Anyone who's still locked into AOL and hasn't left yet must obviously be very trusting of their brand.
What proves this is the idiots who pay for AOL over broadband. A friend of mine just had a perfectly good Bellsouth DSL line installed, and is still paying the 20 some bucks extra to lay AOL over the top of it. WTF? So you and I say WTF but apparently some people see value in paying a lot of extra money for the privledge of using the shitty AOL interface, where I'd bet that every single component has a free alternative on the WWW somewhere.
When I approached them about it, they said that they didn't want their email address to change (@aol.com.) Holy cow. It would really suck to mentally lock yourself into paying for AOL the rest of your life just so your email address won't change. You know, I think I'm a pretty good tech guy when it comes to being able to understand a user's point of view- but sometimes I still get baffled.
Sadly, everyone here apparently gets your point except for the editor who posted the story.
It seems so common place to the rest of us (whether we've been in the business world or not) that google would register many, many variants of their name as a standard practice. Anybody who tries to read something more into this shit shouldn't have the ability to put stuff on the front page. It is like explaining stuff to a damn 5 year old sometimes, I swear...
Before everybody gets swept up in all the hype and euphoria, remember that altitude -- even 100 km -- is easy
For $10 million dollars, why didn't you do it years ago then? I know what your point is but I think there is a pendulum reaction going on here. Some guys are saying, SpaceShipOne is better than the Space Shuttle, which makes guys like you come back with something absurd saying that 100 km is nothing at all.
In reality, and objectively speaking, somewhere in the middle of these two extremist viewpoints is where the truth lies. No, 100 km is not orbit. However, until a couple months ago nobody in the private sector could even go suborbital, and only a 3 governments in the world had done it. So it isn't "easy." Nor is SpaceShipOne a rip off of X-15 like some posters are saying... among many things, the engine is safer and the feather mechanism is unique, and the White Knight is no B-52.
So please, guys, spare the drama on saying how "easy" all of this really is. Oh, and SpaceShipOne does have one similarity to X-15... X-15 led to Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and the Shuttle. This is only the absolute beginning for commercial exploration. All this was done with $20 million or so. What do you think bright minds will come up with when 8 or 10 years of suborbital tourism and additional investors have given Virgin Galactic a few hundred million to play with?
And quite frankly, I'm putting my money on the culture that presently makes: The world's fastest super computer, the most reliable cars, the most advanced communication technology, etc...
Ah, but have you ever flown Virgin? I've never been treated so well on an airline as a Virgin trans-atlantic. I'm sure there are anecdotal horror stories that folks will post as replies (unavoidable in the airline industry). So Virgin Galactic might get my money for a suborbital trip, if it mimics what you can expect on Virgin Atlantic. That is, of course, unless starts offering suborbital flights. Of course, I only fly Hooters Air for the...um... wings.
Considering SpaceShipOne rings in at around $20 mil US, and most people would say that they operate pretty efficiently and without any ridiculous overhead, I'd hate to see what 10 mil euros will buy when it comes to building a Mars ship.
What are you talking about? Office workers do not install software, and they certainly don't install divers.
Using that as an example only... Point being that lots of experienced IT folks have issues getting Linux to work on a desktop, installing software, drivers, etc. In my experience, true "idiot" end users will also encounter their own set of issues. Because, most end users do more than just sit at one app or a browser all day. They may not be installing software but these folks will definately find their own challenges with Linux.
Again, the problem isn't necessarily that users aren't "familiar" with Linux. I think if you took strictly an end user and swapped his Win32 system with OS X, they would have a learning curve but they'd probably be a hell of a lot more at home after a week than they would be if you gave them Fedora or Mandrake. IMHO, from scratch (no computer experience at all), OS X would actually score the highest for the least learning curve.
How can the TCO of Linux possibly be higher than Windows?
Think Linux on the desktop and not server. For example, try converting a call center from Windows to Linux. The user has several different apps they have to use to access different systems, etc. Suppose your average employee maybe has 2 years of college or less and earns under $10 an hour. Typical person isn't tech-savy, but they've got a Dell or a Gateway at home and they use Win98 or maybe WinXP to do various things.
Take this user and give them some flavor of Linux at work. You can train them on how to use their apps... but when the abnormal happens, the user is in unfamiliar territory, and an environment that frankly just isn't a friendly as XP. This isn't really a training issue either. Even IT guys like myself admit that things on the desktop are just harder with Linux. You can't just plug hardware in and expect it to work. Installing drivers is not easy. Heck, installing software isn't easy. People say when a Linux desktop locks up, it isn't Linux, it is X or the Window Manager. Explain this concept to your sub $10 an hour employee and teach them to open a shell, kill X, restart, etc? I think not.
I wouldn't call that "the user has to actually install [it]". I'd call that viral behaviour (even though the installed software doesn't live off a host file or process).
I can second that. I had an old version of Morpheus on my XP SP1 box, and hadn't used in in a year or two since I started buying stuff from iTMS. However a couple songs recently I couldn't find on iTMS, or anywhere (rare and out of print) so I fired up Morpheus and did the dumb ass thing of letting it run overnight.
I woke up the next morning and found literally hundreds of IE popups, which pisses me off since I don't even use IE. I also had several _real_ (I know the difference) messages from XP telling me system files had been replaced/damaged/etc. I checked my registry to see what was now scheduled to run on startup, and probably a dozen adware programs had installed themselves! They were all over my hard drive- nasty ones too that renamed the executable and stuck them in places like/System32. Mind you, this _was_ a stable, patched XP box completely behind a router blocking all inbound ports. So all this shit happened from either Morpheus, or from something Morpheus installed.
Bottom line, installing one app effectively destroyed my box. While I imagined that Morpheus might install with a single adware app, I figured it could be managed and controlled thru very limited usage and never using IE. Fuck was I wrong. And when you end up with a dozen adware apps, you can never get rid of them for good because apparently some of them are working together to reinstall one another.
I wonder how much testing this new engine config has received? I don't believe it has gotten any flight time- it would have to be all ground tests.
Seems kind of concerning to me. When I finish working on my car, it sure as hell might crank up and idle okay in the garage but it is usually hit or miss the first time I take it on a road test. Obviously, these guys are better rocket scientists than I am a car mechanic, but you get the point...
Personally instead of seeing 100's of distros I'd like to see some serious work poured into maybe a handful of popular ones to make them more serious desktop contenders. There is a thin line between "choice" and "fragmentation".
I'm not sure how you managed to miss everything (maybe you're a troll) but my house is about 10 miles inland from Jax beach, pretty darn far from the eye of the thing, and it was a mess enough right here. Boats and marinas tossed all to hell, trees on houses all over the place, and a few houses that just collapsed. And this was on the "far outskirts" of the thing. I have several friends with no electric right now and they won't have electric for several days.
My sister is an insurance agent near Orlando and she could certainly help explain where the 10 billion in damages is from. She's been working around the clock with people calling in claims. Whether it is a $5000 carport that blew away or a $200,000 home that was demolished, this all adds up pretty quick.
Yeah, and what does this say about this site, when this left leaning bogus list story is posted with no disclaimer at all, by someone named "Commander Taco." Tacos should stay at the school cafeteria IMHO.
Too bad in almost every news source, be it Fox, CNN, or "Slashdot" (a joke, I know) you can always tell how a reporter or editor votes just by seeing their behavior or what they publish. To hell with being objective, I suppose. There are but a very few exceptions- Tim Russert for example does a great job for example.
But I think the real story here is that someone is hacking the caller ID system. From what I gather, the caller ID system is easily hacked anyway though, I guess it is just semi-newsworthy that someone is combining it with a callback service and offering it as a service.
Have you ever looked at the data side of a DVD you rent from Blockbuster? WTF do the previous renters DO with these DVDs? Drag them on the asphalt? Probably 1 out every 5 I rent has some sort of defect that usually occurs right at the "good spot" in the movie.
That is about the only thing I ever liked about MD... the optical surface was protected from human exposure.
I'm very disapointed to learn that her story was a hoax. I sure fell for that one- it was definately a moving story to read. I guess it is just hard to believe someone would make up something like that.
Nuclear power will never work in the US for that very reason. Power is a private enterprise.
You're kidding, right? Was Chernobyl run by a private enterprise? No, the world's worst nuclear power accident was caused by exactly what you are proposing- putting it in government hands.
I don't know what makes you think government is the ultimate safety blanket. Governments are big, bloated, and not accountable for their actions. Just look at how they sit in Washington and go back and forth like children trying to decide who reported for duty and who did what on a boat 40 years ago. Yeah, these fuckers will keep us safe.
A private company at least has to endure the threat of going out of business if something bad happens. Unfortunately, that isn't always enough. But I'll still take it over Kerry or Bush.
What the hell is wrong with you? He's absolutely right; I was up by columbia (116th) then and a few days after, and even there you could smell the dust.
At least you could smell the dust and leave on your own before it did what... made you cough a bit?
Not quite the same thing as the government witholding information that your surroundings are being hammered with invisible radiation which people would soon start to die from. Hell, even the firefighters at Chernobyl weren't told that radiation was involved.
A quote like those from Paul Graham and others really don't need a response. He's obviously detached from the real world and has no concept of the hundreds of trade-offs that are required in the real world to build successful systems.
People like this usually last about 5 minutes in a real organization because they either 1. start slobbering uncontrollably on the table or 2. piss managers and business folks off with their horrible geek attitudes.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone who's still locked into AOL and hasn't left yet must obviously be very trusting of their brand.
What proves this is the idiots who pay for AOL over broadband. A friend of mine just had a perfectly good Bellsouth DSL line installed, and is still paying the 20 some bucks extra to lay AOL over the top of it. WTF? So you and I say WTF but apparently some people see value in paying a lot of extra money for the privledge of using the shitty AOL interface, where I'd bet that every single component has a free alternative on the WWW somewhere.
When I approached them about it, they said that they didn't want their email address to change (@aol.com.) Holy cow. It would really suck to mentally lock yourself into paying for AOL the rest of your life just so your email address won't change. You know, I think I'm a pretty good tech guy when it comes to being able to understand a user's point of view- but sometimes I still get baffled.
Sadly, everyone here apparently gets your point except for the editor who posted the story. It seems so common place to the rest of us (whether we've been in the business world or not) that google would register many, many variants of their name as a standard practice. Anybody who tries to read something more into this shit shouldn't have the ability to put stuff on the front page. It is like explaining stuff to a damn 5 year old sometimes, I swear...
Before everybody gets swept up in all the hype and euphoria, remember that altitude -- even 100 km -- is easy
For $10 million dollars, why didn't you do it years ago then? I know what your point is but I think there is a pendulum reaction going on here. Some guys are saying, SpaceShipOne is better than the Space Shuttle, which makes guys like you come back with something absurd saying that 100 km is nothing at all.
In reality, and objectively speaking, somewhere in the middle of these two extremist viewpoints is where the truth lies. No, 100 km is not orbit. However, until a couple months ago nobody in the private sector could even go suborbital, and only a 3 governments in the world had done it. So it isn't "easy." Nor is SpaceShipOne a rip off of X-15 like some posters are saying... among many things, the engine is safer and the feather mechanism is unique, and the White Knight is no B-52.
So please, guys, spare the drama on saying how "easy" all of this really is. Oh, and SpaceShipOne does have one similarity to X-15... X-15 led to Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and the Shuttle. This is only the absolute beginning for commercial exploration. All this was done with $20 million or so. What do you think bright minds will come up with when 8 or 10 years of suborbital tourism and additional investors have given Virgin Galactic a few hundred million to play with?
And quite frankly, I'm putting my money on the culture that presently makes: The world's fastest super computer, the most reliable cars, the most advanced communication technology, etc...
Ah, but have you ever flown Virgin? I've never been treated so well on an airline as a Virgin trans-atlantic. I'm sure there are anecdotal horror stories that folks will post as replies (unavoidable in the airline industry). So Virgin Galactic might get my money for a suborbital trip, if it mimics what you can expect on Virgin Atlantic. That is, of course, unless starts offering suborbital flights. Of course, I only fly Hooters Air for the...um... wings.
Considering SpaceShipOne rings in at around $20 mil US, and most people would say that they operate pretty efficiently and without any ridiculous overhead, I'd hate to see what 10 mil euros will buy when it comes to building a Mars ship.
I once heard reparations described as forcing one group of people to give money to a second group for something a third group did to a fourth group.
Isn't this accurate? If so, is it or isn't it ridiculous to even consider?
it deifnitely appears to be a critical time for search engines.
It also deifnitely appears to be a critical time for dictionary.com.
What are you talking about? Office workers do not install software, and they certainly don't install divers.
Using that as an example only... Point being that lots of experienced IT folks have issues getting Linux to work on a desktop, installing software, drivers, etc. In my experience, true "idiot" end users will also encounter their own set of issues. Because, most end users do more than just sit at one app or a browser all day. They may not be installing software but these folks will definately find their own challenges with Linux.
Again, the problem isn't necessarily that users aren't "familiar" with Linux. I think if you took strictly an end user and swapped his Win32 system with OS X, they would have a learning curve but they'd probably be a hell of a lot more at home after a week than they would be if you gave them Fedora or Mandrake. IMHO, from scratch (no computer experience at all), OS X would actually score the highest for the least learning curve.
How can the TCO of Linux possibly be higher than Windows?
Think Linux on the desktop and not server. For example, try converting a call center from Windows to Linux. The user has several different apps they have to use to access different systems, etc. Suppose your average employee maybe has 2 years of college or less and earns under $10 an hour. Typical person isn't tech-savy, but they've got a Dell or a Gateway at home and they use Win98 or maybe WinXP to do various things.
Take this user and give them some flavor of Linux at work. You can train them on how to use their apps... but when the abnormal happens, the user is in unfamiliar territory, and an environment that frankly just isn't a friendly as XP. This isn't really a training issue either. Even IT guys like myself admit that things on the desktop are just harder with Linux. You can't just plug hardware in and expect it to work. Installing drivers is not easy. Heck, installing software isn't easy. People say when a Linux desktop locks up, it isn't Linux, it is X or the Window Manager. Explain this concept to your sub $10 an hour employee and teach them to open a shell, kill X, restart, etc? I think not.
I wouldn't call that "the user has to actually install [it]". I'd call that viral behaviour (even though the installed software doesn't live off a host file or process).
/System32. Mind you, this _was_ a stable, patched XP box completely behind a router blocking all inbound ports. So all this shit happened from either Morpheus, or from something Morpheus installed.
I can second that. I had an old version of Morpheus on my XP SP1 box, and hadn't used in in a year or two since I started buying stuff from iTMS. However a couple songs recently I couldn't find on iTMS, or anywhere (rare and out of print) so I fired up Morpheus and did the dumb ass thing of letting it run overnight.
I woke up the next morning and found literally hundreds of IE popups, which pisses me off since I don't even use IE. I also had several _real_ (I know the difference) messages from XP telling me system files had been replaced/damaged/etc. I checked my registry to see what was now scheduled to run on startup, and probably a dozen adware programs had installed themselves! They were all over my hard drive- nasty ones too that renamed the executable and stuck them in places like
Bottom line, installing one app effectively destroyed my box. While I imagined that Morpheus might install with a single adware app, I figured it could be managed and controlled thru very limited usage and never using IE. Fuck was I wrong. And when you end up with a dozen adware apps, you can never get rid of them for good because apparently some of them are working together to reinstall one another.
I wonder how much testing this new engine config has received? I don't believe it has gotten any flight time- it would have to be all ground tests.
Seems kind of concerning to me. When I finish working on my car, it sure as hell might crank up and idle okay in the garage but it is usually hit or miss the first time I take it on a road test. Obviously, these guys are better rocket scientists than I am a car mechanic, but you get the point...
Wonder if we'll see SpaceShipOne at Hot Import Nights, and if they'll have a girl modeling out in front?
since when is 1000 meters sub-orbital? give me a break.
They figure if they appease the slashdot crowd they can get us to register to view the articles.
In reality, they're just encouraging more folks to use BugMeNot... now available as a FireFox plugin as well.
Personally instead of seeing 100's of distros I'd like to see some serious work poured into maybe a handful of popular ones to make them more serious desktop contenders. There is a thin line between "choice" and "fragmentation".
I'm not sure how you managed to miss everything (maybe you're a troll) but my house is about 10 miles inland from Jax beach, pretty darn far from the eye of the thing, and it was a mess enough right here. Boats and marinas tossed all to hell, trees on houses all over the place, and a few houses that just collapsed. And this was on the "far outskirts" of the thing. I have several friends with no electric right now and they won't have electric for several days.
My sister is an insurance agent near Orlando and she could certainly help explain where the 10 billion in damages is from. She's been working around the clock with people calling in claims. Whether it is a $5000 carport that blew away or a $200,000 home that was demolished, this all adds up pretty quick.
Yeah, and what does this say about this site, when this left leaning bogus list story is posted with no disclaimer at all, by someone named "Commander Taco." Tacos should stay at the school cafeteria IMHO.
Too bad in almost every news source, be it Fox, CNN, or "Slashdot" (a joke, I know) you can always tell how a reporter or editor votes just by seeing their behavior or what they publish. To hell with being objective, I suppose. There are but a very few exceptions- Tim Russert for example does a great job for example.
In Soviet Russia, the space ship blows up YOU!
But I think the real story here is that someone is hacking the caller ID system. From what I gather, the caller ID system is easily hacked anyway though, I guess it is just semi-newsworthy that someone is combining it with a callback service and offering it as a service.
And it curiously comes in a "stick" format.
Have you ever looked at the data side of a DVD you rent from Blockbuster? WTF do the previous renters DO with these DVDs? Drag them on the asphalt? Probably 1 out every 5 I rent has some sort of defect that usually occurs right at the "good spot" in the movie.
That is about the only thing I ever liked about MD... the optical surface was protected from human exposure.
I'm very disapointed to learn that her story was a hoax. I sure fell for that one- it was definately a moving story to read. I guess it is just hard to believe someone would make up something like that.
Nuclear power will never work in the US for that very reason. Power is a private enterprise.
You're kidding, right? Was Chernobyl run by a private enterprise? No, the world's worst nuclear power accident was caused by exactly what you are proposing- putting it in government hands.
I don't know what makes you think government is the ultimate safety blanket. Governments are big, bloated, and not accountable for their actions. Just look at how they sit in Washington and go back and forth like children trying to decide who reported for duty and who did what on a boat 40 years ago. Yeah, these fuckers will keep us safe.
A private company at least has to endure the threat of going out of business if something bad happens. Unfortunately, that isn't always enough. But I'll still take it over Kerry or Bush.
What the hell is wrong with you? He's absolutely right; I was up by columbia (116th) then and a few days after, and even there you could smell the dust.
At least you could smell the dust and leave on your own before it did what... made you cough a bit?
Not quite the same thing as the government witholding information that your surroundings are being hammered with invisible radiation which people would soon start to die from. Hell, even the firefighters at Chernobyl weren't told that radiation was involved.
A quote like those from Paul Graham and others really don't need a response. He's obviously detached from the real world and has no concept of the hundreds of trade-offs that are required in the real world to build successful systems.
People like this usually last about 5 minutes in a real organization because they either 1. start slobbering uncontrollably on the table or 2. piss managers and business folks off with their horrible geek attitudes.