These aren't normal hard disks, but proper portable models. That doesn't sound like a difference, but they're made to be able to stand being moved (quite violently) during use. I think you'd be surprised by how robust they actually are.
It was Bush's fund-raising dinner in Century City, LA. There were about 50 freepers on the corner (they'd been organising a huge pro-Bush rally for weeks, and only those showed up). There were tens of thousands of anti-Bush/anti-War protesters there, and guess which ones were the violent ones? That's right - the freepers. Slinging all sorts of racial abuse at my Chinese American wife ("we saved your country's ass in WW2!" - my wife was born in Australia, and moved to LA when she was 11. Which country did the US save again?). They shouted through a bullhorn into my ear when I dared raise my "STOP BUSH!" sign, and the LAPD did nothing to stop them. A middle-aged woman elbowed me in the face to try to get my sign down (I'm 6'4, and my sign was on a stick, so she had no chance). They then proceeded to try and fly their US flags in front of my sign (censorship with the US flag anyone?). Complete hypocrites. One of the most disgusting and distressing things I've witnessed. I've never seen people so ignorant and full of hatred before.
Yes, they do. You see, democrats support everyone. They'll stand up for immigrants, gay people, rich people, straight people, poor people, whoever. They don't see circumstance, but people. They don't instantly assume poor people like being poor, that gay people are inherently evil, that rich people are great guys, or that immigrants want to usurp the US and bleed it dry from the inside. Republicans do. Republicans don't tolerate anyone who isn't a republican. They're full of hatred for those people. Democrats will do what they can to help them, which is what being a good person (and funnily enough a good Christian) is all about. They won't decide someone's not worthy of help because of their political beliefs, social standing, religious beliefs, whatever.
I'm not making this up - I've been on freerepublic.com (in fact I got banned again yesterday, for daring to ask a few questions about creationism), and I've seen how those people talk about gay people, immigrants, muslims, etc. It's disgusting. It's worse than disgusting. Comparing their hate-filled twisted perspective to that of your average democrat is just ignorant.
1. Why should the modem vendor write drivers for Linux, when at most 3% of their potential customers will be using it? That's just not economically sensible.
2. The modems were old. We had them already. They weren't bought with linux in mind (though we did try to find some after, that would work with linux, and we couldn't)
3. They do have the specs. They wrote drivers, but the drivers didn't work. If they didn't have the specs to begin with, why are they writing (and selling) drivers?
4. Agreed;)
Why should I have to seek out special hardware that supports linux? It takes longer, needs more in-depth research, and even then doesn't guarantee the hardware will actually work (See point 3 above). I can just go into a PC World or BestBuy and grab a modem off the shelf, and I know, for a fact, it will work with Windows. I don't even need to look at the small print. That extra time, the phone calls, the research, etc. would cost more than a windows setup. Coupled with the fact Linux takes me longer to install, which is even more money. The modems we used were softmodems - we had them lying around, and they worked fine in the windows box.
You've got to understand I'm not prejudiced against linux or windows or whatever. I'm an essentially lazy individual who will use whatever's best for the job. If linux is cheaper and easier, I'll use it. If windows is, I'll use that instead. I just want you to know if you made a good point in favour of linux, I'll actually take it on board as I'm not some windows fanboy.
We shouldn't have to think "which OS will we be using in 2 years?" when buying hardware. That, to me, just sounds silly. I don't blame anyone for the drivers not working (except maybe the coders for doing a shitty job). Linux is a tiny percentage of the market place, and as such wields little influence on the market. No-one is going to hire developers and QA people to test a driver 3% of their market will use. It's just not viable.
As I said before, I don't blame anyone for this. I just have a problem with people demanding drivers for their OS, which makes up such a tiny tiny percentage of their users it just doesn't make sense. If I wrote my own OS, do I deserve the right to get pissy when nVidia don't devote 2 days a week developing drivers for me? Of course not... I chose an OS with a limited userbase, so I chose limited support. That's just life:)
You can't truly believe that every closed source electronic voting solution is inherently evil and created solely as a tool for dictatorship? What difference does it matter whether it's closed source or open source? Just because it's closed source doesn't mean no independent party gets to verify its accuracy. We see this with Diebold, but the government doesn't seem to do anything when Diebold is caught using un-certified machines. The framework for a successful closed-source voting solution is there already, it's just that the government doesn't want to stop Diebold, as they're on the same side.
The how is technical, the why is political. They're two parts of the same problem, and it's very, very hard to draw the line. After all, the technical "features" could be politically motivated.
The stories are predominantly left-leaning, as the people who censor them (directly or indirectly) are predominantly right-leaning. It has nothing to do with whether democrats are more whiney than republicans, or anything else.
There's not much difference between someone hearing about a story once, and it actually being reported. Reporting isn't just giving out the facts once, but educating the masses. Newspapers repeat facts again and again to provide a whole picture for the readers. When news stations and newspapers touch on an important story once then leave it for fear of political/financial recrimination, that's censorship. Even though the story got out, the fact that the outlet feels threatened to reprint/publish the item again is clear censorship. It's been shown countless times that vocal detractors of the Bush regime^H administration get "special" attention. Cut funding, managerial reshufflings, disciplinary action, etc.
It's not about left or right, but who's in power and who isn't.
We are running 4 modems at the same time, and we had 4 modems lying around (and didn't want to buy another COMM card, 4 external modems, and find places to plug them all in and store them in our rack). Linux couldn't support the softmodems, and so we went to windows. How that's a fault of the modem (or me) is beyond me.
We didn't go for the crappy solution. We went for the cheapest we had. "Use the modems we have, and have it installed in one afternoon" versus "buy 4 more modems, a comm card, and install linux and get hylafax working with them" or "use the modems we have, buy a driver for them (x4), find out the driver doesn't work, then install windows and get it working in one afternoon". If you choose step 2, you should see if your ideology isn't clouding your judgement. Just a thought.
These were softmodems, where the modem is actually just a digital signal processor, and the modem is achieved in software, which is near impossible to write. That's the problem. You can't just "write" a softmodem driver in Linux. That's why that company charged me for the driver.
Yes, but if Iraq had the veto like the US, it would have broken exactly 0 resolutions. It just goes to show that the US goes against international will as much as Iraq, it just has the firepower to make sure no-one complains. That's one hell of a double standard.
That site is just plain ridiculous. They preach every sort of discrimination you can think of. DU don't. It's that simple. Sure, DU has its own agenda, but the agenda it's persuing is one of tolerance and acceptance - the freepers' agenda is anything but that. The Free Republic says it's for free speech, yet just try it, and you'll see just how free that speech is. It's a sham site, where people who can't talk on moderate boards go to spout their evil without punishment. I've met those assholes face-to-face, and they really do suck. The protest I was at (in LA) had about 50 freepers, and nearer 20,000 other protesters. The freepers were the most aggressive, dangerous people I've ever seen at a protest. Absolute animals. A woman hit me in the face with her elbow. A woman. Get that. Hardly as up-standing as you'd think.
Oh my god. I hope you're joking about that one. That site is full of hatred towards anyone who's not white and middle class. I met up with some of them at a protest, and they tore into my wife with racial abuse, tried to censor my sign with an American flag (I didn't waste my time pointing out the irony), and was elbowed in the face by a middle-aged freeper.
If you seriously want to learn what the right is thinking, don't go there. All they know is hatred. We know the stories that are out there, we don't need to have some vicious right-wing rhetoric plastered over every news article for us to make sense of it all.
Maybe you should compare similar technologies, say embedded Linux and Windows XP Embedded. You'll find that every argument you've given why Linux is superior also applies to Windows XP embedded. You can run exactly the same apps on it as you can your desktop. IIS, D?COM, Apache, whatever you want, can all be stuck on XP Embedded without modification.
Anyway, with the 98% emulator, you can always put its priority to "below normal", and you won't even notice it:)
America wants it both ways. It condemns Saddam Hussein for breaking UN security resolutions (yet vetoes them by the bucketload, which shows a lot contempt for the international community)
America is the 400lb toddler. It will scream and scream until it gets its own selfish way, making life miserable for everyone else. No-one can stop it as it's just too darn big.
That's kind of my point - you don't have to know about the windows subsystem. On linux, because of its sheer power, you do. Linux is more suited to developers, as it was written by developers for developers. Windows was written by developers for normal people.
I happen to agree with you about the drivers and basic hardware support on Linux - it's hit and miss at the best of times. I set up a fax server at work using HylaFax, and the modems we use weren't supported in linux. We had to pay for drivers. Even then, they didn't work properly. We went straight back to Windows, as we knew full-well we could set it up in an afternoon, no problems. The Linux solution, while cheaper (free as in beer software), took up more time to set up, which in the end cost us more than our windows setup through lost time.
I don't care about which OS people think is better, or which OS has the best philosophy. I'm about using the right tool for the job, and at the moment Linux is the right tool for servers. Web servers, file servers, etc. It's great for that. No, it's the best thing in the world for that. However, I won't have it on my desktop. Sure, it has pretty GUI installers now, but underneath the prettyness is a seriously complicated subsystem, that is mostly unnecessary for normal computer users. I use my windows PC for games, downloading bittorrents, watching movies/media, etc. I know I can get a windows box set up to do all that in next to no time, regardless of hardware. On linux, while all the elements are there, it's not that easy. Hardware compatabilities, special tweaks to system/conf files, multiple packages to install, etc. It's just not what most people want to do. I can understand it if your PC is you raison d'etre, but for me, it's just the box on which I type and watch movies. I don't want to have to load up a text editor to install new drivers for my graphics card, then to find that my Windows emulation/whatever software doesn't work with my game. I, like most people, want hassle-free computing. When linux gets there, I'll be FIRST in the queue. I'd love an OS that does what I want like Windows, yet offers me just a couple of the cool features Linux does (built-in NAT for one thing). Until then, I'll stick with Windows, as I'm lazy;)
No, even if BT had unbundled every loop they can get their hands on, BT are still screwed. Their sheer size means Oftel doesn't let them do anything that they can get away with (due to their size) and other telcos can't. Oftel help, but they get in the way a hell of a lot more often:)
Are you crazy? Oftel were so far up BT's ass. BT couldn't do anything without Oftel screaming "unfair! unfair! abuse of position!". BT wanted to slash call charges, and drastically reduce broadband costs, yet Oftel pipes up and says "that's abusing your position, and unfair to the smaller telcos who can't compete", and so BT has its hands tied. Of course, from the outside, it might look completely different.
The best thing that could happen to VoIP is Oftel staying away.
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These aren't normal hard disks, but proper portable models. That doesn't sound like a difference, but they're made to be able to stand being moved (quite violently) during use. I think you'd be surprised by how robust they actually are.
It was Bush's fund-raising dinner in Century City, LA. There were about 50 freepers on the corner (they'd been organising a huge pro-Bush rally for weeks, and only those showed up). There were tens of thousands of anti-Bush/anti-War protesters there, and guess which ones were the violent ones? That's right - the freepers. Slinging all sorts of racial abuse at my Chinese American wife ("we saved your country's ass in WW2!" - my wife was born in Australia, and moved to LA when she was 11. Which country did the US save again?). They shouted through a bullhorn into my ear when I dared raise my "STOP BUSH!" sign, and the LAPD did nothing to stop them. A middle-aged woman elbowed me in the face to try to get my sign down (I'm 6'4, and my sign was on a stick, so she had no chance). They then proceeded to try and fly their US flags in front of my sign (censorship with the US flag anyone?). Complete hypocrites. One of the most disgusting and distressing things I've witnessed. I've never seen people so ignorant and full of hatred before.
I'm not making this up - I've been on freerepublic.com (in fact I got banned again yesterday, for daring to ask a few questions about creationism), and I've seen how those people talk about gay people, immigrants, muslims, etc. It's disgusting. It's worse than disgusting. Comparing their hate-filled twisted perspective to that of your average democrat is just ignorant.
2. The modems were old. We had them already. They weren't bought with linux in mind (though we did try to find some after, that would work with linux, and we couldn't)
3. They do have the specs. They wrote drivers, but the drivers didn't work. If they didn't have the specs to begin with, why are they writing (and selling) drivers?
4. Agreed
Why should I have to seek out special hardware that supports linux? It takes longer, needs more in-depth research, and even then doesn't guarantee the hardware will actually work (See point 3 above). I can just go into a PC World or BestBuy and grab a modem off the shelf, and I know, for a fact, it will work with Windows. I don't even need to look at the small print. That extra time, the phone calls, the research, etc. would cost more than a windows setup. Coupled with the fact Linux takes me longer to install, which is even more money. The modems we used were softmodems - we had them lying around, and they worked fine in the windows box.
You've got to understand I'm not prejudiced against linux or windows or whatever. I'm an essentially lazy individual who will use whatever's best for the job. If linux is cheaper and easier, I'll use it. If windows is, I'll use that instead. I just want you to know if you made a good point in favour of linux, I'll actually take it on board as I'm not some windows fanboy.
We shouldn't have to think "which OS will we be using in 2 years?" when buying hardware. That, to me, just sounds silly. I don't blame anyone for the drivers not working (except maybe the coders for doing a shitty job). Linux is a tiny percentage of the market place, and as such wields little influence on the market. No-one is going to hire developers and QA people to test a driver 3% of their market will use. It's just not viable.
As I said before, I don't blame anyone for this. I just have a problem with people demanding drivers for their OS, which makes up such a tiny tiny percentage of their users it just doesn't make sense. If I wrote my own OS, do I deserve the right to get pissy when nVidia don't devote 2 days a week developing drivers for me? Of course not... I chose an OS with a limited userbase, so I chose limited support. That's just life :)
Did you actually read that list? There are plenty of articles on there criticising the US government. What the hell is your point? :)
You can't truly believe that every closed source electronic voting solution is inherently evil and created solely as a tool for dictatorship? What difference does it matter whether it's closed source or open source? Just because it's closed source doesn't mean no independent party gets to verify its accuracy. We see this with Diebold, but the government doesn't seem to do anything when Diebold is caught using un-certified machines. The framework for a successful closed-source voting solution is there already, it's just that the government doesn't want to stop Diebold, as they're on the same side.
The how is technical, the why is political. They're two parts of the same problem, and it's very, very hard to draw the line. After all, the technical "features" could be politically motivated.
He really hits the spot. I have a torrent of manufacturing consent. it's out there should anyone want it :)
right. that's how it happened. :-P
There's not much difference between someone hearing about a story once, and it actually being reported. Reporting isn't just giving out the facts once, but educating the masses. Newspapers repeat facts again and again to provide a whole picture for the readers. When news stations and newspapers touch on an important story once then leave it for fear of political/financial recrimination, that's censorship. Even though the story got out, the fact that the outlet feels threatened to reprint/publish the item again is clear censorship. It's been shown countless times that vocal detractors of the Bush regime^H administration get "special" attention. Cut funding, managerial reshufflings, disciplinary action, etc.
It's not about left or right, but who's in power and who isn't.
Too many big words, not enough pretty colors.
Censorship is the act of being censored by someone or something. It can be by anything, not necessarily the government or a large corporation.
We didn't go for the crappy solution. We went for the cheapest we had. "Use the modems we have, and have it installed in one afternoon" versus "buy 4 more modems, a comm card, and install linux and get hylafax working with them" or "use the modems we have, buy a driver for them (x4), find out the driver doesn't work, then install windows and get it working in one afternoon". If you choose step 2, you should see if your ideology isn't clouding your judgement. Just a thought.
These were softmodems, where the modem is actually just a digital signal processor, and the modem is achieved in software, which is near impossible to write. That's the problem. You can't just "write" a softmodem driver in Linux. That's why that company charged me for the driver.
Yes, but if Iraq had the veto like the US, it would have broken exactly 0 resolutions. It just goes to show that the US goes against international will as much as Iraq, it just has the firepower to make sure no-one complains. That's one hell of a double standard.
That site is just plain ridiculous. They preach every sort of discrimination you can think of. DU don't. It's that simple. Sure, DU has its own agenda, but the agenda it's persuing is one of tolerance and acceptance - the freepers' agenda is anything but that. The Free Republic says it's for free speech, yet just try it, and you'll see just how free that speech is. It's a sham site, where people who can't talk on moderate boards go to spout their evil without punishment. I've met those assholes face-to-face, and they really do suck. The protest I was at (in LA) had about 50 freepers, and nearer 20,000 other protesters. The freepers were the most aggressive, dangerous people I've ever seen at a protest. Absolute animals. A woman hit me in the face with her elbow. A woman. Get that. Hardly as up-standing as you'd think.
If you seriously want to learn what the right is thinking, don't go there. All they know is hatred. We know the stories that are out there, we don't need to have some vicious right-wing rhetoric plastered over every news article for us to make sense of it all.
Anyway, with the 98% emulator, you can always put its priority to "below normal", and you won't even notice it :)
America is the 400lb toddler. It will scream and scream until it gets its own selfish way, making life miserable for everyone else. No-one can stop it as it's just too darn big.
shit! so can a pencil and paper! damn we're in trouble now.
If I wrote on here "water is wet", does that mean it ceases to be? :-P
That's kind of my point - you don't have to know about the windows subsystem. On linux, because of its sheer power, you do. Linux is more suited to developers, as it was written by developers for developers. Windows was written by developers for normal people.
I don't care about which OS people think is better, or which OS has the best philosophy. I'm about using the right tool for the job, and at the moment Linux is the right tool for servers. Web servers, file servers, etc. It's great for that. No, it's the best thing in the world for that. However, I won't have it on my desktop. Sure, it has pretty GUI installers now, but underneath the prettyness is a seriously complicated subsystem, that is mostly unnecessary for normal computer users. I use my windows PC for games, downloading bittorrents, watching movies/media, etc. I know I can get a windows box set up to do all that in next to no time, regardless of hardware. On linux, while all the elements are there, it's not that easy. Hardware compatabilities, special tweaks to system/conf files, multiple packages to install, etc. It's just not what most people want to do. I can understand it if your PC is you raison d'etre, but for me, it's just the box on which I type and watch movies. I don't want to have to load up a text editor to install new drivers for my graphics card, then to find that my Windows emulation/whatever software doesn't work with my game. I, like most people, want hassle-free computing. When linux gets there, I'll be FIRST in the queue. I'd love an OS that does what I want like Windows, yet offers me just a couple of the cool features Linux does (built-in NAT for one thing). Until then, I'll stick with Windows, as I'm lazy ;)
No, even if BT had unbundled every loop they can get their hands on, BT are still screwed. Their sheer size means Oftel doesn't let them do anything that they can get away with (due to their size) and other telcos can't. Oftel help, but they get in the way a hell of a lot more often :)
The best thing that could happen to VoIP is Oftel staying away.