Isn't the poppy pretty damn iconic as far as Rememberence Day is concerned?
As a Canadian, I'd say yes.
But here in the US, I have yet to see a poppy in anyone's lapel, and haven't met anyone familiar with the In Flanders Fields poem or who otherwise knows much about Rememberance Day in general. The differences, at least to me, are rather disappointing. When I was a kid, everyone in school and out wore their poppies proudly, and listened with reverence whenever and wherever the poem was recited.
Then, there's the issue of how other countries commemorate the events of either war. I highly doubt Russia (an ally which, IIRC, lost something like 20 million in the last war) commemorates anything with a poem written by a Frenchman about a flower growing in Belgium.
Maybe folks from other countries can offer some insight.
The problem with modern operating systems is that they allow people to think they know how to run a computer. Vista says, "Shall I allow trojan.exe to run?" User says to self, "Self, I have no clue what that is, so I better let it run."
I think that's a fair representation of the current state of affairs. Moreover, it pretty much sums up the beginning, middle and end of most malware issues. From the article:
Recipients running Microsoft Windows who clicked on the attachment in the bogus FTC e-mail were warned by Windows that an executable file (a program installer) was about to run, and given the chance to decline the execution. Anyone who ignored that warning witnessed yet another social engineering feat. The invading program then produced a pop-up alert complaining that Microsoft Word had crashed, and that the user could double-click on a provided icon to restart Word. It was in double-clicking on that "OK" tab that victims were setting the final stages for allowing a Trojan horse program to invade their machines and record every single keystroke that they typed from there on out.
Seems to be that user training and education demands too much of everyone, and is too hard and too expensive. Instead, the "Let's continue the search for outside solutions to protect us from ourselves." approach, instead of being regarded as something that resembles the Lord's Prayer, thus becomes a rational business decision.
Yeah, it went from a lot less than 1% to, less than 1%.
I'm reminded that in the early days of Firefox, people mouthed that same implicit argument. Too small a minority to redesign all those IE-only websites... When the numbers started to approach 10%, people took notice. How things have changed, huh?
Now, of course, the argument is that a business owner would be an idiot to write off 10% of their customer base. More important, the grander issues of healthy competition, accessibility, the destructive effects of monopoly power, etc. are brought to the forefront. Which is where they would have been if people weren't so focused on the numbers alone.
Speaking as one of those IT people, NTFS is probably one of the coolest pieces of software ever to come out of Redmond. ACLs, alternate data streams, directory junctions, single-instance stores, shadow copy, the list of useful features is huge.
Not to sound overly critical, but a "feature list" doesn't, by definition, mean that any of those features are useful. It's the implementation that's the key, and as for the features you've listed, the implementation leaves much to be desired. Let's take the more well-known features:
ACLS? Useful in certain circumstances, I'd agree, but otherwise perverse. Hell, I'd bet the average user (or IT admin) isn't aware of, for example, the simple concept of file ownership, let alone what the default ownerships and perms are on standard (cough) system directories. Or on any of set of registry keys. Windows explorer hides files extensions, so it's unsurprising that it doesn't (can't?) present ACLs (with/or without the extra DOS attributes) when looking at a directory listing, so every user/admin can go on pretending everything is as it should be. Then, there's those nifty ad-hoc tools for managing everything... I can't decide what's worse, right-clicking your way through a file system, or suffering while trying to make use of cmd.exe and the provided tools.
Alternate data streams a great feature? Name 3 people who know WTF they are, how they work, or a single example of their use.
Junctions? LOL. To the extent they work (and/or the extent to which the now-deceased Sysinternals slightly different implementation and corresponding tool) work or ever have worked, junctions are nothing more than an embarrassing and goofy implementation of symlinks. I'd give Microsoft another 2 OS releases to come up with something that's standard and useful. Put simply, Microsoft doesn't get symlinks. They want people to use shortcuts.
Yeah, NTFS has lots 'o features. And it doesn't crash and burn like everything the previous offerings from Redmond. I'd even go so far as to say it's generally problem-free and resilient, but there's that "implementation" thing again. Windows doesn't report sector read/write errors (no underlying terminal, and lack of logging are just two reasons) so you'd never know when a disk is going bad and read/write errors are occurring. Use ckdsk? Right. Try this as a homework assignment: figure out the differences between running chkdsk in cmd.exe window compared with using the context menu options for a given drive. Here's a hint: they're not the same, even for boot-time options. Do you know whether *any* sort of check is run at boot time? Didn't think so.
Oh, did I mention fragmentation? You'll need to pay for a utility to manage that problem, because what's offered by Microsoft (bought, actually) is as dumbed-down as it is featureless. Fragmentation not a problem? Create a new and roomy partition. Copy over a few large files. I guarantee each of them will have hundreds of fragments and be spread all over.
Even more surprisingly, it works pretty much as advertised.
Could be that they were all equipped with Broadcom NICs, Winmodems, and Adaptec RAID cards? Or maybe they all ran Windows at one point, and smashing them was a cathartic response to years of wasted effort?
When they fix it so I don't have to do complicated manual edits the xorg config file to get more than a lousy 1024×768 screen resolution and support for a projector or dual displays...
And those "edits" are more complicated than the edits you typically make in your "letter to mom" wordprocessing document?
Geez.
Look, if you don't understand the format of xorg.conf, that's fine. Admit you don't know how things work. Admittedly, there's lots to know, but it can be simple or complicated, depending on the setup. On the other hand, lots of people will be happy to chip in and give you a fully working configuration you can copy and paste... just like you would in your wordprocessing document. And if you're lucky, you might even be able to use your mouse and not hurt your fingers typing a few characters.;-)
But offering this inflammatory indictment that everything is fucked up because something doesn't work for you strikes me as somewhere between immature and simply childish. And suggesting that support for a feature doesn't exist because you haven't discovered it, can't find it, can't be bothered to try, or refuse to bother learning for yourself is telling everyone you're someone who should be ignored.
Ubuntu, like any distro, is a work in progress up against the vagaries of hardware vendors. Lots of people in lots of disparate areas are offering their hard work. They deserve respect, irrespective of whether things work out of the box for a random Slashdot user. Multimonitor support? High resolutions? They work for me. What's *your* problem?
Next time, instead of brandishing your complaints, maybe take a more constructive approach. Say it didn't work for you. Admit you didn't try very much. Ask for help. You might be surprised at the response.
I remember years back when I first got DSL and, for a lark, ran a whois lookup on my IP address. I nearly shit my pants when my private customer info with SBC appeared. So much for anonymity on the internet, I thought.
For anyone who does have DSL, or otherwise is spending their time pretending to be a 16yo girl on usenet, this link might be helpful to get yourself a more appropriate "Private Customer" designation. I'm sure cable users have a similar option available to them.
The lesson I took away for the experience is even if you want your own domain and you're just an individual, get a lawyer to set up things for you and have his name and address appear on everything. It may be worth the extra few hundred bucks a year.
That would give people a taste of the OS, and for anyone other than the hobbiests, push them towards the hardware...
Indeed. Seems to me that would be similar to the method that Microsoft, Adobe, etc. used to ensure a loyal following. When you're 16 and have a warez copy of Photoshop, for example, chances are good that you'll actually buy the thing when you grow up and you have the money to spend.
I find myself in agreement with the previous poster who said he'd shell out $200 for a legit copy with no strings or obligations attached. I neither want nor need the much vaunted Mac user experience as much as I would like to examine (carefully, at length, and at my leisure) the new OS.
Specifically, it's the Unixy goodness and the ability to run Windows that really interest me. Getting that (and being able to finally get rid of my Windows systems) would be money well spent. My laptop, for example, runs BSD and I'm perfectly happy. I'm definitely not going to throw it or any other perfectly good hardware away if it can be to more productive use. Similarly, dishing out a few grand for a Mac experiment isn't prudent by anyone's standards.
For any any black-turtle-necked guy listening: "Stevo! I could be your next customer. Work with me here, will ya?!!!"
You are correct that Windows teaches someone how to use Windows, much as *nix teaches someone how to use another *nix flavour. The person who picked up Windows 95 is not going to have trouble with WinXP, and the person who learned Unix ten years ago will pick up Ubuntu just fine today.
I think this is true only for very small values of true. Yes, Windows teaches someone how to use Windows, but chances are high that years later they will, if bright and attentive, accumulated a collection of Windows-specific trivia (mostly interface-specific) and nothing more.
By contrast, someone "who learned Unix ten years ago", or even last year, is unlikely within their first few months of learning not to have, at the very least, a familiarity with the fundamentals of what a computer is and how it works. That's knowledge that extends past a single operating system and relevant outside of the fool's notion of a computer as "a tool". In fact, I'd bet that most point-and-click novice Ubuntu users, for example, have a basic understanding of what a kernel is, what code is, how memory is used, file systems, rights and permissions, basic IO, networking, etc., etc. From there, their learning is limited only by their motivation and imagination. I'd even go so far as to say that it would take a undue effort to avoid learning when everything is documented, logical, transparent, historically consistent, and unambiguously presented to the user at every turn.
Seems to me that dismissing any of this as unimportant or characterising it as a bunch of "nitty gritty details" is tantamount to saying learning to use a technology that's become (and will continue to be) a major part of everyone's lives, and is used (and will be continue to be used) daily at work and at home by just about everyone in the industrialised world, is of negligible value. It also suggests that such issues as a skilled and employed work force, patents, copyrights, and the destructive effects of monopoly power aren't real social or political concerns, but mere annoyances.
What is it, I wonder, that we should be teaching our kids? Show them how to press the image of a button, because someone else worked out the button part? If that's the case, then I say we should skip Physics as well. Why invest the time and effort to learn Physics, when it's more efficient if not easier to wait for someone to put the principles, knowledge and study into practical use? We can then just buy the product on the shelf when it's available for sale.
Probably a reference to the collective sigh of all/. readers after simultaneously wondering if the editors are illiterate, or if they simply don't read what they post.
Few read the articles, many don't read even the summary (see the recent "Apple Makes $831 On Each AT&T iPhone"), few make use of the preview button, and our editors don't read the submissions. I wonder what it is any of us are doing here?
Slashdot is the graffiti on technology's bathroom wall.
There was a time in England when a bloke could talk about the gay time he had passing a fag around amongst his friends behind the school (fun/happy time passing a cigarette around) without any double entendres.
Yeah, but how can crackers be both nefarious and savoury, while cookies, which typically are never savoury, are often nefarious? Seems to me there's a contradiction there. Or is a cracker just a white man's version of a biscuit?
Language evolves. Change your manner of communication or prepare for misinterpretation.
The guy is literally running for his life to escape wildfires, yet has the brass balls to 'fire blog'. If that's not worthy of a nomination to Geek of the Year, I dunno what is.
It's easy and often perfectly valid to dismiss blogging as a self-induglent activity, but the fact of the matter in this case (and innumerable others), is that the information people need is spread between local news outlets, right-wing AM radio personalities (the FM folks are too busy rotating their playlists and offering commercials), and a hodgepodge of federal, local, and state offices and websites that even in the best of times are of questionable usefulness.
California is a sprawling mess, so there is no center of anything anywhere. Many of the areas affected could be described as "rural" for people accustomed to living in larger or more cohesive cities, but even the larger cities here are often just an amalgamation of "rural" areas. What would you expect from an city or county website where the population numbers a few hundred thousand? Local news (of any sort just about anywhere) is often a joke. The same could be said of what one could expect from the local TV stations. Going up the ladder, you get to the federal level; good luck getting them on the phone. There are federal websites such as inciweb.org that are set up for this kind of emergency, but too general to be of use for many. That website is down while I write this.
So, where does that leave you? Calling the local police and fire department, or the forestry folks? And hope they know something, aren't overwhelmed (they are) to take yet another call, and have information that's accurate enough, or up to date? They're staffed to answer the flood of phone calls, but if they do have a website, they may or may not update it (daily, if you're lucky) or otherwise bother to provide any useful information. And if you yourself have relevant information, what do you do with it? Call your friends? Post to Slashdot Questions with "My house is on fire!"?
The temperature where I am is going to shoot up an extra 10 degrees (to 100F) for the day, and I'm still left scrambling for information. That said, I'll probably do what I did most of yesterday, watch things burn on TV while listening to the dramatic voiceovers.
Last count there were 12 major fire areas so I'll expect lots of human interest stories to fill the airtime. If I'm lucky, I may hear informed discussions on the politics of the situation -- the too few (Canadian) airtankers and the taxpayers who don't want to pay for them, or a technical discussion of why most are grounded anyway.
Or maybe some bloggers can get it together and offer something more useful. Hell, informed commentary would be a step up. Maybe Craiglist, for example, could add a Local Emergencies section to their Autos, Queers, and Vegan discussion groups? This is the information age, right?
As for your claim of "exponentially" increasing your productivity by simply switching to a new OS... come on now.
Dunno about you, but I don't have too much trouble
- envisioning the writing a short, rudimentary shell script that would equal a day's worth of clicking and pointing on a Windows system
- implement or restore a specific configuration simply by copying some files from one system to another
- accurately diagnose or monitor a problem using the mundane (system logs, debug, verbose options, etc.) or by using readily-available standard tools (file or process monitoring, tcpdump, etc.)
- fix or restore a completely borked system, or install a new one
Seems to me that the time savings from one or more of these obvious or garden variety chores can easily be shown to be exponential.
I've always found that people who have to deal with customer service in almost any vein often get to deal with some of the most loony people, and the rest of us only rarely get to catch a glimpse through the window of insanity.
Yeah, but the real kicker is some of those people you do see through the window (or sit the next cubicle over) are perfectly normal but their email suggests otherwise. There's a good number of literate, educated, well-spoken people I know that I cringe receiving email from.
A few type in ALL CAPS due to reasons that range from being previous AOL customers, poor eyesight, claims of habit, or a personal preference ("It looks better").
Many don't spell czeck. Which is fine, if you can spell, but absurd if they expect the person on the other to dismiss them as lazy, illiterate, or just rude.
Most write in abbreviated form. That's a polite way of saying that they've adopted a habit of excessive abbreviation, truncating words where no appropriate abbreviation exists, and interspering redundant emoticons and a littering of ellipses (where a frigging period would have sufficed) between words with misplaced, absent or seemingly random capitalisation. You end trying to make sense of something that only a monkey who's a William Shatner fan banging away at a typewriter could produce. Were they in hurry, or did they never learn to type? Or is my time just worth less?
Then, of course, there's the one-sentence-per-paragraph folks that leave you wondering whether they're free associating, really have a point or coherent argument to make, or just want to share quiet empty space with their friends. Easier to parse than a full page that consists of a single run-on sentence, but no less annoying.
I shudder to think what any of these smart educated folks would write in a complaint email to some anonymous customer service department. In the heat of anger, we're always inclined to say or do things we know we'd otherwise regret, but while we'd think twice before leaving that nasty little note on the refrigerator for a family member or our significant other, few seem to hesitate to include all of it and more in an email.
How many of these do you overindulge in occasionally?
You need to ask the right question: To what degree are corn... soybeans, and canola part of your or your children's diet?
I prefer to be able to pick my own poison.
If there's any shortsightedness with respect to GMOs, I'd say it's on the side of those who hold economic interests above others which, regrettably, includes our legislators.
Contrast with my personal favorite, BitStream Vera Sans Mono...
Immensely readable, isn't it? On the other hand, I discovered something just recently that I find really annoying. The '+' character, when placed above or below the vertical pipe '|' character, is off-center. Or maybe it's the pipe that's not centered. Doesn't seem to make sense from a typographical perspective.
Either way, I view it as a disapointment for ascii artists, network engineers, and people with entirely too much free time on their hands everywhere.
The following may help to explain things (taken from an Slashdot post):
Indeed. In fact there is no light either. The Sun sucks dark. In fact it sucks dark so hard that the friction of the dark moving to the Sun causes the Sun to be very hot. The flow of dark towards the Sun interrupted by the Earth causes the side of the Earth away from the Sun to accumulate dark, thus causing Night. As the Earth rotates the dark caught on the night side can then be pulled off, this causing the absence of dark known as Day.
What we call light bulbs are truly dark suckers as well. That is why light bulbs are hot, just like the Sun. When a light bulb is full of dark and won't suck dark any more, it cools off. If you look in old light bulbs you can even seen the accumulation of dark.
Dark is also heavier than water. This can be seen in the oceans where the deeper you go the darker it gets.
By issuing a cancel message for the Message-IDs composing the "file" (but with a Distribution: local header as that is as far as their responsibility extends).
I think that's incorrect.
First, cancellation messages have a tortured history and generally aren't honored.
Second, the issue is with content on usenet.com's own servers. All they would need to do is to null out the body of each message and leave the header information (for administrative purposes, etc.). This is indeed what a number of providers actually do. It's not unusual for a news service provider to remove content when asked to do so by law enforcement, or when requested to do so by individuals demonstrating IP ownership and infringment. If you read through the TOS of the larger providers, I'm sure you'll find a section where this is explicitly described.
So yes, a news provider does have some control over content. They can remove it outright, aggressively expire articles, impose retention limitations, or simply remove groups or entire hierarchies. That doesn't mean it's feasible or practical to do so. At least without hurting their profit model.;-)
To all the whiners that don't like the port 25 blocking: Dynamic IP space is already "damaged goods", and you have multiple workarounds available to you. Any sane mail admin (including many large ISPs) already blacklist dynamic space therefor you can't effectively run a mail server on dynamic IP space.
Agreed, but it's worth pointing out that fixed addresses aren't exactly the cat's meow, either.
When I signed up for a DSL account with SBC/ATT, I asked for static addresses and and got my delegation request for tiny/29 netblock processed a few days later. All good, right? With everything setup on my end, I send out a few test messages to my personal ATT email account (hosted by the folks at Yahoo), and it gets the 'YahooFiltered: Bulk' treatment 4 out 5 tries.
Granted, Yahoo uses DomainKeys, but a cursory Google search will reveal any number of problems from all sorts who have gone to the trouble of setting up DKIM, SPF, etc. and run into problems with their email being tagged as spam by Yahoo, Hotmail (especially problematic), or any of the other large email services.
The lesson seems to be is that if you expect your mail to be delivered, have someone else host it, or alternatively (if you don't want to use your ISP as a smart host), pay for one.
There's a lot more information there, including some screenshots of example SPAM and malware sites, trends in attack vectors, zombie systems, etc.. Interesting stuff.
Indeed, though as a mutt user, I feel left out.
Seriously, though, I had no idea spam could be so colourful and attractive looking. All I get is random ascii. If I'm lucky, I may see something like (altered to protect the click-happy) the following:
You can pick up your postcard at the following web address: [1]http://xm190.internetdsl.tpnet.pl/~test/foo/bar/card.exe
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't the poppy pretty damn iconic as far as Rememberence Day is concerned?
As a Canadian, I'd say yes.
But here in the US, I have yet to see a poppy in anyone's lapel, and haven't met anyone familiar with the In Flanders Fields poem or who otherwise knows much about Rememberance Day in general. The differences, at least to me, are rather disappointing. When I was a kid, everyone in school and out wore their poppies proudly, and listened with reverence whenever and wherever the poem was recited.
Then, there's the issue of how other countries commemorate the events of either war. I highly doubt Russia (an ally which, IIRC, lost something like 20 million in the last war) commemorates anything with a poem written by a Frenchman about a flower growing in Belgium.
Maybe folks from other countries can offer some insight.
...welcome our new robotic overlords!
Oh, sure. You say that now, but what will you do when they get driver licenses and start taking out jobs?
Even Lou Dobbs won't be able to save us.
I think that's a fair representation of the current state of affairs. Moreover, it pretty much sums up the beginning, middle and end of most malware issues. From the article:
Seems to be that user training and education demands too much of everyone, and is too hard and too expensive. Instead, the "Let's continue the search for outside solutions to protect us from ourselves." approach, instead of being regarded as something that resembles the Lord's Prayer, thus becomes a rational business decision.
Yeah, it went from a lot less than 1% to, less than 1%.
... When the numbers started to approach 10%, people took notice. How things have changed, huh?
I'm reminded that in the early days of Firefox, people mouthed that same implicit argument. Too small a minority to redesign all those IE-only websites
Now, of course, the argument is that a business owner would be an idiot to write off 10% of their customer base. More important, the grander issues of healthy competition, accessibility, the destructive effects of monopoly power, etc. are brought to the forefront. Which is where they would have been if people weren't so focused on the numbers alone.
Speaking as one of those IT people, NTFS is probably one of the coolest pieces of software ever to come out of Redmond. ACLs, alternate data streams, directory junctions, single-instance stores, shadow copy, the list of useful features is huge.
... I can't decide what's worse, right-clicking your way through a file system, or suffering while trying to make use of cmd.exe and the provided tools.
;-)
Not to sound overly critical, but a "feature list" doesn't, by definition, mean that any of those features are useful. It's the implementation that's the key, and as for the features you've listed, the implementation leaves much to be desired. Let's take the more well-known features:
ACLS? Useful in certain circumstances, I'd agree, but otherwise perverse. Hell, I'd bet the average user (or IT admin) isn't aware of, for example, the simple concept of file ownership, let alone what the default ownerships and perms are on standard (cough) system directories. Or on any of set of registry keys. Windows explorer hides files extensions, so it's unsurprising that it doesn't (can't?) present ACLs (with/or without the extra DOS attributes) when looking at a directory listing, so every user/admin can go on pretending everything is as it should be. Then, there's those nifty ad-hoc tools for managing everything
Alternate data streams a great feature? Name 3 people who know WTF they are, how they work, or a single example of their use.
Junctions? LOL. To the extent they work (and/or the extent to which the now-deceased Sysinternals slightly different implementation and corresponding tool) work or ever have worked, junctions are nothing more than an embarrassing and goofy implementation of symlinks. I'd give Microsoft another 2 OS releases to come up with something that's standard and useful. Put simply, Microsoft doesn't get symlinks. They want people to use shortcuts.
Yeah, NTFS has lots 'o features. And it doesn't crash and burn like everything the previous offerings from Redmond. I'd even go so far as to say it's generally problem-free and resilient, but there's that "implementation" thing again. Windows doesn't report sector read/write errors (no underlying terminal, and lack of logging are just two reasons) so you'd never know when a disk is going bad and read/write errors are occurring. Use ckdsk? Right. Try this as a homework assignment: figure out the differences between running chkdsk in cmd.exe window compared with using the context menu options for a given drive. Here's a hint: they're not the same, even for boot-time options. Do you know whether *any* sort of check is run at boot time? Didn't think so.
Oh, did I mention fragmentation? You'll need to pay for a utility to manage that problem, because what's offered by Microsoft (bought, actually) is as dumbed-down as it is featureless. Fragmentation not a problem? Create a new and roomy partition. Copy over a few large files. I guarantee each of them will have hundreds of fragments and be spread all over.
Even more surprisingly, it works pretty much as advertised.
Like I said, how would you know?
Could be that they were all equipped with Broadcom NICs, Winmodems, and Adaptec RAID cards? Or maybe they all ran Windows at one point, and smashing them was a cathartic response to years of wasted effort?
Nah. My guess is that smashing stuff is just fun.
When they fix it so I don't have to do complicated manual edits the xorg config file to get more than a lousy 1024×768 screen resolution and support for a projector or dual displays ...
... just like you would in your wordprocessing document. And if you're lucky, you might even be able to use your mouse and not hurt your fingers typing a few characters. ;-)
And those "edits" are more complicated than the edits you typically make in your "letter to mom" wordprocessing document?
Geez.
Look, if you don't understand the format of xorg.conf, that's fine. Admit you don't know how things work. Admittedly, there's lots to know, but it can be simple or complicated, depending on the setup. On the other hand, lots of people will be happy to chip in and give you a fully working configuration you can copy and paste
But offering this inflammatory indictment that everything is fucked up because something doesn't work for you strikes me as somewhere between immature and simply childish. And suggesting that support for a feature doesn't exist because you haven't discovered it, can't find it, can't be bothered to try, or refuse to bother learning for yourself is telling everyone you're someone who should be ignored.
Ubuntu, like any distro, is a work in progress up against the vagaries of hardware vendors. Lots of people in lots of disparate areas are offering their hard work. They deserve respect, irrespective of whether things work out of the box for a random Slashdot user. Multimonitor support? High resolutions? They work for me. What's *your* problem?
Next time, instead of brandishing your complaints, maybe take a more constructive approach. Say it didn't work for you. Admit you didn't try very much. Ask for help. You might be surprised at the response.
I remember years back when I first got DSL and, for a lark, ran a whois lookup on my IP address. I nearly shit my pants when my private customer info with SBC appeared. So much for anonymity on the internet, I thought.
For anyone who does have DSL, or otherwise is spending their time pretending to be a 16yo girl on usenet, this link might be helpful to get yourself a more appropriate "Private Customer" designation. I'm sure cable users have a similar option available to them.
The lesson I took away for the experience is even if you want your own domain and you're just an individual, get a lawyer to set up things for you and have his name and address appear on everything. It may be worth the extra few hundred bucks a year.
That would give people a taste of the OS, and for anyone other than the hobbiests, push them towards the hardware...
Indeed. Seems to me that would be similar to the method that Microsoft, Adobe, etc. used to ensure a loyal following. When you're 16 and have a warez copy of Photoshop, for example, chances are good that you'll actually buy the thing when you grow up and you have the money to spend.
I find myself in agreement with the previous poster who said he'd shell out $200 for a legit copy with no strings or obligations attached. I neither want nor need the much vaunted Mac user experience as much as I would like to examine (carefully, at length, and at my leisure) the new OS.
Specifically, it's the Unixy goodness and the ability to run Windows that really interest me. Getting that (and being able to finally get rid of my Windows systems) would be money well spent. My laptop, for example, runs BSD and I'm perfectly happy. I'm definitely not going to throw it or any other perfectly good hardware away if it can be to more productive use. Similarly, dishing out a few grand for a Mac experiment isn't prudent by anyone's standards.
For any any black-turtle-necked guy listening: "Stevo! I could be your next customer. Work with me here, will ya?!!!"
You are correct that Windows teaches someone how to use Windows, much as *nix teaches someone how to use another *nix flavour. The person who picked up Windows 95 is not going to have trouble with WinXP, and the person who learned Unix ten years ago will pick up Ubuntu just fine today.
I think this is true only for very small values of true. Yes, Windows teaches someone how to use Windows, but chances are high that years later they will, if bright and attentive, accumulated a collection of Windows-specific trivia (mostly interface-specific) and nothing more.
By contrast, someone "who learned Unix ten years ago", or even last year, is unlikely within their first few months of learning not to have, at the very least, a familiarity with the fundamentals of what a computer is and how it works. That's knowledge that extends past a single operating system and relevant outside of the fool's notion of a computer as "a tool". In fact, I'd bet that most point-and-click novice Ubuntu users, for example, have a basic understanding of what a kernel is, what code is, how memory is used, file systems, rights and permissions, basic IO, networking, etc., etc. From there, their learning is limited only by their motivation and imagination. I'd even go so far as to say that it would take a undue effort to avoid learning when everything is documented, logical, transparent, historically consistent, and unambiguously presented to the user at every turn.
Seems to me that dismissing any of this as unimportant or characterising it as a bunch of "nitty gritty details" is tantamount to saying learning to use a technology that's become (and will continue to be) a major part of everyone's lives, and is used (and will be continue to be used) daily at work and at home by just about everyone in the industrialised world, is of negligible value. It also suggests that such issues as a skilled and employed work force, patents, copyrights, and the destructive effects of monopoly power aren't real social or political concerns, but mere annoyances.
What is it, I wonder, that we should be teaching our kids? Show them how to press the image of a button, because someone else worked out the button part? If that's the case, then I say we should skip Physics as well. Why invest the time and effort to learn Physics, when it's more efficient if not easier to wait for someone to put the principles, knowledge and study into practical use? We can then just buy the product on the shelf when it's available for sale.
Like software from Microsoft.
Probably a reference to the collective sigh of all /. readers after simultaneously wondering if the editors are illiterate, or if they simply don't read what they post.
Few read the articles, many don't read even the summary (see the recent "Apple Makes $831 On Each AT&T iPhone"), few make use of the preview button, and our editors don't read the submissions. I wonder what it is any of us are doing here?
Slashdot is the graffiti on technology's bathroom wall.
Discuss.
There's still a lesson in diversity and computer security to be learned here.
Indeed. Implementing proper security is no small potatoes.
There was a time in England when a bloke could talk about the gay time he had passing a fag around amongst his friends behind the school (fun/happy time passing a cigarette around) without any double entendres.
;-)
string Hackers="hardware hobbyists"
string Crackers="Saltines, safe-crackers, computer-criminals"
Yeah, but how can crackers be both nefarious and savoury, while cookies, which typically are never savoury, are often nefarious? Seems to me there's a contradiction there. Or is a cracker just a white man's version of a biscuit?
Language evolves. Change your manner of communication or prepare for misinterpretation.
Indeed.
The guy is literally running for his life to escape wildfires, yet has the brass balls to 'fire blog'. If that's not worthy of a nomination to Geek of the Year, I dunno what is.
It's easy and often perfectly valid to dismiss blogging as a self-induglent activity, but the fact of the matter in this case (and innumerable others), is that the information people need is spread between local news outlets, right-wing AM radio personalities (the FM folks are too busy rotating their playlists and offering commercials), and a hodgepodge of federal, local, and state offices and websites that even in the best of times are of questionable usefulness.
California is a sprawling mess, so there is no center of anything anywhere. Many of the areas affected could be described as "rural" for people accustomed to living in larger or more cohesive cities, but even the larger cities here are often just an amalgamation of "rural" areas. What would you expect from an city or county website where the population numbers a few hundred thousand? Local news (of any sort just about anywhere) is often a joke. The same could be said of what one could expect from the local TV stations. Going up the ladder, you get to the federal level; good luck getting them on the phone. There are federal websites such as inciweb.org that are set up for this kind of emergency, but too general to be of use for many. That website is down while I write this.
So, where does that leave you? Calling the local police and fire department, or the forestry folks? And hope they know something, aren't overwhelmed (they are) to take yet another call, and have information that's accurate enough, or up to date? They're staffed to answer the flood of phone calls, but if they do have a website, they may or may not update it (daily, if you're lucky) or otherwise bother to provide any useful information. And if you yourself have relevant information, what do you do with it? Call your friends? Post to Slashdot Questions with "My house is on fire!"?
The temperature where I am is going to shoot up an extra 10 degrees (to 100F) for the day, and I'm still left scrambling for information. That said, I'll probably do what I did most of yesterday, watch things burn on TV while listening to the dramatic voiceovers.
Last count there were 12 major fire areas so I'll expect lots of human interest stories to fill the airtime. If I'm lucky, I may hear informed discussions on the politics of the situation -- the too few (Canadian) airtankers and the taxpayers who don't want to pay for them, or a technical discussion of why most are grounded anyway.
Or maybe some bloggers can get it together and offer something more useful. Hell, informed commentary would be a step up. Maybe Craiglist, for example, could add a Local Emergencies section to their Autos, Queers, and Vegan discussion groups? This is the information age, right?
As for your claim of "exponentially" increasing your productivity by simply switching to a new OS... come on now.
Dunno about you, but I don't have too much trouble
- envisioning the writing a short, rudimentary shell script that would equal a day's worth of clicking and pointing on a Windows system
- implement or restore a specific configuration simply by copying some files from one system to another
- accurately diagnose or monitor a problem using the mundane (system logs, debug, verbose options, etc.) or by using readily-available standard tools (file or process monitoring, tcpdump, etc.)
- fix or restore a completely borked system, or install a new one
Seems to me that the time savings from one or more of these obvious or garden variety chores can easily be shown to be exponential.
I've always found that people who have to deal with customer service in almost any vein often get to deal with some of the most loony people, and the rest of us only rarely get to catch a glimpse through the window of insanity.
Yeah, but the real kicker is some of those people you do see through the window (or sit the next cubicle over) are perfectly normal but their email suggests otherwise. There's a good number of literate, educated, well-spoken people I know that I cringe receiving email from.
A few type in ALL CAPS due to reasons that range from being previous AOL customers, poor eyesight, claims of habit, or a personal preference ("It looks better").
Many don't spell czeck. Which is fine, if you can spell, but absurd if they expect the person on the other to dismiss them as lazy, illiterate, or just rude.
Most write in abbreviated form. That's a polite way of saying that they've adopted a habit of excessive abbreviation, truncating words where no appropriate abbreviation exists, and interspering redundant emoticons and a littering of ellipses (where a frigging period would have sufficed) between words with misplaced, absent or seemingly random capitalisation. You end trying to make sense of something that only a monkey who's a William Shatner fan banging away at a typewriter could produce. Were they in hurry, or did they never learn to type? Or is my time just worth less?
Then, of course, there's the one-sentence-per-paragraph folks that leave you wondering whether they're free associating, really have a point or coherent argument to make, or just want to share quiet empty space with their friends. Easier to parse than a full page that consists of a single run-on sentence, but no less annoying.
I shudder to think what any of these smart educated folks would write in a complaint email to some anonymous customer service department. In the heat of anger, we're always inclined to say or do things we know we'd otherwise regret, but while we'd think twice before leaving that nasty little note on the refrigerator for a family member or our significant other, few seem to hesitate to include all of it and more in an email.
The Libraries Shun Deals to Place Books on Web story in The New York Times covers the subject fairly well.
How many of these do you overindulge in occasionally?
... soybeans, and canola part of your or your children's diet?
You need to ask the right question: To what degree are corn
I prefer to be able to pick my own poison.
If there's any shortsightedness with respect to GMOs, I'd say it's on the side of those who hold economic interests above others which, regrettably, includes our legislators.
Contrast with my personal favorite, BitStream Vera Sans Mono ...
Immensely readable, isn't it? On the other hand, I discovered something just recently that I find really annoying. The '+' character, when placed above or below the vertical pipe '|' character, is off-center. Or maybe it's the pipe that's not centered. Doesn't seem to make sense from a typographical perspective.
Either way, I view it as a disapointment for ascii artists, network engineers, and people with entirely too much free time on their hands everywhere.
The Consolas font is a phenomenal mono-spaced font
;-)
Woohoo. Should I hold my breath for terminal to go with it?
I re-save the document as an .odf, make my changes or answer their questions, and then send it back to them.
Bah.
Just send them a response in groff or LaTeX, but include a makefile if you're feeling generous. On the other hand, a diff should be enough for anyone.
The following may help to explain things (taken from an Slashdot post):
By issuing a cancel message for the Message-IDs composing the "file" (but with a Distribution: local header as that is as far as their responsibility extends).
;-)
I think that's incorrect.
First, cancellation messages have a tortured history and generally aren't honored.
Second, the issue is with content on usenet.com's own servers. All they would need to do is to null out the body of each message and leave the header information (for administrative purposes, etc.). This is indeed what a number of providers actually do. It's not unusual for a news service provider to remove content when asked to do so by law enforcement, or when requested to do so by individuals demonstrating IP ownership and infringment. If you read through the TOS of the larger providers, I'm sure you'll find a section where this is explicitly described.
So yes, a news provider does have some control over content. They can remove it outright, aggressively expire articles, impose retention limitations, or simply remove groups or entire hierarchies. That doesn't mean it's feasible or practical to do so. At least without hurting their profit model.
To all the whiners that don't like the port 25 blocking: Dynamic IP space is already "damaged goods", and you have multiple workarounds available to you. Any sane mail admin (including many large ISPs) already blacklist dynamic space therefor you can't effectively run a mail server on dynamic IP space.
/29 netblock processed a few days later. All good, right? With everything setup on my end, I send out a few test messages to my personal ATT email account (hosted by the folks at Yahoo), and it gets the 'YahooFiltered: Bulk' treatment 4 out 5 tries.
Agreed, but it's worth pointing out that fixed addresses aren't exactly the cat's meow, either.
When I signed up for a DSL account with SBC/ATT, I asked for static addresses and and got my delegation request for tiny
Granted, Yahoo uses DomainKeys, but a cursory Google search will reveal any number of problems from all sorts who have gone to the trouble of setting up DKIM, SPF, etc. and run into problems with their email being tagged as spam by Yahoo, Hotmail (especially problematic), or any of the other large email services.
The lesson seems to be is that if you expect your mail to be delivered, have someone else host it, or alternatively (if you don't want to use your ISP as a smart host), pay for one.
Indeed, though as a mutt user, I feel left out.
Seriously, though, I had no idea spam could be so colourful and attractive looking. All I get is random ascii. If I'm lucky, I may see something like (altered to protect the click-happy) the following: