Tried installing a printer in Windows lately? Tried installing a printer in Linux lately?
With servers Windows is waaaaay behind Linux. My Tyan 1U servers and IBM xSeries eServers all Just Work(tm) with Linux, while setting them up with Windows involves screwing around with RAID driver disks and all kinds of crap.
My ThinkPad T61p Just Worked out of the box, including automagic download of the 3D drivers for the nVidia card on the first boot.
Yes, I concede, Windows is ahead in the area of cutting edge desktop hardware due to the fact that OEMs still place priority on supporting their new hardware under Windows.
Enjoy this state of affairs while it lasts, because it won't for much longer.
On a more serious note, all this ethanol scare tactics are BS. The problems that ethanol cause with food prices are because the US is using corn as a base source. If they used a more sensible crop like sugar cane it'd be better.
I've been to Brazil, I've seen how well their ethanol infrastructure works. To all you ethanol haters/fear mongers I have only this to say:
You can't always stay away from legacy apps. Legacy apps are made to fill a need that a particular company has in a particular situation. This usually means that when their app is finally put up against the wall, their choices are either stick with the entire old ecosystem, OS and all, or rewrite from scratch.
Given finite budgets and a culture that values returns *this* quarter at the expense of every future quarter, guess which option gets picked most often.
There's a fair bit of daylight between being an iron pumping, celery eating health freak, and the lifestyle of the average Slashdotter, especially one who openly admits to having a severe aversion to "boring" tasks.
I think what the OP was (rather crassly) suggesting was that a combination of balanced diet, balanced lifestyle and balanced sense of responsibility could help you (or anyone for that matter) take a more realistic attitude to the boring but necessary parts that make up Life As A Human.
Aah the old media statistics game. It goes a little something like this:
1. Decide what conclusion you want to arrive at. 2. Find a few random facts. 3. Redefine your assumptions so the facts suit your previously decided upon conclusion.
Given a population willing to swallow this BS, why should the modern media concern itself with trivialities like truth and objectivity?
"Or make it a subscription service with a decoder card, easy and done."
Not easy. For a national broadcaster to implement such a system, they would have to deploy a national distribution network for decoder boxes, decoder cards, an administrative infrastructure for issuing and revoking cards and all the associated systems and structures to make it work.
It's not fair to blame Wikipedia for that. Wikipedia offers a "clearing house" for commonly held knowledge, an unfiltered method of exchanging both verified and unverified facts.
If journalists, who are expected to exercise thoroughness, professionalism and proper methods of investigative journalism have become to retarded that they simply quote whatever "research" they first trip over, then that's their fault.
Seriously, we in the west want to get all high horsed about our "free media" and point fingers at places like North Korea where the news is state run. Personally, I say clean up our own back yard before complaining about the mess next door.
You may be interested to read about the role that the Middle East played in the development of modern science. While they are not very mainstream (hey, history gets written by those on top at any point, which at the moment happens to be Western nations), there are many books that deal with the advanced science that was being carried out in that region. Here are some tidbits to get you started:
In the 9th century, 500 years before Europeans started arguing whether the world was round, Al-Battani and his ilk calculated the circumference of the Earth at 40,253km. Correct to within 200km!
Al-Jabr is the Arab mathematician who discovered (or invented, whichever way you lean on that topic) algebra. It is still named after him.
Good luck with this. Scientific history is fascinating!
(Full disclosure: I am a Muslim, which is why I find this topic so interesting.)
Wireless is great for end users and other "last yard" applications, but I don't see WiFi ever overtaking wired networks for anything else. Cables will always be faster (I'm comparing *tomorrow's* cables, with *tomorrow's* wired networks, so sit down and put your trousers back on) than WiFi, and far more reliable due to greater resilience against interference and other environmental factors. It also has a smaller attack surface area, so for security sensitive applications, the additional physical constraints may be a benefit.
Yes, I think that office floors and other last-hop from switch to user applications could become completely wireless, but let's not get carried away. Anyone who says "we don't need wired ethernet any more" is short sighted and simply trying to attract attention. Wired ethernet will always have a place trunking the WiFi hotspots and carrying bulk data.
The bigger issue I see is that big companies are all for P2P activity when users are supplying each other with products / services that compliment the company's revenue streams, but against P2P when they trade anything that reduces those revenue streams.
I'd have no problem with this, if there was anything other than a "Thanks for saving us a million dollars. Here's a gold star." being offered to those users who offer said support. If companies are so adamant to protect their pound of flesh from P2P, how about we demand a little evenhandedness from them and demand they somehow remunerate these so-called super users.
Given the last two posts, I feel that in order to fit in I should say something about a particular organization for African-Americans of unorthodox sexual orientation. Either that or I could share an anecdotal story about a strange experience in a men's lavatory culminating in very strange items being put into a freezer.
Yes, because it's such a hard life jet-setting around, waving at adoring fans hopeful that you'll scribble something in their copy of a $24.99 book turning it into a priceless artifact of literature all the while being paid huge amounts of money for it.
Only a modern human would be lazy enough to want to automate being famous.
I don't think it's a case of Linux being unable to win the desktop. I think it's just that, while we may have superiority on the desktop and under the hood, we still need to gain ground in the area of software. This does not necessarily mean that we have to get Photoshop ported, IMHO building a following behind The Gimp, Inkscape, Blender, KinoDV and other open source apps on both Windows and Linux will help the war effort generally.
While these applications are (to be honest) still far behind their commercial counterparts, a greater user base and higher profile will attract developers and help them catch up, just as higher profile has helped garner support for the Linux kernel itself from developers and companies.
Projects like Big Buck Bunny and Elephants Dream have proven that high quality, professional results can be achieved using open source tools, a proposition that more and more companies will find attractive as new talent enters industries that use these tools.
Give it time. The Linux ecosystem is growing. Growing far faster than the commercial fields. We're already competing toe to toe in areas like web servers (Apache and LigHTTPD) blow away IIS and other web servers, PostgreSQL easily competes on a level field with Oracle and DB2 and Inkscape isn't as far beind Illustrator as Gimp is behind Photoshop. Blender was proved to be a highly capable 3D modeler and animation tool in the BBB and ED projects mentioned above.
Yes, because that would be a great idea on their part.
Seriously, when are we going to stop believing our governments' attempts to keep us scared of one bogey man after another?
What would the DPRK possibly benefit by nuking Japan, other than the safe knowledge they'd need a pretty accurate stopwatch to measure the very short span of time between them doing that and their government being vaporized as every other nation on Earth expressed their displeasure with large amounts of ordinance.
Japan poses no threat to the DPRK. The DPRK's aggressive stance is a response to the isolation and aggressive rhetoric aimed at it by the US, an attitude which is just a holdover from the cold war when North Korea was a USSR satellite state.
Why would any nation want to isolate itself the way the DPRK is isolated? US-DPRK relations are an artifact of the cold war, and unlike the USSR, no state large enough to actually compete with the US emerged there, so the tiny country is being stomped on for no good reason other than for siding with the losing superpower from the twentieth century.
Seriously, how about we stop eating the BS they feed us and doing a little analytical thinking for ourselves for a change? Anyone?
* Brainwashed population:They believed that Iraq has WMDs. Check.
* Keep on the brink of war at all times: Dick Cheyney claimed that the War on Terror could go on "indefinitely". Check.
As for your 4% figure, you have to include the military related R&D spending of all companies in the military industry, such as GE, General Dynamics, Boeing, Northrop-Grumman, Lockheed-Martin and a bunch of others. Just because the US has privatized large parts of its military doesn't mean you can arbitrarily exclude them from the military spending figure. If you include all of these then you'll come to a hell of a lot more than 4%.
Oh, and if you think that you can point to a bunch of government policies and conclude that your country is "better" than another, then the cultural attitude that you represent automatically, in my eyes, makes you worse than just about everyone else.
Slashdot Mirror
Tried installing a printer in Windows lately?
Tried installing a printer in Linux lately?
With servers Windows is waaaaay behind Linux. My Tyan 1U servers and IBM xSeries eServers all Just Work(tm) with Linux, while setting them up with Windows involves screwing around with RAID driver disks and all kinds of crap.
My ThinkPad T61p Just Worked out of the box, including automagic download of the 3D drivers for the nVidia card on the first boot.
Yes, I concede, Windows is ahead in the area of cutting edge desktop hardware due to the fact that OEMs still place priority on supporting their new hardware under Windows.
Enjoy this state of affairs while it lasts, because it won't for much longer.
I like this trend for computer systems to protect us from our own stupidity. Here's another one:
http://static.mrnaz.com/ms_security_works.jpg
"all this ethanol scare tactics are BS"
Holy crap, I'm becoming a real Slashdotter!
In Brazil, you can buy your alcohol cheap!
On a more serious note, all this ethanol scare tactics are BS. The problems that ethanol cause with food prices are because the US is using corn as a base source. If they used a more sensible crop like sugar cane it'd be better.
I've been to Brazil, I've seen how well their ethanol infrastructure works. To all you ethanol haters/fear mongers I have only this to say:
It works, bitches.
You can't always stay away from legacy apps. Legacy apps are made to fill a need that a particular company has in a particular situation. This usually means that when their app is finally put up against the wall, their choices are either stick with the entire old ecosystem, OS and all, or rewrite from scratch.
Given finite budgets and a culture that values returns *this* quarter at the expense of every future quarter, guess which option gets picked most often.
There's a fair bit of daylight between being an iron pumping, celery eating health freak, and the lifestyle of the average Slashdotter, especially one who openly admits to having a severe aversion to "boring" tasks.
I think what the OP was (rather crassly) suggesting was that a combination of balanced diet, balanced lifestyle and balanced sense of responsibility could help you (or anyone for that matter) take a more realistic attitude to the boring but necessary parts that make up Life As A Human.
They haven't because they can't. They'd get sued by Simon and Garfunkel.
It's an example of faith-based moderation.
Aah the old media statistics game. It goes a little something like this:
1. Decide what conclusion you want to arrive at.
2. Find a few random facts.
3. Redefine your assumptions so the facts suit your previously decided upon conclusion.
Given a population willing to swallow this BS, why should the modern media concern itself with trivialities like truth and objectivity?
"Or make it a subscription service with a decoder card, easy and done."
Not easy. For a national broadcaster to implement such a system, they would have to deploy a national distribution network for decoder boxes, decoder cards, an administrative infrastructure for issuing and revoking cards and all the associated systems and structures to make it work.
It's not fair to blame Wikipedia for that. Wikipedia offers a "clearing house" for commonly held knowledge, an unfiltered method of exchanging both verified and unverified facts.
If journalists, who are expected to exercise thoroughness, professionalism and proper methods of investigative journalism have become to retarded that they simply quote whatever "research" they first trip over, then that's their fault.
Seriously, we in the west want to get all high horsed about our "free media" and point fingers at places like North Korea where the news is state run. Personally, I say clean up our own back yard before complaining about the mess next door.
You may be interested to read about the role that the Middle East played in the development of modern science. While they are not very mainstream (hey, history gets written by those on top at any point, which at the moment happens to be Western nations), there are many books that deal with the advanced science that was being carried out in that region. Here are some tidbits to get you started:
Modern optics was pioneered by the discoveries of Ibn Sahl (who discovered Snell's law 800 years before Snellius renamed it).
In the 9th century, 500 years before Europeans started arguing whether the world was round, Al-Battani and his ilk calculated the circumference of the Earth at 40,253km. Correct to within 200km!
Al-Jabr is the Arab mathematician who discovered (or invented, whichever way you lean on that topic) algebra. It is still named after him.
Good luck with this. Scientific history is fascinating!
(Full disclosure: I am a Muslim, which is why I find this topic so interesting.)
Patent? Lithium? It's an element on the periodic table. How could it possibly have ever had a patent filed against it?
Holy crap dude!
Somehow, in your case, "don't feed the trolls" just doesn't say it...
Wireless is great for end users and other "last yard" applications, but I don't see WiFi ever overtaking wired networks for anything else. Cables will always be faster (I'm comparing *tomorrow's* cables, with *tomorrow's* wired networks, so sit down and put your trousers back on) than WiFi, and far more reliable due to greater resilience against interference and other environmental factors. It also has a smaller attack surface area, so for security sensitive applications, the additional physical constraints may be a benefit.
Yes, I think that office floors and other last-hop from switch to user applications could become completely wireless, but let's not get carried away. Anyone who says "we don't need wired ethernet any more" is short sighted and simply trying to attract attention. Wired ethernet will always have a place trunking the WiFi hotspots and carrying bulk data.
The bigger issue I see is that big companies are all for P2P activity when users are supplying each other with products / services that compliment the company's revenue streams, but against P2P when they trade anything that reduces those revenue streams.
I'd have no problem with this, if there was anything other than a "Thanks for saving us a million dollars. Here's a gold star." being offered to those users who offer said support. If companies are so adamant to protect their pound of flesh from P2P, how about we demand a little evenhandedness from them and demand they somehow remunerate these so-called super users.
I hear that these days most marriages usually end up in businesses too; divorce attorneys' businesses.
Given the last two posts, I feel that in order to fit in I should say something about a particular organization for African-Americans of unorthodox sexual orientation. Either that or I could share an anecdotal story about a strange experience in a men's lavatory culminating in very strange items being put into a freezer.
No, I think the FOSS acronym for Free & Open Source Software would become "Oppressed But Engaging In Passive Resistance Software".
I'm not sure, however, what RMS would make of the acronym OBEIPRS.
Al Gore also invented general purpose computing. Why else do you think they call it an Algore-ism?
Yes, because it's such a hard life jet-setting around, waving at adoring fans hopeful that you'll scribble something in their copy of a $24.99 book turning it into a priceless artifact of literature all the while being paid huge amounts of money for it.
Only a modern human would be lazy enough to want to automate being famous.
I don't think it's a case of Linux being unable to win the desktop. I think it's just that, while we may have superiority on the desktop and under the hood, we still need to gain ground in the area of software. This does not necessarily mean that we have to get Photoshop ported, IMHO building a following behind The Gimp, Inkscape, Blender, KinoDV and other open source apps on both Windows and Linux will help the war effort generally.
While these applications are (to be honest) still far behind their commercial counterparts, a greater user base and higher profile will attract developers and help them catch up, just as higher profile has helped garner support for the Linux kernel itself from developers and companies.
Projects like Big Buck Bunny and Elephants Dream have proven that high quality, professional results can be achieved using open source tools, a proposition that more and more companies will find attractive as new talent enters industries that use these tools.
Give it time. The Linux ecosystem is growing. Growing far faster than the commercial fields. We're already competing toe to toe in areas like web servers (Apache and LigHTTPD) blow away IIS and other web servers, PostgreSQL easily competes on a level field with Oracle and DB2 and Inkscape isn't as far beind Illustrator as Gimp is behind Photoshop. Blender was proved to be a highly capable 3D modeler and animation tool in the BBB and ED projects mentioned above.
It's only a matter of time.
Yes, because that would be a great idea on their part.
Seriously, when are we going to stop believing our governments' attempts to keep us scared of one bogey man after another?
What would the DPRK possibly benefit by nuking Japan, other than the safe knowledge they'd need a pretty accurate stopwatch to measure the very short span of time between them doing that and their government being vaporized as every other nation on Earth expressed their displeasure with large amounts of ordinance.
Japan poses no threat to the DPRK. The DPRK's aggressive stance is a response to the isolation and aggressive rhetoric aimed at it by the US, an attitude which is just a holdover from the cold war when North Korea was a USSR satellite state.
Why would any nation want to isolate itself the way the DPRK is isolated? US-DPRK relations are an artifact of the cold war, and unlike the USSR, no state large enough to actually compete with the US emerged there, so the tiny country is being stomped on for no good reason other than for siding with the losing superpower from the twentieth century.
Seriously, how about we stop eating the BS they feed us and doing a little analytical thinking for ourselves for a change? Anyone?
It's not often that I feel it's appropriate to say this, but this is one of the rare occasions where it is:
You want it? Go code it yourself!
(Oh, and before you whoosh me, I know the OP was joking.)
In the US:
* Brainwashed population:They believed that Iraq has WMDs.
Check.
* Keep on the brink of war at all times:
Dick Cheyney claimed that the War on Terror could go on "indefinitely".
Check.
As for your 4% figure, you have to include the military related R&D spending of all companies in the military industry, such as GE, General Dynamics, Boeing, Northrop-Grumman, Lockheed-Martin and a bunch of others. Just because the US has privatized large parts of its military doesn't mean you can arbitrarily exclude them from the military spending figure. If you include all of these then you'll come to a hell of a lot more than 4%.
Oh, and if you think that you can point to a bunch of government policies and conclude that your country is "better" than another, then the cultural attitude that you represent automatically, in my eyes, makes you worse than just about everyone else.