Conectiva is just bad, and that's pretty much a consensus in the brazilian Linux community. If that wasn't enough, their solutions are overpriced, and they're pulling political levers to get government contracts instead of Microsoft - even though their product is _more_ expensive than what Microsoft produces.
Just a few months ago, they got the current left-leaning party to push for a change in public contractor law that put a "priority for Free Software solutions" above other criteria in public contracts.
I mean, they're just out to leech out taxpayer money with some lame nationalistic excuse.
My attempts to get this on the frontpage keep getting rejected, but the brazilian distro to watch is Kurumin, a noppix variant that fits on a mini-CD and includes just SO MUCH fucking software in 180 megs, and so much functionality.
This might seem overstated in bandwidth-abundant America, but it's way easier to download 200-odd megs to try out this new-fangled kool linux thang than the 4x600Mb downloads the new distros have been requiring.
Disclaimer: I'm in no way affiliated with Carlos Morimoto or the Kurumin crowd. Yes, I'm a brazilian taxpayer.
It's not like if it was cleverly cloaked. They're pretty open about it - you're trading in some privacy for some convenience. I mean, not everyone browses porn of embarassing kinds they wouldn't like other people to see.
If it's useful enough, I could see myself thinking of installing it at the Win32 box I use at work. I mostly just look at slashdot and my webmail (hosted at my home Linux computer) anyway.
I mean, gee, there's always a trade-off between convenience and privacy. Not everyone's encrypting all their outbound email with a note on how to install PGP.
Spyware removal software typically counts the number of files + the number of cookies + the number of registry keys related to spyware it finds. So it's not uncommon to get a report with over 150 items when the user has only installed Gator.
A badly-spyware-ridden machine could have thousands of those items.
Now, if only one computer out of 10 has Gator, you'll still find that on average, each computer has 15 items. Most typically - specially in corporate environments - you'll find a few machines with thousands of spyware items and a lot of computers with no spyware - since employees aren't _all_ fucking around with company time.
But Winamp always seemed (before I switched to Linux) to "remember" which tracks I played manually the most when I selected all my mp3 collection to play randomly.
My cheapy Sony discman (nothing special, it just plays ordinary audio-cd`s and is particularly choosy about CD-R brands) seems to do that too - when I keep on skipping after the first seconds of a track on random shuffle, it`ll show up less and less - to the point where it doesn't anymore.
I haven't devised a way to test this in a controlled environment, but I've felt that effect really really strongly over the years with winamp and my discman. Could be some amusing side-effect of pseudorandom generation, could be FAT disk fragmenting, shit, I don`t know. Could even be old-fashioned placebo effect, but I don't think that's it.
Or perhaps I'm schizo. Anyone ever had that impression?
Even to do trivial stuff like mounting a cd-rom you have to have root access.
Soon you find yourself su`ing whenever something complains it wants to run as root.
Finally, you get pissed off and add yourself to/etc/sudoers. Now, all an evil shell script that comes in an attachment needs to do is add a "sudo" before its evil-doing!
Instant linux virus: "nudie-pictures.jpg" (chmodded +x, of course)
I remember being really depressed about his resignation letter (it's somewhere in his website). But then I was 15 - and besides, I didn't quite realize he had gotten rich in the process.
Wonsoponatime, during the early days of the browser wars, there was a "third contestant" (it never was popular enough to be in third, or tenth place, for that matter) called The Other Internet Package, from The Other Company.
I remember having found about it from cnet's browsers.com, and used it for what, a year and a half.
It would organize the site you're browsing in a hierarchical list of hyperlinks on the left as you went through it. It was an amazing concept, specially for, um, I think it was 1996.
Eventually, Windows/my HD/whatever really got fucked, I had to reformat, and could never find again The Other Internet Package. Their website domain, www.theother.com, had been sold to one of those link farms.
When Konqueror acts stupid with me, I still mourn the passing of The Other Internet Package. Just imagine what it could have been, by now. Of all the saddest words of pen and tongue, the saddest are these: it could have been.
It's called econometrics. It's a huge field of statistics that attempts to discover ceteris paribus (all other things remaining constant) relationships between variables.
There are a bunch of very good manuals in econometrics out there. I've had a great experience with Damodar Gujarati and Arthur Goldberger, but apparently the standard textbooks these days are Wooldridge, Ramanathan and Greene.
We do have to typeset out a hell of a lot of equations, you realize. There's even an entirely separated-from-Latex TeX set of macros called VarTex, written by notorious economist Hal Varian, author of _the_ standard undegrad microeconomics manuals, "Intermediate Microeconomics" and "Microeconomic Theory".
Is that it doesn't foster conceptual innovation. I still haven't made up my mind about software patents because it's a bloody damn shame that the author of Visicalc isn't making zillions of dollars off his idea just because some people one-upped him in a few months.
If you've ever worked in a non-IT job, you'd have seen the vast masses automating their work and occasionally doing actual programming (with things like IF clauses on cell formulas) within the spreadsheet framework.
Programming for the masses.
What conceptual innovations has the open source software movement come up with after the days of emacs and tex? I just see it one-upping its commercial counterparts (often doing it better, smarter).
As Steven Landsberg once put it, "the whole economics can be summarized in one principle: *people respond to incentives*". In open source, the incentive is on doing things closer to the UI (e.g. developing k3b, not cdrecord) and, what's worth, looking at what major companies with big pre-coding research labs do, and ripping them off. That's what the Octave folks have done with Matlab, that's what Mozilla's done with Opera and tab browsing, and that's what the KDE people have done with (kill kill kill) MSFT and integrated local file explorer/web browser.
The incentives are all wrong, and I'm really, really worried.
The fact is that regardless of what methodologys used when developing software, in the end you are simply giving instructions to the computer what to do.
Blah. In imperative languages, you do.
In pure functional languages like Haskell, you don't.
And I really don't know why neural networks aren't used en masse to train computers.
Me and my Quantian box are browsing safely and recklessly.
On a less triumphant note, I'll eventually get called to fix Windows machines that suffer from that worm. How can you recover someone's data from an unbootable HD?
Slashdot Mirror
.. .printers, aaaaahhhh!!!!
Jesus, I hate CUPS.
I hate CUPS.
I hate.
Conectiva is just bad, and that's pretty much a consensus in the brazilian Linux community. If that wasn't enough, their solutions are overpriced, and they're pulling political levers to get government contracts instead of Microsoft - even though their product is _more_ expensive than what Microsoft produces.
Just a few months ago, they got the current left-leaning party to push for a change in public contractor law that put a "priority for Free Software solutions" above other criteria in public contracts.
I mean, they're just out to leech out taxpayer money with some lame nationalistic excuse.
My attempts to get this on the frontpage keep getting rejected, but the brazilian distro to watch is Kurumin, a noppix variant that fits on a mini-CD and includes just SO MUCH fucking software in 180 megs, and so much functionality.
This might seem overstated in bandwidth-abundant America, but it's way easier to download 200-odd megs to try out this new-fangled kool linux thang than the 4x600Mb downloads the new distros have been requiring.
Disclaimer: I'm in no way affiliated with Carlos Morimoto or the Kurumin crowd. Yes, I'm a brazilian taxpayer.
Go Forth?
But isn't it a C compiler?
What next, Visual PL/I?
It's not like if it was cleverly cloaked. They're pretty open about it - you're trading in some privacy for some convenience. I mean, not everyone browses porn of embarassing kinds they wouldn't like other people to see.
If it's useful enough, I could see myself thinking of installing it at the Win32 box I use at work. I mostly just look at slashdot and my webmail (hosted at my home Linux computer) anyway.
I mean, gee, there's always a trade-off between convenience and privacy. Not everyone's encrypting all their outbound email with a note on how to install PGP.
Spyware removal software typically counts the number of files + the number of cookies + the number of registry keys related to spyware it finds. So it's not uncommon to get a report with over 150 items when the user has only installed Gator.
A badly-spyware-ridden machine could have thousands of those items.
Now, if only one computer out of 10 has Gator, you'll still find that on average, each computer has 15 items. Most typically - specially in corporate environments - you'll find a few machines with thousands of spyware items and a lot of computers with no spyware - since employees aren't _all_ fucking around with company time.
So, um, another ignorant Slashdot story. Grr.
But Winamp always seemed (before I switched to Linux) to "remember" which tracks I played manually the most when I selected all my mp3 collection to play randomly.
My cheapy Sony discman (nothing special, it just plays ordinary audio-cd`s and is particularly choosy about CD-R brands) seems to do that too - when I keep on skipping after the first seconds of a track on random shuffle, it`ll show up less and less - to the point where it doesn't anymore.
I haven't devised a way to test this in a controlled environment, but I've felt that effect really really strongly over the years with winamp and my discman. Could be some amusing side-effect of pseudorandom generation, could be FAT disk fragmenting, shit, I don`t know. Could even be old-fashioned placebo effect, but I don't think that's it.
Or perhaps I'm schizo. Anyone ever had that impression?
Direct search url not "google.com/search?q=words+here", but instead "a9.com/words+here".
Soon you find yourself su`ing whenever something complains it wants to run as root.
Finally, you get pissed off and add yourself to
Instant linux virus: "nudie-pictures.jpg" (chmodded +x, of course).
Duh.
Sure, market Linux as a cheaper, "generic" alternative to the mainstream OS.
That'll do wonders for the server Linux market, not to mention the general public awareness of Linux.
Oh, and call it "Lindows", so it fits in with the whole industry of substandard equipment with brand names like "Toshipa", "Somy", etc.
God, I just _love_ the use of "geek out" as a verb. Hadn't come across it yet.
Someone should make a "geek out" version of this t-shirt.
of jwz quitting Netscape after the AOL fusion?
I remember being really depressed about his resignation letter (it's somewhere in his website). But then I was 15 - and besides, I didn't quite realize he had gotten rich in the process.
Plretty please! put thumbnail view on open/close dialogs! :D
:-!
KDE has'em.
In fact, KDE has automagic, a la Windows, local printer setup I didn't think would be there.
Of course, the drivers themselves are badly botched
... and of course, "real programmers" get scared.
Do not forget about Haskell, which is pretty much excel-like programming for people with brains.
Wonsoponatime, during the early days of the browser wars, there was a "third contestant" (it never was popular enough to be in third, or tenth place, for that matter) called The Other Internet Package, from The Other Company.
I remember having found about it from cnet's browsers.com, and used it for what, a year and a half.
It would organize the site you're browsing in a hierarchical list of hyperlinks on the left as you went through it. It was an amazing concept, specially for, um, I think it was 1996.
Eventually, Windows/my HD/whatever really got fucked, I had to reformat, and could never find again The Other Internet Package. Their website domain, www.theother.com, had been sold to one of those link farms.
When Konqueror acts stupid with me, I still mourn the passing of The Other Internet Package. Just imagine what it could have been, by now. Of all the saddest words of pen and tongue, the saddest are these: it could have been.
It's called econometrics. It's a huge field of statistics that attempts to discover ceteris paribus (all other things remaining constant) relationships between variables.
There are a bunch of very good manuals in econometrics out there. I've had a great experience with Damodar Gujarati and Arthur Goldberger, but apparently the standard textbooks these days are Wooldridge, Ramanathan and Greene.
In any case, it's worth checking out.
Haskell
Haskell
Haskell
Haskell
and of course, let's not forget about !
I'm an economist, and I use LaTeX.
We do have to typeset out a hell of a lot of equations, you realize. There's even an entirely separated-from-Latex TeX set of macros called VarTex, written by notorious economist Hal Varian, author of _the_ standard undegrad microeconomics manuals, "Intermediate Microeconomics" and "Microeconomic Theory".
Is that it doesn't foster conceptual innovation. I still haven't made up my mind about software patents because it's a bloody damn shame that the author of Visicalc isn't making zillions of dollars off his idea just because some people one-upped him in a few months.
If you've ever worked in a non-IT job, you'd have seen the vast masses automating their work and occasionally doing actual programming (with things like IF clauses on cell formulas) within the spreadsheet framework.
Programming for the masses.
What conceptual innovations has the open source software movement come up with after the days of emacs and tex? I just see it one-upping its commercial counterparts (often doing it better, smarter).
As Steven Landsberg once put it, "the whole economics can be summarized in one principle: *people respond to incentives*". In open source, the incentive is on doing things closer to the UI (e.g. developing k3b, not cdrecord) and, what's worth, looking at what major companies with big pre-coding research labs do, and ripping them off. That's what the Octave folks have done with Matlab, that's what Mozilla's done with Opera and tab browsing, and that's what the KDE people have done with (kill kill kill) MSFT and integrated local file explorer/web browser.
The incentives are all wrong, and I'm really, really worried.
The fact is that regardless of what methodologys used when developing software, in the end you are simply giving instructions to the computer what to do.
Blah. In imperative languages, you do.
In pure functional languages like Haskell, you don't.
And I really don't know why neural networks aren't used en masse to train computers.
Flamebait?
FLAMEBAIT?
But, but, I bashed Windows and promoted Linux!
Hell, do you have to know stochastic partial differential equations to karma-whore now??
"All computers", you sure?
Don'tcha mean "Windows computers"?
Me and my Quantian box are browsing safely and recklessly.
On a less triumphant note, I'll eventually get called to fix Windows machines that suffer from that worm. How can you recover someone's data from an unbootable HD?
At least _that_ one we sorted out :)
It's pretty irrational, when you think about it, getting charged for incoming calls.
I hope feminists complain soon.
'till the vast unwashed mashes discovered the profitable business of reinstalling Windows 98 in badly broken home machines.
It used to be quite profitable, mind you - for a 14-yr-old who has no real expenses...
This is it. I'm installing Linux.
There's just this much evil you can tolerate being a part of. If I was a Microsoft employee, I'd be organising a mass-quit list.
I hope this is never forgotten.