Ahhh the trappings of the BSD license, you do the work - someone else makes money by stealing it.
*shrug* Some people just believe that freedom shouldn't come at the cost of coercion. They believe that their code is as free as it can ever be; and they are right. The code they have written is, indeed, freely available to the entire world. Does that necessarily have to mean that the code someone else writes has to be as well? Should it not be that other person's choice as to whether they want to release their own sweat and blood upon the world in whatever form they choose?
You see, to put it very simply, it boils down to where you want your freedoms to lay. People who choose licenses such as the GNU's General Public License believe that the code should be free, as though it somehow has rights. Or maybe it's just a control issue. "I wrote that code and you have to do what I say if you want to use it! Don't like it? TOUGH! Write you own code then, infidel!"
However, people who choose less restrictive licenses like the BSD license care more about the freedom of the people who write the code. Those folks believe that if you write code, you should get to say what can be done with it, even if that code cannot stand on it's own as part of a separate program. Their code is their gift to the world, and nothing can lessen that gift -- no, not even incorporating their code into a proprietary, closed program. They're glad that that person or company could make good use of what they had written. (And who knows; when the money starts getting thin and the coder needs employment, how much do you want to bet the company who used her code will be a little more eager to give her a job?)
to empty the trash in os x, you just long-click on the trash can, and a little menu pops up: "Empty Trash."
Don't forget you can Ctrl+Click to do the same thing. Ctrl+Click on Macs is usually roughly equivalent of right-clicking in Windows or in X and since I always keep one hand laying on the keyboard (Who the hell can type and mouse at the same time? Better yet, who ever needs to?) at all times, I don't ever find the lack of a second mouse button while I'm using a Mac to be inconvenient.
That's a large problem that I see here; people are stuck in their Windows and X frames of mind when thinking about the issue of mouse buttons and believe that just because having multiple mouse buttons in X or Windows is either required or highly desired, it's the same if you're using a Mac. Simply not true.
You don't give up as much functionality as you might think. You just maybe have to learn a slightly different way to go about things.
Or go buy a multi-button mouse. OS X will default to Ctrl+Clicking for the right mouse button, and there are good drivers available for OS 9 that do the same. The Intellimouse drivers I got with my Intellimouse Optical are a great example. I still never use the right mouse button though, despite the availability.
I grew up in Windows and X. It's only fairly recently that I bought my first Mac (the very wonderful new iBook as a matter of fact) and I have quickly grown fond of only having to worry about a single mouse button and having my menus at the top of the screen. To each their own, but don't bitch about something you'll never use anyway.
Macs aren't inferior just because they only have a single mouse button; nor are they superior for it. It's just a different way of doing things and it suits some more than others. Single button-oriented OSes please me. Simplicity is a virtue.
Having Unix under the hood in OS X pleases me even more.:-)
Definitely check them out! Rob and Mark are turbo studly and they smell good too. Don't forget to hassle Mark about when Asterisk is going to go into production.:-)
You should ask the Congressman why he thinks they should not dedicate their time to something they give away.
Ask him a series of smart rhetorical questions and lead him to his own answer. That is the best way to get these smartie-pantses in our government to realize exactly what is going on; make them figure it out for themselves, but with a good helping hand. It's just like back in high school when you had that pain-in-the-ass teacher who would ask you a lot of rhetorical questions to try to get you to think about a topic in a certain way. That still works out here in the real world, and it happens to be a key tool lawyers and politicians use when discussing or debating a topic.
The fact is that almost everyone with any sort of free time has a hobby. ("Hobby" being defined as an activity that one does in their spare time which does not achieve remuneration for the action.) That hobby might be tending a garden, or watching television, or playing the cello, or having sex, or cataloging astronomical objects in the sky. This also means that there could be people who dedicate their spare time to writing computer programs and helping others to write programs or use their computers better.
Asking a hacker why she gives away her code is like asking a nun why she feeds the poor and gives charity. It's the belief that you're hopefully helping to make the world better and the knowledge that you will be remembered, at least in some small way, for your efforts in time to come. In even more simplistic terms, it's a warm fuzzy combined with an ego stroking. You just can't beat that feeling; even chasing money never feels that good. (Having tried both, I choose the warm fuzzy and ego stroke.)
...since every iteration of the Microsoft or Apple OS requires more RAM, a faster processor, and more colors on the monitor, I think it's more accurate to say that no one needs a new computer to do a spreadsheet program or Word document, provided they don't want to use the latest version.
Now that just isn't true and you know it. At my place of employment we have systems ranging in speed from 233 MHz up to 500 MHz and not a single person has complained that their latest version of Microsoft Office runs way slower on one machine than it does on another. Most don't notice a difference at all. Most don't even complain that their computer at work is way slower than their whizzy new fast computer their kids play games on at home.
Most of the machines around there are more than three years old and aren't looking to have anything other than the RAM in them upgraded any time soon. The most common kinds of software, that is office software, email software, web browsers, the occasional MP3 decoder, and the like simply do not put a very great load on a system. The greatest speed increase we've seen was simply by upgrading all the systems to have 128 MB or more of RAM. I'd say current day applications are more sensitive to the amount of fast memory available than to the speed of the main CPU.
And while doing things like encoding MP3s and editing digital video is getting more and more popular (although there still are NOT many people who do the latter -- have you seen the price of digital video cameras?), even those feats can be accomplished fairly rapidly on what is now a low-end or middle-of-the-road computer. Software isn't THAT much more demanding because users aren't that much more demanding yet; only gamers are.
You're technically right that games aren't the only thing that drive computers. But in all practicality they are. Your average person out there couldn't tell the difference between a 600 MHz system and a 1.2 GHz system if they were sat down in front of them and weren't told which was which (and weren't allowed to peek in any system control panels!) until they tried to play a game.
The name isn't even a homonym. It's not "Atheist OS" and he doesn't even include the SATAN network analyzer tool. (That is a joke, by the way.) Take the name apart. At best you'll come up with "Athe Operating System". Suddenly "Athe" is a naughty word that bespeaks against your personal belief system?
Personally, I think you need to get a grip and not get all hung up over similar sounding words. So what if "AtheOS" sounds a little like the word "atheist"? If you say, "I've got dandruff, some of it itches," with the proper tone, inflection and speed it sounds almost exactly like you're saying "God damn it, son of bitches." (It's really easy to do; try it.[1]) Does that mean you'll never use the former phrase because it's blasphemous?
Of course not. Let's not be silly.
Lighten up, dude. It's no more unfortunate than the existence of any word, real or otherwise, that could be mistakenly heard as any other word you happen to find offensive. Stop whining or stop speaking English. You're going to run up against this problem again and again in your life if you're so sensitive about it.
This isn't meant as a flame, just an honest (perhaps a little brutally so, I admit) opinion about your apparent hypersensitivity to the fact that English words can and often do rhyme.
__
[1] And believe it or not, a Baptist minister taught me that phrase and he is as honestly devout as I've ever seen a person be. He just happens to not be easily offended.
Thanks! For a moment there I thought that I'd slipped into a parallel universe where corny jokes weren't appreciated. But, of course, we all know that THAT isn't true.;) *braces for thrown produce*
Politicians are always quick to grab the credit for things that weren't their doing; that's what makes them politicians. So of course Al Gore is the father of the internet (or whatever). But even if that isn't really true, we still owe him a debt of gratitude for his advances to computer science. After all, he did invent the Al-Gore-ithm too, right?:-P
Hooray! Chalk another one up to the standard-makers of the day! BIND is in the ranks of some of the more reknowned software ever: sendmail, vixie cron, wuftpd, telnet, and finger. All are masterful achievements of software engineering.
Y'all might be right. But still, it can go both ways. A majority of the content out there on the 'net is still served from Unix boxes (i.e. FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Linux, Solaris, HP-UX,... ) all of which, if they support IPv6 at all yet, are all adhereing to standards so they can interoperate. Convincing people like Yahoo! and even Hotmail to switch to NT with a broken (non-interoperable) IPv6 stack probably isn't going to go over too well. Yahoo! has always used FreeBSD because it has always provided them with the level of performance they need which no other OS has managed to match for them, and Hotmail tried to migrate to NT once and it didn't work so they went back to FreeBSD and Solaris (if I'm not mistaken). And think about the largest ISP in the world right now: AOL. They use an awful lot of Sun and SGI boxes to run their data networks. Getting them to switch that infrastructure over to Windows NT doesn't seem all that likely to me as a sysadmin myself. (If it ain't broke, don't fix it. And don't use stuff that's broke.)
Clients aren't the only thing to think about as far as the Internet is concerned: content providers also hold a lot of sway. And don't forget the backbone providers out there too like Sprint and MCI and UUNet. I'll make you a bet that they don't have many NT-based routers. And I don't think any of the root DNS servers run NT either. MS would have to cope with those as well or there would probably be a tremendous outage of name server service. (Who would want to try and memorize an ugly IPv4 or IPv6 address? And I'd love to see Microsoft try to run their own root DNS servers on NT with the same level of quality the current root servers provide.)
Can Microsoft manipulate IPv6 which looks to be a very important future protocol? (Surely more important than DHCP is.) We'll see. And that doesn't even mean that they're going to try. However, if they do, unless they can strong-arm a lot of content providers and data connection backbone providers, they're going to have a very rough time at it and could stand to lose a lot of customers if they screw up.
Eh. I wouldn't go quite as far as you do, personally. While I'm not particularly religious in any way, shape, or form, I don't feel it is valid for me to say that nothing apart from what my senses (and the tools I might use to enhance them) detect exists. There are plenty of things which are ordinarily undetectable, but which leave evidence of their existance. That's why there's such a thing as scientific theory. The part of me that I'd like to think of as rational can't let go of the credo that just because I can't see, hear, smell, feel, or otherwise detect something that it does not exist.
Human knowledge just isn't ultimate. There's always a chance of discovering something new about the universe that we are a part of which leads me to think that just because I can't detect or prove something right now does not mean I (or someone else) won't detect or prove it in the future.
Of course, I'm still not likely to believe some of the garbage dogma that so many others are more than willing to stuff down my throat. But I leave my definition of reality rather open-ended because there's been more than once that I myself and humans in general have been proven wrong in their belief about what reality really is.
You must be older than dirt! Can I have your autograph Mr. #691?
Oh, and I forgot to mention smartasses...;) FYI (not that it matters) it was just for reference. I mean, would you believe that someone has been reading slashdot for a long time if they had a user number of something like 200000?
I've been around here a while (check my user number -- and I remember when user numbers weren't even implemented yet and the basic comment system was teething...) and you'll find that that its just the nature of Slashdot; lots of rumour and inaccuracy with little in the way of journalistic research done. And sometimes you get the occasional soap-box abusers. Anyone remember that fun incident with Sengan a couple of years ago?
On the bright side, where else can you see such a collection of flamers and trolls every single day of the week, every hour of the day?:)
This is a non-issue, folks! And very much so. This is a printer appliance, and not a printer itself. This is a sort of middle-man product designed explicitly so that Windows computers using the SMB protocol can print to any network printer that supports the line printer daemon protocol so that you don't have to install HP's Jet Admin software onto a Windows workstation to allow other Windows clients to use that printer.
In case you hadn't noticed, Windows, by default, in no way supports the LPD protocol, no standard printer drivers that I've ever seen support that kind of functionality, and HP themselves usually distributes third party NT-based server software with their network printers to allow SMB clients to connect to that server which acts as sort of proxy to the network printer itself. All this product does is replace that server software with a box you can easily mount in a rack, give a couple of IP addresses to, and just go instead of having to mess around with complicated software installations and risk crashing that unstable NT box you've decided to use as the SMB (not LPD -- note the difference) print server.
If anything, HP deserves credit (yay HP!) for what they've done with this product, not derided. (And their marketing department looks to be pretty on the ball here, so don't give them crap either.) They're using Linux to provide functionality easily which would otherwise be very difficult if the customer relied strictly on Windows. Your Unix box can still print just fine with this product around because it CAN use the LPD protocol. Your cubicle-mate, however, can't because, if anything, his stupid Windows box probably thinks LPD is a psychoactive drug or something and so, with the HP Jet Direct 4000 Printing Appliance, he now gets the same functionality out of the network printer that you do, and the boss doesn't have to spend $3k on yet another server that has to be configured with a whole OS and all that goes along with that. Or, alternatively, he doesn't have to dance with Samba on a Unix server he may already have set up, taking away resources from the already heavy Oracle database running on it. Or, alternatively to that, he doesn't have to rely on the Jet Admin software being installed on an NT workstation that might possibly crash often or get misconfigured or be prone to any of an infinity of pilot errors. Sounds like a good deal to me.
No, this isn't ironic, CmdrTaco. Y'all just don't do your research and are quick to jump a reactionary gun at anything that doesn't just gush about Linux and is designed to support Windows exclusively. In this case, it's only Windows that needs this support because your Linux box can already do what Windows can't.
Well, since writing this emulator is apparently legal in the nation where Ashran lives, I'd say that he can probably keep on doing just that. He's probably not gonna get smacked in the courts in his own country, and as long as he doesn't visit the USA (or, rather, as long as Verant/Sony and the US Gov't don't find out that he's in the USA) things will be cool. This is all assuming that Verant/Sony even has a legal leg to stand on here. But if code contributors from the US are at risk, do what many crypto projects where there are legality issues on the crypto parts do and just don't allow code from US-ians. It sucks, but them's the breaks.
But one thing just strikes me as odd here. There are plenty of examples of people making clones of clients to utilize proprietary servers and their respective protocols (think ICQ and AOL's Oscar protocol, folks), but there aren't so many people making clones of servers which proprietary clients can utilize. Is there much of a difference between the two? You're still cloning proprietary software and interfaces either way, and in the case of ICQ and Oscar at least, packet sniffing sure doesn't seem to be an illegal way to develop a client -- though I don't know if packet sniffing is all that the fellowes at HackersQuest are doing...
IANAL by far, but I am kind of curious what a good lawyer with some international law experience would have to say about all this fun stuff.
:) Sorry, but I just couldn't help but note the almost-Ayn-Rand-ism there. (*Dons flame-retardant underwear*) Boy was she a git...
Anyhoo, about the Philly stuff, I'm having a hard time believing 2600's story because it seems to me that they are just as likely to put their own ultra-biased spin on things as any government party that would lie and cheat to get me to believe an outright falsehood. I'm also not buying any stories of blaming the police for violence. There is almost always more to it than just "the police are bad". Remember that they're a government supported agency -- they take orders. Usually from local governments, but higher governments have influence on local governments too you know.
I'm wholly unqualified to be much of a judge as to what went on as I don't live in Philly, but at the same time I don't put a lot of weight into people drawing parallels between Philly and the Seattle WTO stuff. I live near Seattle. I know a lot of what went on there. And I realize that the stories that got told might not always be the full truth. Especially when there are politics involved. (Not to be a conpiracy nut, but if you think that most news agencies don't have political leanings and that that doesn't slant how they present news to you, then you need to do a reality check.)
I just hope that everyone involved -- dumbass violent protestors to control-freak government officials alike -- would just get their act together and start doing something that really does benefit everyone instead of just causing a bunch of problems, telling a bunch of lies, and making things more confusing than they need to be. Simplicity can be good, folks. It sucks to live in a world where you have to be sceptical of everything because so many people are so willing to mislead you to further their own agendas.
Oh yeah, and about CmdrTaco editorializing: no big deal. And I'm not saying that because I agree with his opinions (I don't -- which also isn't to say that my opinions are the inverse of his!) but because the last I was aware, Slashdot has never been, and I hope never will be, an objective source of news, if such a thing even actually exists. Get off of your high-journalistic-integrity horses.:)
Yeah, and Tetris is funny in that it's still so damn popular that it keeps being extended in new and interesting ways. Check out Tetrinet.Org for one of the cooler ways I've seen Tetris being played lately. And geez, it's addictive. Almost as good as the original Tengen version of Tetris. I never did like Nintendo's own version of Tetris for their 8 bit system as much as I liked Tengen's for some reason. Anyone remember that? I think I might still have the funky shaped cartridge around here still...
Seems dark humor is especially popular these days.:)
But anyway, call me obnoxiously optimistic, but I really REALLY hope that this fella is able to make his flight, survives, and everything goes well. You probably aren't wondering: why do I hope for this? I'll tell you. Because I want to do this too one day, damnit! When I was a little boy, I dreamt of flying into space the way Armstrong, Aldrin, Ride, and any of the other semi-mystical people the TV and my parents told me about, did.
If this guy takes this first step, as a civilian, whats to stop someone else (or maybe even he himself) from taking the next? And the next. And the next. Space travel is something I want to live to see myself, and I fear that if it stays completely in the hands of the governments that, as a civilian, I'll never get to fly there myself.
Sure, I could join the military and become a pilot or maybe transmogrify myself and become a NASA scientist or whatever, but I'd like to see the day when Joe Average Person can buy his space ticket, get on a flight, and take a jolly holiday to the moon or to the next inhabited planet over.
pri-vate (prI vet) adj. [[ME pryvat privatus, belonging to oneself, not to the state privare, to separate, deprive privus, separate, peculiar, prob. akin to OL pri: see PRIME]] 1 of, belonging to, or concerning a particular person or group; not common or general [private property, a private joke]2 not open to, intended for, or controlled by the public [a private school]3 for an individual person [a private room in a hospital]4 not holding public office [a private citizen]5 away from public view; secluded [a private dining room]6 not publicly or generally known; confidential [...]7 tending to keep one's personal matters to oneself [...]8 carried out on an individual basis [...]9 engaged in work independent of institutions, organizations, agencies, etc.
Nope, I don't see your definition of "private" in there. I think your definition of that word is just an extension of anonymity.
And how does DejaNews go out of it's way to find out who emails who when people are willingly using their service to send email to one-another? I mean, if you're that anal about it, I hope you don't ever send anyone mail via the postal service. How do you think some of the junk mail companies get your address, anyway? You think they don't have a deal with the post office to send random crap out to your own mailbox? (At least in the US, that's the case.) The only way to avoid that is to not get a mailbox in the first place or to just never use your mailbox. Pretty bloody likely, right?
Think of DejaNews as a sort of post office and the 'net in general as just a carrier (which is a half-way decent, though not fully correct, analogy IMHO) and my rant will make a bit of sense.
OK, now, assuming for argument's sake that Deja News runs on Unix, and since their whole business revolves around sent and received emails (that's sort of how one usually posts messages to USENET, right? With exceptions, of course.), I am not at all surprised at their logging what messages are sent and received, etc. My own system at home does that -- I use Unix. DUH.
But now the bigger issue: Privacy. What no one seems to think of is that allowing extensive anonymity on one's system does not a privacy policy make. These are two almost totally separate things. If you want privacy, you should be using PGP or GPG or some other form of encryption technology. If you want anonymity, go to the Anonymizer folks. (Although even they blur the line between the two.)
Privacy is a good thing. If I only want one person to be able to read an email intended for them, I'll bug them into getting and using PGP or something similarly strong. I hope that such people would bug me in return. It's also pretty hard to abuse someone's privacy. Invade it, yes. But cracking a PGP-encrypted message tends to be quite difficult and as long as you have good password policies, it's just that much more difficult.
Anonymity is also pretty good, to an extent. There are some times when you need to say something that would get you in trouble. (I'm talking more than the kind of stuff that gets you flamed; I mean the kind of stuff that'll get you fired from your job or something equally undesirable.) There needs to be that option. It is also very easy to abuse anonymity as is seen every day, over and over again, by spammers and flamers and trolls and their ilk on USENET and many other public "forum"-ish places. That is what needs to be controlled and I don't blame companies like Deja News who need to cover their asses so they can avoid being sued for doing any sort of logging. (Now, if they wanted your private PGP key and password, that's something entirely different and I won't go into that. Key escrow sucks, bigtime. (Okay, so I lied. But I won't get into it any further than that. (Unless you provoke me.)))
The Hitchikers Guide series (of which I am now finishing up Mostly Harmless for probably the sixth time if not more than that) is definitely a damn near seminal literary work in my life. Well, it's a load of giggles anyway.:) I'm absolutely ecstatic that something like h2g2.com is taking off! I can finally horn in on the act, as it were. Yay!
Except...
Damn the exceptions.
It would seem that, after browsing about a bit and then actually registering, I need to use MS Blisternet Exploder 4.whatever to actually do anything remotely useful . What a bummer considering I'm not a Windows 9x or NT user (except for at work where I'm not officially supposed to mess around doing personal stuff anyway -- Yeah. Right.) I was so close to contributing to The Guide that I was practically salivating on my keyboard only to find that it's time to grab my towel and clean it off.
Holy cripes on toast! Does that ever suck.
But I still have high hopes. Maybe it will be fixed for those of us in the Real World who maybe don't use much MS-anything and who even from time to time use browsers that aren't even graphical. (Yup, the Real World can be a pretty ecletic place. Kinda neat, isn't it?) Well, maybe...
Sigh.
Re: The real reason why they kill
on
Why Kids Kill
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· Score: 1
Wow. That description was almost like a walk down memory lane for me. My younger youth (I'm still pretty young here!) was an awful lot like that -- the overwhelming need to "fit in" for a long time followed by the resigning thought that I would never "fit in". And all the other stuff.
I'll admit, I've even had thoughts of killing the people who picked on me and of killing myself. Thankfully, I didn't do either but I'm frightened at how close I came at times.
Fortunately for me, I've developed this sort of mental defect: I realized that if all those people didn't care about me, what was I doing worrying about them? I'll just return the favor. Consequently, I'm a very cynical and sarcastic person, but I'm a lot happier and actually enjoy my life. I don't hate anybody, I just don't care about them. (Excepting, of course, those few people whom I am proud to call my friends.)
So, I think I understand how those kids were feeling. I don't agree with what they did; I wish the outcome of their situation could have been -- well -- more like mine. And it's hard to place blame because in thinking about my own past, there are things that other people did and there are things that I did to myself to exacerbate the way I was feeling. It's hard to tell what did more damage.
So I've given up on placing blame. It doesn't do any good anyway; it just wastes time and energy. I just try to fix the problems. That's all I can really do in this world anyway...
This is based wholly off of observation and not actual experience (as in actually attending a post-secondary (tertiary?) educational institution), per se, so please bear that in mind as you read this.
That being said, the largest reason I see anybody getting a college degree is to potentially make more money. No one gives a hoot anymore about doing a job they love as much as a job they can hopefully tolerate and get paid a good wage for. Why do you think there are so many truly unqualified people with good paying positions out there -- especially in tech-related fields?
Computer technology is the boom at the moment. It is very profitable, and every schmuck out there with enough dough to get into a college or university that offers even the barest hint of a CS/IT/[insert current acronym] program wants to cash in on it. That is very saddening as I am someone who can't really afford to attend the school I would like (there's some truth to that saying, "it takes money to make money") and who actually loves technology and science enough that I spend most, if not all, of my free time learning and absorbing everything that I can. And from some of the people I've known, I'm doing a better job at teaching myself than many colleges out there are teaching their students.
I love this stuff. I'm never going to worry about not having that piece of paper as long as I can do what I love to do because chances are, if I'm that driven by it, I'll do something with it anyway. College degree be damned; I can be successful in all the ways that matter by doing it my way.
Of course, I could just be suffering from acute over-confidence and megalomania.:)
Slashdot Mirror
*shrug* Some people just believe that freedom shouldn't come at the cost of coercion. They believe that their code is as free as it can ever be; and they are right. The code they have written is, indeed, freely available to the entire world. Does that necessarily have to mean that the code someone else writes has to be as well? Should it not be that other person's choice as to whether they want to release their own sweat and blood upon the world in whatever form they choose?
You see, to put it very simply, it boils down to where you want your freedoms to lay. People who choose licenses such as the GNU's General Public License believe that the code should be free, as though it somehow has rights. Or maybe it's just a control issue. "I wrote that code and you have to do what I say if you want to use it! Don't like it? TOUGH! Write you own code then, infidel!"
However, people who choose less restrictive licenses like the BSD license care more about the freedom of the people who write the code. Those folks believe that if you write code, you should get to say what can be done with it, even if that code cannot stand on it's own as part of a separate program. Their code is their gift to the world, and nothing can lessen that gift -- no, not even incorporating their code into a proprietary, closed program. They're glad that that person or company could make good use of what they had written. (And who knows; when the money starts getting thin and the coder needs employment, how much do you want to bet the company who used her code will be a little more eager to give her a job?)
So, is your free software truly free?
Don't forget you can Ctrl+Click to do the same thing. Ctrl+Click on Macs is usually roughly equivalent of right-clicking in Windows or in X and since I always keep one hand laying on the keyboard (Who the hell can type and mouse at the same time? Better yet, who ever needs to?) at all times, I don't ever find the lack of a second mouse button while I'm using a Mac to be inconvenient.
That's a large problem that I see here; people are stuck in their Windows and X frames of mind when thinking about the issue of mouse buttons and believe that just because having multiple mouse buttons in X or Windows is either required or highly desired, it's the same if you're using a Mac. Simply not true.
You don't give up as much functionality as you might think. You just maybe have to learn a slightly different way to go about things.
Or go buy a multi-button mouse. OS X will default to Ctrl+Clicking for the right mouse button, and there are good drivers available for OS 9 that do the same. The Intellimouse drivers I got with my Intellimouse Optical are a great example. I still never use the right mouse button though, despite the availability.
I grew up in Windows and X. It's only fairly recently that I bought my first Mac (the very wonderful new iBook as a matter of fact) and I have quickly grown fond of only having to worry about a single mouse button and having my menus at the top of the screen. To each their own, but don't bitch about something you'll never use anyway.
Macs aren't inferior just because they only have a single mouse button; nor are they superior for it. It's just a different way of doing things and it suits some more than others. Single button-oriented OSes please me. Simplicity is a virtue.
Having Unix under the hood in OS X pleases me even more. :-)
Yes, I know this isn't what you meant. I just wanted to take the opportunity to be mildly facetious. It's the ass in me.
Definitely check them out! Rob and Mark are turbo studly and they smell good too. Don't forget to hassle Mark about when Asterisk is going to go into production. :-)
Ask him a series of smart rhetorical questions and lead him to his own answer. That is the best way to get these smartie-pantses in our government to realize exactly what is going on; make them figure it out for themselves, but with a good helping hand. It's just like back in high school when you had that pain-in-the-ass teacher who would ask you a lot of rhetorical questions to try to get you to think about a topic in a certain way. That still works out here in the real world, and it happens to be a key tool lawyers and politicians use when discussing or debating a topic.
The fact is that almost everyone with any sort of free time has a hobby. ("Hobby" being defined as an activity that one does in their spare time which does not achieve remuneration for the action.) That hobby might be tending a garden, or watching television, or playing the cello, or having sex, or cataloging astronomical objects in the sky. This also means that there could be people who dedicate their spare time to writing computer programs and helping others to write programs or use their computers better.
Asking a hacker why she gives away her code is like asking a nun why she feeds the poor and gives charity. It's the belief that you're hopefully helping to make the world better and the knowledge that you will be remembered, at least in some small way, for your efforts in time to come. In even more simplistic terms, it's a warm fuzzy combined with an ego stroking. You just can't beat that feeling; even chasing money never feels that good. (Having tried both, I choose the warm fuzzy and ego stroke.)
Now that just isn't true and you know it. At my place of employment we have systems ranging in speed from 233 MHz up to 500 MHz and not a single person has complained that their latest version of Microsoft Office runs way slower on one machine than it does on another. Most don't notice a difference at all. Most don't even complain that their computer at work is way slower than their whizzy new fast computer their kids play games on at home.
Most of the machines around there are more than three years old and aren't looking to have anything other than the RAM in them upgraded any time soon. The most common kinds of software, that is office software, email software, web browsers, the occasional MP3 decoder, and the like simply do not put a very great load on a system. The greatest speed increase we've seen was simply by upgrading all the systems to have 128 MB or more of RAM. I'd say current day applications are more sensitive to the amount of fast memory available than to the speed of the main CPU.
And while doing things like encoding MP3s and editing digital video is getting more and more popular (although there still are NOT many people who do the latter -- have you seen the price of digital video cameras?), even those feats can be accomplished fairly rapidly on what is now a low-end or middle-of-the-road computer. Software isn't THAT much more demanding because users aren't that much more demanding yet; only gamers are.
You're technically right that games aren't the only thing that drive computers. But in all practicality they are. Your average person out there couldn't tell the difference between a 600 MHz system and a 1.2 GHz system if they were sat down in front of them and weren't told which was which (and weren't allowed to peek in any system control panels!) until they tried to play a game.
Personally, I think you need to get a grip and not get all hung up over similar sounding words. So what if "AtheOS" sounds a little like the word "atheist"? If you say, "I've got dandruff, some of it itches," with the proper tone, inflection and speed it sounds almost exactly like you're saying "God damn it, son of bitches." (It's really easy to do; try it.[1]) Does that mean you'll never use the former phrase because it's blasphemous?
Of course not. Let's not be silly.
Lighten up, dude. It's no more unfortunate than the existence of any word, real or otherwise, that could be mistakenly heard as any other word you happen to find offensive. Stop whining or stop speaking English. You're going to run up against this problem again and again in your life if you're so sensitive about it.
This isn't meant as a flame, just an honest (perhaps a little brutally so, I admit) opinion about your apparent hypersensitivity to the fact that English words can and often do rhyme.
__
[1] And believe it or not, a Baptist minister taught me that phrase and he is as honestly devout as I've ever seen a person be. He just happens to not be easily offended.
Thanks! For a moment there I thought that I'd slipped into a parallel universe where corny jokes weren't appreciated. But, of course, we all know that THAT isn't true. ;) *braces for thrown produce*
Politicians are always quick to grab the credit for things that weren't their doing; that's what makes them politicians. So of course Al Gore is the father of the internet (or whatever). But even if that isn't really true, we still owe him a debt of gratitude for his advances to computer science. After all, he did invent the Al-Gore-ithm too, right? :-P
Oh, wait... That's damning, isn't it?
Clients aren't the only thing to think about as far as the Internet is concerned: content providers also hold a lot of sway. And don't forget the backbone providers out there too like Sprint and MCI and UUNet. I'll make you a bet that they don't have many NT-based routers. And I don't think any of the root DNS servers run NT either. MS would have to cope with those as well or there would probably be a tremendous outage of name server service. (Who would want to try and memorize an ugly IPv4 or IPv6 address? And I'd love to see Microsoft try to run their own root DNS servers on NT with the same level of quality the current root servers provide.)
Can Microsoft manipulate IPv6 which looks to be a very important future protocol? (Surely more important than DHCP is.) We'll see. And that doesn't even mean that they're going to try. However, if they do, unless they can strong-arm a lot of content providers and data connection backbone providers, they're going to have a very rough time at it and could stand to lose a lot of customers if they screw up.
jer
Human knowledge just isn't ultimate. There's always a chance of discovering something new about the universe that we are a part of which leads me to think that just because I can't detect or prove something right now does not mean I (or someone else) won't detect or prove it in the future.
Of course, I'm still not likely to believe some of the garbage dogma that so many others are more than willing to stuff down my throat. But I leave my definition of reality rather open-ended because there's been more than once that I myself and humans in general have been proven wrong in their belief about what reality really is.
But that's just crazy ol' me. :)
jer
- You must be older than dirt! Can I have your autograph Mr. #691?
Oh, and I forgot to mention smartasses...jer
- thanks for the support jacoff.
Actually, I'm glad someone finally noticed why I chose the username I did.jer
On the bright side, where else can you see such a collection of flamers and trolls every single day of the week, every hour of the day? :)
jer
In case you hadn't noticed, Windows, by default, in no way supports the LPD protocol, no standard printer drivers that I've ever seen support that kind of functionality, and HP themselves usually distributes third party NT-based server software with their network printers to allow SMB clients to connect to that server which acts as sort of proxy to the network printer itself. All this product does is replace that server software with a box you can easily mount in a rack, give a couple of IP addresses to, and just go instead of having to mess around with complicated software installations and risk crashing that unstable NT box you've decided to use as the SMB (not LPD -- note the difference) print server.
If anything, HP deserves credit (yay HP!) for what they've done with this product, not derided. (And their marketing department looks to be pretty on the ball here, so don't give them crap either.) They're using Linux to provide functionality easily which would otherwise be very difficult if the customer relied strictly on Windows. Your Unix box can still print just fine with this product around because it CAN use the LPD protocol. Your cubicle-mate, however, can't because, if anything, his stupid Windows box probably thinks LPD is a psychoactive drug or something and so, with the HP Jet Direct 4000 Printing Appliance, he now gets the same functionality out of the network printer that you do, and the boss doesn't have to spend $3k on yet another server that has to be configured with a whole OS and all that goes along with that. Or, alternatively, he doesn't have to dance with Samba on a Unix server he may already have set up, taking away resources from the already heavy Oracle database running on it. Or, alternatively to that, he doesn't have to rely on the Jet Admin software being installed on an NT workstation that might possibly crash often or get misconfigured or be prone to any of an infinity of pilot errors. Sounds like a good deal to me.
No, this isn't ironic, CmdrTaco. Y'all just don't do your research and are quick to jump a reactionary gun at anything that doesn't just gush about Linux and is designed to support Windows exclusively. In this case, it's only Windows that needs this support because your Linux box can already do what Windows can't.
Geez.
jer
But one thing just strikes me as odd here. There are plenty of examples of people making clones of clients to utilize proprietary servers and their respective protocols (think ICQ and AOL's Oscar protocol, folks), but there aren't so many people making clones of servers which proprietary clients can utilize. Is there much of a difference between the two? You're still cloning proprietary software and interfaces either way, and in the case of ICQ and Oscar at least, packet sniffing sure doesn't seem to be an illegal way to develop a client -- though I don't know if packet sniffing is all that the fellowes at HackersQuest are doing...
IANAL by far, but I am kind of curious what a good lawyer with some international law experience would have to say about all this fun stuff.
jer
Anyhoo, about the Philly stuff, I'm having a hard time believing 2600's story because it seems to me that they are just as likely to put their own ultra-biased spin on things as any government party that would lie and cheat to get me to believe an outright falsehood. I'm also not buying any stories of blaming the police for violence. There is almost always more to it than just "the police are bad". Remember that they're a government supported agency -- they take orders. Usually from local governments, but higher governments have influence on local governments too you know.
I'm wholly unqualified to be much of a judge as to what went on as I don't live in Philly, but at the same time I don't put a lot of weight into people drawing parallels between Philly and the Seattle WTO stuff. I live near Seattle. I know a lot of what went on there. And I realize that the stories that got told might not always be the full truth. Especially when there are politics involved. (Not to be a conpiracy nut, but if you think that most news agencies don't have political leanings and that that doesn't slant how they present news to you, then you need to do a reality check.)
I just hope that everyone involved -- dumbass violent protestors to control-freak government officials alike -- would just get their act together and start doing something that really does benefit everyone instead of just causing a bunch of problems, telling a bunch of lies, and making things more confusing than they need to be. Simplicity can be good, folks. It sucks to live in a world where you have to be sceptical of everything because so many people are so willing to mislead you to further their own agendas.
Oh yeah, and about CmdrTaco editorializing: no big deal. And I'm not saying that because I agree with his opinions (I don't -- which also isn't to say that my opinions are the inverse of his!) but because the last I was aware, Slashdot has never been, and I hope never will be, an objective source of news, if such a thing even actually exists. Get off of your high-journalistic-integrity horses. :)
*goes to dig through memories*
But anyway, call me obnoxiously optimistic, but I really REALLY hope that this fella is able to make his flight, survives, and everything goes well. You probably aren't wondering: why do I hope for this? I'll tell you. Because I want to do this too one day, damnit! When I was a little boy, I dreamt of flying into space the way Armstrong, Aldrin, Ride, and any of the other semi-mystical people the TV and my parents told me about, did.
If this guy takes this first step, as a civilian, whats to stop someone else (or maybe even he himself) from taking the next? And the next. And the next. Space travel is something I want to live to see myself, and I fear that if it stays completely in the hands of the governments that, as a civilian, I'll never get to fly there myself.
Sure, I could join the military and become a pilot or maybe transmogrify myself and become a NASA scientist or whatever, but I'd like to see the day when Joe Average Person can buy his space ticket, get on a flight, and take a jolly holiday to the moon or to the next inhabited planet over.
Is that really so much to dream?
- pri-vate (prI vet) adj. [[ME pryvat privatus, belonging to oneself, not to the state privare, to separate, deprive privus, separate, peculiar, prob. akin to OL pri: see PRIME]] 1 of, belonging to, or concerning a particular person or group; not common or general [private property, a private joke] 2 not open to, intended for, or controlled by the public [a private school] 3 for an individual person [a private room in a hospital] 4 not holding public office [a private citizen] 5 away from public view; secluded [a private dining room] 6 not publicly or generally known; confidential [...] 7 tending to keep one's personal matters to oneself [...] 8 carried out on an individual basis [...] 9 engaged in work independent of institutions, organizations, agencies, etc.
Nope, I don't see your definition of "private" in there. I think your definition of that word is just an extension of anonymity.And how does DejaNews go out of it's way to find out who emails who when people are willingly using their service to send email to one-another? I mean, if you're that anal about it, I hope you don't ever send anyone mail via the postal service. How do you think some of the junk mail companies get your address, anyway? You think they don't have a deal with the post office to send random crap out to your own mailbox? (At least in the US, that's the case.) The only way to avoid that is to not get a mailbox in the first place or to just never use your mailbox. Pretty bloody likely, right?
Think of DejaNews as a sort of post office and the 'net in general as just a carrier (which is a half-way decent, though not fully correct, analogy IMHO) and my rant will make a bit of sense.
But now the bigger issue: Privacy. What no one seems to think of is that allowing extensive anonymity on one's system does not a privacy policy make. These are two almost totally separate things. If you want privacy, you should be using PGP or GPG or some other form of encryption technology. If you want anonymity, go to the Anonymizer folks. (Although even they blur the line between the two.)
Privacy is a good thing. If I only want one person to be able to read an email intended for them, I'll bug them into getting and using PGP or something similarly strong. I hope that such people would bug me in return. It's also pretty hard to abuse someone's privacy. Invade it, yes. But cracking a PGP-encrypted message tends to be quite difficult and as long as you have good password policies, it's just that much more difficult.
Anonymity is also pretty good, to an extent. There are some times when you need to say something that would get you in trouble. (I'm talking more than the kind of stuff that gets you flamed; I mean the kind of stuff that'll get you fired from your job or something equally undesirable.) There needs to be that option. It is also very easy to abuse anonymity as is seen every day, over and over again, by spammers and flamers and trolls and their ilk on USENET and many other public "forum"-ish places. That is what needs to be controlled and I don't blame companies like Deja News who need to cover their asses so they can avoid being sued for doing any sort of logging. (Now, if they wanted your private PGP key and password, that's something entirely different and I won't go into that. Key escrow sucks, bigtime. (Okay, so I lied. But I won't get into it any further than that. (Unless you provoke me.)))
Get it straight, folks:
- Privacy != Anonymity
Mmmkay?Anonymity != Privacy
Except...
Damn the exceptions.
It would seem that, after browsing about a bit and then actually registering, I need to use MS Blisternet Exploder 4.whatever to actually do anything remotely useful . What a bummer considering I'm not a Windows 9x or NT user (except for at work where I'm not officially supposed to mess around doing personal stuff anyway -- Yeah. Right.) I was so close to contributing to The Guide that I was practically salivating on my keyboard only to find that it's time to grab my towel and clean it off.
Holy cripes on toast! Does that ever suck.
But I still have high hopes. Maybe it will be fixed for those of us in the Real World who maybe don't use much MS-anything and who even from time to time use browsers that aren't even graphical. (Yup, the Real World can be a pretty ecletic place. Kinda neat, isn't it?) Well, maybe...
Sigh.
I'll admit, I've even had thoughts of killing the people who picked on me and of killing myself. Thankfully, I didn't do either but I'm frightened at how close I came at times.
Fortunately for me, I've developed this sort of mental defect: I realized that if all those people didn't care about me, what was I doing worrying about them? I'll just return the favor. Consequently, I'm a very cynical and sarcastic person, but I'm a lot happier and actually enjoy my life. I don't hate anybody, I just don't care about them. (Excepting, of course, those few people whom I am proud to call my friends.)
So, I think I understand how those kids were feeling. I don't agree with what they did; I wish the outcome of their situation could have been -- well -- more like mine. And it's hard to place blame because in thinking about my own past, there are things that other people did and there are things that I did to myself to exacerbate the way I was feeling. It's hard to tell what did more damage.
So I've given up on placing blame. It doesn't do any good anyway; it just wastes time and energy. I just try to fix the problems. That's all I can really do in this world anyway...
Jeramey
That being said, the largest reason I see anybody getting a college degree is to potentially make more money. No one gives a hoot anymore about doing a job they love as much as a job they can hopefully tolerate and get paid a good wage for. Why do you think there are so many truly unqualified people with good paying positions out there -- especially in tech-related fields?
Computer technology is the boom at the moment. It is very profitable, and every schmuck out there with enough dough to get into a college or university that offers even the barest hint of a CS/IT/[insert current acronym] program wants to cash in on it. That is very saddening as I am someone who can't really afford to attend the school I would like (there's some truth to that saying, "it takes money to make money") and who actually loves technology and science enough that I spend most, if not all, of my free time learning and absorbing everything that I can. And from some of the people I've known, I'm doing a better job at teaching myself than many colleges out there are teaching their students.
I love this stuff. I'm never going to worry about not having that piece of paper as long as I can do what I love to do because chances are, if I'm that driven by it, I'll do something with it anyway. College degree be damned; I can be successful in all the ways that matter by doing it my way.
Of course, I could just be suffering from acute over-confidence and megalomania. :)