Putty is a poor imitation of Xterm, and an even worse simulation of a Linux VT.
Nice to see someone actually come out and say that. Personally, I think the vast majority of Putty users belong the Don't Know Any Different category. If there's a compromise to be made along those lines, the better choice would be Cygwin, but that brings us close to your rdesktop comparison.
The European Union continues to subsidize thousands of farmers, allowing them to produce huge amounts of surplus food every year that costs EU taxpayers a fortune. There is no political will to curb this waste as (especially in France) the farmers have too much political clout).
I should hope that farmers have a certain degree of political clout. You think that their land, the animals they raise, the food they grow, or the traditions they maintain have no value to a country or its inhabitants?
If that's not your thing, come to America. We've long since replaced farms with urban sprawl and strip malls, farmers with large agribusiness concerns, and the locally grown fruits and vegetables we used to buy in our supermarkets have been replaced with the indigenous products from Third World countries. Some traditions, of course, we hold onto and maintain. Like cheese made from edible oil products that comes in individually wrapped slices. Or the row of car dealerships and fast food restaurants that adorn our city streets.
On the other hand, if you're rich, you'll typically choose something different. Maybe live in Montana where there's cattle ranches, Napa Valley where you live beside miles of vineyards, or some place in Southern California where you're surrounded by citrus or avocado groves. The food you eat will typically be local, or imported from those subsidy-sucking farmers in the EU.
Actually, all that's required to be a christian is to...
Allow me to fix that for you.
Actually, all that's required to be a Protestant Evangelical...
Last I checked, neither recovering Catholics nor disavowed Southern Baptists nor any of the Make It Up As We Go Along denominational offshoots (the folks in Utah, included) have a monopoly on the word "Christian".
To be fair, there is something to be said for personal bias or cultural pride. However, if that's to be taken seriously, well, then, here's something to consider: I'm Orthodox; we prefer to see ourselves as here long before some guy in Rome started wearing a pointy hat and began flexing his power. And that's an even longer time before guys wearing white suits and white shoes convinced themselves they were started talking to God directly and got their own TV shows.
As for any inherent conflict in being a good Christian and science, well, it seems, at least in recent history, to be predominantly localised to the United States, and then specific to certain geographic parts where Protestant Evangelicals are in the majority. If the rest of us Christians follow along, it's for perverse amusement only.
The three- to four-minute "song" has proved to be an incredibly popular format for popular music over the last century, and I don't think you can chalk that up entirely to the machinations of the RIAA (which, let's face it, was a pretty benign organization until fairly recently) or the "music industry." Probably a lot of credit goes to radio, but if people really hated individual songs, there's no way they'd be as popular as they are.
So, to sum up...
The attention span of the average listener is typically 3-4 minutes. By contrast, fans of concept albums need 70 minutes of uninterrupted music, or until the drugs wear off, which ever comes first.
> I've tried to use those thumb-type >> keyboards and I just can't > communicate > >comfortably with them. >
Don't worry. The feeling is mutual.;-)
People with thumb-type keyboards (and screens) who try to communicate with the rest of using such devices remind of midgets who pursue careers in professional wrestling. Some of us laugh, others feel bad or are embarassed, while others try and be polite and hope they'll just go away.
Personally, I think you're correct about the keyboard defining the minimum size of a device, though. The awkward bit is that for comfortable reading, the size of the screen should be defined by the size and shape of a book. I expect those two will be reconciled about the same time that regular TV programs are broadcast in widescreen.
I've never understood the problem with just getting a passport to cross the border.
I think this program is targetted more specifically at cross-border car travellers. That said, here's a few reasons:
1. Most Americans will never travel outside the state they live in let alone outside the country, and see little use in obtaining one, notwithstanding the general native distrust of things associated with federal government. 2. The passport application requires submission of original documentation. Most American don't even have a copy of their birth certificate. 3. Obtaining a passport can take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months. 4. The fee for the passport alone is $67. See No. 1. 5. Driver's licenses are the de facto Identity Card in the U.S. If you try getting into a bar with a passport alone, you could fill a blog describing the looks on people's face when you present it, let alone the different reactions you'd get. 6. Everyone (presumably) already has a driver license so there is a strong incentive by everyone involved to make use of them. 7. Passports don't fit into your wallet which makes them more subject to loss or theft. 8. Passports need to be renewed.
One could argue that voting issues certainly fall under 'Stuff that matters'.
I'd suggest that the only thing that "matters" for anyone keen on the subject is good music and lots of brownies.;-) That said, there was a recent program on The History Channel on the subject that I found interesting. From a Wiki article on the Legal Issues of Cannabis:
Until 1937, consumption and sale of cannabis was legal in most U.S. states. In some areas it could be openly purchased in bulk from grocers or in cigarette form at newsstands, though an increasing number of states had begun to outlaw it. In that year, federal law made possession or transfer of cannabis without the purchase of a by-then-incriminating tax stamp illegal throughout the United States by passing the 1937 Marihuana Tax Act. This was contrary to the advice of the American Medical Association at the time.[2] Legal opinions of the time held that the federal government could not outlaw it entirely. The tax was $100 per pound of hemp, even for clothes or rope. The expense, extremely high for the time, was such that people stopped openly buying and making it. The decision of the United States Congress was based in part on testimony derived from articles in newspapers owned by William Randolph Hearst, who had significant financial interests in the timber industry, which manufactured his newsprint.
The act did not itself criminalize the possession or usage of cannabis, but levied a tax equalling roughly one dollar on anyone who dealt commercially in marijuana. It did, however, include penalty provisions. Violations of proper procedure could result in a fine of up to $2000 and five years' imprisonment. The net effect was to make it too risky for anyone to deal in the substance.
The bill was passed on the grounds that cannabis caused "murder, insanity and death". Today, it is generally accepted that these reasons were fictitious; in 1951, Anslinger himself claimed that he had no evidence to support such a thesis. However, new reasons had emerged by then, which pushed through a bill that superseded the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937.
In 1969 in Leary v. United States, this act was found to be unconstitutional since it violated the Fifth Amendment, since a person seeking the tax stamp would have to incriminate him/herself.
To rephrase the above, if you wanted to deal in the stuff, you needed a tax stamp. Which required possession of the stuff. Which was... wait for it... illegal.
It's hardly surprising that in the decades since, the laws concerning cannabis are just as tortured and contradictory, especially when considered against the background of yet another new study that suggest alcohol and tobacco are more dangerous
Or maybe he's just counting the time until the computer is actually usable. With Linux once the computer is booted, and you see the desktop, it's ready to use. With windows, it takes another 20 seconds (at least) after the desktop appears for it to actually become usable.
The irony, of course, that it's necessary to re-state that last point in the hopes that people might get it. I doubt they will. Microsoft has gone to great lengths to lull the user into thinking the boot process is fast, streamlined and problem free, and given the typical disk thrashing that goes on, it doesn't take a genius to figure out they've also gone to great lengths to "optimize" the process. The end user, when seeing his login screen, or his wallpaper and desktop icons, thinks everything worked and everything is done when nothing could be farther from the truth. There's no real logging of any sort on Windows, so the measure of things remains somewhere between superficial and obscured.
Personally, I think a discussion of boot times for Linux systems is of interest mainly to Windows users. The rest of us typically don't care because we aren't in the habit of needing to reboot for installations, updates, or to "fix" things. In that respect, the article is as interesting as an article on stripping the kernel for faster boot times; there's lots of reasons to compile a custom kernel, but that one is at the bottom of the list.
On my BSD laptop (generic kernel), I can boot to a login prompt in about 35 seconds and be sure that that it's ready for use. Resuming from sleep takes about 4 seconds. If things were any faster, I wouldn't have time to take a sip of coffee.
No, the obstacle for Linux now lies in the odious "power user": the person that has developed a relatively good skill set for using Windows but is too stubborn to port it to another operating system, be it Linux, OS X, or whatever.
Interesting take on the subject. The greatest impediment to change of any sort is inertia, and while I doubt making a switch to Linux, etc. is any different, the category you describe is no doubt the most vocal.
This is, interestingly, a group of users for which many of us have contempt: they can achieve complex tasks but only because or rote learning and memorized steps. They will get that pretty Windows theme or know all the shortcuts to the one application the use frequently, but god forbid they have to use something else and they're lost all over again. They're the people that have command line phobia and yet will have no issues with editing registry files, difference being that the CLI is immensely useful and the Registry is the spawn of Satan.
It occurred to me many moons ago that the sum total of knowledge one obtains using Windows systems (both as a "power user" (ridiculous word) and/or as a typical sysadmin) is a giant convoluted collection of trivia that spans registry edits, workarounds for things that don't work or work badly, memorisation of GUI layout du jour, and various methods of reinstalling borked systems, the value of which erodes as time goes by. Put another way, unless you're a programmer regularly shelling out for an MSDN subscription, you probably know squat. And to paraphrase the poetry of Donald Rumsfeld, you probably don't know that you don't know.
By comparison, anyone, novice users included, who embarked on learning the basics of shell scripting, gained familiarity with a handful of standard programs, and learned how to use a text editor would find his or her skills just as relevant and valuable today as they did when DOS was commonplace. And chances are they would learned even more as time went on.
The CBC [Canadian Broadcasting Corporation] has posted an article on its website promoting the use of Ubuntu Linux to the 'average computer user'.
No, David Conabree, a regular reviewer of new high-tech gear and longtime computer user has written a favorable story on Ubuntu that's been published on the cbc.ca website.
I'm a big fan of cbc.ca and most things Canadian (except for the beer, of course), but I doubt they have an official position of open source software, or are otherwise in the habit of recommending a particular Linux distro to their readers.
I'm normally a stickler for grammar but verbing is a pretty widely accepted practice in colloquial English.
Doubleplus insightful!
It's too hard to construct a meaningful phrase when a single word will do, and with so many words in the English language, who has time to learn them all and pick a better alternative? And for for those naysayers and pedants who say this is a recent practice that is accelerating along with rudeness, poor spelling, decreased attention span and comprehension, I say get with the program, buster! If you want to be a team player, then you know that general illiteracy is inevitable. You'll be happier when you stop trying so hard. Language evolves. Everyone knows that. It's your right to make up words use them as you see fit. Don't let those antiquated notions of correctness like grammar, spelling, punctuation, style or coherence get in the way.
... that what we bathe our minds in will affect us. How and how much it will affect us are debatable, but the standard Slashdot denials seem a bit naive.
Not to worry. Just bathe in the denials and you'll get over it.
Reading and writing are *so* passe, but if you look at Information Age jobs, these skills are absolutely critical. Beyond jobs, literate citizens are key to a functional democracy. The diminishing of information literacy in America proceeds apace, and our cultural and political life suffers as a result. We expect less and less of ourselves, and we pass that on to the next generation.
Literate citizens? You're trying too hard. What's wrong with the current system where everyone depends on their television to provide them with everything they need to know?
Televison is part of our culture, like apple pie. Everyone owns a TV, but not everyone has time to read. Ever hear of the phrase "a picture is worth a thousand words"? Anyone campaigning for elected office, for example, already know they need to raise millions to fund campaign commercials and they're already in the habit of doing so. Not taking advantage of big business (who are always ready and willing to contribute ever-increasing amounts) seems contradictory to our free market economy. If you have lots of money to contribute, why shouldn't you get a bigger say?
I don't about you, but I work hard for a living. I can come home and turn on Fox News and get the important issues of the day summarised for me. That's what the information age is all about.
We're constantly learning that animals can accomplish feats we've been too arrogant to suspect them of: reasoning, memory, abstract concepts, tool use, eleven dimensional bee dances...
Indeed. For anyone who hasn't seen any of the recent stories in the press or on TV, dogs are also said to be able to sniff out cancer..
A bit more useful to mankind than sniffing out polycarbonate disks in luggage, but what the hell. A dog's nose is pretty amazing, but I still like the cold and wet part best.
For his part, David Cancel told Ars that he "strongly supports an increase in the methods and degree to which disclosure is communicated," not only for clickstream data but for any kind of data collected on users' personal surfing habits.
Nicely put. I'd even go so far as to suggest it's even nicer than what we typically hear during White House press conferences.
He stated that "all users should be informed explicitly when their data can be sold to a third party."
The tricky part. A nice sounding pronouncement, but it sidesteps the issue of whether they are, and if so, to what extent, etc. And it overlooks what we should expect, which is typically a progression starting with a scandal, followed by a Mistakes Were Made apology, followed by calls to action and the scattered efforts of those affected but who otherwise have little say in the matter, and if we're lucky, a legislator giving a There Oughta Be a Law speech before some subcomittee.
I've often wondered what the cable companies are doing with respect to TV watching. On the one hand, it seems perfectly reasonable that they could devise a system whereby they could collect statistics on my viewing habits and sell them to Nielsen's. On the other, I'm not aware of whether they can, have plans to, or already do. Maybe someone more knowledgable can clue me in.
There's a million reasons why this wont happen. Most of which comes down to the expense to do so in a big pc reseller like dell. What role does the pc reseller have left?
It's worth pointing out that in the Mini-ITX market, resellers don't have too much of a problem in that regard.
And the colourful CD from VIA that gets included typically has Linux/BSD stuff on it, too. How cool is that?;-)
We are number 172 out of 230 countries in poulation density. Many of the nations below us either possess vast areas of inhospitable land (Russia and Canada).
s/inhospitable/uninhabited/
Russia's population is mostly urban, and Canada is little different in that regard. Living where the bears do can be nice, but it's a bitch getting DSL service.
She has to run a windows application for her work and it doesn't work under wine so I got the free vmware player but got stuck because you need the commercial version to create a virtual disk.
the so-called sysadmins in Corporate settings who will not learn ipconfig, iptables and basic Unix commands..
$ ipconfig bash: ipconfig: command not found
$ echo "alias ipconfig=ifconfig" >> ~/.bashrc
It's never ceased to amaze me the sheer number of workarounds one collects when using or administering Windows systems. To say nothing of endless variations of regkeys and values that must be memorised, but change frequently enough to remind you that the sum total of your knowledge is mostly a collection of useless trivia.
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Putty is a poor imitation of Xterm, and an even worse simulation of a Linux VT.
Nice to see someone actually come out and say that. Personally, I think the vast majority of Putty users belong the Don't Know Any Different category. If there's a compromise to be made along those lines, the better choice would be Cygwin, but that brings us close to your rdesktop comparison.
The European Union continues to subsidize thousands of farmers, allowing them to produce huge amounts of surplus food every year that costs EU taxpayers a fortune. There is no political will to curb this waste as (especially in France) the farmers have too much political clout).
I should hope that farmers have a certain degree of political clout. You think that their land, the animals they raise, the food they grow, or the traditions they maintain have no value to a country or its inhabitants?
If that's not your thing, come to America. We've long since replaced farms with urban sprawl and strip malls, farmers with large agribusiness concerns, and the locally grown fruits and vegetables we used to buy in our supermarkets have been replaced with the indigenous products from Third World countries. Some traditions, of course, we hold onto and maintain. Like cheese made from edible oil products that comes in individually wrapped slices. Or the row of car dealerships and fast food restaurants that adorn our city streets.
On the other hand, if you're rich, you'll typically choose something different. Maybe live in Montana where there's cattle ranches, Napa Valley where you live beside miles of vineyards, or some place in Southern California where you're surrounded by citrus or avocado groves. The food you eat will typically be local, or imported from those subsidy-sucking farmers in the EU.
Actually, all that's required to be a christian is to ...
...
Allow me to fix that for you.
Actually, all that's required to be a Protestant Evangelical
Last I checked, neither recovering Catholics nor disavowed Southern Baptists nor any of the Make It Up As We Go Along denominational offshoots (the folks in Utah, included) have a monopoly on the word "Christian".
To be fair, there is something to be said for personal bias or cultural pride. However, if that's to be taken seriously, well, then, here's something to consider: I'm Orthodox; we prefer to see ourselves as here long before some guy in Rome started wearing a pointy hat and began flexing his power. And that's an even longer time before guys wearing white suits and white shoes convinced themselves they were started talking to God directly and got their own TV shows.
As for any inherent conflict in being a good Christian and science, well, it seems, at least in recent history, to be predominantly localised to the United States, and then specific to certain geographic parts where Protestant Evangelicals are in the majority. If the rest of us Christians follow along, it's for perverse amusement only.
The three- to four-minute "song" has proved to be an incredibly popular format for popular music over the last century, and I don't think you can chalk that up entirely to the machinations of the RIAA (which, let's face it, was a pretty benign organization until fairly recently) or the "music industry." Probably a lot of credit goes to radio, but if people really hated individual songs, there's no way they'd be as popular as they are.
So, to sum up
The attention span of the average listener is typically 3-4 minutes. By contrast, fans of concept albums need 70 minutes of uninterrupted music, or until the drugs wear off, which ever comes first.
BTW the 5" OQO Model 02 is now my sex object... powerful enough to run a full OS in the palm of your hand.
I think there should exist a -1 Too Informative moderation for a post that uses the phrase "sex object" and "palm of your hand" in the same sentence.
> I've tried
;-)
...
to use those
thumb-type
>> keyboards and
I just can't
> communicate
> >comfortably
with them.
>
Don't worry. The feeling is mutual.
People with thumb-type keyboards (and screens) who try to communicate with the rest of using such devices remind of midgets who pursue careers in professional wrestling. Some of us laugh, others feel bad or are embarassed, while others try and be polite and hope they'll just go away.
Personally, I think you're correct about the keyboard defining the minimum size of a device, though. The awkward bit is that for comfortable reading, the size of the screen should be defined by the size and shape of a book. I expect those two will be reconciled about the same time that regular TV programs are broadcast in widescreen.
Special purpose devices, on the other hand
I've never understood the problem with just getting a passport to cross the border.
I think this program is targetted more specifically at cross-border car travellers. That said, here's a few reasons:
1. Most Americans will never travel outside the state they live in let alone outside the country, and see little use in obtaining one, notwithstanding the general native distrust of things associated with federal government.
2. The passport application requires submission of original documentation. Most American don't even have a copy of their birth certificate.
3. Obtaining a passport can take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months.
4. The fee for the passport alone is $67. See No. 1.
5. Driver's licenses are the de facto Identity Card in the U.S. If you try getting into a bar with a passport alone, you could fill a blog describing the looks on people's face when you present it, let alone the different reactions you'd get.
6. Everyone (presumably) already has a driver license so there is a strong incentive by everyone involved to make use of them.
7. Passports don't fit into your wallet which makes them more subject to loss or theft.
8. Passports need to be renewed.
I'd suggest that the only thing that "matters" for anyone keen on the subject is good music and lots of brownies.
The key to criminalisation was the way in which Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 was written and passed.
To rephrase the above, if you wanted to deal in the stuff, you needed a tax stamp. Which required possession of the stuff. Which was
It's hardly surprising that in the decades since, the laws concerning cannabis are just as tortured and contradictory, especially when considered against the background of yet another new study that suggest alcohol and tobacco are more dangerous
Or maybe he's just counting the time until the computer is actually usable. With Linux once the computer is booted, and you see the desktop, it's ready to use. With windows, it takes another 20 seconds (at least) after the desktop appears for it to actually become usable.
The irony, of course, that it's necessary to re-state that last point in the hopes that people might get it. I doubt they will. Microsoft has gone to great lengths to lull the user into thinking the boot process is fast, streamlined and problem free, and given the typical disk thrashing that goes on, it doesn't take a genius to figure out they've also gone to great lengths to "optimize" the process. The end user, when seeing his login screen, or his wallpaper and desktop icons, thinks everything worked and everything is done when nothing could be farther from the truth. There's no real logging of any sort on Windows, so the measure of things remains somewhere between superficial and obscured.
Personally, I think a discussion of boot times for Linux systems is of interest mainly to Windows users. The rest of us typically don't care because we aren't in the habit of needing to reboot for installations, updates, or to "fix" things. In that respect, the article is as interesting as an article on stripping the kernel for faster boot times; there's lots of reasons to compile a custom kernel, but that one is at the bottom of the list.
On my BSD laptop (generic kernel), I can boot to a login prompt in about 35 seconds and be sure that that it's ready for use. Resuming from sleep takes about 4 seconds. If things were any faster, I wouldn't have time to take a sip of coffee.
No, the obstacle for Linux now lies in the odious "power user": the person that has developed a relatively good skill set for using Windows but is too stubborn to port it to another operating system, be it Linux, OS X, or whatever.
Interesting take on the subject. The greatest impediment to change of any sort is inertia, and while I doubt making a switch to Linux, etc. is any different, the category you describe is no doubt the most vocal.
This is, interestingly, a group of users for which many of us have contempt: they can achieve complex tasks but only because or rote learning and memorized steps. They will get that pretty Windows theme or know all the shortcuts to the one application the use frequently, but god forbid they have to use something else and they're lost all over again. They're the people that have command line phobia and yet will have no issues with editing registry files, difference being that the CLI is immensely useful and the Registry is the spawn of Satan.
It occurred to me many moons ago that the sum total of knowledge one obtains using Windows systems (both as a "power user" (ridiculous word) and/or as a typical sysadmin) is a giant convoluted collection of trivia that spans registry edits, workarounds for things that don't work or work badly, memorisation of GUI layout du jour, and various methods of reinstalling borked systems, the value of which erodes as time goes by. Put another way, unless you're a programmer regularly shelling out for an MSDN subscription, you probably know squat. And to paraphrase the poetry of Donald Rumsfeld, you probably don't know that you don't know.
By comparison, anyone, novice users included, who embarked on learning the basics of shell scripting, gained familiarity with a handful of standard programs, and learned how to use a text editor would find his or her skills just as relevant and valuable today as they did when DOS was commonplace. And chances are they would learned even more as time went on.
The CBC [Canadian Broadcasting Corporation] has posted an article on its website promoting the use of Ubuntu Linux to the 'average computer user'.
No, David Conabree, a regular reviewer of new high-tech gear and longtime computer user has written a favorable story on Ubuntu that's been published on the cbc.ca website.
I'm a big fan of cbc.ca and most things Canadian (except for the beer, of course), but I doubt they have an official position of open source software, or are otherwise in the habit of recommending a particular Linux distro to their readers.
Let's see... I'm 41, have loved metal since I was 14 ...
Nah, you should have said "The 70's called and they want their music back."
I'm normally a stickler for grammar but verbing is a pretty widely accepted practice in colloquial English.
Doubleplus insightful!
It's too hard to construct a meaningful phrase when a single word will do, and with so many words in the English language, who has time to learn them all and pick a better alternative? And for for those naysayers and pedants who say this is a recent practice that is accelerating along with rudeness, poor spelling, decreased attention span and comprehension, I say get with the program, buster! If you want to be a team player, then you know that general illiteracy is inevitable. You'll be happier when you stop trying so hard. Language evolves. Everyone knows that. It's your right to make up words use them as you see fit. Don't let those antiquated notions of correctness like grammar, spelling, punctuation, style or coherence get in the way.
... quit personifying corporations?
They hate it when you do that.
... that what we bathe our minds in will affect us. How and how much it will affect us are debatable, but the standard Slashdot denials seem a bit naive.
Not to worry. Just bathe in the denials and you'll get over it.
So, will the astronauts keep their base clean using autonomous robotic, magnetic vacuum cleaners called Moonbas?
Even better, why not send up a Super Model?
Now, could someone please pass the Grey Poupon?
And pass me the remote, while you're at it.
Reading and writing are *so* passe, but if you look at Information Age jobs, these skills are absolutely critical. Beyond jobs, literate citizens are key to a functional democracy. The diminishing of information literacy in America proceeds apace, and our cultural and political life suffers as a result. We expect less and less of ourselves, and we pass that on to the next generation.
Literate citizens? You're trying too hard. What's wrong with the current system where everyone depends on their television to provide them with everything they need to know?
Televison is part of our culture, like apple pie. Everyone owns a TV, but not everyone has time to read. Ever hear of the phrase "a picture is worth a thousand words"? Anyone campaigning for elected office, for example, already know they need to raise millions to fund campaign commercials and they're already in the habit of doing so. Not taking advantage of big business (who are always ready and willing to contribute ever-increasing amounts) seems contradictory to our free market economy. If you have lots of money to contribute, why shouldn't you get a bigger say?
I don't about you, but I work hard for a living. I can come home and turn on Fox News and get the important issues of the day summarised for me. That's what the information age is all about.
We're constantly learning that animals can accomplish feats we've been too arrogant to suspect them of: reasoning, memory, abstract concepts, tool use, eleven dimensional bee dances...
Indeed. For anyone who hasn't seen any of the recent stories in the press or on TV, dogs are also said to be able to sniff out cancer..
A bit more useful to mankind than sniffing out polycarbonate disks in luggage, but what the hell. A dog's nose is pretty amazing, but I still like the cold and wet part best.
For his part, David Cancel told Ars that he "strongly supports an increase in the methods and degree to which disclosure is communicated," not only for clickstream data but for any kind of data collected on users' personal surfing habits.
Nicely put. I'd even go so far as to suggest it's even nicer than what we typically hear during White House press conferences.
He stated that "all users should be informed explicitly when their data can be sold to a third party."
The tricky part. A nice sounding pronouncement, but it sidesteps the issue of whether they are, and if so, to what extent, etc. And it overlooks what we should expect, which is typically a progression starting with a scandal, followed by a Mistakes Were Made apology, followed by calls to action and the scattered efforts of those affected but who otherwise have little say in the matter, and if we're lucky, a legislator giving a There Oughta Be a Law speech before some subcomittee.
I've often wondered what the cable companies are doing with respect to TV watching. On the one hand, it seems perfectly reasonable that they could devise a system whereby they could collect statistics on my viewing habits and sell them to Nielsen's. On the other, I'm not aware of whether they can, have plans to, or already do. Maybe someone more knowledgable can clue me in.
There's a million reasons why this wont happen. Most of which comes down to the expense to do so in a big pc reseller like dell. What role does the pc reseller have left?
;-)
It's worth pointing out that in the Mini-ITX market, resellers don't have too much of a problem in that regard.
And the colourful CD from VIA that gets included typically has Linux/BSD stuff on it, too. How cool is that?
We are number 172 out of 230 countries in poulation density. Many of the nations below us either possess vast areas of inhospitable land (Russia and Canada).
s/inhospitable/uninhabited/
Russia's population is mostly urban, and Canada is little different in that regard. Living where the bears do can be nice, but it's a bitch getting DSL service.
She has to run a windows application for her work and it doesn't work under wine so I got the free vmware player but got stuck because you need the commercial version to create a virtual disk.
Maybe try using the free vmware server product and get unstuck?
the so-called sysadmins in Corporate settings who will not learn ipconfig, iptables and basic Unix commands..
$ ipconfig
bash: ipconfig: command not found
$ echo "alias ipconfig=ifconfig" >> ~/.bashrc
It's never ceased to amaze me the sheer number of workarounds one collects when using or administering Windows systems. To say nothing of endless variations of regkeys and values that must be memorised, but change frequently enough to remind you that the sum total of your knowledge is mostly a collection of useless trivia.
just install it w/o Runlevel 5 coming on by default, just like 99.00000% of sysadmins do w/ RHEL.
If that's the case, why do those 99.00000% of sysadmins install X to begin with?
now if'n you can get Vista to install w/o a GUI, well - that I've gotta see...
If you could, the non-GUI usability that has been promised since Win2k would be still be somewhere between awkward and useless.