I'm still at a loss to figure out what the point of the OSDN personals is... Slashdot has what, like a million readers of which 12 are female? That means they each have thousands of potential geeks to date. The odds are good, but the goods are odd.
What is the point of calling anyone who disagrees with your position a "closed minded homophobic freak"? The poster was characterizing their moral values, not fear, so the "phobia" part is absurd -- a childish "you don't agree with me 'cause you must be chicken, nya nya nya". And of course the "closed minded... freak" part is even more ridiculous. How open minded are YOU being to people with alternate viewpoints?
That being said, the underlying reason gay marriage is such a controversial topic is that marriage is of a dual nature, both a religious vow and a legal status, and this topic underscores the dischotomy between the two aspects. We don't argue about gay drivers licences because that is completely a civil matter, or gay baptisms because that is entirely for the church to decide, but a real look at marriage must address both parts. And that can potentially deny someone a legal standing, or make a mockery of one of the oldest religious ceremonies, someone is going to get upset however you handle the issue. Understand why those with different views are upset, rather than dismissing them as "freaks".
Your argument is also incomplete. You have friends who are gay, so you want to extend the concept of marriage in order to include them. But redefining marriage as a union between any two people is just as arbitrary as defining it between a man and a woman. What if someone wants a marriage between a man, his father, two women, a child, and a dead goat? Should the law recognize this union as well, or are you content merely to exchange one arbitrary definition for one you are more comfortable with?
Hmmm... maybe there should be a law that requires election districts to have the minimum possible perimeter.:-)
I've wondered about a similar approach myself. The absolute minimum perimeter division into N zones may not be the best approach since the maps couldn't take into account things like rivers and highways that might be convenient to separate zones, nor would it factor in population density. However, it seems that it would be possible to specify rules that would lead to non-Gerrymanderable zones. For instance:
Any member or group of members within (legislative body that does the districting) may propose a map.
To be a valid map, a proposal must divide the region into N districts.
To be a valid map, the most populous and least populous regions may not differ in population by more than X percent.
Of the valid map proposals put forth, the one with the least total perimeter for all districts will be selected.
Of course I don't put it past politicians to screw up even something like this. They would probably wait till five minutes before the final selection and propose the most favorable map to themselves they could come up with that has 1 mile less perimeter than the map they stole from the other party the night before.
Not directly related to display panels, but since we're talking about LEDs here, something I've been curious about...
A few years ago LEDs were these dim little lights that might come on to tell you that your hard drive is being accessed or your caps lock is on. Lately we see products like LED traffic lights, LED brake lights on cars, LED flashlights , etc. that are vastly brighter than the old LEDs we've seen for years. What sort of breakthrough or advances did the LED industry make to allow such bright, daylight-visible LEDs to become possible?
I think that any biometric or RFID authentication technology should be combined with a PIN. It's just common sense to combine a secuity token that you posses with a PIN that you must memorize. This doesn't lead to perfect security, but it wraps the physical posession of an authentication token in another layer of security.
Unfortunately, the trend seems to be removing layers of security for financial transactions to make them seem more convenient, rather than doing anything to make them secure. When I'm using my Visa card, few merchants care about ID, especially for purchases under $100, and I don't even remember the last time one checked the signature. Really instills me with confidence that they're doing their part to keep the system safe from theft and fraud.
The result was that Nixon got elected and the Republican party became the party of pandering to racists. I have no idea why they wanted to do that, long term it is a major handicap. Population trends are not good for the Republican party.
I disagree. I think that on the whole, if you were to take a sampling across the political spectrum and ask whether people should be treated the same regardless of their race or color, you would get a lot more "yes" replies from Republicans. Democrats, on the other hand, would reject this philosophy in favor of an affirmative-action approach, swinging the pendulum of discrimination the other way instead of putting it behind us once and for all. Unfortunately for them, I think the former position has broader (though perhaps less vocal) support among mainstream voters.
So if by "racists" you mean Nazis and Klan members, then perhaps they do vote Republican, but if you look at racism in the broader sense of basing the treatment and opportunities you give to people on the color of their skin, then the Democratic party would certainly be the larger bastion for racism in America.
I don't know about gaming on an HDTV, but I have a widescreen on my laptop (1680 x 1050 WSXGA) and it hasn't been of much advantage to gaming. Most games let you pick from common 4:3 screen ratios like 1024 x 768, which then get stretched out a bit to fill the wider screen. The aspect ratios being off is annoying but not nearly as noticable as I would have expected.
I hope that between the increasing popularity of non-4:3 screens and fact that gaming graphics rendered from 3D models these days instead of just some predrawn sprite bitmap, better support for nonstandard screen resolutions becomes more common in the near future. We're there for desktops, but games still make a few too many assumptions about resolution and aspect ratio for widescreen to be the way to go.
AFAIK you cannot trademark common English words. The example I've always seen is that you cannot trademark the word "orange", but you could trademark a unique phrase containing the word "orange".
IANAL either, but I believe that the way trademarks work (in the U.S. anyway) is that you can trademark common words, within the context of a particular domain. For example, within the context of computers, only a certain company can call their products "Apple" (a common English word), but now that that company is also getting into the music business, they've come into legal conflict with the company that has the rights to the word over in that industry.
Limiting the trademark to a particular domain like this leads to many unrelated companies sharing the same common word, which usually works out okay as long as they are in separate businesses... there might be an airline, a pizza place, and a lawn care service that all use the same common word for their name, but this is unlikely to create any confusion on the part of the customers. There might be a little resentment over who gets the.com name, but that's a different topic.
Broader protection applies to companies that make up a word out of the blue instead of using a common one. For instance, it would be unwise to call your new business "Exxon" even if it has nothing to do with petroleum, because that's a word unique to a particular company. You might on the other hand be able to use the word "Shell".
As a side note, for common words to be used in a trademark, the use of the word within that domain should be unique. "Apple" pretty much had no meaning in the context of computers before that company took the name, so any reference to "Apple" within the field of computers presumably refers to their trademark. On the other hand, "Windows" was a common term within computing for a type of GUI element, already had meaning within that domain, and never should have been granted as a trademark to the Microsoft Corportation.
I find it troubling when the shortcomings of the electronic voting schemes currently being used are portrayed in a partisan perspective, to illustrate how evil Bush is, or or conspiracies to steal elections, or claims like that. Approaching the issue as a political attack ploy might mobilize the left to action, but will only cause backlash from conservatives and drive them to support these voting technologies, if only to oppose the political attack.
In truth, having fair, verifiable, open elections with accurate vote counts is not a liberal thing or a conservative thing, it's something that everyone participating in a democratic process should be striving for.
Too often, voting issues are used not simply to elect political leaders, but as a political tool in their own right. For instance, in Florida in 2000, liberals push for recount after recount hoping to eventually get a result favorable to their candidate, yet in California 2003, the same left tries to halt a recall election until all precincts have electronic voting machines that would make such scrutiny of the paper trail impossible. Do they like double checking votes, or not, or do they just pick whatever is most advantageous for their candidate? Obviously, counterexamples of inconsistent attitudes towards voting by conservatives could be put forth as well, the point is that the voting process can become politicized and that is bad.
I just want a good, honest election. I want a paper trail that can be used to verify the winner according to some specific, predefined criteria. I want the ballots secure from tampering, hacking, fraud, and such. I want every part of the process, from how the votes will be tallied to how the electoral college works to how the voting machines work (including full source code) available for full public review and discourse. I do not want these things because I am conservative or liberal, but because I believe in a representative system of government. The candidate I hope will prevail will not be shared by someone of a differing ideology, but my vision for the voting process itself certainly could be.
When cassettes came along, they offered an advantage that appealed to customers: they were small enough to take with you.
CD's offered improved sound quality and much better ease of use (no more fast forwarding, rewinding, or turning the media over to hear the rest). They also avoid the glitches or pops that other media develop under normal wear and tear - CD's only scratch from mishandling, not from the laser wearing them out. These advantages allowed them to overcome their (artificially) higher price and initial read-only limitation
Other media have been proposed but not caught on. 8 tracks briefly flourished, but offered no advantages over a cassette tape, yet were bulkier and more annoying to use. Mini-discs offer only small size, which isn't enough. Audio DVD's have improved sound compared to CD, but this hasn't proven sufficient reason for anyone but an audiophile niche to take much interest.
On the other hand, MP3 has slightly lower sound quality than a CD, but has gained widespread acceptance, much to the RIAA's chagrin. Ease of use surpasses even the CD, and the portability problem has been solved - a person's entire music collection can fit into their pocket, or listened to across a (high bandwidth) network with no physical media at all. A bonus for the user is the upgrade path. Rather than it being easier for the user to buy all the music they already legally own/license/whatever over again, a CD ripper is all that is needed to move your previous investment into the modern times.
In this landscape, where does this new format fit in? What does it bring to the table that would compel joe user to embrace it at all, much less buy all his existing music over again? Sure, it's small, but not as small as an MP3. Manufacturers might bump the audio quality up to THX level, but that would only give a benefit to those who have both a discerning ear and high end audio equipment. Price could be dropped to entice people to switch, but the RIAA isn't that intelligent. Extras and bonus materials could be offered, a la the DVD, but that would take a lot of work from the publisher and probably be passed on as a higher price, further stacking the odds against acceptance.
In short, I don't see what advantage this would offer would be that is compelling enough to get anyone to adopt it.
Why must it be so difficult? I'm not a Linux newbie, and should have no difficulty installing another distro to try out, but Debian is worrying me.
I do a little research, and find that debian-stable has pretty dated packages, so debian-unstable is what I need. So far so good. Much of the Debian discussion refers to versions by codename, so I look around for a bit and learn how "sid", "sarge", "woody" and such map to stable and unstable. Now I know I want to try debian-unstable, a.k.a "sid". I go to the "Getting Debian page to look for a mirror with some ISOs. They encourage me to use jigdo to download it. I don't want to use jigdo. Maybe when I download the next version, but for now please keep this simple without throwing in extra steps. I click on the "fetch full CD images link" instead. All the mirrors listed for unstable are in Europe and Asia, whereas I am in the United States. I frown and click on one and am presented a list of the 11 ISO's for sid. WTF is in Debian that takes 11 CDs? I research a bit more to see if this is really what I need before initiating this multi-gigabyte download, and find a page saying you shouldn't install unstable directly, but install stable first then switch your install over. More annoyance, Fedora Core doesn't tell you to install RH9 first then change to an unstable version, if I know up front that I want an unstable version I should be able to just install it.
At this point I began to rethink whether I really wanted to try Debian enough to deal with this. I hadn't even begun the install process yet, but this is still much further than Random Windows User would get.
Debian advocates, please help me out. I'm interested in giving debian-unstable a shot, but if it's going to be much harder than "download two or three iso's, burn, boot, install, see if you like it" that makes me wary right off the bat. Am I going about things the wrong way? Can someone point me in the right direction as to the simplest and most straightforward approach to getting debian-unstable onto a system to try out?
Be careful, today is the 228th anniversary of the United States Marine Corps, you're likely to incur the wrath of the jarheads with that kind of comment...
It's annoying enough to know that when you're sitting at a computer using a browser to surf the Web, a couple requests a day will get hijacked to the spam site.
But what about automated HTTP requests? You might be running some script to wget the latest greatest kernel source and instead it downloads a piece of spam. The hijacked HTTP request might come in the middle of a Gentoo build, or as you mirror a Web site and have a page replaced with an advertisement. You could be tunneling some other protocol over HTTP, and then who knows what this would do.
Very stupid and annoying of Belkin. If they wanted to make their parental control thing so easy to use, just include a CD that says "Put this CD into any computer on your network to enable parental control on your new Belkin router!" Newbies can figure that out. I don't want my own router launching some kind of spoofing attack on me three times a day just so I can view more spam.
While the appeal of stealing somebody's car and their money at the same time is quite apparent, this scam seems like it would be more effective if the perpetrator kept their ruse more subtle. Buy the car, pay with a counterfeit cashiers check. The overpaying and wanting cash back part may generate cash for the criminal in the process, but it's a definite red flag that something is amiss. A person supposedly owes them $20k but is too lazy to pay it in two separate cashiers checks? Yeah, whatever.
I can see people being fooled because the bank told them the funds cleared and then rescinded them, not everyone knows banks are that lax about confirming payments. A scammer could steal a lot of cars that way. But the fact that it is more profitable for them to throw in this implausable twist and go for the cash as well makes a sad statement about the gullibility of the public.
I'd played around a lot with the Fedora Core beta (Severn) over the weekend, and wanted to describe my experience a bit for those thinking of going that route. Purely anecdotal, your mileage my vary, and all that stuff.
I initially installed over an existing RH9 install, and also tried an install on a fresh partition. The install process was very similar and it upgraded my existing packages nicely, and did a good job of preserving configuration.
Fedora also has a couple channels on redhat.com for up2date, they work a lot like the one from RH9, but with newer versions of the software. Initially I was subscribed to the Rawhide channel, but after updating up2date itself, it changed to a Fedora Core channel that offered the same stuff. Four of the packages (the desktop backgrounds, indexhtml, and some http configuration package) did not have the right GPG signature, which causes up2date to prompt you (annoying during a very long download that should be able to complete unattended), and can also make up2date hang when it goes to install those packages.
On a positive note, Fedora can recognize my Broadcom ethernet on its own now, with RH9 I had to download and install a separate driver.
Red Hat Graphical Boot (rhgb) is pretty hit or miss, I had it working briefly but it broke again. Looked pretty good while it was working, but was hard to keep working. Also didn't appear to have much in the way of man pages.
The system would sometimes slow way down when booting as it got to probing modules and/or detecting new hardware. I got errors about it trying to install the floppy.o module (floppyless system), and sometimes lots of stuff scrolling by about other block-major devices not being found.
The Linuxant Driverloader program I need to use my WiFi card installs under the 2.4.22.2088 kernel, but after doing up2date and getting the latest (2.4.22.2115, iirc) it would not install. Even under 2088 it gave me problems I had not encountered when running it on a RH9 system that had been updated to the same kernel.
When doing an update install, it adds a new entry to your existing bootloader, as would be expected. When doing a fresh install, it seems to only let you use GRUB, which could be an annoyance to those who prefer LILO. Of course you could change it after the fact.
To sum it all up, Fedora Core is for the most part quite slick and I really liked that it has more current versions of the packages than RH9, which has to play it safe for the corporate world. However, I experienced enough frustrations to have doubts as to whether Fedora Core is really as ready as it needs to be to take over from Red Hat 9.
Yes, V-chips are mandated by law for a TV, but what I'm talking about is a big monitor that forgoes the other features of a TV. If you have no tuner, just a big screen displaying an s-video feed from your sattelite box, what would the v-chip do? The device I want knows would know nothing about channels, ratings, etc. it just takes a signal from your cable box, dvd player, av reciever or whatever and displays it.
For a home-theater setup, most of the features already in a TV are unnecessary. You don't need a tuner, the sattelite or cable box does that. You don't need speakers and sound circuitry, it'll be hooked up to a surround-sound stereo anyway. Most people also don't need a v-chip, closed-circuit decoder, and similar fluff. Would consumers be better off if manufacturers would offer a version without all this? It would basically be a huge 42" monitor, without as fine a dot pitch. Give it inputs for composite, svideo, dvi, and vga. Does anyone make them already? Would it cost noticably less than a comparable TV? How much of the cost of a TV is the actual display, and how much is for the frivilous features?
Over the past few weeks Knoppix has gotten me out of a couple tough spots.
First, I was setting up RedHat on my laptop. Unfortunately, RH9 came with no drivers for my ethernet or wifi. No problem, I'll just go online and... Uh oh, Catch-22, I can't download network drivers till I get online. Fortunately, Knoppix recognized the ethernet card and got me up and running, I downloaded to the hard drive, rebooted to RedHat, and set it up.
True, I could have also solved that using sneakernet / USB drive / whatever, but the next time Knoppix helped me it was more indispensable. I was adjusting my LILO settings and came up with a conf file that ran just fine in lilo, but caused a kernel panic every time I booted with it. No rescue disc either, being a floppyless computer. I booted Knoppix, fixed the lilo.conf, mounted my/boot partition, and made a working bootloader.
Anyway, Knoppix is good to have around. When something is messed up, it will get you up and running, see all your files, and see most of the hardware out there too. Plus of course the obvious Linux evangilism uses.
Of course Slashdotters will think geeks would make great political leaders. Plato thought "philosopher-kings" would be the ideal rulers. Nobles thought the aristocracy had a "divine right" to rule others. Throughout history, there have been rich people advocating plutocracy, priests who liked theocracy, generals using coups to establish martial law, and so on. In the end everyone thinks that their own social class is uniquely qualified to run things, because that's the perspective they're used to looking at the world from. If what you have is a hammer, every problem looks like the proverbial nail.
I first got a HP48SX in 1989 (or maybe 90) and it was very amazing technology. Since then they've done the GX and the 49, which are nice improvements but basically just small incremental upgrades, which is disappointing considering all the new technology that has come out during that time period. Calculators basically hit their peak and then stagnated for over a dozen years and couting.
Here's what I think the ubercalculator of 2003 should be. The technology exists to make it, sure it wouldn't be cheap, but what nerd wouldn't want one...
I'd design such a beast as basically a PDA, but specialized in serious math rather than tracking appointments. Give it a fold-open design with a scientific calculator keypad on one part and a full-color TFT QVGA screen. A nice 400-mhz or so processor to manipulate even symbolic equations quickly. An operating environment that resembles neither a daytimer or a more primitive calculator, but best described as Pocket Mathematica. USB, IRDA, and Bluetooth connectivity, a nice recharging cradle, and have it come preloaded with a a vast collection of equations, reference charts, and such from a variety of disciplines... mathematics, physics, chemistry, engineering, statistics, etc.
No, no professor in their right mind would let you use such a monstrosity on a test, but I imagine there are other geeks out there who would want it. Or maybe I've just dreamed up a calculator so excessive you'd be better off using a small laptop./shrug
While some people have given the parent a flamebait mod and hostile replies, the poster makes a good (and humorous) point. Apple is not typically thought of in terms best price performance any more than, say, Cadillac is in the car industry. Macs are bought by those willing to pay a premium for that distinct Apple stying, OSX's slick interface with the power of Unix behind the scenes, the "it just works" factor, and so on. Those who don't care about the amenities and just want bang for the buck go for a Dell or eMachines or whatever. I personally find it quite interesting that a company whose image is more luxury than value and whose products are so much newer in this field than the Linux Beowulf clusters is able to achieve such an impressive level of performance for the cost.
Spokesangels for the Lord hinted at possible use of DRM in future holy scriptures, citing rampant piracy such as the appearance of the Ten Commandments on file-sharing networks almost immediately after their release on Mount Sinai.
Copyright reform advocates responded with complaints that a life plus 70 year copyright held by an immortal being was effectively perpetual.
God announced a new non-disclosure agreement for His prophets, claiming their writings often revealed "spoilers" and other proprietary information, including highly anticipated projects such as The End of the World.
Lawyers for Satan have filed for a filed for an injunction ceasing distribution of the Bible on the grounds that its negative portrayal of their client constitutes libel. They are also seeking unspecified damages.
Research into the Bible Code, hidden messages allegedly contained within God's intellectual property, promped threats of DMCA lawsuits for trying to break the scripture's encryption scheme. In a telephone interview from Heaven, God also suggested that this type of reverse-engineering was a violation of the end user licensing agreement. The situation took an unexpected twist when Darl McBride claimed to be the true owner of said intellectual property, and demanded $699 from God for its continued use...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm still at a loss to figure out what the point of the OSDN personals is... Slashdot has what, like a million readers of which 12 are female? That means they each have thousands of potential geeks to date. The odds are good, but the goods are odd.
What is the point of calling anyone who disagrees with your position a "closed minded homophobic freak"? The poster was characterizing their moral values, not fear, so the "phobia" part is absurd -- a childish "you don't agree with me 'cause you must be chicken, nya nya nya". And of course the "closed minded ... freak" part is even more ridiculous. How open minded are YOU being to people with alternate viewpoints?
That being said, the underlying reason gay marriage is such a controversial topic is that marriage is of a dual nature, both a religious vow and a legal status, and this topic underscores the dischotomy between the two aspects. We don't argue about gay drivers licences because that is completely a civil matter, or gay baptisms because that is entirely for the church to decide, but a real look at marriage must address both parts. And that can potentially deny someone a legal standing, or make a mockery of one of the oldest religious ceremonies, someone is going to get upset however you handle the issue. Understand why those with different views are upset, rather than dismissing them as "freaks".
Your argument is also incomplete. You have friends who are gay, so you want to extend the concept of marriage in order to include them. But redefining marriage as a union between any two people is just as arbitrary as defining it between a man and a woman. What if someone wants a marriage between a man, his father, two women, a child, and a dead goat? Should the law recognize this union as well, or are you content merely to exchange one arbitrary definition for one you are more comfortable with?
Hmmm... maybe there should be a law that requires election districts to have the minimum possible perimeter. :-)
I've wondered about a similar approach myself. The absolute minimum perimeter division into N zones may not be the best approach since the maps couldn't take into account things like rivers and highways that might be convenient to separate zones, nor would it factor in population density. However, it seems that it would be possible to specify rules that would lead to non-Gerrymanderable zones. For instance:
Of course I don't put it past politicians to screw up even something like this. They would probably wait till five minutes before the final selection and propose the most favorable map to themselves they could come up with that has 1 mile less perimeter than the map they stole from the other party the night before.
Not directly related to display panels, but since we're talking about LEDs here, something I've been curious about...
A few years ago LEDs were these dim little lights that might come on to tell you that your hard drive is being accessed or your caps lock is on. Lately we see products like LED traffic lights, LED brake lights on cars, LED flashlights , etc. that are vastly brighter than the old LEDs we've seen for years. What sort of breakthrough or advances did the LED industry make to allow such bright, daylight-visible LEDs to become possible?
I think that any biometric or RFID authentication technology should be combined with a PIN. It's just common sense to combine a secuity token that you posses with a PIN that you must memorize. This doesn't lead to perfect security, but it wraps the physical posession of an authentication token in another layer of security.
Unfortunately, the trend seems to be removing layers of security for financial transactions to make them seem more convenient, rather than doing anything to make them secure. When I'm using my Visa card, few merchants care about ID, especially for purchases under $100, and I don't even remember the last time one checked the signature. Really instills me with confidence that they're doing their part to keep the system safe from theft and fraud.
The result was that Nixon got elected and the Republican party became the party of pandering to racists. I have no idea why they wanted to do that, long term it is a major handicap. Population trends are not good for the Republican party.
I disagree. I think that on the whole, if you were to take a sampling across the political spectrum and ask whether people should be treated the same regardless of their race or color, you would get a lot more "yes" replies from Republicans. Democrats, on the other hand, would reject this philosophy in favor of an affirmative-action approach, swinging the pendulum of discrimination the other way instead of putting it behind us once and for all. Unfortunately for them, I think the former position has broader (though perhaps less vocal) support among mainstream voters.
So if by "racists" you mean Nazis and Klan members, then perhaps they do vote Republican, but if you look at racism in the broader sense of basing the treatment and opportunities you give to people on the color of their skin, then the Democratic party would certainly be the larger bastion for racism in America.
I don't know about gaming on an HDTV, but I have a widescreen on my laptop (1680 x 1050 WSXGA) and it hasn't been of much advantage to gaming. Most games let you pick from common 4:3 screen ratios like 1024 x 768, which then get stretched out a bit to fill the wider screen. The aspect ratios being off is annoying but not nearly as noticable as I would have expected.
I hope that between the increasing popularity of non-4:3 screens and fact that gaming graphics rendered from 3D models these days instead of just some predrawn sprite bitmap, better support for nonstandard screen resolutions becomes more common in the near future. We're there for desktops, but games still make a few too many assumptions about resolution and aspect ratio for widescreen to be the way to go.
AFAIK you cannot trademark common English words. The example I've always seen is that you cannot trademark the word "orange", but you could trademark a unique phrase containing the word "orange".
IANAL either, but I believe that the way trademarks work (in the U.S. anyway) is that you can trademark common words, within the context of a particular domain. For example, within the context of computers, only a certain company can call their products "Apple" (a common English word), but now that that company is also getting into the music business, they've come into legal conflict with the company that has the rights to the word over in that industry.
Limiting the trademark to a particular domain like this leads to many unrelated companies sharing the same common word, which usually works out okay as long as they are in separate businesses... there might be an airline, a pizza place, and a lawn care service that all use the same common word for their name, but this is unlikely to create any confusion on the part of the customers. There might be a little resentment over who gets the .com name, but that's a different topic.
Broader protection applies to companies that make up a word out of the blue instead of using a common one. For instance, it would be unwise to call your new business "Exxon" even if it has nothing to do with petroleum, because that's a word unique to a particular company. You might on the other hand be able to use the word "Shell".
As a side note, for common words to be used in a trademark, the use of the word within that domain should be unique. "Apple" pretty much had no meaning in the context of computers before that company took the name, so any reference to "Apple" within the field of computers presumably refers to their trademark. On the other hand, "Windows" was a common term within computing for a type of GUI element, already had meaning within that domain, and never should have been granted as a trademark to the Microsoft Corportation.
I find it troubling when the shortcomings of the electronic voting schemes currently being used are portrayed in a partisan perspective, to illustrate how evil Bush is, or or conspiracies to steal elections, or claims like that. Approaching the issue as a political attack ploy might mobilize the left to action, but will only cause backlash from conservatives and drive them to support these voting technologies, if only to oppose the political attack.
In truth, having fair, verifiable, open elections with accurate vote counts is not a liberal thing or a conservative thing, it's something that everyone participating in a democratic process should be striving for.
Too often, voting issues are used not simply to elect political leaders, but as a political tool in their own right. For instance, in Florida in 2000, liberals push for recount after recount hoping to eventually get a result favorable to their candidate, yet in California 2003, the same left tries to halt a recall election until all precincts have electronic voting machines that would make such scrutiny of the paper trail impossible. Do they like double checking votes, or not, or do they just pick whatever is most advantageous for their candidate? Obviously, counterexamples of inconsistent attitudes towards voting by conservatives could be put forth as well, the point is that the voting process can become politicized and that is bad.
I just want a good, honest election. I want a paper trail that can be used to verify the winner according to some specific, predefined criteria. I want the ballots secure from tampering, hacking, fraud, and such. I want every part of the process, from how the votes will be tallied to how the electoral college works to how the voting machines work (including full source code) available for full public review and discourse. I do not want these things because I am conservative or liberal, but because I believe in a representative system of government. The candidate I hope will prevail will not be shared by someone of a differing ideology, but my vision for the voting process itself certainly could be.
When cassettes came along, they offered an advantage that appealed to customers: they were small enough to take with you.
CD's offered improved sound quality and much better ease of use (no more fast forwarding, rewinding, or turning the media over to hear the rest). They also avoid the glitches or pops that other media develop under normal wear and tear - CD's only scratch from mishandling, not from the laser wearing them out. These advantages allowed them to overcome their (artificially) higher price and initial read-only limitation
Other media have been proposed but not caught on. 8 tracks briefly flourished, but offered no advantages over a cassette tape, yet were bulkier and more annoying to use. Mini-discs offer only small size, which isn't enough. Audio DVD's have improved sound compared to CD, but this hasn't proven sufficient reason for anyone but an audiophile niche to take much interest.
On the other hand, MP3 has slightly lower sound quality than a CD, but has gained widespread acceptance, much to the RIAA's chagrin. Ease of use surpasses even the CD, and the portability problem has been solved - a person's entire music collection can fit into their pocket, or listened to across a (high bandwidth) network with no physical media at all. A bonus for the user is the upgrade path. Rather than it being easier for the user to buy all the music they already legally own/license/whatever over again, a CD ripper is all that is needed to move your previous investment into the modern times.
In this landscape, where does this new format fit in? What does it bring to the table that would compel joe user to embrace it at all, much less buy all his existing music over again? Sure, it's small, but not as small as an MP3. Manufacturers might bump the audio quality up to THX level, but that would only give a benefit to those who have both a discerning ear and high end audio equipment. Price could be dropped to entice people to switch, but the RIAA isn't that intelligent. Extras and bonus materials could be offered, a la the DVD, but that would take a lot of work from the publisher and probably be passed on as a higher price, further stacking the odds against acceptance.
In short, I don't see what advantage this would offer would be that is compelling enough to get anyone to adopt it.
Why must it be so difficult? I'm not a Linux newbie, and should have no difficulty installing another distro to try out, but Debian is worrying me.
I do a little research, and find that debian-stable has pretty dated packages, so debian-unstable is what I need. So far so good. Much of the Debian discussion refers to versions by codename, so I look around for a bit and learn how "sid", "sarge", "woody" and such map to stable and unstable. Now I know I want to try debian-unstable, a.k.a "sid". I go to the "Getting Debian page to look for a mirror with some ISOs. They encourage me to use jigdo to download it. I don't want to use jigdo. Maybe when I download the next version, but for now please keep this simple without throwing in extra steps. I click on the "fetch full CD images link" instead. All the mirrors listed for unstable are in Europe and Asia, whereas I am in the United States. I frown and click on one and am presented a list of the 11 ISO's for sid. WTF is in Debian that takes 11 CDs? I research a bit more to see if this is really what I need before initiating this multi-gigabyte download, and find a page saying you shouldn't install unstable directly, but install stable first then switch your install over. More annoyance, Fedora Core doesn't tell you to install RH9 first then change to an unstable version, if I know up front that I want an unstable version I should be able to just install it.
At this point I began to rethink whether I really wanted to try Debian enough to deal with this. I hadn't even begun the install process yet, but this is still much further than Random Windows User would get.
Debian advocates, please help me out. I'm interested in giving debian-unstable a shot, but if it's going to be much harder than "download two or three iso's, burn, boot, install, see if you like it" that makes me wary right off the bat. Am I going about things the wrong way? Can someone point me in the right direction as to the simplest and most straightforward approach to getting debian-unstable onto a system to try out?
November the 10th is never a good day.
Be careful, today is the 228th anniversary of the United States Marine Corps, you're likely to incur the wrath of the jarheads with that kind of comment...
If I reboot into Windows before going to bed, do I qualify for a pro-rated amount?
It's annoying enough to know that when you're sitting at a computer using a browser to surf the Web, a couple requests a day will get hijacked to the spam site.
But what about automated HTTP requests? You might be running some script to wget the latest greatest kernel source and instead it downloads a piece of spam. The hijacked HTTP request might come in the middle of a Gentoo build, or as you mirror a Web site and have a page replaced with an advertisement. You could be tunneling some other protocol over HTTP, and then who knows what this would do.
Very stupid and annoying of Belkin. If they wanted to make their parental control thing so easy to use, just include a CD that says "Put this CD into any computer on your network to enable parental control on your new Belkin router!" Newbies can figure that out. I don't want my own router launching some kind of spoofing attack on me three times a day just so I can view more spam.
While the appeal of stealing somebody's car and their money at the same time is quite apparent, this scam seems like it would be more effective if the perpetrator kept their ruse more subtle. Buy the car, pay with a counterfeit cashiers check. The overpaying and wanting cash back part may generate cash for the criminal in the process, but it's a definite red flag that something is amiss. A person supposedly owes them $20k but is too lazy to pay it in two separate cashiers checks? Yeah, whatever.
I can see people being fooled because the bank told them the funds cleared and then rescinded them, not everyone knows banks are that lax about confirming payments. A scammer could steal a lot of cars that way. But the fact that it is more profitable for them to throw in this implausable twist and go for the cash as well makes a sad statement about the gullibility of the public.
I'd played around a lot with the Fedora Core beta (Severn) over the weekend, and wanted to describe my experience a bit for those thinking of going that route. Purely anecdotal, your mileage my vary, and all that stuff.
I initially installed over an existing RH9 install, and also tried an install on a fresh partition. The install process was very similar and it upgraded my existing packages nicely, and did a good job of preserving configuration.
Fedora also has a couple channels on redhat.com for up2date, they work a lot like the one from RH9, but with newer versions of the software. Initially I was subscribed to the Rawhide channel, but after updating up2date itself, it changed to a Fedora Core channel that offered the same stuff. Four of the packages (the desktop backgrounds, indexhtml, and some http configuration package) did not have the right GPG signature, which causes up2date to prompt you (annoying during a very long download that should be able to complete unattended), and can also make up2date hang when it goes to install those packages.
On a positive note, Fedora can recognize my Broadcom ethernet on its own now, with RH9 I had to download and install a separate driver.
Red Hat Graphical Boot (rhgb) is pretty hit or miss, I had it working briefly but it broke again. Looked pretty good while it was working, but was hard to keep working. Also didn't appear to have much in the way of man pages.
The system would sometimes slow way down when booting as it got to probing modules and/or detecting new hardware. I got errors about it trying to install the floppy.o module (floppyless system), and sometimes lots of stuff scrolling by about other block-major devices not being found.
The Linuxant Driverloader program I need to use my WiFi card installs under the 2.4.22.2088 kernel, but after doing up2date and getting the latest (2.4.22.2115, iirc) it would not install. Even under 2088 it gave me problems I had not encountered when running it on a RH9 system that had been updated to the same kernel.
When doing an update install, it adds a new entry to your existing bootloader, as would be expected. When doing a fresh install, it seems to only let you use GRUB, which could be an annoyance to those who prefer LILO. Of course you could change it after the fact.
To sum it all up, Fedora Core is for the most part quite slick and I really liked that it has more current versions of the packages than RH9, which has to play it safe for the corporate world. However, I experienced enough frustrations to have doubts as to whether Fedora Core is really as ready as it needs to be to take over from Red Hat 9.
Yes, V-chips are mandated by law for a TV, but what I'm talking about is a big monitor that forgoes the other features of a TV. If you have no tuner, just a big screen displaying an s-video feed from your sattelite box, what would the v-chip do? The device I want knows would know nothing about channels, ratings, etc. it just takes a signal from your cable box, dvd player, av reciever or whatever and displays it.
For a home-theater setup, most of the features already in a TV are unnecessary. You don't need a tuner, the sattelite or cable box does that. You don't need speakers and sound circuitry, it'll be hooked up to a surround-sound stereo anyway. Most people also don't need a v-chip, closed-circuit decoder, and similar fluff. Would consumers be better off if manufacturers would offer a version without all this? It would basically be a huge 42" monitor, without as fine a dot pitch. Give it inputs for composite, svideo, dvi, and vga. Does anyone make them already? Would it cost noticably less than a comparable TV? How much of the cost of a TV is the actual display, and how much is for the frivilous features?
Over the past few weeks Knoppix has gotten me out of a couple tough spots.
First, I was setting up RedHat on my laptop. Unfortunately, RH9 came with no drivers for my ethernet or wifi. No problem, I'll just go online and... Uh oh, Catch-22, I can't download network drivers till I get online. Fortunately, Knoppix recognized the ethernet card and got me up and running, I downloaded to the hard drive, rebooted to RedHat, and set it up.
True, I could have also solved that using sneakernet / USB drive / whatever, but the next time Knoppix helped me it was more indispensable. I was adjusting my LILO settings and came up with a conf file that ran just fine in lilo, but caused a kernel panic every time I booted with it. No rescue disc either, being a floppyless computer. I booted Knoppix, fixed the lilo.conf, mounted my /boot partition, and made a working bootloader.
Anyway, Knoppix is good to have around. When something is messed up, it will get you up and running, see all your files, and see most of the hardware out there too. Plus of course the obvious Linux evangilism uses.
The cost of war just went up by $699
Personally, I'd love to see Darl try to collect from someone with next-gen battle gear and one of these...
Of course Slashdotters will think geeks would make great political leaders. Plato thought "philosopher-kings" would be the ideal rulers. Nobles thought the aristocracy had a "divine right" to rule others. Throughout history, there have been rich people advocating plutocracy, priests who liked theocracy, generals using coups to establish martial law, and so on. In the end everyone thinks that their own social class is uniquely qualified to run things, because that's the perspective they're used to looking at the world from. If what you have is a hammer, every problem looks like the proverbial nail.
I first got a HP48SX in 1989 (or maybe 90) and it was very amazing technology. Since then they've done the GX and the 49, which are nice improvements but basically just small incremental upgrades, which is disappointing considering all the new technology that has come out during that time period. Calculators basically hit their peak and then stagnated for over a dozen years and couting.
Here's what I think the ubercalculator of 2003 should be. The technology exists to make it, sure it wouldn't be cheap, but what nerd wouldn't want one...
I'd design such a beast as basically a PDA, but specialized in serious math rather than tracking appointments. Give it a fold-open design with a scientific calculator keypad on one part and a full-color TFT QVGA screen. A nice 400-mhz or so processor to manipulate even symbolic equations quickly. An operating environment that resembles neither a daytimer or a more primitive calculator, but best described as Pocket Mathematica. USB, IRDA, and Bluetooth connectivity, a nice recharging cradle, and have it come preloaded with a a vast collection of equations, reference charts, and such from a variety of disciplines... mathematics, physics, chemistry, engineering, statistics, etc.
No, no professor in their right mind would let you use such a monstrosity on a test, but I imagine there are other geeks out there who would want it. Or maybe I've just dreamed up a calculator so excessive you'd be better off using a small laptop. /shrug
While some people have given the parent a flamebait mod and hostile replies, the poster makes a good (and humorous) point. Apple is not typically thought of in terms best price performance any more than, say, Cadillac is in the car industry. Macs are bought by those willing to pay a premium for that distinct Apple stying, OSX's slick interface with the power of Unix behind the scenes, the "it just works" factor, and so on. Those who don't care about the amenities and just want bang for the buck go for a Dell or eMachines or whatever. I personally find it quite interesting that a company whose image is more luxury than value and whose products are so much newer in this field than the Linux Beowulf clusters is able to achieve such an impressive level of performance for the cost.
Wow, Goverminator hasn't been elected for 2 weeks and Skynet is already flexing its muscles
Arnie finally gets that "Phased Plasma Rifle in the 40-Watt Range" he wanted in T1, just in time to clean up Sacramento...
In other developments...