I like linux because it gives me flexibility. You like MacOS X because it is easy to use. I like Wordpress because it is simple. You like Joomla because it is adaptable.
Fair enough, but how do you explain all the Macbooks visible at this Drupal Conference?:-)
LOL. Allow me to chime in with the OP for folks like you that refuse to get it.
Of course you can read text on an LCD, just like you can also read text on a CRT with 60Hz flicker, in giant lights at softball game, or hand scrawled on a bathroom wall with really bad kerning. You can also rub lemon juice on paper cuts to keep them from getting infected, but the majority of us choose not to.
The point is that e-ink is easier on the eyes, which makes what you're reading... wait for it... easier to read.
In Jeff Bezos' interview on The Charlie Rose show, he used a flashlight analogy, saying thta reading on a convential screen is like staring into a flashlight. The light may not be as bright as a typical flashlight, but it's a helluva lot brighter (and different) than the light reflected off a piece of paper. Or a Kindle. Ergo, Bezos opted not to use a LCD screen, while being aware of the tradeoffs of doing so. The reaction to his decision has ranged from praise to amazement to a shitload of Kindles being sold.
So it can't read PDFs. Big negative IMHO - I wouldn't mind having something like this (at $150 max) to stash dozens of technical references and white papers on. But I'm not going to go through the hassle of converting every PDF I'd want to store.
Nice to someone draw attention to the fact that paperback novels aren't the sum total of everything people spend their time reading. Given that popular fiction seem to be Kindle's focus, the rest of the world will have to wait for something else altogether.
Which is a shame, really. The ideal reading device should accommodate anything and everything in written form. That would include technical papers, manuals, textbooks, and newspapers, among others, in addition to what's currently being read by airline passengers trying to pass the time with their Kindles.
The earliest sense of decimate was 'kill one in every ten of', a reference to the ancient Roman practice of killing one in every ten of a group of soldiers as a collective punishment. This has been more or less totally superseded by the sense 'kill or destroy a large proportion of', although some traditionalists argue that this later sense is incorrect.
Yeah, yeah, I know. But apart from the aqueduct, the sanitation, the roads and the word 'decimate', what else have the Romans ever done for us?
Tons of fun for a certain kind of hacker, but not of any interest for people writing serious scripts.
Most serious scripts are (and continue to be) written using/bin/sh. Maybe your definition of serious is something different?
But the scripting community has moved on, and doesn't really care that Bash or Csh now have features that other scripting languages acquired decades ago.
Huh? Some of the new features are welcome for interactive use, and bash is extremely popular in that regard. Feature parity (in a general hand-wavy sense) doesn't exist between bash, csh, zsh, etc., so decades later, the choice of shells remains important, as does continued development.
Personally I use bash (with plenty of Perl one-liners thrown in for good measure), but I'd be misguided to think that bash (or Perl) is available everywhere, or didn't concede that other shells do certain things far better.
That aside I would like to ask my fellow slashdots running their own mail servers, (I do speakeasy actaully allows this under their tos) why its a problem for you to use your ISP as a smart host?
I've run my own mail server on and off over the years, and decided to do it permanently just over two years ago.
Why?
Why do anything for yourself rather than let someone else provide a comparable service? Allow me to use a non-car analogy. The Holiday Inn suits some folks fine, some want their own apartment, while others insist on building and/or designing their own house. Me, I fall into the latter category.
Obviously, there's work involved (trivial if you know what you're doing beforehand), but that work invariably offers something in return. In my case (continuing the "build your own house" analogy), I don't have to deal with lousy contractors (subpar hosting companies), unqualified tradesman (help desk drones), ambiguous chain of command (no direct accountability by the person actually in charge of the mail servers), ambiguous contractual obligations (unpublished exceptions to the TOS), or any other nonsense. It's just me, my servers and my logs.
The downsides? My UPS won't protect me from accessing or receiving mail due to an extended power outage. On the other hand, I've received exactly 2 spam messages in just over 2 years. I'd say that's a real bargain.
You can set up port 25 SMTP to require authentication for relay purposes, without having to configure end user's machines for another port.
More broadly, authentication can be configured for port 25, port 587, or not at all. Typically, the submission port requires authentication.
As for the article, this factoid is amusing:
Spamhaus currently includes 225,454 U.S. based Internet addresses on its CBL. Of those, nearly one-quarter -- almost 56,000 -- are assigned to Verizon.net. Comcast, which according to Spamhaus is home to the next-largest concentration of malicious hosts among U.S. ISPs, has fewer than half as many listings.
I'd see it as annoying, then again, it's a very good branding technique.
I assume you're talking about Dell here, but Microsoft does an excellent job without any help. Take a typical system, open a single IE window and then count the number of "blue E" logos that appear on your monitor. The count should be 5 (title bar, address bar, status bar, desktop, quicklaunch). Open another window, and you get 4 more.
Small wonder people associate the logo with The Internet.
For the price of an acre on Manhattan, you could buy 100 acres in the Midwest, plus the equipment and personnel to operate it, plus transportation of the final product to NYC. That's the market trying to give you a hint that allocating Manhattan real estate to agriculture is not the most efficient thing to do.
Fair enough, but those things that increase our quality of life tend to be inherently inefficient. A workplace environment may demand high productivity from its workers, but good friendships require cutting lots of slack. You can't fully comprehend the meaning of such things until you spend 3 hours eating lunch in a house in the Italian countryside where the food was grown and harvested (or raised and slaughtered), on the same or neighbouring property as it has been done for hundreds of years. Upscale American urbanites, of course, refer to such things in a more trendy manner ("slow food", "buy seasonal and local", etc.)
People have written books on what efficiency (in the form of modern agrobusiness and consumerism) has brought us. I won't reiterate any of the conclusions. What I will point out is that there are large American cities where there an increasing amount of real estate dedicated to parks and open air environments, the rooftops of buildings are increasing covered with vegetation (Chicago is a good example), and paved-over urban space is re-allocated for community gardening. And, surprise, the people living there like it that way.
Certainly it could be recycled into new products, too.
That elicits the image of a dog chasing it's tail.
Sure, you can take steps to mitigate problems, but it seems, at least to me, more reasonable to address the root of the problem. Which is too much fucking plastic.
there is more than enough iron in the ground to coat the entire earth with it several times). Instead of buying your salami in cheap plastic packaging you'll simply buy it in a can.
Interesting comment. I'd wager that a huge portion of the plastic we make could (and perhaps, should) be replaced with something else. Mind you, we'd have to figure in the hidden costs of health problems and environmental degradation associated with the manufacture, use and disposal of plastics for the price to even out.
As a side note (for those who aren't Italian or otherwise salami afficionados), real salami (not the stuff sold in grocery chains under the same moniker) doesn't require plastic or any other form of packaging. The surface mold protects it just fine while it's hanging in open air while curing, and will protect just fine on the way home from the market.
I just do not understand why a government "just mulling Open Source" as the headline says, is news worthy. It's just a gimmick.
May I suggest reading the article instead of the Slashdot headline? For those similarly disinclined to click the link:
Public Works and Government Services Canada is accepting submissions about "no-charge licensed software" until Feb. 19 through Merx, a government website that allows vendors to bid on contracts... The Merx posting is the first time the government has ever made such a formal request for information about this type of software, Public Works confirmed Thursday.
In this case, the government has specified that the request will not result in the awarding of any contract but will be used to put together guidelines related to the planning, purchase, use and disposal of such software within the government.
I'll allow others to respond to your non sequiturs concerning the state of higher education in Canada, and the domestic auto industry.
Rats and mice don't eat cables...They chew the insulation off to make their nests...or if it happens to be in their way. So your best be it to figure out what the hell they're eating, and shut down their food supply. They'll move on shortly thereafter.
I'll add to what you just wrote.
First, it's true that rats don't eat cables and instead use the insulation to make their nests, but it's worth pointing out that rats will eat almost anything, and what they don't eat they tend to chew up to make their nests. If you have just cables, consider yourself lucky. The typical homeowner with rats in the garage will see his papers, books, and furniture destroyed.
Second, what rats don't eat or chew on will be likely be covered in shit and urine. Rats do this on the move (no stopping for a private piss in the corner for them) so expect everything to be dirtied, if not damaged.
Third, what isn't eaten, chewed, shit on, or pissed on may be salvageable, but that may not be good enough. Rats carry all sorts of diseases (as do their fleas), but their leftovers (saliva, urine, droppings, etc.) are similarly problematic. Hantavirus, for example, is common enough in the US, and breathing in dust from a rat infestation should be considered a real risk.
As for "moving on", yes, they'll move on, but they tend to stay until they decide to do so. It's not unlike ants. Leave some food unattended for a day, and you'll have ant problems for weeks. Do it again, and they'll calculate the moving average in their little brains, and you'll have ant problems for far longer than you'd think. Female rats, IIRC, will go into heat every few days, and will mate with anyone (incest is no problem). The little fuckers reach sexual maturity after a few few weeks of being born. That suggests that once you have a rat problem, you will continue to have a rat problem.
I have a neighbour who is the kind of woman you see on the local news from time to time: too many cats to count. She also has lots of fruit trees. The rats come for the fruit and cat food, but the cats are too well fed to be of any use, so the rats end up in my garage. Occassionally, they dig through the drywayll and end up in my kitchen.
Killing them with poison is, regrettably, the best approach. In a rural or farm environment, cats, terriers and owls tend to keep their populations in check.
Okay, this is probably a dumb question, but how do you print anything without CUPS?
Enscript and lpr? I've always used postscript capable printers. And to make life even easier, I rely on network capable printers.
Give the printer a hostname (DNS or/etc/hosts) Create spool directory Create a filter script to detect and/or convert to postscript Create an entry in/etc/printcap Enable lpd Use lpr to print
Most of the article is about grey listing. That's nearly suicidal for most mail server administrators.
That would depend on a lot of things
Executive A, "This guy just sent me a contract 60 seconds ago. I keep clicking the damn send/receive button but it's not coming in. Are you a fucking moron or something? What the HELL is going on?!!"
Chances are high that anyone sending contracts has already sent previous messages, so the receipt of the contract would not be subject to any delay. That's assuming that you haven't already whitelisted folks in the habit of sending you contracts. From the spamd manpage
whitelisted hosts do not talk to spamd. Their connections are instead sent to a real mail server, such as sendmail(8).
greylisted hosts are redirected to spamd, but spamd has not yet decided if they are likely spammers. They are given a temporary failure message by spamd when they try to deliver mail.
When spamd is run in default mode, it will greylist connections from new hosts. Depending on its configuration, it may choose to blacklist the host or, if the checks described below are met, eventually whitelist it. When spamd is run in blacklist-only mode, using the -b flag, it will con- sult a pre-defined set of blacklist addresses to decide whether to tarpit the host or not.
So beware online reviews of monitors. Better look for user reviews.
Speaking of which, and at the risk of going on a tangent, I'm in the middle of redoing my setup at home for which I need one large or possibly two medium sized monitors. Anyone have any "user reviews" they'd care to share?
Don't play games, mostly terminal windows, but I'd prefer any multimedia entertainment featuring large bosomed women to be delivered in all its glory.
There could be many reasons to download it on XP. It's not a fuck-up until a Vista-only MS app installs on XP. Until then, it's just some guy downloading a file on XP.
Reminds of what I went through recently. Lured by all the hype about the new Consolas font (yeah, I get excited about such things), I decided to go download it from Microsoft and have a look. The font is there by default for Vista users, but what the hell, we're all running Windows right, and I don't recall Microsoft ever charging extra for their fonts.
The download went fine. The installation routine, however, required Visual Studio 2005 to be preinstalled so it quit with its error message. Not one to be turned away so easily, I discovered that the font is included with the (free) PowerPoint viewer. Downloaded that, installed it, made a backup of the newly-installed fonts, and uninstalled PowerPoint.
The font, I discovered, is unimpressive.
The moral of the story? Stupid is as stupid does. Self respect comes at a price, and a sane environment (something not available with Windows) is preferrable to chasing the promises of the new.
Your post is misleading and inaccurate... Do a fresh installation of Windows, don't install anything on it, take a look at the Windows directory. I recommend you sort by file type. You'll notice it's actually quite organised...
I understand the point you're trying to make, but suggesting that the Windows directory, or any default directory structure, is misleading and inaccurate. I'd go so far as to say it's nonsense.
A *unix user with a few years of experience behind him or her could, with little effort, identify and justify each and every directory or file on the hard drive (along with their respective permissions), and additionally identify the source of those files and directories. Hell, a novice reader could spend a few minutes reading hier(7) and get most of the way there. Granted Linux is a bet messy when compared to the BSDs, for example, but the point remains valid.
So while Windows is no longer an unholy mess, you can not say it's organised. If you do, I'd suggest you look a bit closer. What you'll find is a crude structure that follows a basic basic rules with countless one-off exceptions, all with exceptions to exceptions to exceptions, each overlayed with dizzying complex permissions. While you're at it, do the same with the registry. If you can go more than a few minutes without scratching your head, I have no doubts that in short order, you'll throw up your arms in frustration and give up.
Now if you think my excercise was uncessary or unproductive, consider the circular reasoning of making such a conclusion and insisting Windows is organised.
Organised? I'd suggest that even for an experienced admin/programmer, it's mostly unknowable.
If you can't find anybody in your old company that likes you, you probably need to work on your social skills. It's one of the things employers need to make sure the job gets done.
Given that we're all sharing in the burdens of the current financial crisis, let's try something more positive instead of drawing attention to the fact that some of our Slashdot readers may not be liked by any of their co-workers.
Gentle Slashdot reader, repeat after me:
"I'm good enough. I'm smart enough. And gosh, people like me!"
Another common misconception seems to be that Linux has to take over the world. I couldn't care less how fast the community grows because it works already!
While I'd generally agree, you're ignoring the economic and political aspects to this. I don't need to reiterate the widespread and profoundly negative effects of Microsoft and its monopoly power, but it's a no brainer that an increased adoption of Linux would go a long way to addressing those problems. That point is painfully underscored by the fact that technology is playing such an increasing role in everyone's life that it's starting to shape how we leave and interact with one another.
So while you or I can be happy in our sandboxes, we'd be fools not to recognise that what we do (or don't do) has ramifications outside of it. Nature, left on its own, will establish an equilibrium. History, however, tells us that in society, nothing happens until folks to stand up for a cause or movement, and lead others.
In Linus' case, we have an unappointed and unwilling leader who says, "I'm happy. Hope you're happy, too."
Slashdot Mirror
I like linux because it gives me flexibility. You like MacOS X because it is easy to use. I like Wordpress because it is simple. You like Joomla because it is adaptable.
Fair enough, but how do you explain all the Macbooks visible at this Drupal Conference? :-)
and... you can't read text on an LCD?
LOL. Allow me to chime in with the OP for folks like you that refuse to get it.
Of course you can read text on an LCD, just like you can also read text on a CRT with 60Hz flicker, in giant lights at softball game, or hand scrawled on a bathroom wall with really bad kerning. You can also rub lemon juice on paper cuts to keep them from getting infected, but the majority of us choose not to.
The point is that e-ink is easier on the eyes, which makes what you're reading ... wait for it ... easier to read.
In Jeff Bezos' interview on The Charlie Rose show, he used a flashlight analogy, saying thta reading on a convential screen is like staring into a flashlight. The light may not be as bright as a typical flashlight, but it's a helluva lot brighter (and different) than the light reflected off a piece of paper. Or a Kindle. Ergo, Bezos opted not to use a LCD screen, while being aware of the tradeoffs of doing so. The reaction to his decision has ranged from praise to amazement to a shitload of Kindles being sold.
So it can't read PDFs. Big negative IMHO - I wouldn't mind having something like this (at $150 max) to stash dozens of technical references and white papers on. But I'm not going to go through the hassle of converting every PDF I'd want to store.
Nice to someone draw attention to the fact that paperback novels aren't the sum total of everything people spend their time reading. Given that popular fiction seem to be Kindle's focus, the rest of the world will have to wait for something else altogether.
Which is a shame, really. The ideal reading device should accommodate anything and everything in written form. That would include technical papers, manuals, textbooks, and newspapers, among others, in addition to what's currently being read by airline passengers trying to pass the time with their Kindles.
For anyone interested, Jeff Bezos is scheduled to appear tonight on Charlie Rose on your local PBS station.
No doubt, he'll spend most of his time talking about Kindle.
You know that "decimated" means that a tenth was taken... so it was more than decimated...
More specifically,
Yeah, yeah, I know. But apart from the aqueduct, the sanitation, the roads and the word 'decimate', what else have the Romans ever done for us?
Tons of fun for a certain kind of hacker, but not of any interest for people writing serious scripts.
Most serious scripts are (and continue to be) written using /bin/sh. Maybe your definition of serious is something different?
But the scripting community has moved on, and doesn't really care that Bash or Csh now have features that other scripting languages acquired decades ago.
Huh? Some of the new features are welcome for interactive use, and bash is extremely popular in that regard. Feature parity (in a general hand-wavy sense) doesn't exist between bash, csh, zsh, etc., so decades later, the choice of shells remains important, as does continued development.
Personally I use bash (with plenty of Perl one-liners thrown in for good measure), but I'd be misguided to think that bash (or Perl) is available everywhere, or didn't concede that other shells do certain things far better.
Postits Everywhere.
LOL. If you're going to use a method that no one will use, I'd suggest a 3-part process.
1. Writing your own manpages. Easy enough to do, but to make things really easy, require that each is properly formatted, but incomplete.
2. Write info pages to supplement your manpages. The manpage has already been written, so feel free to skip this step.
3. Sit back and marvel and your system. To impress your boss, be sure to write a manpage or two documenting how things work.
That aside I would like to ask my fellow slashdots running their own mail servers, (I do speakeasy actaully allows this under their tos) why its a problem for you to use your ISP as a smart host?
I've run my own mail server on and off over the years, and decided to do it permanently just over two years ago.
Why?
Why do anything for yourself rather than let someone else provide a comparable service? Allow me to use a non-car analogy. The Holiday Inn suits some folks fine, some want their own apartment, while others insist on building and/or designing their own house. Me, I fall into the latter category.
Obviously, there's work involved (trivial if you know what you're doing beforehand), but that work invariably offers something in return. In my case (continuing the "build your own house" analogy), I don't have to deal with lousy contractors (subpar hosting companies), unqualified tradesman (help desk drones), ambiguous chain of command (no direct accountability by the person actually in charge of the mail servers), ambiguous contractual obligations (unpublished exceptions to the TOS), or any other nonsense. It's just me, my servers and my logs.
The downsides? My UPS won't protect me from accessing or receiving mail due to an extended power outage. On the other hand, I've received exactly 2 spam messages in just over 2 years. I'd say that's a real bargain.
You can set up port 25 SMTP to require authentication for relay purposes, without having to configure end user's machines for another port.
More broadly, authentication can be configured for port 25, port 587, or not at all. Typically, the submission port requires authentication.
As for the article, this factoid is amusing:
I'd see it as annoying, then again, it's a very good branding technique.
I assume you're talking about Dell here, but Microsoft does an excellent job without any help. Take a typical system, open a single IE window and then count the number of "blue E" logos that appear on your monitor. The count should be 5 (title bar, address bar, status bar, desktop, quicklaunch). Open another window, and you get 4 more.
Small wonder people associate the logo with The Internet.
think I just witnessed a brutal murder...of a spell checker.
No worries. It's just Scottish.
For the price of an acre on Manhattan, you could buy 100 acres in the Midwest, plus the equipment and personnel to operate it, plus transportation of the final product to NYC. That's the market trying to give you a hint that allocating Manhattan real estate to agriculture is not the most efficient thing to do.
Fair enough, but those things that increase our quality of life tend to be inherently inefficient. A workplace environment may demand high productivity from its workers, but good friendships require cutting lots of slack. You can't fully comprehend the meaning of such things until you spend 3 hours eating lunch in a house in the Italian countryside where the food was grown and harvested (or raised and slaughtered), on the same or neighbouring property as it has been done for hundreds of years. Upscale American urbanites, of course, refer to such things in a more trendy manner ("slow food", "buy seasonal and local", etc.)
People have written books on what efficiency (in the form of modern agrobusiness and consumerism) has brought us. I won't reiterate any of the conclusions. What I will point out is that there are large American cities where there an increasing amount of real estate dedicated to parks and open air environments, the rooftops of buildings are increasing covered with vegetation (Chicago is a good example), and paved-over urban space is re-allocated for community gardening. And, surprise, the people living there like it that way.
Certainly it could be recycled into new products, too.
That elicits the image of a dog chasing it's tail.
Sure, you can take steps to mitigate problems, but it seems, at least to me, more reasonable to address the root of the problem. Which is too much fucking plastic.
there is more than enough iron in the ground to coat the entire earth with it several times). Instead of buying your salami in cheap plastic packaging you'll simply buy it in a can.
Interesting comment. I'd wager that a huge portion of the plastic we make could (and perhaps, should) be replaced with something else. Mind you, we'd have to figure in the hidden costs of health problems and environmental degradation associated with the manufacture, use and disposal of plastics for the price to even out.
As a side note (for those who aren't Italian or otherwise salami afficionados), real salami (not the stuff sold in grocery chains under the same moniker) doesn't require plastic or any other form of packaging. The surface mold protects it just fine while it's hanging in open air while curing, and will protect just fine on the way home from the market.
I just do not understand why a government "just mulling Open Source" as the headline says, is news worthy. It's just a gimmick.
May I suggest reading the article instead of the Slashdot headline? For those similarly disinclined to click the link:
I'll allow others to respond to your non sequiturs concerning the state of higher education in Canada, and the domestic auto industry.
President Obama smokes crack?!!?!??!!?!
Dunno. Has he stopped beating his wife?
Rats and mice don't eat cables...They chew the insulation off to make their nests...or if it happens to be in their way. So your best be it to figure out what the hell they're eating, and shut down their food supply. They'll move on shortly thereafter.
I'll add to what you just wrote.
First, it's true that rats don't eat cables and instead use the insulation to make their nests, but it's worth pointing out that rats will eat almost anything, and what they don't eat they tend to chew up to make their nests. If you have just cables, consider yourself lucky. The typical homeowner with rats in the garage will see his papers, books, and furniture destroyed.
Second, what rats don't eat or chew on will be likely be covered in shit and urine. Rats do this on the move (no stopping for a private piss in the corner for them) so expect everything to be dirtied, if not damaged.
Third, what isn't eaten, chewed, shit on, or pissed on may be salvageable, but that may not be good enough. Rats carry all sorts of diseases (as do their fleas), but their leftovers (saliva, urine, droppings, etc.) are similarly problematic. Hantavirus, for example, is common enough in the US, and breathing in dust from a rat infestation should be considered a real risk.
As for "moving on", yes, they'll move on, but they tend to stay until they decide to do so. It's not unlike ants. Leave some food unattended for a day, and you'll have ant problems for weeks. Do it again, and they'll calculate the moving average in their little brains, and you'll have ant problems for far longer than you'd think. Female rats, IIRC, will go into heat every few days, and will mate with anyone (incest is no problem). The little fuckers reach sexual maturity after a few few weeks of being born. That suggests that once you have a rat problem, you will continue to have a rat problem.
I have a neighbour who is the kind of woman you see on the local news from time to time: too many cats to count. She also has lots of fruit trees. The rats come for the fruit and cat food, but the cats are too well fed to be of any use, so the rats end up in my garage. Occassionally, they dig through the drywayll and end up in my kitchen.
Killing them with poison is, regrettably, the best approach. In a rural or farm environment, cats, terriers and owls tend to keep their populations in check.
Okay, this is probably a dumb question, but how do you print anything without CUPS?
Enscript and lpr? I've always used postscript capable printers. And to make life even easier, I rely on network capable printers.
Give the printer a hostname (DNS or /etc/hosts) /etc/printcap
Create spool directory
Create a filter script to detect and/or convert to postscript
Create an entry in
Enable lpd
Use lpr to print
Most of the article is about grey listing. That's nearly suicidal for most mail server administrators.
That would depend on a lot of things
Executive A, "This guy just sent me a contract 60 seconds ago. I keep clicking the damn send/receive button but it's not coming in. Are you a fucking moron or something? What the HELL is going on?!!"
Chances are high that anyone sending contracts has already sent previous messages, so the receipt of the contract would not be subject to any delay. That's assuming that you haven't already whitelisted folks in the habit of sending you contracts. From the spamd manpage
So beware online reviews of monitors. Better look for user reviews.
Speaking of which, and at the risk of going on a tangent, I'm in the middle of redoing my setup at home for which I need one large or possibly two medium sized monitors. Anyone have any "user reviews" they'd care to share?
Don't play games, mostly terminal windows, but I'd prefer any multimedia entertainment featuring large bosomed women to be delivered in all its glory.
There could be many reasons to download it on XP. It's not a fuck-up until a Vista-only MS app installs on XP. Until then, it's just some guy downloading a file on XP.
Reminds of what I went through recently. Lured by all the hype about the new Consolas font (yeah, I get excited about such things), I decided to go download it from Microsoft and have a look. The font is there by default for Vista users, but what the hell, we're all running Windows right, and I don't recall Microsoft ever charging extra for their fonts.
The download went fine. The installation routine, however, required Visual Studio 2005 to be preinstalled so it quit with its error message. Not one to be turned away so easily, I discovered that the font is included with the (free) PowerPoint viewer. Downloaded that, installed it, made a backup of the newly-installed fonts, and uninstalled PowerPoint.
The font, I discovered, is unimpressive.
The moral of the story? Stupid is as stupid does. Self respect comes at a price, and a sane environment (something not available with Windows) is preferrable to chasing the promises of the new.
Your post is misleading and inaccurate ... Do a fresh installation of Windows, don't install anything on it, take a look at the Windows directory. I recommend you sort by file type. You'll notice it's actually quite organised ...
I understand the point you're trying to make, but suggesting that the Windows directory, or any default directory structure, is misleading and inaccurate. I'd go so far as to say it's nonsense.
A *unix user with a few years of experience behind him or her could, with little effort, identify and justify each and every directory or file on the hard drive (along with their respective permissions), and additionally identify the source of those files and directories. Hell, a novice reader could spend a few minutes reading hier(7) and get most of the way there. Granted Linux is a bet messy when compared to the BSDs, for example, but the point remains valid.
So while Windows is no longer an unholy mess, you can not say it's organised. If you do, I'd suggest you look a bit closer. What you'll find is a crude structure that follows a basic basic rules with countless one-off exceptions, all with exceptions to exceptions to exceptions, each overlayed with dizzying complex permissions. While you're at it, do the same with the registry. If you can go more than a few minutes without scratching your head, I have no doubts that in short order, you'll throw up your arms in frustration and give up.
Now if you think my excercise was uncessary or unproductive, consider the circular reasoning of making such a conclusion and insisting Windows is organised.
Organised? I'd suggest that even for an experienced admin/programmer, it's mostly unknowable.
Louisiana allows for open carry
IIRC, for alcohol as well as firearms. :-)
If you can't find anybody in your old company that likes you, you probably need to work on your social skills. It's one of the things employers need to make sure the job gets done.
Given that we're all sharing in the burdens of the current financial crisis, let's try something more positive instead of drawing attention to the fact that some of our Slashdot readers may not be liked by any of their co-workers.
Gentle Slashdot reader, repeat after me:
"I'm good enough. I'm smart enough. And gosh, people like me!"
Another common misconception seems to be that Linux has to take over the world. I couldn't care less how fast the community grows because it works already!
While I'd generally agree, you're ignoring the economic and political aspects to this. I don't need to reiterate the widespread and profoundly negative effects of Microsoft and its monopoly power, but it's a no brainer that an increased adoption of Linux would go a long way to addressing those problems. That point is painfully underscored by the fact that technology is playing such an increasing role in everyone's life that it's starting to shape how we leave and interact with one another.
So while you or I can be happy in our sandboxes, we'd be fools not to recognise that what we do (or don't do) has ramifications outside of it. Nature, left on its own, will establish an equilibrium. History, however, tells us that in society, nothing happens until folks to stand up for a cause or movement, and lead others.
In Linus' case, we have an unappointed and unwilling leader who says, "I'm happy. Hope you're happy, too."