Educating the lowest common denominator doesn't help anyone out. It is precisely the disentegration of the socio-economic status quo that is responsible for American "dirty work" jobs being outsourced, fostering new economic prosperity in places like India, who can now afford to educate their people in a way that was strictly a western practice 30 years ago.
If you want the American GDP back up, focus on steering talented kids (there's plenty of them) toward innovation in science the way their grandparents were steered, pre and post ww2. History has shown that if you lead technologically and socially, economics will follow suit. Let your underpriveledged kids get desperate enough to work for a living like THEIR grandparents did, and maybe we can get some of our jobs back from overseas. Life's too easy for the middle and lower middle class these days.
The cost of linux vs. its competitors has been more than exhausted here and everywhere else too many times in the past 10 years to even bother addressing again. All i'll say is this: market share walks the walk, philosophy talks the talk.
When it comes to MY hard earned money, it's being put to use really making a difference in MY standard of living. When I have Gates dollars maybe i'll start worrying about everyone else.
Donating linux hardware to schools doesn't make you a saint, it makes you an activist. The distinction is important. And furthermore, even if you were St. Peter Incarnate, i'd still bust your ass for flaming HP when they did nothing unethical, immoral, or in opposition to any promises they have ever made. The "N" in 2600N designates the presence of an ethernet port. Nothing more. Had you read their website before you bought the printer, you would have known that it didn't have linux drivers, saving yourself both the $250 and getting called out by me on an internet site over your misinformation.
So by all means, congratulations on boosting your own e-political agenda by giving some kids access to linux. That has nothing to do with this post, but since you seem to need validation on the subject, there it is.
My contribution to society is that by virtue of being a high-earning republican, my copious tax dollars end up paying to replace your crappy donated hardware with expensive Macs after the system realizes there is no legitimate basis for linux in elementary or middle schools. Further down the road, my copious tax dollars will pay for your disadvantaged children to eat and watch cable TV while they serve their jail sentences.
No need to thank me, I'm forced to do it by the government.
I think your original post's -3 score speaks for itself. If you need a few bucks to buy a low-end color laserjet that supports linux, my lawn needs mowed. Let me know.
Maybe HP figured since you cheaped out on your OS you'd have a few spare bucks to spend on a printer other than their absolute bottom-of-the-line color laserjet, which isn't "new" by any stretch of the imagination.
HP offers linux drivers for every color laserjet they make starting with the 3600 series and going up. So apparently the only asshole around here is the one who spends $250 bucks on a color laser and expects it to have features no other printer in its class has; and then shits on the company for his own cheap ways.
I can tell that you don't have a job by your obvious distaste for wasting time on inconsequentials. Once you're out of college and in the workforce, you'll sympathize.
Every day it seems like there's a new link to xyzcomputing, which is possibly the most uninformative and sophomoric tech site in existence. Without exception, every link he's posted to their crappy site has been either A) dumb and uninteresting or B) a repeat of a previous Slashdot post as well as dumb and uninteresting.
Here is the text of an email I just shot off to Zonk, i'll be curious to see if I get a response:
Zonk,
At a frequency which is RIDICULOUS, you post links to xyzcomputing.net on the Slashdot front page, for articles ranging from stupid and uninformative to COMPLETE REPEATS of stuff that was posted on Slashdot A MONTH AGO. To me, the only reason that would make any sense at all for you to be doing this is that you're pocketing money from xyzcomputing ad revenues. The site is garbage, their articles are juvenile, and they have never ONCE posted anything that hasn't already been dissected up, down and every which way elsewhere on the web. I request that you either provide a logical and proveable explanation for your repeated links to their site, or that you quit polluting Slashdot with their garbage.
I eagerly await your response.
Ian L. Massey
Slashdot subscriber #743270
In all seriousness, I do not spend money subscribing to Slashdot to see this dirge on such a frequent basis. No one and nothing is perfect, and I certainly do not expect this site to be an exception, but this has just gone too far. If he's pocketing xyzcomputing ad money then he can use some of it to refund my subscription fee, cause I'm tired of being exposed to this trash.
Splogs exacerbate comment and trackback spam. As matter of fact, for about 2 months now, my spam has gone from 100% prescription drug crap to 100% "nuisance spam", 80% of which links directly to splogs which are link farms to other splogs, and presumably, eventually to "legit" blogs.
The problem surfaces when the "splogs" are used to comment spam and trackback spam legitimate blogs. It's through these links that PageRank is increased. If everyone starts proactively dealing with spam on their own sites, this problem will solve itself. MovableType users can upgrade to 3.2, which has spam blocking features, or use the great plugin MT-Blacklist. Either will eliminate this problem. An AC mentioned that WordPress has a similar set of options. I know that TypePad does. The only major blog service provider left to come up with a solution is Blogger, and in the interim you can require registration to post comments on your Blogger site or turn comments off entirely. LiveJournal and all the clones are blocked from trackback by 90% of normal blog sites already, so they don't even count.
Another poster suggested that we ignore this problem, and it will go away. Untrue. Ignoring the 600 spam comments a day is exactly what the spammers would prefer you do, so that they can stink up every site on the internet with their crap. We are fortunate that in the case of this "new" form of spam, the tools necessary to get rid of it are already there and effective, we just need to get them all turned on.
I think it's a pretty interesting topic, and this article supplies the back story for folks who didn't know it already. Ultimately, the hows and the whys don't matter to anyone who has any real say in this issue, though. This will by and large be decided by diplomats and beaurocrats whose experience with the internet consists of their assistant/secretary spending an hour a day trying to help them use it completely in vain.
What it really boils down to is we either trust the completely untrustworthy, unstable and unorganized UN to handle this very serious responsibility (which we've been handling just fine all by ourselves for years now), or we further degrade our world image by telling the UN where to stick it and keeping the root servers under the perfectly competent management they have right now and have always had.
America is experiencing sort of a golden age of being loathed globally at the moment, which historically has happened to every major world power, especially when they decided to exercise some of their power to improve their position, as we have been doing for the past few years. It is to be expected, and eventually we can expect one of two solutions to occur naturally: A. America reaches a place where it is comfortable enough to slow its expansion/influence, and the rest of the world's grumbling gradually decreases, or B. the shit hits the fan for one of a billion reasons and America's term as world power comes to a halt. It is my opinion that I will live to see "A" happen more than once in my lifetime, and that I'll be dead long before "B" occurs. This root server issue will be solved like every other diplomatic row, in that things will stay exactly the same but a "resolution" will be drafted that strokes the little countries' egos enough that they forget about it for now.
In effect, the site's information architecture *IS* up for redesign? possibly? thus negating the limiting factors of the original contest announcement?
I agree with the article for the most part, in that good design is generally reliant for usability upon a solid foundation of content structuring underneath, but I think that in Slashdot's case, a hell of a lot of good could come from just scrapping and rewriting the "look and feel" from the ground up.
Setting aside complaints about timeliness and originality of content lately, I think that Slashdot's main problem is that if anything, the information it contains is TOO categorized and divided. You could spend an hour just familiarizing yourself with all the various "sections", and that's not even considering shit like "Ask Slashdot" and other regular types of submissions/articles with their own special little names that would confound a newbie to the point of exasperation.
There's no good way to simplify a juggernaut like slashdot, there is simply too much out there, and it has too large a community for any 180 degree changes in how it works. I think the best that can be done is a dramatic re-think of the UI, and a reliance on site search to get at the older innards.
I also clicked your link, and tried all the things listed. Running 1.5 beta 2 on XP Pro Sp2, no crashes, not so much as a slowdown. They must have fixed whatever bugs you found.
they are from illegitimate, fraudulent or criminal companies/organizations
When sites provide useful information and also offer me the option to subscribe and thereby get rid of ads, like Slashdot, I do so. And will continue to do so.
yeah congratulations on that observation, galileo.
your average linux user would have no use whatsoever for this CD. The idea here is to steal marketshare from IE and OE by making Firefox and Thunderbird a turnkey solution, and not just a 10 minute web-romping joyride of sequential installs for geeks.
Europe designed and built the world wide web and should control it. End of story. If Americans want to use it, great, and they should be thankful to us, like they should be thankful to us for a great many things, for opening it up to everybody around the world. There was no requirement for us to do so.
The world wide web relies on IP to function. It is a module of internet functionality, no more or less important than any other module. The root servers have always been american owned and operated, and will always be american owned and operated unless we CHOOSE otherwise. Thanks, Europe, for letting us use your plugin that requires our technology to function. Real generous of you.
The internet has worked just fine so far, so why change it? Brazil wouldn't rely on the internet for 90% of their tax collection if America owning the root servers was a big problem for them, so why all of the sudden should we change? I have yet to see anyone make a convincing argument for switching. Answer this question, in detail and with facts backing your response up: What is there to gain by changing what has worked fine since the beginning of this technology?
No lame-ass philosophical answers like "its a global network so everyone should have a little chunk of the control!". Let's try sticking to legitimate facts and genuine REASONS why changing would benefit us, and by us I mean the current owners of the root servers, whom any change would thereby have to be authorized by. This whole "you wont sign em over then we will take them" load of crap is just that: a load of crap. No one's going to TAKE shit, and we all know it. So focus on convincing us. Go!
I know which family members know nothing and which can handle themselves. The ones that are truly computer illiterate, I administrate their machines as if I owned them. They make no choices except what to use it for on a day to day basis.
They get Win2k or XP, all patches, up to date drivers, they pay for Norton AV, adaware and spybot run weekly as scheduled tasks. They surf with Firefox and select extensions, they use Gmail. If they have broadband they use CAT5, not USB. If they have dialup they use Dialup Networking, NOT AOL. They don't have at least a router with NAT, they run ZoneAlarm. Nothing gets "yes'd" in ZoneAlarm without my go ahead. They break any of the (extensive) rules, they find someone else to mess with it. No exceptions.
Slashdot Mirror
Educating the lowest common denominator doesn't help anyone out. It is precisely the disentegration of the socio-economic status quo that is responsible for American "dirty work" jobs being outsourced, fostering new economic prosperity in places like India, who can now afford to educate their people in a way that was strictly a western practice 30 years ago.
If you want the American GDP back up, focus on steering talented kids (there's plenty of them) toward innovation in science the way their grandparents were steered, pre and post ww2. History has shown that if you lead technologically and socially, economics will follow suit. Let your underpriveledged kids get desperate enough to work for a living like THEIR grandparents did, and maybe we can get some of our jobs back from overseas. Life's too easy for the middle and lower middle class these days.
The cost of linux vs. its competitors has been more than exhausted here and everywhere else too many times in the past 10 years to even bother addressing again. All i'll say is this: market share walks the walk, philosophy talks the talk.
When it comes to MY hard earned money, it's being put to use really making a difference in MY standard of living. When I have Gates dollars maybe i'll start worrying about everyone else.
Donating linux hardware to schools doesn't make you a saint, it makes you an activist. The distinction is important. And furthermore, even if you were St. Peter Incarnate, i'd still bust your ass for flaming HP when they did nothing unethical, immoral, or in opposition to any promises they have ever made. The "N" in 2600N designates the presence of an ethernet port. Nothing more. Had you read their website before you bought the printer, you would have known that it didn't have linux drivers, saving yourself both the $250 and getting called out by me on an internet site over your misinformation. So by all means, congratulations on boosting your own e-political agenda by giving some kids access to linux. That has nothing to do with this post, but since you seem to need validation on the subject, there it is. My contribution to society is that by virtue of being a high-earning republican, my copious tax dollars end up paying to replace your crappy donated hardware with expensive Macs after the system realizes there is no legitimate basis for linux in elementary or middle schools. Further down the road, my copious tax dollars will pay for your disadvantaged children to eat and watch cable TV while they serve their jail sentences. No need to thank me, I'm forced to do it by the government.
I think your original post's -3 score speaks for itself. If you need a few bucks to buy a low-end color laserjet that supports linux, my lawn needs mowed. Let me know.
Maybe HP figured since you cheaped out on your OS you'd have a few spare bucks to spend on a printer other than their absolute bottom-of-the-line color laserjet, which isn't "new" by any stretch of the imagination.
HP offers linux drivers for every color laserjet they make starting with the 3600 series and going up. So apparently the only asshole around here is the one who spends $250 bucks on a color laser and expects it to have features no other printer in its class has; and then shits on the company for his own cheap ways.
Douche.
I can tell that you don't have a job by your obvious distaste for wasting time on inconsequentials. Once you're out of college and in the workforce, you'll sympathize.
Every day it seems like there's a new link to xyzcomputing, which is possibly the most uninformative and sophomoric tech site in existence. Without exception, every link he's posted to their crappy site has been either A) dumb and uninteresting or B) a repeat of a previous Slashdot post as well as dumb and uninteresting.
Here is the text of an email I just shot off to Zonk, i'll be curious to see if I get a response:
In all seriousness, I do not spend money subscribing to Slashdot to see this dirge on such a frequent basis. No one and nothing is perfect, and I certainly do not expect this site to be an exception, but this has just gone too far. If he's pocketing xyzcomputing ad money then he can use some of it to refund my subscription fee, cause I'm tired of being exposed to this trash.
Splogs exacerbate comment and trackback spam. As matter of fact, for about 2 months now, my spam has gone from 100% prescription drug crap to 100% "nuisance spam", 80% of which links directly to splogs which are link farms to other splogs, and presumably, eventually to "legit" blogs.
The problem surfaces when the "splogs" are used to comment spam and trackback spam legitimate blogs. It's through these links that PageRank is increased. If everyone starts proactively dealing with spam on their own sites, this problem will solve itself. MovableType users can upgrade to 3.2, which has spam blocking features, or use the great plugin MT-Blacklist. Either will eliminate this problem. An AC mentioned that WordPress has a similar set of options. I know that TypePad does. The only major blog service provider left to come up with a solution is Blogger, and in the interim you can require registration to post comments on your Blogger site or turn comments off entirely. LiveJournal and all the clones are blocked from trackback by 90% of normal blog sites already, so they don't even count.
Another poster suggested that we ignore this problem, and it will go away. Untrue. Ignoring the 600 spam comments a day is exactly what the spammers would prefer you do, so that they can stink up every site on the internet with their crap. We are fortunate that in the case of this "new" form of spam, the tools necessary to get rid of it are already there and effective, we just need to get them all turned on.
I think it's a pretty interesting topic, and this article supplies the back story for folks who didn't know it already. Ultimately, the hows and the whys don't matter to anyone who has any real say in this issue, though. This will by and large be decided by diplomats and beaurocrats whose experience with the internet consists of their assistant/secretary spending an hour a day trying to help them use it completely in vain.
What it really boils down to is we either trust the completely untrustworthy, unstable and unorganized UN to handle this very serious responsibility (which we've been handling just fine all by ourselves for years now), or we further degrade our world image by telling the UN where to stick it and keeping the root servers under the perfectly competent management they have right now and have always had.
America is experiencing sort of a golden age of being loathed globally at the moment, which historically has happened to every major world power, especially when they decided to exercise some of their power to improve their position, as we have been doing for the past few years. It is to be expected, and eventually we can expect one of two solutions to occur naturally: A. America reaches a place where it is comfortable enough to slow its expansion/influence, and the rest of the world's grumbling gradually decreases, or B. the shit hits the fan for one of a billion reasons and America's term as world power comes to a halt. It is my opinion that I will live to see "A" happen more than once in my lifetime, and that I'll be dead long before "B" occurs. This root server issue will be solved like every other diplomatic row, in that things will stay exactly the same but a "resolution" will be drafted that strokes the little countries' egos enough that they forget about it for now.
if you're so anti-firefox, why does your "CoMmAnD CeNTeR" have a firefox desktop image?
e sktop.jpg
http://tomchu.com/images/computers/commandcenterd
poser.
lately ought to be "exodus" by bob marley.
In effect, the site's information architecture *IS* up for redesign? possibly? thus negating the limiting factors of the original contest announcement? I agree with the article for the most part, in that good design is generally reliant for usability upon a solid foundation of content structuring underneath, but I think that in Slashdot's case, a hell of a lot of good could come from just scrapping and rewriting the "look and feel" from the ground up. Setting aside complaints about timeliness and originality of content lately, I think that Slashdot's main problem is that if anything, the information it contains is TOO categorized and divided. You could spend an hour just familiarizing yourself with all the various "sections", and that's not even considering shit like "Ask Slashdot" and other regular types of submissions/articles with their own special little names that would confound a newbie to the point of exasperation. There's no good way to simplify a juggernaut like slashdot, there is simply too much out there, and it has too large a community for any 180 degree changes in how it works. I think the best that can be done is a dramatic re-think of the UI, and a reliance on site search to get at the older innards.
I also clicked your link, and tried all the things listed. Running 1.5 beta 2 on XP Pro Sp2, no crashes, not so much as a slowdown. They must have fixed whatever bugs you found.
I block ads with adblock for several reasons.
When sites provide useful information and also offer me the option to subscribe and thereby get rid of ads, like Slashdot, I do so. And will continue to do so.
yeah congratulations on that observation, galileo. your average linux user would have no use whatsoever for this CD. The idea here is to steal marketshare from IE and OE by making Firefox and Thunderbird a turnkey solution, and not just a 10 minute web-romping joyride of sequential installs for geeks.
The world wide web relies on IP to function. It is a module of internet functionality, no more or less important than any other module. The root servers have always been american owned and operated, and will always be american owned and operated unless we CHOOSE otherwise. Thanks, Europe, for letting us use your plugin that requires our technology to function. Real generous of you.
The internet has worked just fine so far, so why change it? Brazil wouldn't rely on the internet for 90% of their tax collection if America owning the root servers was a big problem for them, so why all of the sudden should we change? I have yet to see anyone make a convincing argument for switching. Answer this question, in detail and with facts backing your response up: What is there to gain by changing what has worked fine since the beginning of this technology?
No lame-ass philosophical answers like "its a global network so everyone should have a little chunk of the control!". Let's try sticking to legitimate facts and genuine REASONS why changing would benefit us, and by us I mean the current owners of the root servers, whom any change would thereby have to be authorized by. This whole "you wont sign em over then we will take them" load of crap is just that: a load of crap. No one's going to TAKE shit, and we all know it. So focus on convincing us. Go!
I know which family members know nothing and which can handle themselves. The ones that are truly computer illiterate, I administrate their machines as if I owned them. They make no choices except what to use it for on a day to day basis.
They get Win2k or XP, all patches, up to date drivers, they pay for Norton AV, adaware and spybot run weekly as scheduled tasks. They surf with Firefox and select extensions, they use Gmail. If they have broadband they use CAT5, not USB. If they have dialup they use Dialup Networking, NOT AOL. They don't have at least a router with NAT, they run ZoneAlarm. Nothing gets "yes'd" in ZoneAlarm without my go ahead. They break any of the (extensive) rules, they find someone else to mess with it. No exceptions.
stealing quotes from bash.org, the top 50 at that, to get slashmodded up. tsk tsk.