I just graduated from RPI in december. And on average in most of my upper level CS classes there were about 2-3 girls. So it wouldn't be hard to do much better. The sad part is that the population is significantly larger in CS I, CS II, and Data Structures and Analysis (the pseudo CS3 at our school). There were tons there, who would get through it and quit, change majors or stop taking elective in the area. I vividly remember being in a lab for cs2 and having multiple girls seated on either side of me. In ta'ing DSA there were still a significant amount present, but a lot of them expressed that once they were done with DSA that was it (either they were comp sys and decidedly not taking any more comp sci'ish elective or they were swapping out of CS to another major and using the cs classes they had thus taken as elective credits).
Can't really say I can blame them that much. If I wasn't someone coming in having done CS significantly in high school, and having already interned, knowing full well I 100% wanted to go down this path it would have crossed my mind. Often the early classes can be very tedious, with assignments and grades heavily dependent on coding ability when coding style, technique and good debugging practices are hardly covered in the classes at all.
If things like patterns, UML and software doc and design practices, and CVS were covered earlier I think students, and females especially may find more hope and interest. Even something like graph theory would be good to cover earlier. It (graph theory) should be made a requirement for accredited degree paths anyhow IMHO.
the funny bottom line is that increasing the female population in CS departments won't just make the universities happier; it will increase the male CS student morale as well.
As off topic as that is.. I dunno if I'd be so quick to say that. If BMW were to start releasing cars in that range there would be a significant quality drop compared to what regular "BMW" is. The purity of the brand is important to them. As an aside I think the target at that price range wouldn't involve GM much, it would probably be Honda/Toyota/Nissan/Volkswagon. In an attempt to grab the loyalty before consumers move on to the respective groups upper brand (Acura / Lexus / Infiniti / Audi). And couldn't the exact same statement be made about Mercedes?
For that matter why doesn't Bentley, Ferrari, Porsche, etc release cheap versions of their cars? Because thats not what they are. BMW's aim is to be a (high performance) luxury vehicle. I tend to doubt if they want to enter that segment of the market which is heavily saturated and would be a much tighter competition for smaller profits.
Why doesn't Breitling and Rolex release less expensive watches? Why is there a Lexus and Toyota? etc. It's a debacle across many industries. Gibson has Epiphone, Fender has fender and squire, PRS makes some 'se' models that suck. Maybe you should tell Patron to start making a 10 dollar handle of tequila to compete with .
All aside even if they did enter that segment I don't think there is any evidence to suggest that they would crush toyota, gm or honda. And considerations of adverse impact on the traditional BMW sales would be intriguing.
what it mainly comes down to I think is maintaining brand image and identity.
IBM is not a hardware company; and they don't intend to be. Look at their strategic moves to get OUT of the commodity game by selling of thinkpad to lenovo. The fact that YOU don't notice is mostly because IBM doesn't target you. They don't sell consumer software; they sell products that are used by businesses. Yes IBM sells some hardware, and some very good hardware. But to call them a hardware company would be like calling Microsoft an Operating System company; although that one is slightly more valid...
read an annual report; they dont make their largest amount of income or sales in hardware.. its software, services and consulting. Not to mention IP and patents.
Not known for great software? Have you heard of a brand called Websphere? Have you used an ATM recently (IBM hardware and software run just about every ATM you encounter). IBM has been making great software for a long time; they just haven't made it for you.
Oh no their java ide wasn't fantastic. big freaking whoop, Eclipse is only the standard now on every platform, not just windows, and many people are starting to use it for C/C++ development and beyond. Ever hear of DB2? Tivoli?
IBM is a large company and not every offering is going to be as exceptional as others. It's not like everything microsoft makes is great. Sure windowsXP was good. but winME sucked. Internet Explorer is miserable. You know what else is miserable, mspaint. Sure that's not the emphasis of the company but neither was Visual Age by IBM. Why can't microsoft design a system that actually makes clean uninstalls to begin with. Ever check your registry? every program leaves tracks there. Microsoft Backup, and System restore? not exactly great pieces of software.
You want to know how IBM turned around? Read the book by their CEO prior to Sam Palmisano, Louis V. Gerstner, Jr. entitled "Who says elephants can't dance"
IANAL but well the way i see it, if all that was left behind was a usb key with a file on it that was this NIN song, and lets presume that it was just an mp3; the person who discovers the usb key could do whatever they like with it including posting it on the web as he/she pleased. Why? Better question why not! Did the person sign a license, no (unless there is some legalese file on the usb key as well, or extremely visible copyright mark in the file name). The person would have every right to do what they please with the file. They have no reason to believe that is copyrighted or anything. Heck they could call distribution of it fair use in intent to discern the authenticity of the recording and what it actually really is. Assuming there was no license of any sort that was visible to the user I dont see what the RIAA can do, other than ask for the person to stop sharing it if they go and produce the copyright and demonstrate that the file is indeed the copyrighted recording..
here's my parallel analogy. I walk into a hotel bathroom and find a hand written piece of paper with some code on it which I read and decide I have a use for in my product. There is no name or copyright info of any kind on the paper. I then share the code with people from my website as an interesting utility. I have no way of knowing who wrote it or what it is. Does due diligence require me to google the whole internet to find a verbatim reproduction of this code? Do I have to google for utilities that might do what this thing does despite not knowing if the code is the same? And furthermore even if someone complains and says that it is their code how can they prove that that code is theirs.
What if it was an unmarked cassette, can I rip that and through any other means copy/sell/publish (perhaps on a compilation of awesome songs or such? If someone were to actually have the rights to it would they be entitled to collecting money from me? Or would I just have to stop.
I am most definitely not a lawyer but the question of due diligence seems to be a very complicated one. Not to mention possible contamination of knowledge that has occurred.
All in all this just seems like a pretty stupid thing. and if there is some hidden way to verify copyright info on an mp3 that should probably be published in a highly visible place... but in these cases how can you be sure that they werent just set as copyrighted without actuallybeing copyrighted. point in question: if i write a piece of code and then simply write "copyright x/x/2007" on it, does that actually make it copyrighted? I didn't think so..
as much as everyone loves to hate this guy... stop referencing 'his keyboard'
John dvorak isn't responsible for the Dvorak keyboard layout; August Dvorak is.
And by the way coming from a very linux/mac happy crowd that's a stupid line of argument. Just because something isn't popular doesn't mean it isn't significantly better. just because something is better doesnt mean it will be popular for you haters of double negatives
examples:
- Windows usage comp'd to linux/mac/a sack of potatoes plugged into the wall
- vhs and beta
- people buying cars made by Ford
- george W. and just about anyone else who ran
- american idol and just about anything else on TV
umm whats the difference between code and source code?
im pretty sure last time i checked they were the same. maybe they changed since i came home from work.
personally i distribute binaries and source code. people like binaries because they dont want to code
other than that a valid point.
dunno what you are smoking, no one in the world pays 200 for a razr... maybe a krazr.... its 100 and with the $50 that every single company gives you right now no matter what (all i did was renew my 2 year contract) brings it down to 50 bucks.. stop complaining about it being expensive. 10 minutes a week? why do you even need a cell phone? and that assumes that they still offer service to your ancient phone after 3 years... also assumes that you dont have to replace the battery.
thats a pretty meaningless comment..
if you lived in canada, or mexico you could probably say the same thing. North America isn't one country, neither is Europe. the country state thing has nothing to do with this. And if you havent already realized it just because you live in europe doesn't neccesarily save you... IANAL but I'm pretty sure that if you had a business website, which conducted business in America and had an office of some sort on american soil they could indeed come after you.
and if you still haven't figured it out the days of "the copyright / patent / trademark wasn't registered in my country so it doesnt mean jack to me " are coming to an end. But even if they weren't do you really think its smart to either admit your ignorance of the 'law' or your blatant disregard far it? I'm not saying that you do or dont do or I do or dont do certain actions.. What I'm saying is that its a heck of lot smarter not to wave a flag around saying look at me look at me I found the loophole/excetion etc.. because chances are if you do it long enuogh as people are doing now, gov'ts will get sick of it and the prevelance will become larger and they will have to take action and do something about it.
it really wouldn't surprise me in the coming years if we started to see more global laws formed, and some sort of "geneva convention" for the internet if you will. granted it'd be vastly different but with the prevelance of cyberspace and the near total ambiguity behind the legal jurisdiction on it it seems like its about time for a little order.
now that's a good problem, of course now its stuck in my head (the swap that is, well for C/C++ at least) as i recall it was either in java or perl where you could do that without a problem becuase they had a parallel assignment method. i think it was perl, yuo just said something to the effect of a,b = b,a and it did it, but thats not very interesting for us.
im hoping that the solution isnt one based on math... i.e.
* a += *b; (a-> A+B)
* b = *a - *b; (b = A)
*a -= *b; (a->B)
because under/overflow isnt cool
and im pretty sure the "real" solution has more to do with that they are pointers. and thus that it doesnt have to be ints, it could be anything?
oh well cheers, and kudos go to the first responder for actually posting a recognition as he did, a. its an unusual sight on/. and b. reminds me I shuold have been more polite to start, which of course results in the overall politeness going up even if no one else takes notice lol
that is precisely what he is NOT looking for or asking for.. which part of complex computing concepts and OS internals did you fail to grasp? a bank account program / class (if done in c++) is merely another silly and trivial program to write. Heck i've had do write one in just about every other lower level CS class i've ever taken. it doesnt involve whats really going on with the computer and it has nothing to do with a hack, OS internals, or any of that good stuff.....
chapter exercises? are you kidding me? thats like responding to "im looking for some complex math puzzles" and you say pick up your calc book and do the section reviews... 99% of the time they arent challenging, interesting or of any more value than any other mundane problem in the section of the books exercises.
call me crazy, but i thought the idea was to answer the question at hand, not suggest a blatant alternative that you cant even do anything about. If someone asks how do i do such and such, do us all a favor, and dont make an entire reponse out of questioning why they'd want to do that; granted there are cases where that is needed, but at least if you do, have it be for an actual legitamte reason.. not a "tell them to get better email service..." because guess what? that is out of the questions askers control..
one minor problem with your "If too much legit mail gets classified as spam, Hotmail & yahoo's customers will complain, or take their business elsewhere." comment; what business and what customers? yahoo and hotmail both provide free services that include email; as such the typical yahoo / hotmail email user is not a customer of the company.
as good as this is, for anyone who actually cares about this stuff, theres is one major problem... merely because you are in someones buddy list doesnt mean they ever talk to you or you talk to them lol... many of us are guilty of this, often at college for example, you just sorta throw in every name you get and you dont weed out the obsolete ones you dont talk to anymore or never have talked to and such. Theres a large chance that the person who only has three other people on his list talks with those 3 people a lot, so much so that you could argue that his "bandwidth of connectivity" or total communication could be greater than the loser with 250 buddies, who barely ever even talks to a single one of them... granted thats a little extreme but i think my point is pretty clear. But perhaps they are being smart and only considering two way links as a connection so that someone with 200+ names on his list, few of whom have him on theirs, wouldnt add to the score...
also, how does it handle if you put yourself on your own buddy list? fun with loops?
of course i really don't give a damn either way:-p just thuoght id make a point / see if they or anyone else had thuoght of or noticed this
is it just me, or does anyone else think that Longhorn, while an odd name, was a much more interesting / enticing one. Maybe go more the mac os naming route, something like Win6.0 Longhorn.. granted they have a pension for keeping their name in the main title but Windows Vista just sounds like some crappy tourist attraction at some place I didn't wanna go to in the first place
you realize of course that because this game is being "revoked" or whatever you want to call, lots of people, particularly in the target audience segment, who hadn't previously purchased it but were planning on buying it later or whatever are now much more likely to buy it.. This is exactly the kind of publicity the GTA series has thrived on. Granted the execs may not like it, but I'd be willing to bet that sales of the game will get a second spurt now as people quickly grab one for posterity/ while they can / etc.. I wasn't sure if I was going to buy the game as i was in the middle of several others, now I'll prob go pick it up asap before they change it or stop selling it... even if i cant enable the mod, to gamers its somewhat going to be a collectors item..
on a second note, does anyone else think it's somewhat ironic that the depiction of acts which are legal in real life, such as nudity, sex, tits.., are always what gets a game censor'd or drives up the rating. Where as there never seems to be a problem with a game that depicts illicit and illegal activity.. semi kidding, but look at mortal kombat; you've got assault, battery, murder, manslaughter, assault with a deadly weapon, etc.. or need for speed; speeding, reckless driving, reckless endangerment, use of non-street legal cars (yes i know im being picky, but a majority of nissan skyline gt-r's are not street legal in the US by simply importing them from japan...) and then of course is the depiction, use of, and sale of drugs in video games.. Don't get me wrong I don't have a problem with any of it. I have no complaints at all, and i cant stand people who claim "games are too violent" if they are too violent for you then don't buy them, its that simple.. I could say that I find country music offensive because its too hokey and lacks anything bearing a remote resemblance to a catchy tune, but if i said that i guarentee you i'd piss plenty of people off, and id bet if the government did something to censor "crappy" music somebody would likely end up getting shot:-) I only bring it up because i think that it speaks to the stupidity of those who complain about censorship in both video games and even on TV. We have no problem with depictions of actions that are felonies, but god forbid they show some legal "adult" activity and magically people have a problem with it.. Makes me really wonder about people, i find it odd they'd rather expose their children to violence then to nudity, but i guess this is a pretty deep rooted thing in society
i say distributing specifically because the act of making it available for view is what distrbution is, making something available to others.. additionally i use the term distributing because the group who is suing the wayback machine would contend that they are breaking the law by "distributing without license or consent" copyrighted material. "making it publicly..." is merely the manner in which they are distributing it; And im pretty sure the distribution method itself would only be of the courts concern IF they were charging people to look at the material, which is why i went with the more generic term..
glad you liked the analogy; carry on and take care
I have to disagree with your comment. Your basis of using a back isnt applicable
it would be like me taking a picture of a billboard advertisement (which I don't own, and is publicly viewable), and doing this of every billboard in town, everyday, and then distributing that somewhere....
Not really. The book was published and at some point purchased, then the book went out of print or aged doesnt matter... The book was never public knowledge, in the public domain, or an open commodity. If you wanted to read / get a copy of the book legally, you had to buy it or obtain a legally obtained copy from the library.
Not so with a webpage, there is no charge to look at this webpage, it is not for sale, and it is not a controlled commodity. It's publicaly viewable. Anyone and everyone who reads it makes a copy in order to view it. Many people's copies will be destroyed when they empty their cache, doesn't mean they lost the right to look at it. With a book you are taking something that was for sale and now freely distributing it. The webpage was freely viewable to begin with, so there isnt a comparison..
now if the page wasnt publicly viewable (password protected / members only.. ) and the storage enabled people who weren't able to see the material before to see it now, then maybe there might be something but thats not what this case is
I think you need to learn what copyright infringement is, because either you don't have a clue, or you just enough intelligence to know how to apply it.
In what way are they infringing on copyrights? They aren't doing anything anyone of us couldn't do. Simply copying over publicly viewable webpages onto their machines. If I had a couple extra petabytes around I could probably do it as well.
heck, while you're looking up what copyright infringment is, read up on what a copyright is, what can be copyrighted, intellectual property, public knowledge, and fair use.
One thing that I think is worth considering is that quite often the messages and communications that us "nerds" are trying to get across are quite rapid. The ideas and thoughts come faster than you can put them out. My intuition tell me that quite simply put, 'post-processing' everything I/we type is a bottleneck to productivity and effective communication. Afterall effective communication is that which can be understood, and I while I like to spell correctly, you would probably all understand me if I made an occasional spelling or grammatical error.... But if you really want to pick on nerds, you should probably be picking on current society as a whole; no one is immune..
examples? When people pick up a phone and are asked for themselves, i.e. bob picks up phone, other end says may I please speak to bob, what do they say 99% of the time? "This is him" guess what, this is grammatically incorrect (him is an objective pronoun, which is not appropriate for use with is, you need a subjective pronoun to refer to this. him is this? nope, He is this, this is he... that whole business of "am are is was were be being and been") But here's catch 22; does anyone give a monkey's left nut? I'd be willing to bet that unless you are an english teacher, (and even the one who taught me this hinted they probably don't answer it correctly because the answer would seem wrong to the other person...) you don't. I won't even mention the grammar that TV presents us with.
look at english/grammar grades across the country, there is no special rate of failure just for nerds. More likely you only see more of the nerds supposed error because they are typing and posting on the internet far more often than others.
Grammar like anything else has a time, a place, and levels of adherence to it. A parallel would be a compiling a C program. In some environments and configurations you can do things which are not grammatically correct in C, such as C++ style comments, and declaration of variables after the first non declaration statement in a scope. But this won't always generate warnings. Like many things you have to adjust the filter if you will to what it is being applied to.
This is so things can be accomplished, if you painstakingly checked over every IM comment you were to make and every single email of every day my guess is that your communication productivity level would drop to that of the United State Congress's. Or in other words you'd get nothing done and you'd get nothing done slowly.
I would agree with you highly that it is troubling that techs would regard the ignorance as a badge of honor. I find (orignally said "But for me at least that", but I shouldn't start a sentence with a preposition now should I? Would it inhibit understand? probably not therein lies a dillema to our society of fastfood / express service / speed is everything) this is self implying, anyone who regards their ignorance or apparent stupidity as honor is pretty stupid themselves in my book. (However well written that book may be) Much akin to the teenage punk who breaks rules/laws/gets into trouble and thinks he's cooler because of it.
my guess is because a game that is entertaining to you will not be entertaining to a 5 year old. Think about market segments as a whole. Do you enjoy watching Barney, sesame street, blue's clues, pokemon? If you are at all a typical person over the age of 12 probably not.. although for pokemon i may have to slide that to over 16 lol...
Do 5 year old's like watching the news?, reading the wall street journal? law and order? slashdot? (sorry guys it had to be mentioned:-p ) Probably not.
While there will always be age transcending games like Mario or sonic.. or perhaps the sports games, its an extremely difficult task to create a game that will really appeal to a universal audience..
to appeal to older gamers there often needs to be either a distinct / complicated plot (see RPG's... how many 5 year olds could sit through a Final Fantasy game? i know when i played FF1 on nes i wanted to shoot myself, now FF3 aka FF6 is just about my fave game all-time... next to pit-fall harry) If the game compromises on story complexity which they can certainly do and still have a captivating story, such as mario or zelda or many others, then they have to have a large variety of game play, that is both possible for the young while challenging for the masters. this is the problem that is becoming more evident to me
when i played Mario 1-3, even mario world, i noticed the games were challenging. Doing everything in SMW was no small task, you could beat the game doing the bare minimum of things but there were a ot of meaningful (while not monotanous (SP?)) challenges left, like the rainbow road.
Legend of Zelda and even link to the past were very challenging games... Now look at mario64 and zelda64 and the sequels to them... the difficulty is a joke in comparison. Zelda64 made to and had to make the most of its story because while the gameplay was entertaining it really lacked the kind of challenged that even a high school gamer would like. That was the problem that plagues the N64 in my opinion. Starfox 64 could easily be beaten on the hardest courses in your first day playing, where as star fox on SNES continues to challenge me on the hardest settings if i havent been playing the game semi-repeatedly.
With systems allowing more and more complex user interfaces and more reality the challenges only seem to get larger. think about sports games, a classic problem as of late is attaining realistic gae play that offers a complex amount of things for the gamer to do (like the many moves and subtleties to a madden style football game) while still making it enjoyable for the younger players who simply cant deal with a million buttons and a million options.
I tend to find the ramp is all too often to steep. On many sports games, the easy and rookie levels are a joke, but you turn it up one more level and all the sudden the computer starts to become godlike. it's a universal truth to many fields, the middle ground is tough to cover. This is one of the many reasons I'm a big fan of emulators and the hacks that allow people for example to emulate and play old atari/nes/snes/etc games on their xbox's, its nice for us to revisit old games, and good for younger gamers to ramp up to the complexity of todays controllers. It amazes me how enjoyable games were on nintendo with only two buttons and a control stick, even snes with the 4/6 buttons (l and r tending to be used semi sparingly)... now look at a GC, PS2 and Xbox, where you have much more than that, ps2 has 8 buttons two sticks and a pad, GC has 7 plus the C-stick, and xbox is roughly the same as PS2.
I agree with you whole heartedly about trying new things. that or revolutionizing the way they do certain things. I'm still waiting for a hockey game where you can really put some aim onto your shots. Platform games today have been pretty good, but to me they lack the wonder of the legendary mario and megaman games. I havent seen a new megaman in ages (i dont count the megaman64 thing and yes i need to play the
No i think he's wrong for saying "Clean yourself up and show up to work looking like a decent human being people." in saying that with the other things he has gone beyond having his own opinion and is now trying to issue people a wake up call that they need to adjust how they act. He went beyond his opinion and is now implying that their opinion or actions are wrong. If he had merely said the first part, I probably wouldnt have said anything, although i'd still have disgust for such a closed mind. And if he had said while i really don't care for it, that is the price we pay for individuality and its their personal choice, I would have thuought ok this guy has an opinion that i disagre with, but he is reasonable about it and respectful of others opinions and consequently his opinion is deserving of that same respect.
on another note, i never mentioned the nazi's per se. Prison workers come to mind, as do the oppresive working conditions of factories before unions and in the early stages of the manufactoring revolution.
the problem is that its thinking like that which leads to further thinking similar to that and expansion upon that. First they try to tell us what we need to look like, what next? What about when he doesn't feel its appropriate for you to question your governement?
you can see this attitude all across society today, where people assume they have the only view that matters and that their "values" (if they can even be called that) need to be imposed on all. Examples? the arguments as of late against gay marriage. I cant even listen to them, all the garbage about "the sanctitiy of marriage" and "its only right for.." "its only natural for... " "its immoral.." and then they drag on some more.
when someone starts to suggest that anyone is anyless of a human being, or any more or less decent for holding a view or opinion, or for acting in which they have every right to do so, i tend to be become rather curious and usually rather concerned and frankly i would hope more people would... (and yes i see the paradox here in that you could make the argument the writer is entitled to that view and here i am saying what im saying... except im not telling him he shouldn't dislike their appearence, or that hes indecent for disliking their appreance, im attacking him for attacking others)
and while the nazi's were bad for their acts, in many ways its what the acts were based upon, stood for, and the series of things that led to those events that enabled them to happen. And while i agree they werent bad because they wore uniforms i have to disagree with the latter of that statement. they attempt to achieve order was the primary evil! All of the actions you label them evil / bad for were actions they too to achieve "order", the key is what they called order.
I like order as much as the next guy, but when you start calling people indecent for not liking it, or from not conforming to it then I have a problem.
it is people like you who drag down our entire nation. Your "clean yourself up" line is a load of bull shit.
"I find it pleasant to work in a homogeneous environment where everyone looks the same."
Did you skip that all those classes in elemtenary school where they teach tolerance, what prejudice is, that its bad, and about diversity. Perhaps you'd be happier in a slave labor camp in some foreign country where everyone looks the same, or is forced to lest they be persecuted, segragated or killed for doing so.
The glory of America is that A. we all dont have to think like you, and B. that we dont all think like you. People fought and died for these rights. Whether or not you or I have any opinion as to their appearance is irrelevant. You're entitled to your opinion that you dont like the appearence, but that's all that you are entitled to. While I for one don't find the appearence to be preferential for myself, they have every right to it, and i'll defend that right to the end. Becuase you never know when it will be my opinion or preference or whatnot that some pompous douche bag such as yourself finds "undesireable" and then tries to outlaw it. The only thing unprofessional is thinking that you somehow know better than everyone else what is right.. personnally i find your attitude to be unprofessional, distracting and repulsive. clean yourself up and act like a decent american...
notice how this was posted by an anonymous coward too?
Re:Which distros can resize partitions?
on
Test Driving Linux
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· Score: 1
its simple, at least with partition magic, simply resize the ntfs partition down, and theres an option to give the space to other part's... another way to do it is to simply shrink the windows partition, then create an ext3 partition in this new free space, then move that partition to be adjacent to your original ext3 and then merge them...
I've done it several times with partition magic and its rather simple, if you need more detailed help drop me a line
Honestly, it sounds to me like you dont know what you are doing.. Installing linux on the same HDD as windows isn't risky at all IMHO, and in fact just about everyone i know using linux and windows still uses that exact approach, its fine as long as you know what you are doing... this is no caveat special to linux, even intalling another version of windows side by side with windows can seriously screw up your HDD if you dont know what you're doing. Either way, i've done this more times than i can count, first for myself, and later for others and not once have i had to repair windows, or reinstall service packs.
if you are really worried about them being on the same disc, then consider this, hard drives are dirt cheap these days, i bought a seagate 120gigger for 50 bucks after a 50 dollar rebate...
throw in this second hard drive, grab a simple and noob friendly distro like fedora core3 and install... when setting up partitions, you wont need a special thing to resize ntfs since there wont be any ntfs on this second hard drive.. just install linux on it, etc. and remember to choose grub for bootloader
now all you have to do is setup grub which is very simple.. just make sure you install grub to the MBS.. theres lots of help for grub, and the fedora default grub setup is usually pretty decent, requiring only minor tweaks. in your case your linux stuff will all be on (hd1,x) and your windows would be (hd0,x) assuming you have only two standard hard drives...
personally all of my installs are on a common hard drive and i have never once had to try multiple times, or reinstall service packs or anything like that, and i only started using linux in 2002, (red hat 7.3 valhalla for those who are curious)
this install was done on a laptop with no problems and didnt even harm the IBM rescue recovery partition... Even with my desktop i use the same approach, i have one drive which is simply the windows OS and the linux OS's, and i have a seperate drive (used to be partitions back when drives werent so cheap) where i keep my large data files, like the gigs upon gigs of music, videos, games, artwork, etc.
as much as im not a live cd user, there is a way to save your data, again you have to think a little bit.. if you were only having problems with boot up issues, or didnt want to deal with grub, or did have a partition you could get rid or extra space, simply format it to ext2 (or ur fave linux fs) and after booting from the live cd, mount it.. not that hard.
trying out linux is pretty easy compared to a lot of things... a windows user cant exactly "try" out the Mac OS X without buying an entire seperate machine, and the same would go vice versa.. however with a x86 PC its very easy to not only dual boot between windows/linux; but you could go further and have multiple linux distros to boot between.
While it seems cumbersome from the outside its simple once you get going... IMHO larger problems are the amount of windows users who are still despite years of using a computer still effectivly newbies to the computer because they dont know how to do anything. They can read their email, and do word... but if anything goes wrong they dont have a clue, and they will be helpless no matter what OS they are using. If you're willing to spend a little effort to search or lookup the answer for a linux question you can almost always find it, or find a linux user who'd be happy to help. Linux people are pretty good about helping noobs, since a. they were one once probably not long ago, b. the whole open source nature of community involved with linux, and c. the more of us using it, the less people using MS which will put eventually put more and more pressure on companies to support linux
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I just graduated from RPI in december. And on average in most of my upper level CS classes there were about 2-3 girls. So it wouldn't be hard to do much better. The sad part is that the population is significantly larger in CS I, CS II, and Data Structures and Analysis (the pseudo CS3 at our school). There were tons there, who would get through it and quit, change majors or stop taking elective in the area. I vividly remember being in a lab for cs2 and having multiple girls seated on either side of me. In ta'ing DSA there were still a significant amount present, but a lot of them expressed that once they were done with DSA that was it (either they were comp sys and decidedly not taking any more comp sci'ish elective or they were swapping out of CS to another major and using the cs classes they had thus taken as elective credits).
Can't really say I can blame them that much. If I wasn't someone coming in having done CS significantly in high school, and having already interned, knowing full well I 100% wanted to go down this path it would have crossed my mind. Often the early classes can be very tedious, with assignments and grades heavily dependent on coding ability when coding style, technique and good debugging practices are hardly covered in the classes at all.
If things like patterns, UML and software doc and design practices, and CVS were covered earlier I think students, and females especially may find more hope and interest. Even something like graph theory would be good to cover earlier. It (graph theory) should be made a requirement for accredited degree paths anyhow IMHO.
the funny bottom line is that increasing the female population in CS departments won't just make the universities happier; it will increase the male CS student morale as well.
As off topic as that is.. I dunno if I'd be so quick to say that. If BMW were to start releasing cars in that range there would be a significant quality drop compared to what regular "BMW" is. The purity of the brand is important to them. As an aside I think the target at that price range wouldn't involve GM much, it would probably be Honda/Toyota/Nissan/Volkswagon. In an attempt to grab the loyalty before consumers move on to the respective groups upper brand (Acura / Lexus / Infiniti / Audi). And couldn't the exact same statement be made about Mercedes?
For that matter why doesn't Bentley, Ferrari, Porsche, etc release cheap versions of their cars? Because thats not what they are. BMW's aim is to be a (high performance) luxury vehicle. I tend to doubt if they want to enter that segment of the market which is heavily saturated and would be a much tighter competition for smaller profits.
Why doesn't Breitling and Rolex release less expensive watches? Why is there a Lexus and Toyota? etc. It's a debacle across many industries. Gibson has Epiphone, Fender has fender and squire, PRS makes some 'se' models that suck. Maybe you should tell Patron to start making a 10 dollar handle of tequila to compete with .
All aside even if they did enter that segment I don't think there is any evidence to suggest that they would crush toyota, gm or honda. And considerations of adverse impact on the traditional BMW sales would be intriguing.
what it mainly comes down to I think is maintaining brand image and identity.
Yeah I'd say so. But then again I never called them a software company, the article did.
IBM is not a hardware company; and they don't intend to be. Look at their strategic moves to get OUT of the commodity game by selling of thinkpad to lenovo. The fact that YOU don't notice is mostly because IBM doesn't target you. They don't sell consumer software; they sell products that are used by businesses. Yes IBM sells some hardware, and some very good hardware. But to call them a hardware company would be like calling Microsoft an Operating System company; although that one is slightly more valid... read an annual report; they dont make their largest amount of income or sales in hardware.. its software, services and consulting. Not to mention IP and patents. Not known for great software? Have you heard of a brand called Websphere? Have you used an ATM recently (IBM hardware and software run just about every ATM you encounter). IBM has been making great software for a long time; they just haven't made it for you. Oh no their java ide wasn't fantastic. big freaking whoop, Eclipse is only the standard now on every platform, not just windows, and many people are starting to use it for C/C++ development and beyond. Ever hear of DB2? Tivoli? IBM is a large company and not every offering is going to be as exceptional as others. It's not like everything microsoft makes is great. Sure windowsXP was good. but winME sucked. Internet Explorer is miserable. You know what else is miserable, mspaint. Sure that's not the emphasis of the company but neither was Visual Age by IBM. Why can't microsoft design a system that actually makes clean uninstalls to begin with. Ever check your registry? every program leaves tracks there. Microsoft Backup, and System restore? not exactly great pieces of software. You want to know how IBM turned around? Read the book by their CEO prior to Sam Palmisano, Louis V. Gerstner, Jr. entitled "Who says elephants can't dance"
IANAL but well the way i see it, if all that was left behind was a usb key with a file on it that was this NIN song, and lets presume that it was just an mp3; the person who discovers the usb key could do whatever they like with it including posting it on the web as he/she pleased. Why? Better question why not! Did the person sign a license, no (unless there is some legalese file on the usb key as well, or extremely visible copyright mark in the file name). The person would have every right to do what they please with the file. They have no reason to believe that is copyrighted or anything. Heck they could call distribution of it fair use in intent to discern the authenticity of the recording and what it actually really is. Assuming there was no license of any sort that was visible to the user I dont see what the RIAA can do, other than ask for the person to stop sharing it if they go and produce the copyright and demonstrate that the file is indeed the copyrighted recording..
here's my parallel analogy. I walk into a hotel bathroom and find a hand written piece of paper with some code on it which I read and decide I have a use for in my product. There is no name or copyright info of any kind on the paper. I then share the code with people from my website as an interesting utility. I have no way of knowing who wrote it or what it is. Does due diligence require me to google the whole internet to find a verbatim reproduction of this code? Do I have to google for utilities that might do what this thing does despite not knowing if the code is the same? And furthermore even if someone complains and says that it is their code how can they prove that that code is theirs.
What if it was an unmarked cassette, can I rip that and through any other means copy/sell/publish (perhaps on a compilation of awesome songs or such? If someone were to actually have the rights to it would they be entitled to collecting money from me? Or would I just have to stop.
I am most definitely not a lawyer but the question of due diligence seems to be a very complicated one. Not to mention possible contamination of knowledge that has occurred.
All in all this just seems like a pretty stupid thing.
and if there is some hidden way to verify copyright info on an mp3 that should probably be published in a highly visible place... but in these cases how can you be sure that they werent just set as copyrighted without actuallybeing copyrighted.
point in question: if i write a piece of code and then simply write "copyright x/x/2007" on it, does that actually make it copyrighted? I didn't think so..
as much as everyone loves to hate this guy... stop referencing 'his keyboard' John dvorak isn't responsible for the Dvorak keyboard layout; August Dvorak is. And by the way coming from a very linux/mac happy crowd that's a stupid line of argument. Just because something isn't popular doesn't mean it isn't significantly better. just because something is better doesnt mean it will be popular for you haters of double negatives examples: - Windows usage comp'd to linux/mac/a sack of potatoes plugged into the wall - vhs and beta - people buying cars made by Ford - george W. and just about anyone else who ran - american idol and just about anything else on TV
umm whats the difference between code and source code? im pretty sure last time i checked they were the same. maybe they changed since i came home from work. personally i distribute binaries and source code. people like binaries because they dont want to code other than that a valid point.
dunno what you are smoking, no one in the world pays 200 for a razr... maybe a krazr.... its 100 and with the $50 that every single company gives you right now no matter what (all i did was renew my 2 year contract) brings it down to 50 bucks.. stop complaining about it being expensive. 10 minutes a week? why do you even need a cell phone? and that assumes that they still offer service to your ancient phone after 3 years... also assumes that you dont have to replace the battery.
thats a pretty meaningless comment.. if you lived in canada, or mexico you could probably say the same thing. North America isn't one country, neither is Europe. the country state thing has nothing to do with this. And if you havent already realized it just because you live in europe doesn't neccesarily save you... IANAL but I'm pretty sure that if you had a business website, which conducted business in America and had an office of some sort on american soil they could indeed come after you.
and if you still haven't figured it out the days of "the copyright / patent / trademark wasn't registered in my country so it doesnt mean jack to me " are coming to an end. But even if they weren't do you really think its smart to either admit your ignorance of the 'law' or your blatant disregard far it? I'm not saying that you do or dont do or I do or dont do certain actions.. What I'm saying is that its a heck of lot smarter not to wave a flag around saying look at me look at me I found the loophole/excetion etc.. because chances are if you do it long enuogh as people are doing now, gov'ts will get sick of it and the prevelance will become larger and they will have to take action and do something about it.
it really wouldn't surprise me in the coming years if we started to see more global laws formed, and some sort of "geneva convention" for the internet if you will. granted it'd be vastly different but with the prevelance of cyberspace and the near total ambiguity behind the legal jurisdiction on it it seems like its about time for a little order.
now that's a good problem, of course now its stuck in my head (the swap that is, well for C/C++ at least) as i recall it was either in java or perl where you could do that without a problem becuase they had a parallel assignment method. i think it was perl, yuo just said something to the effect of a,b = b,a and it did it, but thats not very interesting for us. im hoping that the solution isnt one based on math... i.e.
/. and b. reminds me I shuold have been more polite to start, which of course results in the overall politeness going up even if no one else takes notice lol
* a += *b; (a-> A+B)
* b = *a - *b; (b = A)
*a -= *b; (a->B)
because under/overflow isnt cool and im pretty sure the "real" solution has more to do with that they are pointers. and thus that it doesnt have to be ints, it could be anything?
oh well cheers, and kudos go to the first responder for actually posting a recognition as he did, a. its an unusual sight on
laters
that is precisely what he is NOT looking for or asking for.. which part of complex computing concepts and OS internals did you fail to grasp? a bank account program / class (if done in c++) is merely another silly and trivial program to write. Heck i've had do write one in just about every other lower level CS class i've ever taken. it doesnt involve whats really going on with the computer and it has nothing to do with a hack, OS internals, or any of that good stuff.....
chapter exercises? are you kidding me? thats like responding to "im looking for some complex math puzzles" and you say pick up your calc book and do the section reviews... 99% of the time they arent challenging, interesting or of any more value than any other mundane problem in the section of the books exercises.
next time, rtfa and then rtfa again.
call me crazy, but i thought the idea was to answer the question at hand, not suggest a blatant alternative that you cant even do anything about. If someone asks how do i do such and such, do us all a favor, and dont make an entire reponse out of questioning why they'd want to do that; granted there are cases where that is needed, but at least if you do, have it be for an actual legitamte reason.. not a "tell them to get better email service..." because guess what? that is out of the questions askers control..
one minor problem with your "If too much legit mail gets classified as spam, Hotmail & yahoo's customers will complain, or take their business elsewhere." comment; what business and what customers? yahoo and hotmail both provide free services that include email; as such the typical yahoo / hotmail email user is not a customer of the company.
as good as this is, for anyone who actually cares about this stuff, theres is one major problem... merely because you are in someones buddy list doesnt mean they ever talk to you or you talk to them lol... many of us are guilty of this, often at college for example, you just sorta throw in every name you get and you dont weed out the obsolete ones you dont talk to anymore or never have talked to and such. Theres a large chance that the person who only has three other people on his list talks with those 3 people a lot, so much so that you could argue that his "bandwidth of connectivity" or total communication could be greater than the loser with 250 buddies, who barely ever even talks to a single one of them... granted thats a little extreme but i think my point is pretty clear. But perhaps they are being smart and only considering two way links as a connection so that someone with 200+ names on his list, few of whom have him on theirs, wouldnt add to the score... also, how does it handle if you put yourself on your own buddy list? fun with loops? of course i really don't give a damn either way :-p just thuoght id make a point / see if they or anyone else had thuoght of or noticed this
is it just me, or does anyone else think that Longhorn, while an odd name, was a much more interesting / enticing one. Maybe go more the mac os naming route, something like Win6.0 Longhorn.. granted they have a pension for keeping their name in the main title but Windows Vista just sounds like some crappy tourist attraction at some place I didn't wanna go to in the first place
you realize of course that because this game is being "revoked" or whatever you want to call, lots of people, particularly in the target audience segment, who hadn't previously purchased it but were planning on buying it later or whatever are now much more likely to buy it.. This is exactly the kind of publicity the GTA series has thrived on. Granted the execs may not like it, but I'd be willing to bet that sales of the game will get a second spurt now as people quickly grab one for posterity/ while they can / etc.. I wasn't sure if I was going to buy the game as i was in the middle of several others, now I'll prob go pick it up asap before they change it or stop selling it... even if i cant enable the mod, to gamers its somewhat going to be a collectors item..
:-) I only bring it up because i think that it speaks to the stupidity of those who complain about censorship in both video games and even on TV. We have no problem with depictions of actions that are felonies, but god forbid they show some legal "adult" activity and magically people have a problem with it.. Makes me really wonder about people, i find it odd they'd rather expose their children to violence then to nudity, but i guess this is a pretty deep rooted thing in society
on a second note, does anyone else think it's somewhat ironic that the depiction of acts which are legal in real life, such as nudity, sex, tits.., are always what gets a game censor'd or drives up the rating. Where as there never seems to be a problem with a game that depicts illicit and illegal activity.. semi kidding, but look at mortal kombat; you've got assault, battery, murder, manslaughter, assault with a deadly weapon, etc.. or need for speed; speeding, reckless driving, reckless endangerment, use of non-street legal cars (yes i know im being picky, but a majority of nissan skyline gt-r's are not street legal in the US by simply importing them from japan...) and then of course is the depiction, use of, and sale of drugs in video games.. Don't get me wrong I don't have a problem with any of it. I have no complaints at all, and i cant stand people who claim "games are too violent" if they are too violent for you then don't buy them, its that simple.. I could say that I find country music offensive because its too hokey and lacks anything bearing a remote resemblance to a catchy tune, but if i said that i guarentee you i'd piss plenty of people off, and id bet if the government did something to censor "crappy" music somebody would likely end up getting shot
i say distributing specifically because the act of making it available for view is what distrbution is, making something available to others.. additionally i use the term distributing because the group who is suing the wayback machine would contend that they are breaking the law by "distributing without license or consent" copyrighted material. "making it publicly..." is merely the manner in which they are distributing it; And im pretty sure the distribution method itself would only be of the courts concern IF they were charging people to look at the material, which is why i went with the more generic term.. glad you liked the analogy; carry on and take care
I have to disagree with your comment. Your basis of using a back isnt applicable it would be like me taking a picture of a billboard advertisement (which I don't own, and is publicly viewable), and doing this of every billboard in town, everyday, and then distributing that somewhere....
Not really. The book was published and at some point purchased, then the book went out of print or aged doesnt matter... The book was never public knowledge, in the public domain, or an open commodity. If you wanted to read / get a copy of the book legally, you had to buy it or obtain a legally obtained copy from the library. Not so with a webpage, there is no charge to look at this webpage, it is not for sale, and it is not a controlled commodity. It's publicaly viewable. Anyone and everyone who reads it makes a copy in order to view it. Many people's copies will be destroyed when they empty their cache, doesn't mean they lost the right to look at it. With a book you are taking something that was for sale and now freely distributing it. The webpage was freely viewable to begin with, so there isnt a comparison.. now if the page wasnt publicly viewable (password protected / members only.. ) and the storage enabled people who weren't able to see the material before to see it now, then maybe there might be something but thats not what this case is
I think you need to learn what copyright infringement is, because either you don't have a clue, or you just enough intelligence to know how to apply it. In what way are they infringing on copyrights? They aren't doing anything anyone of us couldn't do. Simply copying over publicly viewable webpages onto their machines. If I had a couple extra petabytes around I could probably do it as well. heck, while you're looking up what copyright infringment is, read up on what a copyright is, what can be copyrighted, intellectual property, public knowledge, and fair use.
One thing that I think is worth considering is that quite often the messages and communications that us "nerds" are trying to get across are quite rapid. The ideas and thoughts come faster than you can put them out. My intuition tell me that quite simply put, 'post-processing' everything I/we type is a bottleneck to productivity and effective communication. Afterall effective communication is that which can be understood, and I while I like to spell correctly, you would probably all understand me if I made an occasional spelling or grammatical error.... But if you really want to pick on nerds, you should probably be picking on current society as a whole; no one is immune..
examples? When people pick up a phone and are asked for themselves, i.e. bob picks up phone, other end says may I please speak to bob, what do they say 99% of the time? "This is him" guess what, this is grammatically incorrect (him is an objective pronoun, which is not appropriate for use with is, you need a subjective pronoun to refer to this. him is this? nope, He is this, this is he... that whole business of "am are is was were be being and been") But here's catch 22; does anyone give a monkey's left nut? I'd be willing to bet that unless you are an english teacher, (and even the one who taught me this hinted they probably don't answer it correctly because the answer would seem wrong to the other person...) you don't. I won't even mention the grammar that TV presents us with.
look at english/grammar grades across the country, there is no special rate of failure just for nerds. More likely you only see more of the nerds supposed error because they are typing and posting on the internet far more often than others.
Grammar like anything else has a time, a place, and levels of adherence to it. A parallel would be a compiling a C program. In some environments and configurations you can do things which are not grammatically correct in C, such as C++ style comments, and declaration of variables after the first non declaration statement in a scope. But this won't always generate warnings. Like many things you have to adjust the filter if you will to what it is being applied to.
This is so things can be accomplished, if you painstakingly checked over every IM comment you were to make and every single email of every day my guess is that your communication productivity level would drop to that of the United State Congress's. Or in other words you'd get nothing done and you'd get nothing done slowly.
I would agree with you highly that it is troubling that techs would regard the ignorance as a badge of honor. I find (orignally said "But for me at least that", but I shouldn't start a sentence with a preposition now should I? Would it inhibit understand? probably not therein lies a dillema to our society of fastfood / express service / speed is everything) this is self implying, anyone who regards their ignorance or apparent stupidity as honor is pretty stupid themselves in my book. (However well written that book may be) Much akin to the teenage punk who breaks rules/laws/gets into trouble and thinks he's cooler because of it.
my guess is because a game that is entertaining to you will not be entertaining to a 5 year old. Think about market segments as a whole. Do you enjoy watching Barney, sesame street, blue's clues, pokemon? If you are at all a typical person over the age of 12 probably not.. although for pokemon i may have to slide that to over 16 lol...
:-p ) Probably not.
Do 5 year old's like watching the news?, reading the wall street journal? law and order? slashdot? (sorry guys it had to be mentioned
While there will always be age transcending games like Mario or sonic.. or perhaps the sports games, its an extremely difficult task to create a game that will really appeal to a universal audience.. to appeal to older gamers there often needs to be either a distinct / complicated plot (see RPG's... how many 5 year olds could sit through a Final Fantasy game? i know when i played FF1 on nes i wanted to shoot myself, now FF3 aka FF6 is just about my fave game all-time... next to pit-fall harry) If the game compromises on story complexity which they can certainly do and still have a captivating story, such as mario or zelda or many others, then they have to have a large variety of game play, that is both possible for the young while challenging for the masters. this is the problem that is becoming more evident to me
when i played Mario 1-3, even mario world, i noticed the games were challenging. Doing everything in SMW was no small task, you could beat the game doing the bare minimum of things but there were a ot of meaningful (while not monotanous (SP?)) challenges left, like the rainbow road. Legend of Zelda and even link to the past were very challenging games... Now look at mario64 and zelda64 and the sequels to them... the difficulty is a joke in comparison. Zelda64 made to and had to make the most of its story because while the gameplay was entertaining it really lacked the kind of challenged that even a high school gamer would like. That was the problem that plagues the N64 in my opinion. Starfox 64 could easily be beaten on the hardest courses in your first day playing, where as star fox on SNES continues to challenge me on the hardest settings if i havent been playing the game semi-repeatedly.
With systems allowing more and more complex user interfaces and more reality the challenges only seem to get larger. think about sports games, a classic problem as of late is attaining realistic gae play that offers a complex amount of things for the gamer to do (like the many moves and subtleties to a madden style football game) while still making it enjoyable for the younger players who simply cant deal with a million buttons and a million options.
I tend to find the ramp is all too often to steep. On many sports games, the easy and rookie levels are a joke, but you turn it up one more level and all the sudden the computer starts to become godlike. it's a universal truth to many fields, the middle ground is tough to cover. This is one of the many reasons I'm a big fan of emulators and the hacks that allow people for example to emulate and play old atari/nes/snes/etc games on their xbox's, its nice for us to revisit old games, and good for younger gamers to ramp up to the complexity of todays controllers. It amazes me how enjoyable games were on nintendo with only two buttons and a control stick, even snes with the 4/6 buttons (l and r tending to be used semi sparingly)... now look at a GC, PS2 and Xbox, where you have much more than that, ps2 has 8 buttons two sticks and a pad, GC has 7 plus the C-stick, and xbox is roughly the same as PS2.
I agree with you whole heartedly about trying new things. that or revolutionizing the way they do certain things. I'm still waiting for a hockey game where you can really put some aim onto your shots. Platform games today have been pretty good, but to me they lack the wonder of the legendary mario and megaman games. I havent seen a new megaman in ages (i dont count the megaman64 thing and yes i need to play the
No i think he's wrong for saying "Clean yourself up and show up to work looking like a decent human being people." in saying that with the other things he has gone beyond having his own opinion and is now trying to issue people a wake up call that they need to adjust how they act. He went beyond his opinion and is now implying that their opinion or actions are wrong. If he had merely said the first part, I probably wouldnt have said anything, although i'd still have disgust for such a closed mind. And if he had said while i really don't care for it, that is the price we pay for individuality and its their personal choice, I would have thuought ok this guy has an opinion that i disagre with, but he is reasonable about it and respectful of others opinions and consequently his opinion is deserving of that same respect.
... " "its immoral.." and then they drag on some more.
on another note, i never mentioned the nazi's per se. Prison workers come to mind, as do the oppresive working conditions of factories before unions and in the early stages of the manufactoring revolution.
the problem is that its thinking like that which leads to further thinking similar to that and expansion upon that. First they try to tell us what we need to look like, what next? What about when he doesn't feel its appropriate for you to question your governement?
you can see this attitude all across society today, where people assume they have the only view that matters and that their "values" (if they can even be called that) need to be imposed on all. Examples? the arguments as of late against gay marriage. I cant even listen to them, all the garbage about "the sanctitiy of marriage" and "its only right for.." "its only natural for
when someone starts to suggest that anyone is anyless of a human being, or any more or less decent for holding a view or opinion, or for acting in which they have every right to do so, i tend to be become rather curious and usually rather concerned and frankly i would hope more people would... (and yes i see the paradox here in that you could make the argument the writer is entitled to that view and here i am saying what im saying... except im not telling him he shouldn't dislike their appearence, or that hes indecent for disliking their appreance, im attacking him for attacking others)
and while the nazi's were bad for their acts, in many ways its what the acts were based upon, stood for, and the series of things that led to those events that enabled them to happen. And while i agree they werent bad because they wore uniforms i have to disagree with the latter of that statement. they attempt to achieve order was the primary evil! All of the actions you label them evil / bad for were actions they too to achieve "order", the key is what they called order.
I like order as much as the next guy, but when you start calling people indecent for not liking it, or from not conforming to it then I have a problem.
it is people like you who drag down our entire nation. Your "clean yourself up" line is a load of bull shit.
"I find it pleasant to work in a homogeneous environment where everyone looks the same." Did you skip that all those classes in elemtenary school where they teach tolerance, what prejudice is, that its bad, and about diversity. Perhaps you'd be happier in a slave labor camp in some foreign country where everyone looks the same, or is forced to lest they be persecuted, segragated or killed for doing so.
The glory of America is that A. we all dont have to think like you, and B. that we dont all think like you. People fought and died for these rights. Whether or not you or I have any opinion as to their appearance is irrelevant. You're entitled to your opinion that you dont like the appearence, but that's all that you are entitled to. While I for one don't find the appearence to be preferential for myself, they have every right to it, and i'll defend that right to the end. Becuase you never know when it will be my opinion or preference or whatnot that some pompous douche bag such as yourself finds "undesireable" and then tries to outlaw it. The only thing unprofessional is thinking that you somehow know better than everyone else what is right.. personnally i find your attitude to be unprofessional, distracting and repulsive. clean yourself up and act like a decent american... notice how this was posted by an anonymous coward too?
its simple, at least with partition magic, simply resize the ntfs partition down, and theres an option to give the space to other part's... another way to do it is to simply shrink the windows partition, then create an ext3 partition in this new free space, then move that partition to be adjacent to your original ext3 and then merge them... I've done it several times with partition magic and its rather simple, if you need more detailed help drop me a line
Honestly, it sounds to me like you dont know what you are doing.. Installing linux on the same HDD as windows isn't risky at all IMHO, and in fact just about everyone i know using linux and windows still uses that exact approach, its fine as long as you know what you are doing... this is no caveat special to linux, even intalling another version of windows side by side with windows can seriously screw up your HDD if you dont know what you're doing. Either way, i've done this more times than i can count, first for myself, and later for others and not once have i had to repair windows, or reinstall service packs.
if you are really worried about them being on the same disc, then consider this, hard drives are dirt cheap these days, i bought a seagate 120gigger for 50 bucks after a 50 dollar rebate... throw in this second hard drive, grab a simple and noob friendly distro like fedora core3 and install...
when setting up partitions, you wont need a special thing to resize ntfs since there wont be any ntfs on this second hard drive.. just install linux on it, etc. and remember to choose grub for bootloader
now all you have to do is setup grub which is very simple.. just make sure you install grub to the MBS.. theres lots of help for grub, and the fedora default grub setup is usually pretty decent, requiring only minor tweaks. in your case your linux stuff will all be on (hd1,x) and your windows would be (hd0,x) assuming you have only two standard hard drives...
personally all of my installs are on a common hard drive and i have never once had to try multiple times, or reinstall service packs or anything like that, and i only started using linux in 2002, (red hat 7.3 valhalla for those who are curious) this install was done on a laptop with no problems and didnt even harm the IBM rescue recovery partition... Even with my desktop i use the same approach, i have one drive which is simply the windows OS and the linux OS's, and i have a seperate drive (used to be partitions back when drives werent so cheap) where i keep my large data files, like the gigs upon gigs of music, videos, games, artwork, etc.
as much as im not a live cd user, there is a way to save your data, again you have to think a little bit.. if you were only having problems with boot up issues, or didnt want to deal with grub, or did have a partition you could get rid or extra space, simply format it to ext2 (or ur fave linux fs) and after booting from the live cd, mount it.. not that hard.
trying out linux is pretty easy compared to a lot of things... a windows user cant exactly "try" out the Mac OS X without buying an entire seperate machine, and the same would go vice versa.. however with a x86 PC its very easy to not only dual boot between windows/linux; but you could go further and have multiple linux distros to boot between.
While it seems cumbersome from the outside its simple once you get going... IMHO larger problems are the amount of windows users who are still despite years of using a computer still effectivly newbies to the computer because they dont know how to do anything. They can read their email, and do word... but if anything goes wrong they dont have a clue, and they will be helpless no matter what OS they are using. If you're willing to spend a little effort to search or lookup the answer for a linux question you can almost always find it, or find a linux user who'd be happy to help. Linux people are pretty good about helping noobs, since a. they were one once probably not long ago, b. the whole open source nature of community involved with linux, and c. the more of us using it, the less people using MS which will put eventually put more and more pressure on companies to support linux