Uh. What debian can't be installed in forty minutes? My last debian install was as a backup to my production server and I certainly spent less than an hour doing it. Most of that time was spent downloading (I was using a net-install). The actual time I physically spent at the machine installation was under a half hour.
Ubuntu is pretty sweet for the desktop, but there's too much desktop-y stuff involved in it. Without doing some research, I wouldn't even know how to do an Ubuntu install completely free from any window manager whatsoever. With Debian, however, there's nothing I don't want installed by default. I only have to deal with a GUI if I want to. And since I don't want to, installing my window manager is as simple as "apt-get install screen". Done. Hurrah!
Anyway, the whole idea that Debian is somehow this painfully difficult distro is just absurd and I don't know why people buy into that. It might be more difficult than normal to get a fully operational desktop and window manager with all the trimming going than something like Ubuntu where it's all pretty much built into the installer by default, but in every other aspect, you can't get much easier and straightforward than debian. I've been using it since about 1999 and I keep playing with other distros every couple of years to see if I can be swayed away (and other than Ubuntu for pure-desktop systems), I don't see any compelling reason to stray from Debian. And even then... only to a Debian-extension like Ubuntu...
Last time I saw DVDs on sale anywhere, they were still $23 to $30, unless they were at least a decade old, were previously used or were just horrible movies that they couldn't sell.
Really, I don't understand people who would pay $20 or $25 for a DVD. How many times could you possibly watch the same movie in your life?! I'm pretty certain the ending is always going to be the same. It's not like the ewoks get blow-torched and roasted over a pit kebab style after the tenth viewing.
Who is the bigger idiot here? The engineer that actually thought "I'm going to submit this to my company for a patent" or his company for actually going ahead and submitting the patent on his behalf? Even if the employee is an idiot, you would think someone in the company would have given him the "um... someone already invented post-it notes like decades ago" speech.
And remember, according to all the do-gooders, little johnny downloading a $1,200 copy of Photoshop via bit torrent so he can play with photos on his blog is just as evil and bad and harmful to corporations as the middle aged guy manufacturing and distributing tens of thousands of copies of the $1,200 application for a hundred bucks a piece. Or whatever.
The Times Online is wrong. Scoble never said Microsoft Sucks. But don't worry Slashdot Editors -- the truth was only revealed/explained two or three days ago. I'm sure you'll catch up sometime in April and retract the inaccurate statement.
I personally block all advertisements, period. I don't care about people justifying the need for ads and how I'm "stealing" if I don't watch the ads on a site. I remember a time when people ran services like BBSes (which could require quite a large personal investment at times) because they enjoyed it. Not because they could make a bunch of money, be the next famous internet-whore. They understood a project was probably going to cost them money rather than make them money and they didn't care.
Now it seems that if you don't offer advertising and you don't make money off it, there is somehow no reason to be bothered with it. I offer a service and have for almost a decade now and I've spent about $30k on it. No ads. No fees. No nothing. It's a service. I love providing it. It's enjoyable. Could I make money on it? Sure. Have companies offered me a lot of money to buy it from me? Yeah. Will I sell it? Fuck no. What's the point of the web if it's just reduced to one giant market?
If by illustrative, you mean that it conveys absolutely no explanation of what it is but it doesn't do so with a very shiny flash interface thingy, then yes. Illustrative . . . but not informative.
I think we all presumed it was some sort of web data collecting tool. But maybe it's about collecting random stats like the political party makeup of each country and how many people in each country own what kind of car or have a certain carbon footprint. But who knows. Either way, that is hardly new either. As for "collecting public data" in that regard, Google is completely off base in suggesting that hasn't ever been thought of before. It's called the CIA Factbook and you've been able to access it online as long as there has been a web.
He wouldn't have made much money, anyway. Everyone knows that the real money is in providing a service for fourteen year old girls to shake their half naked asses in a camera for paedophiles to watch so they can target them with advertising for used schoolgirl panties and long-range cameras and binoculars from The Sharper Image catalog. Google will pay you a couple billion for that.
'Public organizations around the world invest 20 billion dollars a year producing different kinds of statistics. Until now, nobody has thought of collecting all the information in the same place. That should be possible with Trendalyzer, which will be able to present that quantity of data in a clear way as well as giving the user the ability to compare many different kinds of information.'" Of course people have thought of collecting all of that information in one single place. Just because none of the services have achieved such massive market share that they essentially did collect all of the stats around the world doesn't mean that wasn't and isn't their goal.
Google, I dig you for now, but I'm not really sure that I care for the idea of having google own nearly all of the search data for every search done by every individual around the planet in the history of google and beyond combined with all of the world-wide traffic analysis data.
And as someone who would be targeted for this service -- why would I bother? There are plenty of free open source utilities out there that provide every ounce of data you could ever want and they're incredibly easy to configure and deploy.
No, the benefit here seems to be less for the end-users deploying the service and more for whoever google then turns around and sells the massive amounts of correlated information to. For instance, let's see every bit of data about a specific user so we can see everything from each search he does to his entire browsing trail. Bet we could sell that for a lot of money!
Hopefully you will still have a simple way as a user to prevent google from collecting this information just like you can do with their stupid Urchin service (by blocking it). And, sadly, people will still continue to use this new service because they'll sell out their mother's medical history and offer up a sample of their own blood and cholesterol ratings if it means getting something "for free".
Nothing says security like naming your flagship product after the part of a house that is made of thin glass and can be broken with a small rock, stick or an elbow and allows everyone outside to see everything going on inside.
We already embrace draconian copyright law and we already monitor all transmissions (it's called echelon or whatever they're calling it these days).
And for people who are going to say "hey, the RIAA/MPAA/BSA/US Government are only protecting our interests abroad!"... um... no. They are only protecting corporate interests abroad and doing so by manipulating and demanding how other nations will behave.
This is a case of American corporations not liking the laws other nations have within their own borders. The reason we want to change their laws and force them to abide by our broken copyright systems is the same reason we want them to become democracies and the same reason that we allow corporations to do business in countries that are a risk to our nation by threat of military actions, spying and have terribly humanitarian records. That reason being that corporations have saturated existing markets. Everyone who is going to by a Justin Timberlake CD in America, Austrlia and the United Kingdom already has done so. To continue expanding their corporations, they need to expand into new markets.
Helping bring other countries into competition with us at the expense of our own nation and citizens will eventually level them off to a point where they can all afford to buy our CDs and DVDs and videogames, as long as their legal systems and copyright systems (which we will force them to devise and comply with to our liking). Meanwhile, the average person in America and the UK can have their lifestyles seriously reduced in quality before they will no longer be capable or willing to buy content from these corporations.
If some people are allowed to "opt-out" of paying for channels with violence then I want to be allowed to opt out of paying for the dozen non-english channels, the two dozen religious channels and the dozen shopping network channels.
Also, what's wrong with a little violence? I thought these type of people nearly wet themselves trying to praise how great that jesus snuff film thing was a few years ago?
Because suffering a stroke is precisely like arrogantly expecting and demanding society to foot the bill for the xerox copies of yourself that you so carelessly squirted into the world. Completely.
Speak for yourself. I go to the doctor and when I leave, I find out how much was covered by my health insurance. Usually almost all of it. Then I pay for the rest. Not a big deal. Healthcare in America truly sucks ass if you have none at all, but it isn't this horror-fest that everyone makes it out to be. I've had full coverage since I was about 19 through my employer. It's unfortunate that some fifteen percent do not have coverage and I'm all for finding a way to help them out as long as it doesn't mean sacrificing my own coverage quality, but people seem to think that the only way you see a doctor in this country is if you suck the state dry or sell your soul and that just isn't true.
Frankly, nature sucks ass. I don't want my computer to look more like a damned fig tree. I want nature to look more like a clean-room.
Now, if you can present me with some sort of all-encompassing world in which everything is organic in a Farscape-style, then great. But just making something look like a tacky wood coffee table from 1973 doesn't impress me much.
Yeah, I don't want my computer to look like an oak tree. I want it to look like a computer. How are straight lines and cube shapes ugly?! What's next, all of our tech stuff has to be outfitted with doilies and inlaid with velvet?! I guess that's less ridiculous than some architect kid with too much time spending thousands of hours making an oak-ish box.
Oh well. Some people like a car because it is reliable, sturdy, high quality, powerful, fast and handles well. Others like it because it's shiny and red.
I can't believe that was modded "insightful". Good grief!:P
Anyway, I'd want to know if I was going to die young so I could choose to live wrecklessly and enjoy all the stuff I'm not supposed to enjoy. Honestly, if you know you're only going to live to be 34 years old, then what's the point of worrying about eating fast food, boozing, smoking and humping anything with a pulse? Live the good life without paying any of the consequences.
I think there is more to it than just that, though.
As I have said before, the tech industry suffers from too many "it's a living" people. There was a point where most people in the industry were in it because it was a passion. They love the world of tech. They've breathed it since they were young. It was something they wanted to do for a long time and they flat out get off on it. These are the guys that take pride in their work. Know their field and other fields in the area inside out. Stay late at the office and spend their free time doing things related to their work -- because they LOVE doing it.
At some point, it followed the nursing industry. A decade ago there were countless "there is a shortage of nurses in the country - go to nursing school now and you could make a career!" movements going on. The same thing started happening to the tech field. It was less about "do you love tech?" and "do you want to make money? then sign up for this vocational school or go take CS courses at your university and make a career out of it!".
So you eventually wind up with fewer people who love what they do and take pride in it and more people who are just punching a time card because it's the popular field right now. If polishing choo-choo trains had been in demand when they needed a career, they would have gone into that. And those people don't care enough to take risks, be creative or push boundaries. As long as they have a check, job security and can punch out (both physically and mentally) af 5:00PM, they don't care what else goes on in the office or at the company or in the industry.
I build myself a top of the line machine about once a year, so I already have my "dream machine". But the above is a truedream machine. Especially if it washed your dishes, cooked your meals and ran linux.
This whole thing is stupid. It was a promotional stunt and we all know that Sinbad knew about it from the beginning; probably did it directly, himself.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh. What debian can't be installed in forty minutes? My last debian install was as a backup to my production server and I certainly spent less than an hour doing it. Most of that time was spent downloading (I was using a net-install). The actual time I physically spent at the machine installation was under a half hour.
Ubuntu is pretty sweet for the desktop, but there's too much desktop-y stuff involved in it. Without doing some research, I wouldn't even know how to do an Ubuntu install completely free from any window manager whatsoever. With Debian, however, there's nothing I don't want installed by default. I only have to deal with a GUI if I want to. And since I don't want to, installing my window manager is as simple as "apt-get install screen". Done. Hurrah!
Anyway, the whole idea that Debian is somehow this painfully difficult distro is just absurd and I don't know why people buy into that. It might be more difficult than normal to get a fully operational desktop and window manager with all the trimming going than something like Ubuntu where it's all pretty much built into the installer by default, but in every other aspect, you can't get much easier and straightforward than debian. I've been using it since about 1999 and I keep playing with other distros every couple of years to see if I can be swayed away (and other than Ubuntu for pure-desktop systems), I don't see any compelling reason to stray from Debian. And even then... only to a Debian-extension like Ubuntu...
Sometimes you need firm leadership to make decisions rather than stagnate by trying to please everyone all the time and doing nothing.
Last time I saw DVDs on sale anywhere, they were still $23 to $30, unless they were at least a decade old, were previously used or were just horrible movies that they couldn't sell.
Really, I don't understand people who would pay $20 or $25 for a DVD. How many times could you possibly watch the same movie in your life?! I'm pretty certain the ending is always going to be the same. It's not like the ewoks get blow-torched and roasted over a pit kebab style after the tenth viewing.
Who is the bigger idiot here? The engineer that actually thought "I'm going to submit this to my company for a patent" or his company for actually going ahead and submitting the patent on his behalf? Even if the employee is an idiot, you would think someone in the company would have given him the "um... someone already invented post-it notes like decades ago" speech.
And remember, according to all the do-gooders, little johnny downloading a $1,200 copy of Photoshop via bit torrent so he can play with photos on his blog is just as evil and bad and harmful to corporations as the middle aged guy manufacturing and distributing tens of thousands of copies of the $1,200 application for a hundred bucks a piece. Or whatever.
The Times Online is wrong. Scoble never said Microsoft Sucks. But don't worry Slashdot Editors -- the truth was only revealed/explained two or three days ago. I'm sure you'll catch up sometime in April and retract the inaccurate statement.
m vps-were-in-it-to-win-really/
http://scobleizer.com/2007/03/16/microsoft-tells-
I personally block all advertisements, period. I don't care about people justifying the need for ads and how I'm "stealing" if I don't watch the ads on a site. I remember a time when people ran services like BBSes (which could require quite a large personal investment at times) because they enjoyed it. Not because they could make a bunch of money, be the next famous internet-whore. They understood a project was probably going to cost them money rather than make them money and they didn't care.
Now it seems that if you don't offer advertising and you don't make money off it, there is somehow no reason to be bothered with it. I offer a service and have for almost a decade now and I've spent about $30k on it. No ads. No fees. No nothing. It's a service. I love providing it. It's enjoyable. Could I make money on it? Sure. Have companies offered me a lot of money to buy it from me? Yeah. Will I sell it? Fuck no. What's the point of the web if it's just reduced to one giant market?
If by illustrative, you mean that it conveys absolutely no explanation of what it is but it doesn't do so with a very shiny flash interface thingy, then yes. Illustrative . . . but not informative.
I think we all presumed it was some sort of web data collecting tool. But maybe it's about collecting random stats like the political party makeup of each country and how many people in each country own what kind of car or have a certain carbon footprint. But who knows. Either way, that is hardly new either. As for "collecting public data" in that regard, Google is completely off base in suggesting that hasn't ever been thought of before. It's called the CIA Factbook and you've been able to access it online as long as there has been a web.
Only practically free? I'm surprised you can't get it for absolutely no cost whatsoever, Mr. Balmer.
He wouldn't have made much money, anyway. Everyone knows that the real money is in providing a service for fourteen year old girls to shake their half naked asses in a camera for paedophiles to watch so they can target them with advertising for used schoolgirl panties and long-range cameras and binoculars from The Sharper Image catalog. Google will pay you a couple billion for that.
Google, I dig you for now, but I'm not really sure that I care for the idea of having google own nearly all of the search data for every search done by every individual around the planet in the history of google and beyond combined with all of the world-wide traffic analysis data.
And as someone who would be targeted for this service -- why would I bother? There are plenty of free open source utilities out there that provide every ounce of data you could ever want and they're incredibly easy to configure and deploy.
No, the benefit here seems to be less for the end-users deploying the service and more for whoever google then turns around and sells the massive amounts of correlated information to. For instance, let's see every bit of data about a specific user so we can see everything from each search he does to his entire browsing trail. Bet we could sell that for a lot of money!
Hopefully you will still have a simple way as a user to prevent google from collecting this information just like you can do with their stupid Urchin service (by blocking it). And, sadly, people will still continue to use this new service because they'll sell out their mother's medical history and offer up a sample of their own blood and cholesterol ratings if it means getting something "for free".
Nothing says security like naming your flagship product after the part of a house that is made of thin glass and can be broken with a small rock, stick or an elbow and allows everyone outside to see everything going on inside.
We already embrace draconian copyright law and we already monitor all transmissions (it's called echelon or whatever they're calling it these days).
And for people who are going to say "hey, the RIAA/MPAA/BSA/US Government are only protecting our interests abroad!"... um... no. They are only protecting corporate interests abroad and doing so by manipulating and demanding how other nations will behave.
This is a case of American corporations not liking the laws other nations have within their own borders. The reason we want to change their laws and force them to abide by our broken copyright systems is the same reason we want them to become democracies and the same reason that we allow corporations to do business in countries that are a risk to our nation by threat of military actions, spying and have terribly humanitarian records. That reason being that corporations have saturated existing markets. Everyone who is going to by a Justin Timberlake CD in America, Austrlia and the United Kingdom already has done so. To continue expanding their corporations, they need to expand into new markets.
Helping bring other countries into competition with us at the expense of our own nation and citizens will eventually level them off to a point where they can all afford to buy our CDs and DVDs and videogames, as long as their legal systems and copyright systems (which we will force them to devise and comply with to our liking). Meanwhile, the average person in America and the UK can have their lifestyles seriously reduced in quality before they will no longer be capable or willing to buy content from these corporations.
If some people are allowed to "opt-out" of paying for channels with violence then I want to be allowed to opt out of paying for the dozen non-english channels, the two dozen religious channels and the dozen shopping network channels.
Also, what's wrong with a little violence? I thought these type of people nearly wet themselves trying to praise how great that jesus snuff film thing was a few years ago?
Because suffering a stroke is precisely like arrogantly expecting and demanding society to foot the bill for the xerox copies of yourself that you so carelessly squirted into the world. Completely.
Speak for yourself. I go to the doctor and when I leave, I find out how much was covered by my health insurance. Usually almost all of it. Then I pay for the rest. Not a big deal. Healthcare in America truly sucks ass if you have none at all, but it isn't this horror-fest that everyone makes it out to be. I've had full coverage since I was about 19 through my employer. It's unfortunate that some fifteen percent do not have coverage and I'm all for finding a way to help them out as long as it doesn't mean sacrificing my own coverage quality, but people seem to think that the only way you see a doctor in this country is if you suck the state dry or sell your soul and that just isn't true.
Frankly, nature sucks ass. I don't want my computer to look more like a damned fig tree. I want nature to look more like a clean-room.
Now, if you can present me with some sort of all-encompassing world in which everything is organic in a Farscape-style, then great. But just making something look like a tacky wood coffee table from 1973 doesn't impress me much.
Substance is more important than style.
Yeah, I don't want my computer to look like an oak tree. I want it to look like a computer. How are straight lines and cube shapes ugly?! What's next, all of our tech stuff has to be outfitted with doilies and inlaid with velvet?! I guess that's less ridiculous than some architect kid with too much time spending thousands of hours making an oak-ish box.
Oh well. Some people like a car because it is reliable, sturdy, high quality, powerful, fast and handles well. Others like it because it's shiny and red.
I can't believe that was modded "insightful". Good grief! :P
Anyway, I'd want to know if I was going to die young so I could choose to live wrecklessly and enjoy all the stuff I'm not supposed to enjoy. Honestly, if you know you're only going to live to be 34 years old, then what's the point of worrying about eating fast food, boozing, smoking and humping anything with a pulse? Live the good life without paying any of the consequences.
Yeah. That was my first thought, too. Great way to get herpes or something. Gross.
I think there is more to it than just that, though.
As I have said before, the tech industry suffers from too many "it's a living" people. There was a point where most people in the industry were in it because it was a passion. They love the world of tech. They've breathed it since they were young. It was something they wanted to do for a long time and they flat out get off on it. These are the guys that take pride in their work. Know their field and other fields in the area inside out. Stay late at the office and spend their free time doing things related to their work -- because they LOVE doing it.
At some point, it followed the nursing industry. A decade ago there were countless "there is a shortage of nurses in the country - go to nursing school now and you could make a career!" movements going on. The same thing started happening to the tech field. It was less about "do you love tech?" and "do you want to make money? then sign up for this vocational school or go take CS courses at your university and make a career out of it!".
So you eventually wind up with fewer people who love what they do and take pride in it and more people who are just punching a time card because it's the popular field right now. If polishing choo-choo trains had been in demand when they needed a career, they would have gone into that. And those people don't care enough to take risks, be creative or push boundaries. As long as they have a check, job security and can punch out (both physically and mentally) af 5:00PM, they don't care what else goes on in the office or at the company or in the industry.
Where is the "-1 Whipped Pussy" mod?
Don't be hatin' on me, just because I have now provided the world with the design for the perfect Stepford (and linux) wife.
The Sandia / Cray Red Storm super computer crammed inside of a Real Doll.
I build myself a top of the line machine about once a year, so I already have my "dream machine". But the above is a true dream machine. Especially if it washed your dishes, cooked your meals and ran linux.
This whole thing is stupid. It was a promotional stunt and we all know that Sinbad knew about it from the beginning; probably did it directly, himself.