Oh gee, a whole US$0.50 extra? Currently we're paying, around, 79 to 80 pence per litre for petrol, thats gas to you American's. That works out at US$4.83 per (US) gallon.
It never ceases to amaze me that American's complain about their fuel prices...
Al.
Re:So professors get paid just to show up
on
Professors vs. WiFi
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· Score: 2
Hard work is one thing, but we are PAYING them, they arent free, they arent giving up anything here, we pay them to do what we want them to do, and thats give an exciting lecture.
Actually, at least in the hard sciences, you're wrong. Most of the money going to pay your lecturer's salary will be from research income.
...the Linux community does not need to set up businesses with the specific intention of trying to "win" users from Microsoft; all we have to do is continue to develop software in the same way, and the users will make the switch all by themselves'.
So we don't have to standardise then, good. The only standardisation I want is for RedHat to stop using their own configuration files with their GUI configuration tools and use then ones in/etc like everyone else.
Last I heard the Rotory Rocket company's assets had been seized, including the Roton prototype, and that XCOR had bought at least some of them, including the IP rights to the design.
From looking at the XCOR Website they've pretty much shelved the Roton in favour of their own suborbital spaceplane design, the Xerus, which they're prototyping with the EZ-Rocket.
In any case it looks like the Roton is dead, which is a shame, it was a novel and interesting design. Which isn't to say it was going to work when they scaled it up of course...
Instead of going ahead with the Delta Clipper, which had working flight tested hardware, they went with the more expensive, riskier, technology of the Lockhead Martin X-33 design for the RLV program. While much more impressive, if it worked, the Lockheed design was alot riskier.
Then in 2001 they killed the entire SSTO program stone cold dead...
who actually gets loads of spam every day? I get about 3 per day (3 too many!). You always hear about these poor suckers getting 200 or so a day, but how many of us actrually have to put up with that much stuff?
According to my filter logs I'm currently getting between 100 and 150 spam messages a day, I'm currently using RBL and SpamAssassin to filter my inbox so I usually only see 2 or 3 a week out of this total. Its still annoying though,
Just because you don't get any spam, doesn't mean everybody else isn't geting any...
If I got that much, I'd just switch email accounts, cos I just wouldn't put up with it.
Some people just don't have that option, you can't change your work email address, I know I certainly can't change mine...
X is too much of a pain in the ass for desktop users. XF86Config files are way over most people's heads. Font configuration is a nightmare, and without some tweaking fonts look like shit in X.
Which is why is should all be done by the system admin, none of it should be touched by individual users. Thats sort of why you have to login as root to play with any of this stuff...
To really get Linux on the desktops of Lusers, X has to be replaced by something entirely intended for desktops.
The success, or not, of Linux in the "desktop" marketplace holds absolutely no interest for me and a whole bunch of other people. Why do people persist in saying it has to?
I don't NEED to display the window from one machine on another, but running X, I don't have the option of turning that feature off.
You might not need to, but alot of other people do...
These days, a desktop environment should be dedicated to local applications FIRST, and then provide support for remoting windows SECOND.
Looking at the windows open right now on my desktop, about half of them are running on remote machines, this is fairly typical. When you need this sort of functionality, you really need it...
That said, having just tried to upgrade my 1.1 browser to 1.2b, I've backed out and gone back to using the previous version. I got lots and lots of stuff breaking with 1.2, for instance the preferences popup didn't on several occasions. It doesn't look ready for primetime quite yet...
An advertising journal predicts that a piece of technology that lets you skip ads will fail? Well I'm shocked, deeply shocked I must say... its not as if they have an axe to grind, is it?
Again, Linux NEEDS a unified desktop. I can't say it more. It may sound sad, but it has to be done.
Why? The first thing I do when I install any Linux distribution is get rid of both GNOME and KDE. Why the heck would I want all that fluff to take up memory and CPU? I drop back into WindowMaker, nice, pretty, but a heck of alot more streamlined. Its got a menu, its got a background I can drop xterms on. Why do you need a desktop for heaven's sake? Let alone a unified one?
The have cell phones there with built-in cameras that you can use to see the other person you're talking to (assuming their phone supports it) or even take pictures and e-mail them.
What I don't understand is how four of you people have TOTALLY MISSED THE POINT.
No, I got the point, I just didn't think it was particularly relevant. Presumably none of the others thought so either.
If YOU were writing the userland code for a kernel wouldn't you want a say in where exactly the kernel was going?
Not particularly, I've been in similar situations in the past. If I want my user level code to run on the available infrastructure then I make sure I obey their API, I leave it to the low level infrastructure people to figure out how best to optimise their code.
Conversely when I'm doing low level infrastructure I don't particularly want nosey user land coders sticking their two penny's worth in, they (usually) aren't up to speed with the problems I'm facing.
Do you want to have to rewrite your entire codebase to support changes in the kernel's API or to handle some sort of new operating paradigm the kernel programmers decided to hammer out?
Why would I rewrite my codebase if the kernel developers go and do something daft? If the kernel developers want my code to work after they go and do something that breaks backwards compatibility so much that fundametal thinks like the compiler and build tools are broken then they can fork it and support it themselves.
After all the GNU tools were specifically written for HURD, the fact that they work under Linux at all is just a bonus (for people who use Linux). Its not important (or shouldn't be) to the GNU gang.
I don't know of any applications in X that don't adhere to left-click-highlite/middle-click-paste.
Actually there are a bunch, mostly those new furry user friendly thingys that people seem to like so much, I run across one every once in a while but can't remember any off the top of my head...
It's as universal a behaviour as any in Linuxland and has been for years.
Ever since X11R3, which was circa 1988 if I remember correctly, which I might not it being such a very long time ago. I distictly remember the switch over from R5 to R6 in 1992 (or was it 1993?) but I'm a bit fuzzy before that...
...but from what I have seen around Slashdot and other Linux-fanzines is that they do want to replace Windows.
I wouldn't regard the Slashdot community as a representative sample of Linux developers, either userland or kernel.
I know I don't give a stuff about people using my software, at least the stuff I didn't get paid to write, I wrote it because I needed to do something, some of it was (might be) marginally useful to other people so I GPL'd it and released it.
I'm always suprised (and admittedly pleased) when I get a patch, but I don't expect them. I actually get more comments (and "thanks" emails) about the one mini-HOWTO I wrote, which was actually supposed to be an internal document for my work collegues that sort of leaked out onto the web (as such things have a tendancy to do).
Okay, I'm rambling, but basically I'd be suprised if the bulk of the "Linux must rule the world" fanboys have ever strung two lines of code together in their life, and until they get round to writing some code (or writing some decent documentation for all that lousy doucumented code we already have) their opinion on where Linux is going doesn't really count for much.
As far as I know *every* linux distribution uses the GNU toolset...
I've heard this arguement so often recently I really am tempted to blow a couple of weekends and build one that sits on top of the BSD toolset. The reason every linux distribution uses the GNU tools is pretty much historical. Linus getting up on the other side of the bed one morning (sometime back towards the end of 1991) could have meant that we'd all be using BSD based distributions.
If the GNU people suddenly decided that their software was no longer open source and changed their licensing Linux as an OS would be up a creek without a canoe. The Linux kernel would sit around idling while all the GNU stuff can be ported to run on [insert kernel here].
Okay discarding the point that that the GNU Project won't ever suddenly decide to close source their tools, and even if they did we could just take the last revision released under the GPL, fork it and continue on from there, then...
...you could (of course) build a Linux distribution ontop of BSD tools rather than GNU, nobody has really made a determined stab at it, although a quick check on Google found the bsd-utils-aconf project on SourceForge, but its certainly doable.
A person with a disability in our nation has a right to access public and publicly provided services under the ADA.
Okay, I'm not an American so maybe i'm just missing something fundamental here, but... but surely Southwest Airlines isn't a publicaly provided service? Isn't it just another private company? To us Brits a public service is something the government does, such stuff comes under very different laws to private individuals or companies providing services, even is the service is identical to that provided by the government.
This is about preventing someone from making use out of a given service, a service mind you that they are fully capable of receiving, because of their disability.
Anyway, surely Southwest have a telephone booking service? Wouldn't this satisfy the law? Why does the guy have to be able to use the website if he has access to the same service(s) though different means?
I'm just basically confused how this suit could have any basis at all!?
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't mind paying an extra .50$ per gallon...
Oh gee, a whole US$0.50 extra? Currently we're paying, around, 79 to 80 pence per litre for petrol, thats gas to you American's. That works out at US$4.83 per (US) gallon.
It never ceases to amaze me that American's complain about their fuel prices...
Al.Hard work is one thing, but we are PAYING them, they arent free, they arent giving up anything here, we pay them to do what we want them to do, and thats give an exciting lecture.
Actually, at least in the hard sciences, you're wrong. Most of the money going to pay your lecturer's salary will be from research income.
Al.So we don't have to standardise then, good. The only standardisation I want is for RedHat to stop using their own configuration files with their GUI configuration tools and use then ones in /etc like everyone else.
Al.Check out Rotary Rockets..
Last I heard the Rotory Rocket company's assets had been seized, including the Roton prototype, and that XCOR had bought at least some of them, including the IP rights to the design.
From looking at the XCOR Website they've pretty much shelved the Roton in favour of their own suborbital spaceplane design, the Xerus, which they're prototyping with the EZ-Rocket.
In any case it looks like the Roton is dead, which is a shame, it was a novel and interesting design. Which isn't to say it was going to work when they scaled it up of course...
Al.NASA basically killed the McDonnell Douglas DC-X.
Instead of going ahead with the Delta Clipper, which had working flight tested hardware, they went with the more expensive, riskier, technology of the Lockhead Martin X-33 design for the RLV program. While much more impressive, if it worked, the Lockheed design was alot riskier.
Then in 2001 they killed the entire SSTO program stone cold dead...
Al.SpamAssassin is rule based and doesn't as yet use this new, dubios, spamarchive. It can use Vipul's Razor, however, as well as SPEWS, SpamCop, etc.
But, err, SpamAssassin also uses Vipul's Razor to filter inbound mail if you ask it to...!?
Al.who actually gets loads of spam every day? I get about 3 per day (3 too many!). You always hear about these poor suckers getting 200 or so a day, but how many of us actrually have to put up with that much stuff?
According to my filter logs I'm currently getting between 100 and 150 spam messages a day, I'm currently using RBL and SpamAssassin to filter my inbox so I usually only see 2 or 3 a week out of this total. Its still annoying though,
Just because you don't get any spam, doesn't mean everybody else isn't geting any...
If I got that much, I'd just switch email accounts, cos I just wouldn't put up with it.
Some people just don't have that option, you can't change your work email address, I know I certainly can't change mine...
Al.Since Star Trek you've written a great deal of sci-fi novels...
Shatner's book are ghost written...
Al.X is too much of a pain in the ass for desktop users. XF86Config files are way over most people's heads. Font configuration is a nightmare, and without some tweaking fonts look like shit in X.
Which is why is should all be done by the system admin, none of it should be touched by individual users. Thats sort of why you have to login as root to play with any of this stuff...
To really get Linux on the desktops of Lusers, X has to be replaced by something entirely intended for desktops.
The success, or not, of Linux in the "desktop" marketplace holds absolutely no interest for me and a whole bunch of other people. Why do people persist in saying it has to?
Al.I don't NEED to display the window from one machine on another, but running X, I don't have the option of turning that feature off.
You might not need to, but alot of other people do...
These days, a desktop environment should be dedicated to local applications FIRST, and then provide support for remoting windows SECOND.
Looking at the windows open right now on my desktop, about half of them are running on remote machines, this is fairly typical. When you need this sort of functionality, you really need it...
Al.Version control is something any user-friendly system should handle automatically.
Heck VMS had this as an intergal part of its filesystem back in the 80's (?), I've never really understood why it never caught on...
Al.As of 1.2beta almost all of these are fixed.
As of 1.0.1 most of these were fixed.
That said, having just tried to upgrade my 1.1 browser to 1.2b, I've backed out and gone back to using the previous version. I got lots and lots of stuff breaking with 1.2, for instance the preferences popup didn't on several occasions. It doesn't look ready for primetime quite yet...
Al.An advertising journal predicts that a piece of technology that lets you skip ads will fail? Well I'm shocked, deeply shocked I must say... its not as if they have an axe to grind, is it?
Al.We humans control our motion AND direction with only 2 legs.
Really? Damn! I knew I was doing something wrong...
Al.Again, Linux NEEDS a unified desktop. I can't say it more. It may sound sad, but it has to be done.
Why? The first thing I do when I install any Linux distribution is get rid of both GNOME and KDE. Why the heck would I want all that fluff to take up memory and CPU? I drop back into WindowMaker, nice, pretty, but a heck of alot more streamlined. Its got a menu, its got a background I can drop xterms on. Why do you need a desktop for heaven's sake? Let alone a unified one?
Al.The have cell phones there with built-in cameras that you can use to see the other person you're talking to (assuming their phone supports it) or even take pictures and e-mail them.
Its called MMS, we have that in Europe now...
Al.Why? Are you planning one?
Al.What I don't understand is how four of you people have TOTALLY MISSED THE POINT.
No, I got the point, I just didn't think it was particularly relevant. Presumably none of the others thought so either.
If YOU were writing the userland code for a kernel wouldn't you want a say in where exactly the kernel was going?
Not particularly, I've been in similar situations in the past. If I want my user level code to run on the available infrastructure then I make sure I obey their API, I leave it to the low level infrastructure people to figure out how best to optimise their code.
Conversely when I'm doing low level infrastructure I don't particularly want nosey user land coders sticking their two penny's worth in, they (usually) aren't up to speed with the problems I'm facing.
Do you want to have to rewrite your entire codebase to support changes in the kernel's API or to handle some sort of new operating paradigm the kernel programmers decided to hammer out?
Why would I rewrite my codebase if the kernel developers go and do something daft? If the kernel developers want my code to work after they go and do something that breaks backwards compatibility so much that fundametal thinks like the compiler and build tools are broken then they can fork it and support it themselves.
After all the GNU tools were specifically written for HURD, the fact that they work under Linux at all is just a bonus (for people who use Linux). Its not important (or shouldn't be) to the GNU gang.
Al.I don't know of any applications in X that don't adhere to left-click-highlite/middle-click-paste.
Actually there are a bunch, mostly those new furry user friendly thingys that people seem to like so much, I run across one every once in a while but can't remember any off the top of my head...
It's as universal a behaviour as any in Linuxland and has been for years.
Ever since X11R3, which was circa 1988 if I remember correctly, which I might not it being such a very long time ago. I distictly remember the switch over from R5 to R6 in 1992 (or was it 1993?) but I'm a bit fuzzy before that...
Al.I wouldn't regard the Slashdot community as a representative sample of Linux developers, either userland or kernel.
I know I don't give a stuff about people using my software, at least the stuff I didn't get paid to write, I wrote it because I needed to do something, some of it was (might be) marginally useful to other people so I GPL'd it and released it.
I'm always suprised (and admittedly pleased) when I get a patch, but I don't expect them. I actually get more comments (and "thanks" emails) about the one mini-HOWTO I wrote, which was actually supposed to be an internal document for my work collegues that sort of leaked out onto the web (as such things have a tendancy to do).
Okay, I'm rambling, but basically I'd be suprised if the bulk of the "Linux must rule the world" fanboys have ever strung two lines of code together in their life, and until they get round to writing some code (or writing some decent documentation for all that lousy doucumented code we already have) their opinion on where Linux is going doesn't really count for much.
Al.GNU info is an abomination and should be taken out and shot
Agreed! What exactly was wrong with man pages anyway!?
Al.No more man, info, html, pdf, ps or whatnot. I'd prefer a fixed SGML DTD...
I'd settle for them getting rid of those horrible info page (thingys) and going back to man pages like the creator intended....
Al.As far as I know *every* linux distribution uses the GNU toolset...
I've heard this arguement so often recently I really am tempted to blow a couple of weekends and build one that sits on top of the BSD toolset. The reason every linux distribution uses the GNU tools is pretty much historical. Linus getting up on the other side of the bed one morning (sometime back towards the end of 1991) could have meant that we'd all be using BSD based distributions.
Al.If the GNU people suddenly decided that their software was no longer open source and changed their licensing Linux as an OS would be up a creek without a canoe. The Linux kernel would sit around idling while all the GNU stuff can be ported to run on [insert kernel here].
Okay discarding the point that that the GNU Project won't ever suddenly decide to close source their tools, and even if they did we could just take the last revision released under the GPL, fork it and continue on from there, then...
...you could (of course) build a Linux distribution ontop of BSD tools rather than GNU, nobody has really made a determined stab at it, although a quick check on Google found the bsd-utils-aconf project on SourceForge, but its certainly doable.
Al.A person with a disability in our nation has a right to access public and publicly provided services under the ADA.
Okay, I'm not an American so maybe i'm just missing something fundamental here, but... but surely Southwest Airlines isn't a publicaly provided service? Isn't it just another private company? To us Brits a public service is something the government does, such stuff comes under very different laws to private individuals or companies providing services, even is the service is identical to that provided by the government.
This is about preventing someone from making use out of a given service, a service mind you that they are fully capable of receiving, because of their disability.
Anyway, surely Southwest have a telephone booking service? Wouldn't this satisfy the law? Why does the guy have to be able to use the website if he has access to the same service(s) though different means?
I'm just basically confused how this suit could have any basis at all!?
Al.