I know will work with Linux. As long as the Windows and Linux versions have the same hardware, I'll buy either one since I'm going to wipe and reinstall anyway.
The point is that this gives Microsoft an unfair advantage over other OS providers and it must be dealt with.
Love the use of the passive voice there - who's doing the 'dealing'? Not sure what is 'fair' anyway. Do you mean it's a violation of Sherman anti-trust? If not, you're just whining.
If you want Vista, fine! But if you don't want it, you shouldn't have to buy it. It's that simple!
And I 'should' have a pony. Unfortunately, the world doesn't work on 'should.' The fact is, Dell does get a lot of revenue from pre-loaded crapware, cost savings by making essentially identical Windows computers in volume, etc. The best you have to hope for is the Linux version doesn't cost *more*, and I do agree $225 is excessive. However, the wipe/reinstall option is always available.
Government has much more capacity to do harm and no rational or constitutional (I'm also biased toward U.S. government in this discussion) justification to act differnetly between two individuals on the basis of "size of dildo" or some such.
Ah, but the thing is, I know I'm not doing anything illegal or immoral from a governmental standpoint, and I *still* don't want the clowns messing with my shit. That's the crux of killing their 'nothing to hide' argument. I don't trust that the materials my government finds in a search will remain confidential - ie, leaks abound, things get made public, get in public records, etc. Then it finds its way to my employer, newspapers, etc.
For that reason, though I may be doing nothing immoral, unethical, etc, I don't want anyone messing in my private life. Period.
Off-hand, the main problem with that argument is that it assumes that legal behavior and ethical/moral behavior are exactly the same.
You're still giving them too much credit. The argument also assumes that perfectly *legal, ethical and moral* behavior/characteristics could never be used to harm their owner. Counterexamples of things I wouldn't want my government/employer/friends/insurance to know about me that break no ethical, moral, or legal bounds:
The types of sex toys I use with my wife
Medical conditions I suffer from
The fact that I occasionally pick my nose
My affinity for Jane Austen movies
Whether I'm currently looking for a job
My love of midget porn
How often I masturbate
I could go on, but I think you get the point. ;)
There is no argument here, no discussion. Does Groklaw actually think that Microsofts Army of Layers knows less than they do about law or something?
It's not knowledge of the law that is at issue. Microsoft's Army of Lawyers thinks they can "win." That often has little to do with the actual facts of the case.
If [Web] 1.0 is full page refreshes for content, Web 2.0 is, "How do I minimize page views and deliver content more seamlessly?"'"
If 1.0 is surfing one handed while jerking off, Web 2.0 is having a USB pocket pussy connected to an interactive AJAX interface.
In all seriousness, can we dispense with the fucking Web 2.0 crap? It is today's "information superhighway". If you use the phrase without a hint of sarcasm, you are an idiot.
I, for one, use GNU/Linux and only F/OSS
Where shall we mail your trophy?
I HAD bought the LIFETIME upgrade YEARS ago on it..
Dude, you type like Shatner talks.
The first thing you do every morning is check the sev 1 problems that have occurred when you are out. Next off you look at the 24 hour report to see what is out of whack. Anything odd you follow up on. If everything is fine then you have a cup of strong coffee and wait for the first dumb question of the day.
Seriously. If our IT manager makes it from the door to his desk before being accosted, it's a damn good day for him. Poor bastard.
Can you really do computer science well without mathematics?
You can't do computer SCIENCE at all without the math. You might do some software engineering. Without understanding phenomena that underly the principles you're studying, there is no science. Namely, without any study of algorithms, what's left in the major that anyone would actually call science?
I honestly don't understand the whining. To get the ACM-approved CS major, you end up basically having to get a minor in math, which will generally require a few classes in Calc, a Linear Algebra course, a Discrete Math course, and maybe two others. It's really not that hard.
Well, your post is a bit disturbing because it shows that you either have never made a credit card purchase before or never read what you were signing. The purpose of the signature is to indicate your agreement to pay for the goods or services rendered to you and not decide to charge them back after you receive them and claim you did not purchase them.
No shit Sherlock, my point is that the signature is pointless as an authentication device regarding that selfsame authorization. I'd thought that would have been obvious, but if you sign your posts I'll use smaller words and state the obvious in the future.
But I really just got tired of having to compile things that I could not get with slackpkg or slapt
Often as not, converting .RPMs works fine.
Since I will probably quest to install Slack again someday, does anyone know if it comes with a GUI installer yet?
I don't think that's high on Pat's probability list (wasn't as of 11, doubt it's in this one). On the up side, it's probably the same as you remember, so it shouldn't cause you any problems.
Visa, for instance, doesn't require your signature for purchases at or below $25."
I think they've finally realized a simple truth: cashiers aren't handwriting analysts. Nor would they have sufficient sample (ie, 1, from the back of the card) to perform the analysis if one happened to be so trained.
The signature provides virtually no up-front protection. As far as I can see, the signature serves one purpose: to allow the card company/merchant to investigate, after the fact, whether purchases you are claiming are fraudulent were actually signed by you (and even that's tenuous). At best, it allows them to compare a signature in question to your past signatures to see if it matches. A signature might, at best, prevent cardholders from buying something, getting remorse, realizing they can't return it, and claiming fraud.
If I have a stolen card (and preferably a fake driver's license to accompany), and practice the signature on the back of the card 100 times, there is no way it'll get spotted at the counter.
MY IPHONE DOESNT WORK. I activated two yesterday, they both worked for 12 hours. This morning neither phone will make or receive calls; or browse on EDGE. The GSM/EDGE modem is BRICKED -- STAY FAR AWAY. Apple blames ATT, and ATT blames Apple. These guys are in way over their heads.
What's that? Buying a new Apple first-generation product at launch is a BAD IDEA??? Whodathunk it???
I'll get mine in a couple of years. Thanks for eating the early-adopter sticker shock and bugs though.
The final enzyme did work with real HIV in the lab. They identified a site in HIV similar to the cre binding motif, but which cre was not able to bind. They created intermediate sequences to bridge the gap between the cre binding site and this HIV sequence. Using directed evolution they could evolve cre to bind sites progressively more unlike the cre site and progressively more like the HIV site. The final outcome was an enzyme able to excise sequences flanked by the HIV specific pattern.
Ah! If that's the case then my mistake; I wasn't able to get that out of the damned Scientific American writeup. That makes a lot more sense. Thanks for the info.
Think of this as an initial proof-of-concept. Fiddling with DNA is extremely useful - correcting genetic diseases and curing all sorts of viruses that hang out in your cells comes to mind (e.g. herpes). You could even look at curing cancer, since that's typically due to genetic mutations that could be potentially removed, making cells non-cancerous again.
No doubt. I definitely think the technique stands on its own as far as coolness factor.
What I find slightly annoying is the perceived need to validate it by linking it to HIV, which seems completely irrelevant to the actual research since the DNA segment in question could have been anything. Worse yet, it doesn't even recognize HIV at all as the headlines claim - it simply recognizes anchor groups (which HIV does not possess) and removes whatever happens to be between them. Sure, it recognizes HIV that is artificially tagged with these groups, but it would find any DNA sequence tagged with the groups. So what does this research have to do with HIV? Absolutely nothing. Seems like name-dropping to me.
I realize much of this effect is due to the funding climate in academia, which makes it impossible to get money these days unless you're coat-tailing on a handful of high-profile buzzwords. But I still find over-aggressive promotion of one's results to be distasteful. Naturally, these guys aren't the first and won't be the last.
HIV does not naturally contain loxP sites, so the team created a hybrid of the two DNA molecules, which they used to select a series of mutated Cre enzymes that were increasingly able to recognize the combined DNA.
So...this technique won't work at all in the real world. It won't even work with actual HIV even in the lab.
It's interesting research for its own sake, but in this case it has absolutely nothing to do with HIV. They simply found an interesting way to remove an arbitrary snippet of DNA. In fact, to make it work with HIV, they had to cheat and add tags to the HIV sequence.
This is like saying I could break into a bank vault after I replaced the lock with one I knew the combination to. It says nothing about the bank, only that I possess the capability to manipulate locks.
Still, MS claims the failure rate is around 3%, so that's pretty fricking improbable assuming that they're not lying..
I bet that number's for new systems, and I bet they keep giving him refurbs which probably have a higher failure rate. This does seem extreme, but when you consider the possibility that they keep sending him junk and mixing in the ole' weak anthropic principle, it's not totally impossible.
Considering he keeps getting different malfunctions, seems like it would be tough to blame his power system. Unless his electrician routed the lightning rod to the main breaker box. ;)
Cuba on the other hand, not so bad in recent times, but they only give us cigars so we keep the embargo.
On the contrary - I believe the main reason we still have the embargo is because of the agricultural lobby, particularly the rice lobby. Every time the possibility of lifting the embargo comes up, rice farmers in the Gulf Coast area scream bloody murder. What started as politics has become good old fashioned protectionism.
Should they develop the sort of industrial economy that China has, watch us lift the embargo. Since it'll happen after Casto's death, the US will be able to do it and save face.
WTF is a slack package? Perhaps you mean "slack role" eh? Slack isn't a package manager.
What the hell are you talking about? Slackware comes with its own package manager which provides a utility for conversion from rpm. Which is what I did.
The article says it was "developed natively." So this is definitely not the win.exe version wrapped in Wine?
Nope. Runs for real, native stuff as far as I can tell. And, I might add, it runs in more than gnome and KDE as claimed - it parked in fluxbox right in the tray like a good boy. The RPM even converted to a Slack package just fine.
It hasn't indexed yet even though I've told it to, but I think it's waiting for idle time on my machine and I'm killing it this morning.