"The correct value [of the GB] is 1 billion (1,000,000,000) bytes. In short, you are a retard."
Nice to know that complex technical arguments can be solved using a simple personal insult.
Perhaps explain why every operating system for the last 3 decades have defined 1KB = 1024 bytes, 1MB = 1024**2 bytes, and when large storage became available, extended that to 1GB = 1024**3 bytes.
Then along comes a hard disk manufacturer, unilaterally redefines it, and suddenly they're right? And fdisk is wrong. And ls is wrong. And format is wrong. And hdparm is wrong. And Windows Explorer is wrong. And all the computer science papers since 1955 are wrong. Somehow, all those technical people who created the computers, the hardware, and all the programming tools, they made some mistake, and were wrong all along. All it took was a hard-disk manufacturer to come along and correct them.
And suddenly, we're using SI conventions to explain our redefinition of the GB. Nevermind that the byte is not an SI unit, never was, never will be.
Nevermind that hard disk manufacturers for a long time defined a GB as 1000 * 1000 * 1024 bytes. Perhaps they didn't have the gall to change the value of a KB, which is fairly fundamental to computing. Talk about mixing your units.
Oh yes, and of course there's the Gibibyte. Invented in about 1998, in response to the hard-disk manufacturers redefinition of the GB, and not even heard of before that. Odd how that word was never used when Unix was being written. Perhaps those early programmers weren't technical enough, and it took the insight and intelligence of a marketing department to spot their mistake.
Hence followed such confusion that even the IEEE was duped into believing they should endorse the change. So somehow, all of our operating systems are now out of date. Perhaps you could be the first to update the VAX and Unix code to reflect the new standard. Perhaps you could change the FTP servers, HTTP clients, network monitoring tools, the formatting utilities. Perhaps you could get some of my 1980 programming manuals republished, to reflect the new marketing-friendly standards, and all those websites which refer to 1.44MB floppy disks, well history must be rewritten.
Is this a bad time to mention that the Nomad Zen has a battery that you can replace without having take a hot scalpel to the case?
It also doesn't have the distinctive "mug me" white headphone cord, plus the slight advantage of having twice as much hard disk as an iPod for 2/3 the cost. (or optionally 3 times the disk space for equal cost)
I think they still lie about the disk size though. Does anyone have a comparaison chart of which MP3-player manufacturers redefine the GB to their own convenience, and which use the correct value?
"Politicians currently get access to voting records after elections. Yep, your anonymous vote is not really anonymous. It's only anonymous during the election, to prevent vote buying. After that, anyone in the government can get those records."
How can that possibly be allowed in a democracy?
"Vote republican, or you lose your job when we get access to your voting records."
"what will be the state of open source today without linux?"
Would have developed a different kernel.
Think about it -- the only reason hurd has never been extensively funded (in workforce terms) is that when linux appeared, it ticked off the "kernel" item in GNU's to-do list. If linux hadn't been Free Software, then all those kernel-hackers (other than linus) would have been working on hurd or some other kernel.
Without the kernel, what use is GNU? There would have been enough people whose business would have benefitted from a free software operating system to force it to become a reality, no matter what the state of linux.
"But seriously, we use a shredding company here at my office for our important papers."
I never figured that one out completely. If you want document security, the answer is to collect up all the most important, most embarassing, most confidential documents, and then give that pile of paper to someone who puts it in his van and promises to shred it sometime.
Yeah right...
Would be cool to buy a shredding company though, and then make a huge lump of money on the stock market with insider knowledge of lots of companies. Not that people would ever modify their ethics if there were phenomenal amounts of money involved.
"All that routing and broadcasting is expensive though. Slow. Thats why freenet sux. (That and the whole java thing.)"
BitTorrent does the same routing and broadcasting, and seems to manage okay under load.
Plus I was referring to Konspire which is written in C++. In fact, the website has a whole page dedicated to why Java isn't suitable for this kind of work. Not that it affects the speed of your network connections what language the program is in.
"Encrypt the packets? Fine. You can still trace their origin."
Sign the packets. Broadcast them, and anyone who receives them broadcasts them to anyone else who's interested. You don't need to hide the fact you're sending packets if there's no way of knowing whether you originated them or not. You're just a part of the network, routing traffic for anyone who's interested. You're no more liable for filtering it than the Tier-1 routers are.
You sent that packet? No I didn't I forwarded it. From whom? Don't know, it's automatic.
"Here, lets make a minor change to your statement. Publishing a.PDF on the Internet? Is that ironic, or just pathetic?
Totally agree. It's crap to find a PDF rather than a web-page when you're browsing, because you need a different program to open it, a program without the navigation features or usability enhancements of your browser, a program which isn't integrated with your browser in any meaningful way (displaying in the client rectangle notwithstanding), and generally is a PITA to read compared to HTML.
If a page is HTML, you can read it, search it, bookmark it, copy it, convert it, print it on any page size, and run automatic tools on it. With PDF, you can print it, and you can try to view it on-screen. But really you need to print it.
So, please, tell me the difference between the two?
* Time taken to load OpenOffice compared to xpdf
* PDF, there's an attempt by Adobe to make it viewable on my computer. DOC, there's no such attempt on the part of Microsoft
* PDF is an open published standard, DOC is not. Hence there is exactly one free viewer for DOC, and many, many free viewers for PDF.
* PDF is a document standard, DOC in addition contains a programming language capable of running code on many computers. See the point about there being only one or two programs capable of displaying it.
Doesn't matter so much though, they're both a blight on the internet. Don't bother with PDF unless you're expecting someone to print it before they read it, and don't bother with DOC if you're expecting anyone to read it.
"I believe, the blinkenlights people added support into mplayer so that they can play back any video clips on the matrix. It should be interesting what they do this year."
"It's not the tool, it's the file format that the tool uses. OpenOffice 1.1 still can't flawlessly im/export MS Office 2000 which is 3 year old software"
If your priority is opening MS-Office documents, you should consider using OpenOffice. Not only is it often better at opening Word documents than Word itself, but when the file format is upgraded, it will be more likely to support the new format without additional cost.
There are people asking for "completely the same" as if they can't find anything else that OOo lacks. It's like hearing someone moan that it's not fully compatible because it doesn't have the same Microsoft logo on the box. Yeah, we embedded a video in a powerpoint presentation in a spreadsheet in a document, and now it doesn't work. Duh!
At university, there were plenty of course materials posted on the intranet in MS-Office format. I could always reliably open them with OpenOffice, whereas people with MSOffice had problems. Example: the title pages that we had to use for the thesis, a.DOC document. Half the class came back the next week to complain that they coulnd't read it, using their latest copies of MS Office. I never noticed a problem, it opened just fine in OOo.
"Must people, like me, who were big buyers of retail(brick and mortar) music went to downloading music online for free because it was easier than heading down to the local music store... It wasn't that I wouldn't pay for the music, it was just that it was easier to download it with a better selection of music."
More than that, I find it's a lot easier to find music you like when you can listen to it, rather than staring at a CD cover and wondering what it sounds like.
Yes I know you can play CDs in some stores, but try asking them to listen to 65 different albums before buying one. If you want to find music (and it's taken for granted that the radio is no use) then you either need a friend with a very large music collection, or a copy of Kazaa-lite.
Re:What do you want to support?
on
Xandros version 2
·
· Score: 0, Troll
"If your mother is anything like mine, you will be her tech support. What would you rather support?"
"I just looked at this website, and now my computer's not working! What should I do?"
"There are all these boxes popping up with rude messages. What should I do?"
"I deleted some files, and it says "kernel32.dll not found". What should I do?"
Yeah, I can see why you'd want to stick to Windows for people you're giving technical support to...
Slashdot Mirror
"I'd hardly say it's relevant, any software that made such a braindead choice (why 30 and not 32 bits?) deserves to break"
Just out of interest, why does somebody making a 32-bit choice not deserve their program to break in a short while?
"We need to measure dates many centuries into the future... I know! I'll ignore all the calendar systems and functions, and count in milliseconds..."
"I'm going to be a fucking millionaire over this one!"
Or a monopolist.
"The correct value [of the GB] is 1 billion (1,000,000,000) bytes. In short, you are a retard."
Nice to know that complex technical arguments can be solved using a simple personal insult.
Perhaps explain why every operating system for the last 3 decades have defined 1KB = 1024 bytes, 1MB = 1024**2 bytes, and when large storage became available, extended that to 1GB = 1024**3 bytes.
Then along comes a hard disk manufacturer, unilaterally redefines it, and suddenly they're right? And fdisk is wrong. And ls is wrong. And format is wrong. And hdparm is wrong. And Windows Explorer is wrong. And all the computer science papers since 1955 are wrong. Somehow, all those technical people who created the computers, the hardware, and all the programming tools, they made some mistake, and were wrong all along. All it took was a hard-disk manufacturer to come along and correct them.
And suddenly, we're using SI conventions to explain our redefinition of the GB. Nevermind that the byte is not an SI unit, never was, never will be.
Nevermind that hard disk manufacturers for a long time defined a GB as 1000 * 1000 * 1024 bytes. Perhaps they didn't have the gall to change the value of a KB, which is fairly fundamental to computing. Talk about mixing your units.
Oh yes, and of course there's the Gibibyte. Invented in about 1998, in response to the hard-disk manufacturers redefinition of the GB, and not even heard of before that. Odd how that word was never used when Unix was being written. Perhaps those early programmers weren't technical enough, and it took the insight and intelligence of a marketing department to spot their mistake.
Hence followed such confusion that even the IEEE was duped into believing they should endorse the change. So somehow, all of our operating systems are now out of date. Perhaps you could be the first to update the VAX and Unix code to reflect the new standard. Perhaps you could change the FTP servers, HTTP clients, network monitoring tools, the formatting utilities. Perhaps you could get some of my 1980 programming manuals republished, to reflect the new marketing-friendly standards, and all those websites which refer to 1.44MB floppy disks, well history must be rewritten.
"What $10,000 could have done to advance some more meaningful Open Source project."
Is it not meaningful that the best browser in the world doesn't work on your computer?
Sounds quite a reasonable request to me...
Is this a bad time to mention that the Nomad Zen has a battery that you can replace without having take a hot scalpel to the case?
It also doesn't have the distinctive "mug me" white headphone cord, plus the slight advantage of having twice as much hard disk as an iPod for 2/3 the cost. (or optionally 3 times the disk space for equal cost)
I think they still lie about the disk size though. Does anyone have a comparaison chart of which MP3-player manufacturers redefine the GB to their own convenience, and which use the correct value?
"Politicians currently get access to voting records after elections. Yep, your anonymous vote is not really anonymous. It's only anonymous during the election, to prevent vote buying. After that, anyone in the government can get those records."
How can that possibly be allowed in a democracy?
"Vote republican, or you lose your job when we get access to your voting records."
I wouldn't suggest keeping $2000 in a PayPal account.
First person to transfer a dollar to it from a stolen credit card, or from a non-english-speaking country, and that money is gone.
"what will be the state of open source today without linux?"
Would have developed a different kernel.
Think about it -- the only reason hurd has never been extensively funded (in workforce terms) is that when linux appeared, it ticked off the "kernel" item in GNU's to-do list. If linux hadn't been Free Software, then all those kernel-hackers (other than linus) would have been working on hurd or some other kernel.
Without the kernel, what use is GNU? There would have been enough people whose business would have benefitted from a free software operating system to force it to become a reality, no matter what the state of linux.
"Why do we use them? Because it would take me two or three days to destroy a single box of paper records that we have. I don't have time for that."
I know this isn't the official opinion of the shredder company, but... have you ever considered a bonfire?
I know if I had a box full of paper to securely dispose of, I would't be feeding each sheet into a shredder...
"But seriously, we use a shredding company here at my office for our important papers."
I never figured that one out completely. If you want document security, the answer is to collect up all the most important, most embarassing, most confidential documents, and then give that pile of paper to someone who puts it in his van and promises to shred it sometime.
Yeah right...
Would be cool to buy a shredding company though, and then make a huge lump of money on the stock market with insider knowledge of lots of companies. Not that people would ever modify their ethics if there were phenomenal amounts of money involved.
You don't need a google news link. Just pick it up from the trash at the back of the NYTimes building
"I'm not sure what to think of Ellison."
James Bond villain.
"Ours is the loneliest profession, Mr. Bond."
"Mod parent Insightful, He makes a very good point." -- by Anonymous Coward on 07:48 PM
If you got an account on slashdot, you'd be able to make such moderations.
"All that routing and broadcasting is expensive though. Slow. Thats why freenet sux. (That and the whole java thing.)"
BitTorrent does the same routing and broadcasting, and seems to manage okay under load.
Plus I was referring to Konspire which is written in C++. In fact, the website has a whole page dedicated to why Java isn't suitable for this kind of work. Not that it affects the speed of your network connections what language the program is in.
"Encrypt the packets? Fine. You can still trace their origin."
Sign the packets. Broadcast them, and anyone who receives them broadcasts them to anyone else who's interested. You don't need to hide the fact you're sending packets if there's no way of knowing whether you originated them or not. You're just a part of the network, routing traffic for anyone who's interested. You're no more liable for filtering it than the Tier-1 routers are.
You sent that packet? No I didn't I forwarded it. From whom? Don't know, it's automatic.
Konspire2B
"Here, lets make a minor change to your statement. Publishing a .PDF on the Internet? Is that ironic, or just pathetic?
Totally agree. It's crap to find a PDF rather than a web-page when you're browsing, because you need a different program to open it, a program without the navigation features or usability enhancements of your browser, a program which isn't integrated with your browser in any meaningful way (displaying in the client rectangle notwithstanding), and generally is a PITA to read compared to HTML.
If a page is HTML, you can read it, search it, bookmark it, copy it, convert it, print it on any page size, and run automatic tools on it. With PDF, you can print it, and you can try to view it on-screen. But really you need to print it.
So, please, tell me the difference between the two?
* Time taken to load OpenOffice compared to xpdf
* PDF, there's an attempt by Adobe to make it viewable on my computer. DOC, there's no such attempt on the part of Microsoft
* PDF is an open published standard, DOC is not. Hence there is exactly one free viewer for DOC, and many, many free viewers for PDF.
* PDF is a document standard, DOC in addition contains a programming language capable of running code on many computers. See the point about there being only one or two programs capable of displaying it.
Doesn't matter so much though, they're both a blight on the internet. Don't bother with PDF unless you're expecting someone to print it before they read it, and don't bother with DOC if you're expecting anyone to read it.
"Obviously, but you don't get electricity, food, running water, open source software, and the internet without a stable government."
They had a stable government until a few months ago.
-1: Troll
Publishing a .DOC on the internet? Is that ironic, or just pathetic?
Microsoft web site. Minimum requirements: not just a browser, but an entire office suite, and only the latest version will do.
"I believe, the blinkenlights people added support into mplayer so that they can play back any video clips on the matrix. It should be interesting what they do this year."
Play the Matrix on the matrix?
"Do you happen to recall with the "D" in "DRM" stands for, Sparky?"
Do you happen to recall with the "non" in "non-DRM" stands for, linguist?
"It's not the tool, it's the file format that the tool uses. OpenOffice 1.1 still can't flawlessly im/export MS Office 2000 which is 3 year old software"
.DOC document. Half the class came back the next week to complain that they coulnd't read it, using their latest copies of MS Office. I never noticed a problem, it opened just fine in OOo.
If your priority is opening MS-Office documents, you should consider using OpenOffice. Not only is it often better at opening Word documents than Word itself, but when the file format is upgraded, it will be more likely to support the new format without additional cost.
There are people asking for "completely the same" as if they can't find anything else that OOo lacks. It's like hearing someone moan that it's not fully compatible because it doesn't have the same Microsoft logo on the box. Yeah, we embedded a video in a powerpoint presentation in a spreadsheet in a document, and now it doesn't work. Duh!
At university, there were plenty of course materials posted on the intranet in MS-Office format. I could always reliably open them with OpenOffice, whereas people with MSOffice had problems. Example: the title pages that we had to use for the thesis, a
"Do you seriously think the music companies would agree on letting a company distribute non-DRM'ed music?"
Like tapes? Or radio?
"Must people, like me, who were big buyers of retail(brick and mortar) music went to downloading music online for free because it was easier than heading down to the local music store... It wasn't that I wouldn't pay for the music, it was just that it was easier to download it with a better selection of music."
More than that, I find it's a lot easier to find music you like when you can listen to it, rather than staring at a CD cover and wondering what it sounds like.
Yes I know you can play CDs in some stores, but try asking them to listen to 65 different albums before buying one. If you want to find music (and it's taken for granted that the radio is no use) then you either need a friend with a very large music collection, or a copy of Kazaa-lite.
"If your mother is anything like mine, you will be her tech support. What would you rather support?"
"I just looked at this website, and now my computer's not working! What should I do?"
"There are all these boxes popping up with rude messages. What should I do?"
"I deleted some files, and it says "kernel32.dll not found". What should I do?"
Yeah, I can see why you'd want to stick to Windows for people you're giving technical support to...
"The sheer thinking of a WORLDWIDE change to the entire email system is actually quite propsterous."
Let's just start with an X-something header... the email system was designed to be extensible.
X-Domain-Authorisation for example. An electronic signature of the registered domain owner. No more emails appearing to be from my domain.