I'd like to do a social experiment and write a virus that pops up a window asking the question: "Install Virus?". The options are "No Thanks" and "yeah sure, pwn me". Now, I'm usually an optimist, but I think the results of this study would be depressing.
We can browse if we want to, we can leave your friends behind
Cause your friends dont browse and if they dont browse
Well theyre are no friends of mine
I say, we can browse where we want to, catch a virus we will never find
And we can act like we come from out of this OS
Leave the real one far behind,
It's how you decipher something that makes it an explanation.
Einstein's equations of general relativity don't really explain anything unless you understand the math. To anyone else, they're just kooky looking symbols. To many people these may just be buckets with spinning water in them. To these researchers they may turn out to be explanations.
AFAIK laser spectroscopy is used on small numbers (as in less than an Avogadro's number) of atoms, molecules or slightly larger structures. It also often ionizes or otherwise rips the structure apart. The thing that may be new here is that they are working on solid materials for which atomic force microscopes and tunneling microscopes may have been the state of the art until now.
Well, there's a third option of GNU/Linux. But actually I'd prefer option number 2 (The distro) and that's what I'm starting to lean towards when someone asks me what OS I use. Calling it by the distro name and letting people know that there are lots of distros lets them know that it's a wide scale planet wide thing, not lead or created by any one person.
And for me it's not just who gets the credit, but the history of the whole thing. People talk about the OS as "Linux", then use the information that Torvalds created the Linux kernel in '91 and come to the conclusion that the whole OS was invented in '91. Which is just plain wrong.
Either: a) What Torvalds created (the kernel) is the only thing refered to as Linux and it is recognized that there is alot more to the OS, much of which was already invented.
b) The OS is called Linux, but it's recognized that Linux was started in the early 80's by the FSF before Torvalds even got to university.
One of those options makes logical sense. The other, not so much. I'm not going to ignore facts and history just because of convenience.
Great post. I was also going to come in here and say how the portrayal of the orcs seems like the idea of some noble savage; good at heart but unsophisticated and unintelligent. But I see you've got it covered nicely, and better than what I would have done.
I had been thinking about reading that book, but now I think I've finally been convinced.
I'm not saying he wasn't hepped up on drugs or that he was in agony. I'm saying that in the video he was not moving. Period. I could have put the handcuffs on him at that point.
The excerpt was not tiny. It went on for quite a while. Even if the police were forced to beat him in submission, they didn't need to beat him for 30-60 seconds after he was in submission (I don't remember the actual time). At any point in the 'tiny excerpt' that was shown publicly an officer could have put handcuffs on the guy and ended it. Instead, they just kept taking turns beating him.
How crazy, criminal or drug addicted the guy was is irrelevant. Nobody deserves that treatment. And if we are going to go into character assasinations lets look into how this was but one out of many (many!) instances of LAPD brutality. The same police department that was named the country's most corrupt. The same one where several years ago many officers were dismissed and charged with things like planting evidence, theft and murder(!). Read about it here.
Well, sure it probably is to hook people into buying Skype out. But that's a good idea for alot of people anyway. I just moved overseas and have spent many hours (~10) talking to my family on Skype out and so far it has cost me 5 bucks. Pretty sweet to someone who remembers when 10c/min was all the rage.
Well, based on your anectdotal evidence, Linux has a ways to go. But based on my equally valid anectdotal evidence Linux is just fine now. I recently purchased my first laptop, so I previously new hardly anything about wireless, Linux or Windows. What did I do to get wireless working? Install Ubuntu and then.. nothing else. That was it. Less than what you had to do to get it working in Windows.
Well, I did have to choose a network in the network control panel.
Anyway, something not working on one specific hardware configuration doesn't say much. There will always be some computer that doesn't like some operating system.
If you have it you can just double click a.deb package and it installs. I've only tried it twice and those were packages for which I already had the dependencies installed, but supposedly it works as smoothly as if you had used apt. Actually I think it does use apt, it's just that it can be used for a.deb package that you already have sitting on your hard-drive.
If you were a new user to unix, what would you prefer:
A) open synaptic, search the thousands of packages, hope you find what you're after, install it.
B) download an app folder, drag it to your appliactions folder. go.
You forgot the part in B) where you search through the internet for the home page of the application. Then you read the home page trying to find out how to download it. Once you see the "download" link you go through a couple of pages asking you what version you want and what mirror you want to use. Then after waiting for the download you finally start the actuall installation.
Whereas with A) it's more like: Open Synaptic, use the search field to find the app faster than you would on the net, install it.
I prefer option A. It's more convinient for me and the repository based system has other benefits I'd rather not do without. I can see where you are coming from, but different people prefer different things. I'm just glad the distros agree with me (or rather I agree with them).
And for the record, it's not the distribution or Linux devs who are stopping app folders from coming to GNU/Linux. They already exist. Nothing stops someone from bundling everything a program needs in a self-contained folder. That's how most of the proprietary apps I use are packaged. Open source devs could do this with their programs too, but it would be more effort without much benefit when the distros are going to package it anyway.
No, dick, you were not saying that all developing nations are not alike. You never said anything like that. All you were doing was repeating the dumb-assed assertion that there is no use providing people in developing counrtries with cheap computers. That all other problems have to be solved first, before computers could really be usefull. You said "First basic needs (clean,accesible water, sanitation etc), then basic infrastructure(roads,taps in most dwellings etc) then basic services(hospitals,schools, electricity etc..)". I replied, in nicer words, that you are a idiot, because many people in Africa already have those things, and they could really benefit from some IT now.
Just because people in other parts of a country are starving doesn't mean the better off ones shouldn't get help in the area of computers and IT. People are starving in the richest countries in the world, but no one wants to stop technological development until everyone has food and shelter.
Yeah, I was in the cities. Each with populations of around a million or more. Most of those people with homes, food, and access to education, health care, and clean water. What they didn't have was enough money for their own computer. Which was why the computer cafes were always packed. Given your history of living in Africa (if it's true), saying that there aren't many people in Africa who could make good use of cheap computers makes you either retarded or a god-damned liar. And you deserve the shit that I and the mods have given you.
Do you really think that they don't have hospitals and roads in countries like Kenya and Zambia? Because if that is your opinion, then you are really showing your ignorance about such countries. Did you even read and understand my post? Here is the gist of it: All developing nations are not alike. Some have serious food/water shortages, but not all.
I have been to several developing countries. And they all had clean, accesible water, sanitation, roads, indoor plumbing in most homes, hospitals, schools, electricity, etc. But they were still poor, and could really use cheap computers.
The countries you are thinking of, without running water or roads or electricity are not the countries targeted by these cheap computer initiatives.
These computers aren't meant for people without clean water and no food or shelter. Obviouslly, they have bigger problems. Whey can't people get that there are tens of millions of people in third-world countries who have clean water, food and shelter but are still very poor. It is for them that these computers are meant, not the poorest of the poor. This has been stated so many times around here: the third-world is not one homogeneous pit of disease and starvation. For some third world countries, the lack of computers/connectivity/information IS one of their biggest problems.
...the reality is that there are concepts that are fairly ubiquitous across most of Africa, so it's not unreasonable to describe a particular word or concept as "African"
Maybe, but Ubuntu is not one of those concepts. Calling the word "African" sounds ignorant, if not condescending. In Swahili it has a more literal meaning of "centre"; The buses in Dar es Salaam that go downtown were labled "Ubuntu". I've been told that in Rwanda it means "free" as in beer, not as in freedom.
And these are in places where a Bantu language is spoken. In northern Africa the word does not even exist. It's insulting to the populations of many countries in the north when they are not considered to be "real" Africans.
The other condescending thing is calling it "ancient", trying to give it some kind of air of native mysticism. There are old words in western languages too, but we don't go around calling them "ancient". Person A: "what's communism?" Person B: "Well, it's an ancient European word meaning "sharing".
Ubuntu Linux should have just stuck to Desmond Tutu's definition, which I believe they used to quote. It's sad to me for my favourite distro to misrepresent people in some of my favourite places.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, I see now. Being able to specify which apps are executable by which user. Yeah, Linux can do that. Don't know about Windows though.
The user ID question still stands.
Two of the many options are
/. number I don't see how this wasn't already known. You steal someone's account?:)
a: use GNU/Linux
b: don't give your sister an administrative account.
And, not to be rude but judging by that low
It's funny 'cause it's true.
I'd like to do a social experiment and write a virus that pops up a window asking the question: "Install Virus?". The options are "No Thanks" and "yeah sure, pwn me". Now, I'm usually an optimist, but I think the results of this study would be depressing.
We can browse if we want to,
we can leave your friends behind
Cause your friends dont browse and if they dont browse
Well theyre are no friends of mine
I say, we can browse where we want to,
catch a virus we will never find
And we can act like we come from out of this OS
Leave the real one far behind,
It's how you decipher something that makes it an explanation.
Einstein's equations of general relativity don't really explain anything unless you understand the math. To anyone else, they're just kooky looking symbols. To many people these may just be buckets with spinning water in them. To these researchers they may turn out to be explanations.
AFAIK laser spectroscopy is used on small numbers (as in less than an Avogadro's number) of atoms, molecules or slightly larger structures. It also often ionizes or otherwise rips the structure apart. The thing that may be new here is that they are working on solid materials for which atomic force microscopes and tunneling microscopes may have been the state of the art until now.
Now, I'm never one to complain about the decisions of /. editors (and I'm not here either), but it's pretty funny seeing this in the hardware sections.
Maybe Ars Technica will have a review later...
TFA? Yeah, it's worth reading. It's pretty cool the toys these guys (physicists in general) get to play with.
Well, there's a third option of GNU/Linux. But actually I'd prefer option number 2 (The distro) and that's what I'm starting to lean towards when someone asks me what OS I use. Calling it by the distro name and letting people know that there are lots of distros lets them know that it's a wide scale planet wide thing, not lead or created by any one person.
And for me it's not just who gets the credit, but the history of the whole thing. People talk about the OS as "Linux", then use the information that Torvalds created the Linux kernel in '91 and come to the conclusion that the whole OS was invented in '91. Which is just plain wrong.
Either:
a) What Torvalds created (the kernel) is the only thing refered to as Linux and it is recognized that there is alot more to the OS, much of which was already invented.
b) The OS is called Linux, but it's recognized that Linux was started in the early 80's by the FSF before Torvalds even got to university.
One of those options makes logical sense. The other, not so much. I'm not going to ignore facts and history just because of convenience.
I agree. But that's what happens when people refer to the whole OS as "Linux". Torvalds gets credited with creating and leading the whole thing.
Great post. I was also going to come in here and say how the portrayal of the orcs seems like the idea of some noble savage; good at heart but unsophisticated and unintelligent. But I see you've got it covered nicely, and better than what I would have done.
I had been thinking about reading that book, but now I think I've finally been convinced.
I'm not saying he wasn't hepped up on drugs or that he was in agony. I'm saying that in the video he was not moving. Period. I could have put the handcuffs on him at that point.
The excerpt was not tiny. It went on for quite a while. Even if the police were forced to beat him in submission, they didn't need to beat him for 30-60 seconds after he was in submission (I don't remember the actual time). At any point in the 'tiny excerpt' that was shown publicly an officer could have put handcuffs on the guy and ended it. Instead, they just kept taking turns beating him.
How crazy, criminal or drug addicted the guy was is irrelevant. Nobody deserves that treatment. And if we are going to go into character assasinations lets look into how this was but one out of many (many!) instances of LAPD brutality. The same police department that was named the country's most corrupt. The same one where several years ago many officers were dismissed and charged with things like planting evidence, theft and murder(!). Read about it here.
I've never met anyone that *didn't* want to run OS X
One more here. Let's see how long we can get this list...
Well, sure it probably is to hook people into buying Skype out. But that's a good idea for alot of people anyway. I just moved overseas and have spent many hours (~10) talking to my family on Skype out and so far it has cost me 5 bucks. Pretty sweet to someone who remembers when 10c/min was all the rage.
I am aware that I sound like an advertisment.
I don't think FreeBSD devs care who's using OSX. They are not the same even if they do use similar kernels.
Can you point out the study or survey which shows that most Linux devs spend their time on useless eye-candy? Because I don't think that is the case.
I was going to eat that mummy!!!
Well, based on your anectdotal evidence, Linux has a ways to go. But based on my equally valid anectdotal evidence Linux is just fine now. I recently purchased my first laptop, so I previously new hardly anything about wireless, Linux or Windows. What did I do to get wireless working? Install Ubuntu and then.. nothing else. That was it. Less than what you had to do to get it working in Windows.
Well, I did have to choose a network in the network control panel.
Anyway, something not working on one specific hardware configuration doesn't say much. There will always be some computer that doesn't like some operating system.
For Debian based systems there is gdebi.
.deb package and it installs. I've only tried it twice and those were packages for which I already had the dependencies installed, but supposedly it works as smoothly as if you had used apt. Actually I think it does use apt, it's just that it can be used for a .deb package that you already have sitting on your hard-drive.
If you have it you can just double click a
If you were a new user to unix, what would you prefer:
A) open synaptic, search the thousands of packages, hope you find what you're after, install it.
B) download an app folder, drag it to your appliactions folder. go.
You forgot the part in B) where you search through the internet for the home page of the application. Then you read the home page trying to find out how to download it. Once you see the "download" link you go through a couple of pages asking you what version you want and what mirror you want to use. Then after waiting for the download you finally start the actuall installation.
Whereas with A) it's more like: Open Synaptic, use the search field to find the app faster than you would on the net, install it.
I prefer option A. It's more convinient for me and the repository based system has other benefits I'd rather not do without. I can see where you are coming from, but different people prefer different things. I'm just glad the distros agree with me (or rather I agree with them).
And for the record, it's not the distribution or Linux devs who are stopping app folders from coming to GNU/Linux. They already exist. Nothing stops someone from bundling everything a program needs in a self-contained folder. That's how most of the proprietary apps I use are packaged. Open source devs could do this with their programs too, but it would be more effort without much benefit when the distros are going to package it anyway.
Oh so we want to be assholes do we?
No, dick, you were not saying that all developing nations are not alike. You never said anything like that. All you were doing was repeating the dumb-assed assertion that there is no use providing people in developing counrtries with cheap computers. That all other problems have to be solved first, before computers could really be usefull. You said "First basic needs (clean,accesible water, sanitation etc), then basic infrastructure(roads,taps in most dwellings etc) then basic services(hospitals,schools, electricity etc..)". I replied, in nicer words, that you are a idiot, because many people in Africa already have those things, and they could really benefit from some IT now.
Just because people in other parts of a country are starving doesn't mean the better off ones shouldn't get help in the area of computers and IT. People are starving in the richest countries in the world, but no one wants to stop technological development until everyone has food and shelter.
Yeah, I was in the cities. Each with populations of around a million or more. Most of those people with homes, food, and access to education, health care, and clean water. What they didn't have was enough money for their own computer. Which was why the computer cafes were always packed. Given your history of living in Africa (if it's true), saying that there aren't many people in Africa who could make good use of cheap computers makes you either retarded or a god-damned liar. And you deserve the shit that I and the mods have given you.
Do you really think that they don't have hospitals and roads in countries like Kenya and Zambia? Because if that is your opinion, then you are really showing your ignorance about such countries. Did you even read and understand my post? Here is the gist of it: All developing nations are not alike. Some have serious food/water shortages, but not all.
I have been to several developing countries. And they all had clean, accesible water, sanitation, roads, indoor plumbing in most homes, hospitals, schools, electricity, etc. But they were still poor, and could really use cheap computers.
The countries you are thinking of, without running water or roads or electricity are not the countries targeted by these cheap computer initiatives.
These computers aren't meant for people without clean water and no food or shelter. Obviouslly, they have bigger problems. Whey can't people get that there are tens of millions of people in third-world countries who have clean water, food and shelter but are still very poor. It is for them that these computers are meant, not the poorest of the poor. This has been stated so many times around here: the third-world is not one homogeneous pit of disease and starvation. For some third world countries, the lack of computers/connectivity/information IS one of their biggest problems.
Maybe slashdot will be spoofed next. That will be a story. That could be the story. Emails that read:
/. won't even have to rephrase it.
"Tech website Slashdot article links to vulnerability exploiting websites. Read more here"
And whoever submits it to
...the reality is that there are concepts that are fairly ubiquitous across most of Africa, so it's not unreasonable to describe a particular word or concept as "African"
Maybe, but Ubuntu is not one of those concepts. Calling the word "African" sounds ignorant, if not condescending. In Swahili it has a more literal meaning of "centre"; The buses in Dar es Salaam that go downtown were labled "Ubuntu". I've been told that in Rwanda it means "free" as in beer, not as in freedom.
And these are in places where a Bantu language is spoken. In northern Africa the word does not even exist. It's insulting to the populations of many countries in the north when they are not considered to be "real" Africans.
The other condescending thing is calling it "ancient", trying to give it some kind of air of native mysticism. There are old words in western languages too, but we don't go around calling them "ancient".
Person A: "what's communism?"
Person B: "Well, it's an ancient European word meaning "sharing".
Ubuntu Linux should have just stuck to Desmond Tutu's definition, which I believe they used to quote. It's sad to me for my favourite distro to misrepresent people in some of my favourite places.
So some guy I never heard of represents the whole country now?
Well, take it from Canada's i_should_be_working, DRM is teh suxors.
Wait.. is that what the article is about? Whatever.