That "saving" would be more than offset by the lower capabilities and higher failure rates of 10-year-old hardware. Do you really want to trust your work, even temporarily, to a 10-year-old PC hard drive. Or use a 10mbps network card on a gigabit network if you're sharing files on a server? Or laptops (the project included converting lots of laptops) with only wireless b and crappy encryption?
"trendy" modern distros...actually run slower under Linux
They're talking about servers.
Don't be silly - they're talking desktop users switching from Windows+Office to Linux+OpenOffice - 14,000 PCs and laptops. Since when does anyone run OpenOffice on a server?
It's actually worse that even that. They also lower their expectations as to how much it will cost, because after all, "it's already done, it just needs to be patched".
And that doesn't even get near the cases where they already blew their budget, and now fixing it will not only cost too much, but take too long for it to be justified. So they'll "work on their next version" internally. And that wil be full of bugs and not work so well either.
The truth is that the reason these courses are booming is because people either don't have jobs, or are insecure in their current jobs - same as in every down economy in history - and they still believe that "if worse happens, I can pick up a few bucks making web sites."
There's no such thing as "preponderance of evidence" in criminal trials. The standard is a much higher one - "beyond a reasonable doubt."
Photographs can only be introduced into evidence if you have a witness to testify under oath as to their provenance. "I took these photographs on such-and-such a date, blah blah blah."
With video evidence (and increasingly with digital photographs) seeing is no longer believing. Even today, simple things like changing a timestamp can make innocent actions look crooked, and vice versa. Photos and videos can't be cross-examined. Witnesses can.
Considering that I bought Simcity 2000, Simcity 3000 Unlimited (for both the PC and the Nintendo Wii), and Simcity 4 + Rush Hour pack, they've just lost a loyal customer.
Within 10 years all video evidence will be useless, for the simple reason that anyone will be able to render any sort of video. Want a video of the Prez free-basing with hookers? No problem. Want a video of the prosecutor and the judge having sex with a dead donkey? No problem.
Eventually, the standard of proof will fall back to "if you don't have at least 2 witnesses, forget it."
It might have been so farcically stupid that people in the training rightly realized it was asinine and didn't actually do anything from it either, hence the lack of a need for retraining.
Somehow I doubt it. There are enough regular cops, prosecutors, rent-a-cops, politicians, and company directors who think they can bend the law because they are "special."
Of all the things that users have been asking for, this was not on the list. Do you even listen?
What next - powerpoint slide decks?
I want to be able to exclude it from the list of stories - life is too short to look at a video that takes 5 to 10 minutes to say what I can glom from reading a story in 30 seconds.
If nobody buys a 3D tv, then who'll make content for it? Who'll fund the R&D to improve?
The same suckers with more money than brains^W^W^W^W^W^Wearly adopters who buy all sorts of s*** before it's really ready for prime time? You know - the ones who went out and bought 42" DLP 720i rear projection TVS for $4000 over 3 years rather than putting aside $50 a month for 3 years and buying a 50" 1080p plasma + 1000 watt surround-sound system for cash.
They're now stuck with their PoS because they can't bear the thought of throwing out something that was so expensive, even though they couldn't get $300 for it if they tried.
NO - I hate the lies behind bubbles, whether it was the housing bubble, the current student loan bubble, or the lies behind the social media bubble. Until they produce hard, reproducible statistics (and the fact that they haven't when they could, is very telling) to prove otherwise, I'm going to continue to say what the studies show, that it's crap for insecure people and lazy unimaginative marketers.
How about we all just exclude Roblimo in our user options, nothing of value will be lost (I checked, everything Roblimo posts here appears to be videos, and at least half of them seem like slashvertisements).
This is why my sister switched to Apple and why my daughters love their iPhones. They just work.
Honestly, if I had to do it all over again, the only *nixes I would have bothered with would have been IBM and (maybe) FreeBSD, because there are always going to be fundamental quality control problems with most open source software.
It's disappointing, but that's the reality, and in retrospect wasting all those years on linux was a mistake. Example - when the linux foundation was crowing about how there are so many jobs in the linux job market, I went to the same job site they used for their stats, and it turns out they blatantly distorted the facts. Using the same search (linux), but actually going beyond just the number of results returned, 92% of all the "linux" jobs required using proprietary systems - some of them had absolutely nothing to do with linux, even peripherally. It's a shame to say it, but too much linux looks bad on a resume.
Unfortunately, what's done is done. We're seeing the same problems with android as have plagued desktop linux - problems due to too many forks. And there is no solution, not this year, not 10 years down the road.
So I'll keep on logging out and rebooting regularly. It is what it is, and for mindshare purposes, they still believe it's more important to add new features than to fix existing ones. Otherwise, they'd do a feature freeze until they achieve zero bugs, even if it took a year.
Want some real advice? Do not buy a 3D tv. There's almost no content, the technology is immature, and the price will only go lower for better technology as time goes on.
BTW - this guy is no expert.
Who submitted this shite anyway? Oh, there was no submitter - it's a slashvertisement brought to you by roblimo. Can we have a way to down-mod stories? We've only been asking for that for years and years and years now. It would be better than those stupid anti_social_media buttons.
The easiest way is to get a dog. Walking them every morning and evening gives you exercise, and you'll be able to meet total strangers (sort of like all the people who "recommend" each other on linkedin). Plus they don't post embarrassing photos of you and they won't ignore you to check their facebook page.
The problem is firefox-specific. Other programs don't have anywhere near the same level of gobbling up ram and not freeing it on exit. Firefox is simply buggy, and even after exiting the program, there's ram that's not free. Most of it is freed up after logging out and back in, but still, the only way to get it all back is to reboot.
Not a big deal for a home machine - I usually turn it off at night anyway - and for a server it would be a non-issue because you wouldn't be running a windowing manager anyway, but still, it does show a problem that has persisted over the years.
All in all, it's still "good enough computing" for me, but I can't really recommend it any more for anyone else - the non-free stuff has improved too much in the last few years. Still, who knows? Maybe even now someone is developing the NBOT (Next Big Open Thingee) - I'd give it a whirl.
6. be amazed at how quick you manage to find other crap to fill your disk(s) up with again.
Absolutely true. I remember how we used to save space by only uncompressing applications as needed, then deleting the uncompressed version. All of a sudden, the drives had 30% more space... but not for long:-(
There are obviously exceptions to pretty much any rule where we're talking about human conduct, but that doesn't take away from the fact that facebook is a problem for many people, allowing them to replace real interaction with superficial "friends" (and then when that doesn't fix their self-esteem problems, go on quests for more and more pseudo-friends, the same as an alcoholic goes after more and more booze to "fix" their problems).
Facebook is not only an enabler, it's also become the instigator in many cases. If it were to disappear tomorrow, long-term, society would be better off.
Of course I'm only talking about real accounts - the millions of fake ones are just a normal market reaction to people trying to make a buck any way they can, manipulating the system for their benefit, same as the SEO scam artists.
1. data deduplication. Most people have a lot of redundancy ever since hard drives started growing past a few gigabytes.
2. for photos - people might have 20, 30 shots, of which only 2 or 3 are really "keepers." Get rid of the crapola. Same goes for videos that are "better off forgotten" or that, while still viewable, wuld be a pain to watch because we no longer can stand looking at 320x200.
3. tar lots of little files into one big file, so as to not lose disk space to 4k sectors holding a 330-byte file, etc.,
4. bzip2 (much better compression than gzip) for most stuff, re-encode to h.264 for videos.
5. be amazed at how much space you've freed up.
blondeguy.com??? Really????? It's pretty much just a hobby site.
Development of the base code was completely halted in 2006. What you can buy now is an obsolete system with updated add-ons such as openoffice. That's like someone selling Vista and calling it a new version because they changed the solitaire game. It's dead, and IBM has been telling people for years to get over it already. Even NCR and Diebold switched from it to... *gasp* XP because XP runs better on modern hardware.
So, do you have any sales figures to back up your claim that someone is actually buying this totally outdated piece of you-know-what?
It's called "disable account" - but it doesn't really work. They'll keep sending you status updates via email, and tell you when someone shares stuff with you, even though you've disabled the account. I disabled mine monthas ago, after hardly using it for several years after I finally signed up.
It's one way for them to keep their user numbers artificially inflated.
Dumped twitter years ago - boring!
Thinking of dumping google+ as well - I check it every few days, but really, it's not all that interesting compared to the real world. Especially now that spring is here! (I know, it's heresy to even speak of that big blue room with the bright light in the sky that can burn your skin if you stay there too long, and the living green carpet, and creatures that look almost as real as the digital people and birds and squirrels we see every day,... but still...:-)
Slashdot Mirror
That "saving" would be more than offset by the lower capabilities and higher failure rates of 10-year-old hardware. Do you really want to trust your work, even temporarily, to a 10-year-old PC hard drive. Or use a 10mbps network card on a gigabit network if you're sharing files on a server? Or laptops (the project included converting lots of laptops) with only wireless b and crappy encryption?
Don't be silly - they're talking desktop users switching from Windows+Office to Linux+OpenOffice - 14,000 PCs and laptops. Since when does anyone run OpenOffice on a server?
And that doesn't even get near the cases where they already blew their budget, and now fixing it will not only cost too much, but take too long for it to be justified. So they'll "work on their next version" internally. And that wil be full of bugs and not work so well either.
The truth is that the reason these courses are booming is because people either don't have jobs, or are insecure in their current jobs - same as in every down economy in history - and they still believe that "if worse happens, I can pick up a few bucks making web sites."
On the Wii, they changed the name to SimCity Creator - but if you've played SimCity 3000, you'll recognize it's a port of SimCity 3000.
There's no such thing as "preponderance of evidence" in criminal trials. The standard is a much higher one - "beyond a reasonable doubt."
Photographs can only be introduced into evidence if you have a witness to testify under oath as to their provenance. "I took these photographs on such-and-such a date, blah blah blah."
With video evidence (and increasingly with digital photographs) seeing is no longer believing. Even today, simple things like changing a timestamp can make innocent actions look crooked, and vice versa. Photos and videos can't be cross-examined. Witnesses can.
Considering that I bought Simcity 2000, Simcity 3000 Unlimited (for both the PC and the Nintendo Wii), and Simcity 4 + Rush Hour pack, they've just lost a loyal customer.
Within 10 years all video evidence will be useless, for the simple reason that anyone will be able to render any sort of video. Want a video of the Prez free-basing with hookers? No problem. Want a video of the prosecutor and the judge having sex with a dead donkey? No problem.
Eventually, the standard of proof will fall back to "if you don't have at least 2 witnesses, forget it."
Somehow I doubt it. There are enough regular cops, prosecutors, rent-a-cops, politicians, and company directors who think they can bend the law because they are "special."
Of all the things that users have been asking for, this was not on the list. Do you even listen?
What next - powerpoint slide decks?
I want to be able to exclude it from the list of stories - life is too short to look at a video that takes 5 to 10 minutes to say what I can glom from reading a story in 30 seconds.
If you're buying plasma (LCD picture quality is crap in comparison), 3d is still double the price - or more, so no, it's not worth the extra $$$.
Definitely. The best way to buy a TV is to go and look at it. Find friends who bought similar TVs. Ask around. Everyone has different tastes.
The same suckers with more money than brains^W^W^W^W^W^Wearly adopters who buy all sorts of s*** before it's really ready for prime time? You know - the ones who went out and bought 42" DLP 720i rear projection TVS for $4000 over 3 years rather than putting aside $50 a month for 3 years and buying a 50" 1080p plasma + 1000 watt surround-sound system for cash.
They're now stuck with their PoS because they can't bear the thought of throwing out something that was so expensive, even though they couldn't get $300 for it if they tried.
NO - I hate the lies behind bubbles, whether it was the housing bubble, the current student loan bubble, or the lies behind the social media bubble. Until they produce hard, reproducible statistics (and the fact that they haven't when they could, is very telling) to prove otherwise, I'm going to continue to say what the studies show, that it's crap for insecure people and lazy unimaginative marketers.
I'm in. Thx for the nudge. Nothing personal, Rob.
This is why my sister switched to Apple and why my daughters love their iPhones. They just work.
Honestly, if I had to do it all over again, the only *nixes I would have bothered with would have been IBM and (maybe) FreeBSD, because there are always going to be fundamental quality control problems with most open source software.
It's disappointing, but that's the reality, and in retrospect wasting all those years on linux was a mistake. Example - when the linux foundation was crowing about how there are so many jobs in the linux job market, I went to the same job site they used for their stats, and it turns out they blatantly distorted the facts. Using the same search (linux), but actually going beyond just the number of results returned, 92% of all the "linux" jobs required using proprietary systems - some of them had absolutely nothing to do with linux, even peripherally. It's a shame to say it, but too much linux looks bad on a resume.
Unfortunately, what's done is done. We're seeing the same problems with android as have plagued desktop linux - problems due to too many forks. And there is no solution, not this year, not 10 years down the road.
So I'll keep on logging out and rebooting regularly. It is what it is, and for mindshare purposes, they still believe it's more important to add new features than to fix existing ones. Otherwise, they'd do a feature freeze until they achieve zero bugs, even if it took a year.
BTW - this guy is no expert.
Who submitted this shite anyway? Oh, there was no submitter - it's a slashvertisement brought to you by roblimo. Can we have a way to down-mod stories? We've only been asking for that for years and years and years now. It would be better than those stupid anti_social_media buttons.
I'm using the open-source radion driver. Again, it's an issue specific to firefox, not a closed-source driver.
The easiest way is to get a dog. Walking them every morning and evening gives you exercise, and you'll be able to meet total strangers (sort of like all the people who "recommend" each other on linkedin). Plus they don't post embarrassing photos of you and they won't ignore you to check their facebook page.
Not a big deal for a home machine - I usually turn it off at night anyway - and for a server it would be a non-issue because you wouldn't be running a windowing manager anyway, but still, it does show a problem that has persisted over the years.
All in all, it's still "good enough computing" for me, but I can't really recommend it any more for anyone else - the non-free stuff has improved too much in the last few years. Still, who knows? Maybe even now someone is developing the NBOT (Next Big Open Thingee) - I'd give it a whirl.
Absolutely true. I remember how we used to save space by only uncompressing applications as needed, then deleting the uncompressed version. All of a sudden, the drives had 30% more space ... but not for long :-(
Isn't that the basis for pretty much all marketing?
There are obviously exceptions to pretty much any rule where we're talking about human conduct, but that doesn't take away from the fact that facebook is a problem for many people, allowing them to replace real interaction with superficial "friends" (and then when that doesn't fix their self-esteem problems, go on quests for more and more pseudo-friends, the same as an alcoholic goes after more and more booze to "fix" their problems).
Facebook is not only an enabler, it's also become the instigator in many cases. If it were to disappear tomorrow, long-term, society would be better off.
Of course I'm only talking about real accounts - the millions of fake ones are just a normal market reaction to people trying to make a buck any way they can, manipulating the system for their benefit, same as the SEO scam artists.
1. data deduplication. Most people have a lot of redundancy ever since hard drives started growing past a few gigabytes.
2. for photos - people might have 20, 30 shots, of which only 2 or 3 are really "keepers." Get rid of the crapola. Same goes for videos that are "better off forgotten" or that, while still viewable, wuld be a pain to watch because we no longer can stand looking at 320x200.
3. tar lots of little files into one big file, so as to not lose disk space to 4k sectors holding a 330-byte file, etc.,
4. bzip2 (much better compression than gzip) for most stuff, re-encode to h.264 for videos.
5. be amazed at how much space you've freed up.
the only canadian vendor - site looks like a hobby blog - features their dead cat! Kind of appropriate - a dead cat selling a dead OS?
blondeguy.com??? Really????? It's pretty much just a hobby site.
Development of the base code was completely halted in 2006. What you can buy now is an obsolete system with updated add-ons such as openoffice. That's like someone selling Vista and calling it a new version because they changed the solitaire game. It's dead, and IBM has been telling people for years to get over it already. Even NCR and Diebold switched from it to ... *gasp* XP because XP runs better on modern hardware.
So, do you have any sales figures to back up your claim that someone is actually buying this totally outdated piece of you-know-what?
It's called "disable account" - but it doesn't really work. They'll keep sending you status updates via email, and tell you when someone shares stuff with you, even though you've disabled the account. I disabled mine monthas ago, after hardly using it for several years after I finally signed up.
It's one way for them to keep their user numbers artificially inflated.
Dumped twitter years ago - boring!
Thinking of dumping google+ as well - I check it every few days, but really, it's not all that interesting compared to the real world. Especially now that spring is here! (I know, it's heresy to even speak of that big blue room with the bright light in the sky that can burn your skin if you stay there too long, and the living green carpet, and creatures that look almost as real as the digital people and birds and squirrels we see every day, ... but still ... :-)