A few years ago, one capacitor on my (relatively expensive) MSI board blew away VERY loud, and with a massive photon emission. To make it worse, I was just under the table, looking for the plug to attach my webcam as it happened. I was scared shitless..:-)
Besides, as far as I remember, those capacitors were not counterfeit themselves, they "just" contained the crappy electrolyte. As far as I remembered, quite a few component manufacturers were affected.
Your sig is just perfect, man! Such an insight, such a great public display of mental and intellectual superiority of closed source proponents!
Lemme see if I can do something like that... wait... oh, I got it:
"Microsoft fans: a bunch of retards who are actually *paying* real money to the richest company in the world for the privilege of becoming their beta tester"
It's not as good as yours, I'm affraid, and it's too long, but at least it's just as stupid and stomach-turning-ignorant.
Do you, at least, get some kind of discount from the MS on the final version for your testing efforts? No? A T-Shirt? A hand-shake and a "thank you"? Well, I thought so...
Well, if the NRA says so, then it must be true!:-)
Besides, if there realy are 4.5 million cases per year where a person had to pull a gun to ward off an attack (which is ridiculous - 4.5 million is 1.5% of the entire USA population!), then there must be something seriously wrong with your society, and you should considder trying to solve that problem by means different than pumping even more firearms into hands of ordinary people (which, obviously, doesn't work).
I am 35, and have never *ever* been even remotely in the situation to need a gun to protect myself or my property. Neither has *anybody* else that I happen to know. I live in Europe.
To be fair, I haven't seen any better arguments from the proponents of free gun posession rights neither.
Besides, how often did you (or some other poster from the "guns are good for protecting own life/property/whatever" club) actually shot somebody who was threatening you? I suppose, for the most people around here, the answer will be "never".
Having a gun to protect yourself might give you a false sense of comfort and security, but believe me - you DON'T want to come in situation to use that gun. Against an armed criminal, to whom your life means *nothing at all* and who probably already has some blood on his hands, you wouldn't stand much chance if he sees you pulling your glock out of the drawer. The odds are you'll actually panick and shoot that neighbours kid sneaking out of your daughters bedroom in the middle of the night instead.
No, it's the documentation of the interfaces and protocolls MS is supposed to publish (and keep up-to-date with further updates, of course), not the source code. Documentation, as somebody else pointed out, MS (hopefully) already has.
Now, the source code is the implementation of those protocolls. If MS manages to supply the market with the best implementation, MS will keep the market. If not, it will lose it (or at least some parts of it) to the competition.
On the other hand, if MS keeps their protocolls secret, changing them every now and then just so that the reverse engineering efforts of the competition get undermined, the quality of the implementation MS provides is largely of no importance, because there is no NEED for MS to improve it.
I am sure you see in which of the above two cases the consumer is a winner, and in which the consumer is just a silent cash-cow, forced to update from time to time, and with no chance to ever come out of being dependent on one (and only one) company.
Now again, what is your problem with the EU in this case?
Either you have almost nothing installed on your system, or you are not being honest with us.
I did the same yesterday. Finally, I thought, for I couldn't believe all this "dist-upgrade" stuff Debian fan-boys were talking about for years before I saw it with my very eyes. The wish to try it out was why I installed Ubuntu in the first place.
First of all, it took me about 1 hour to download 1GB of changes. After that, the installation process started, and took 2 hours and some questions (which I most certainly did NOT want to answer with "y", as so many people advocate) for the process to stop with the following error message
Errors were encountered while processing:
tetex-base
tetex-bin
tetex-extra
jadetex
E: Sub-process/usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
Shit. I removed those packages and started dist-upgrade again. This time, it seems, all went well, except for some 6 packages which were "held back". I managed to resolve those problems too, but it did take some time.
After the next boot, I saw my X config was hosed. Sure thing, I said, that's because I have to re-install NVIDIA drivers. Bad luck - X kept failing on me, regardless of what I tried.
Finally, I managed to activate the "nv" driver, go graphics (aptitude in the console is... well, let's be gentle and say "not a pleasant experience", except if you have a *lot* of time on your hands to RTFM). After installing the most current kernel (386 - eeeek) and the NVIDIA drivers from the Ubuntu repository, I was finally able to get my X back to where it was before the upgrade.
All in all, some 3.5 hours, during which I had to pull some of the tricks I learned in the past 10+ years of Linux experience. NOT BAD AT ALL, for a distribution upgrade, but FAR FAR FAR away from the "15 minutes" fairytale I keep hearing about.
All aside: the system really looks & works great now! There are still some minor annoyancies that I'll have to resolve in the months to come, but that's OK.
To all newbies: don't try this at home, except if it's OK if you screw up your system. The easier way, based on my experience, would be to get the DVD and install the upgrade on another partition.
First: "you don't know Sun will come up tomorrow, but you don't know for certain". So far, the Sun has ALWAYS come up, for as long as the written human history goes. Also, Sun goes up because it follows simple and rather well understood laws of physic. It's a very safe assumption, proven to be correct in every single experiment so far, that the Sun will come up tomorrow.
On the other hand, quite a lot of famous very helthy pro sports have already died from cancer - even those whose jobs don't involve "crushing their testicles" (as you put it), therefore there is no point to assume executing sport and living a healthy life would spare you from cancer. Even if you add "don't sit on a bad bicycle sattle" to it.
Speaking of which, there is no proof whatsoever that a bad bicycle seat had anything to do with Armstrong's cancer. According to your reasoning, all pro bicycle drivers should get testicle cancer, which is demonstrated to be wrong.
Seems not. Some newbie low-life modded the original poster "Redundant". He obviously didn't get the reference, which is at least as relevant as the article itself.
"Troll" is just about the most abused moderation option. I vote for removing it alltogether - a LOT of posts get modded down as trolls just because the moderator didn't get the point, or - even worse - because the moderator doesn't agree with the oppinion expressed in the post.
Come on, most people - creationists or not - can't even spell "microevolution" correctly.:-)
Besides, "microevolution" is nothing you can really "believe in". You don't "believe in" scientific discoveries. You accept them, based on the evidence and/or the mathematical model, or you do not. "Beliefs" belong into the realm of religion, not science.
In what way does this address any part of what I said? It doesn't even make much sense: without a degree, you'd be even worse off, having to compete for the job with your hypothetical 50000 other applicants who *do* have a degree and are - as you said - ready to work for less. Why in the world should a HR department pick you over the other guy?
If you have to compete with people with degrees who are willing to work for less money, the worst approach you can possibly take is to say "forget the college, you don't need it". Get yourself a higher degree, lower your offer, or do both.
Finally, the education is NEVER worthless. Even the "useless" knowledge, not directly related to what you might be doing one day, can come very handy when it comes to communicating with the customer who is not exactly a high school drop-out.
No offend, but this is rubish. What kind of education comes handy depends largely on what kind of job you are striving to get. If you are into system administration, I'm sure you'll do fine without a college degree. On the other hand, if you want to design and implement safety critical applications, you'd have a hard time if you never studied how to approach complex engineering problems, how to fight your way through piles of mediocre documentation, and separate the worthy information from the noise.
F***ed-up previous post, sorry.
Flamebait/Troll mod option should really not be offered to everybody. How the hell does parent qualify as a flamebait??? There really are a *lot* complete systems out there with half-assed on-board graphic cards!
Yes, they transferred the data between Linux and Windows using the USB memory stick as a work-around, while they were waiting for me to find some time and fix their/etc/fstab. But, what was the point of your question? How does the ability of Ubuntu to automatically mount a USB stick change the fact that there is no nice way to make a windows partition world-writeable? Besides, a few days ago, one of the computers stopped mounting the USB drive automatically, for whatever reason. Luckily, it was the relative's computer, and she is not afraid of mounting/unmounting the USB stick manually.
While my computer is a dual-boot machine, I boot windows inly 2-3 times a year. Besides, I do know how to set the umask in/etc/fstab. No problems here.
What I was talking about, is two computers, which I installed in a dual-boot fashion for a friend and for a relative, so that they don't have to worry about their windows environments getting infected by a virus/trojan/spyware/whatever over and over again, despite all installed patches and expensive anti-virus software. So far - so good, they are happily surfing and reading their mails via Linux for three months already.
Now, those people also use their computers for work. On one computer, there is a strong requirement for a specific CAD software not available for Linux, on the other one, it is MS Word (no, OpenOffice filters are not yet working perfectly). For these people, Windows is still a MUST. They use Linux in order to access Internet, and they *need* a nice way to make their windows partitions writeable from Linux. As time passes, you'll see more and more such Linux users. I was very surprised to see that there is no nice way in Ubuntu to achieve that.
It was funny, though, to see that they have accepted that something as trivial as that is not possible to do without my help, and are still very happy with their Ubuntu installations. If there is something we can thank Microsoft for, then it is lowering the people's expectations on what computers can and can not do (and how hard it can be to make them do something they are supposed to do).
I'm afraid you missed the subject completely. We are explicitely *not* talking about sucky implementations of the idea of communism, as we saw them all over the world, but rather of the idea per se. You might be very surprised to see that the very most of the points you presented here have nothing to do with the communist manifesto, regardless of what you keep hearing at those NRA meetings.
I know I'll regret asking, but I can't help myself: what in the world is wrong with free education for all children (your point #10)?
Slashdot Mirror
He actually gave you quite a few very interesting examples in support of his statement.
A few years ago, one capacitor on my (relatively expensive) MSI board blew away VERY loud, and with a massive photon emission. To make it worse, I was just under the table, looking for the plug to attach my webcam as it happened. I was scared shitless.. :-)
Besides, as far as I remember, those capacitors were not counterfeit themselves, they "just" contained the crappy electrolyte. As far as I remembered, quite a few component manufacturers were affected.
Oh great, now you made me spill my coke - THROUGH THE NOSE! :-)
Your sig is just perfect, man! Such an insight, such a great public display of mental and intellectual superiority of closed source proponents!
Lemme see if I can do something like that... wait... oh, I got it:
"Microsoft fans: a bunch of retards who are actually *paying* real money to the richest company in the world for the privilege of becoming their beta tester"
It's not as good as yours, I'm affraid, and it's too long, but at least it's just as stupid and stomach-turning-ignorant.
Do you, at least, get some kind of discount from the MS on the final version for your testing efforts? No? A T-Shirt? A hand-shake and a "thank you"? Well, I thought so...
Gosh, in good old time, people thought LISP would take over the world! Nowadays, people don't even call it by name ("Emacs scripting language") ;-)
Well, if the NRA says so, then it must be true! :-)
Besides, if there realy are 4.5 million cases per year where a person had to pull a gun to ward off an attack (which is ridiculous - 4.5 million is 1.5% of the entire USA population!), then there must be something seriously wrong with your society, and you should considder trying to solve that problem by means different than pumping even more firearms into hands of ordinary people (which, obviously, doesn't work).
I am 35, and have never *ever* been even remotely in the situation to need a gun to protect myself or my property. Neither has *anybody* else that I happen to know. I live in Europe.
To be fair, I haven't seen any better arguments from the proponents of free gun posession rights neither.
Besides, how often did you (or some other poster from the "guns are good for protecting own life/property/whatever" club) actually shot somebody who was threatening you? I suppose, for the most people around here, the answer will be "never".
Having a gun to protect yourself might give you a false sense of comfort and security, but believe me - you DON'T want to come in situation to use that gun. Against an armed criminal, to whom your life means *nothing at all* and who probably already has some blood on his hands, you wouldn't stand much chance if he sees you pulling your glock out of the drawer. The odds are you'll actually panick and shoot that neighbours kid sneaking out of your daughters bedroom in the middle of the night instead.
No, it's the documentation of the interfaces and protocolls MS is supposed to publish (and keep up-to-date with further updates, of course), not the source code. Documentation, as somebody else pointed out, MS (hopefully) already has.
Now, the source code is the implementation of those protocolls. If MS manages to supply the market with the best implementation, MS will keep the market. If not, it will lose it (or at least some parts of it) to the competition.
On the other hand, if MS keeps their protocolls secret, changing them every now and then just so that the reverse engineering efforts of the competition get undermined, the quality of the implementation MS provides is largely of no importance, because there is no NEED for MS to improve it.
I am sure you see in which of the above two cases the consumer is a winner, and in which the consumer is just a silent cash-cow, forced to update from time to time, and with no chance to ever come out of being dependent on one (and only one) company.
Now again, what is your problem with the EU in this case?
Well, imagine - EU insisting that companies follow the laws, and is not afraid of showing some muscles to make sure they will.
If anything, that's a reason to *join* the EU, not to pull out.
What would you prefer the EU to do? To say "well, uh... OK, so... you're not playing by the rules, but we can't afford a fight, so.. OK, so be it."?
Either you have almost nothing installed on your system, or you are not being honest with us.
/usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
I did the same yesterday. Finally, I thought, for I couldn't believe all this "dist-upgrade" stuff Debian fan-boys were talking about for years before I saw it with my very eyes. The wish to try it out was why I installed Ubuntu in the first place.
First of all, it took me about 1 hour to download 1GB of changes. After that, the installation process started, and took 2 hours and some questions (which I most certainly did NOT want to answer with "y", as so many people advocate) for the process to stop with the following error message
Errors were encountered while processing:
tetex-base
tetex-bin
tetex-extra
jadetex
E: Sub-process
Shit. I removed those packages and started dist-upgrade again. This time, it seems, all went well, except for some 6 packages which were "held back". I managed to resolve those problems too, but it did take some time.
After the next boot, I saw my X config was hosed. Sure thing, I said, that's because I have to re-install NVIDIA drivers. Bad luck - X kept failing on me, regardless of what I tried.
Finally, I managed to activate the "nv" driver, go graphics (aptitude in the console is... well, let's be gentle and say "not a pleasant experience", except if you have a *lot* of time on your hands to RTFM). After installing the most current kernel (386 - eeeek) and the NVIDIA drivers from the Ubuntu repository, I was finally able to get my X back to where it was before the upgrade.
All in all, some 3.5 hours, during which I had to pull some of the tricks I learned in the past 10+ years of Linux experience. NOT BAD AT ALL, for a distribution upgrade, but FAR FAR FAR away from the "15 minutes" fairytale I keep hearing about.
All aside: the system really looks & works great now! There are still some minor annoyancies that I'll have to resolve in the months to come, but that's OK.
To all newbies: don't try this at home, except if it's OK if you screw up your system. The easier way, based on my experience, would be to get the DVD and install the upgrade on another partition.
Now, how about somebody modding GP up? Parent just proved he wasn't flamebaiting.
Sorry, you're wrong on both accounts.
First: "you don't know Sun will come up tomorrow, but you don't know for certain". So far, the Sun has ALWAYS come up, for as long as the written human history goes. Also, Sun goes up because it follows simple and rather well understood laws of physic. It's a very safe assumption, proven to be correct in every single experiment so far, that the Sun will come up tomorrow.
On the other hand, quite a lot of famous very helthy pro sports have already died from cancer - even those whose jobs don't involve "crushing their testicles" (as you put it), therefore there is no point to assume executing sport and living a healthy life would spare you from cancer. Even if you add "don't sit on a bad bicycle sattle" to it.
Speaking of which, there is no proof whatsoever that a bad bicycle seat had anything to do with Armstrong's cancer. According to your reasoning, all pro bicycle drivers should get testicle cancer, which is demonstrated to be wrong.
Seems not. Some newbie low-life modded the original poster "Redundant". He obviously didn't get the reference, which is at least as relevant as the article itself.
You see what I meant? Somebody modded my above comment as troll. :-)
"Troll" is just about the most abused moderation option. I vote for removing it alltogether - a LOT of posts get modded down as trolls just because the moderator didn't get the point, or - even worse - because the moderator doesn't agree with the oppinion expressed in the post.
> Most creationists believe in "microevolution"
:-)
Come on, most people - creationists or not - can't even spell "microevolution" correctly.
Besides, "microevolution" is nothing you can really "believe in". You don't "believe in" scientific discoveries. You accept them, based on the evidence and/or the mathematical model, or you do not. "Beliefs" belong into the realm of religion, not science.
In what way does this address any part of what I said? It doesn't even make much sense: without a degree, you'd be even worse off, having to compete for the job with your hypothetical 50000 other applicants who *do* have a degree and are - as you said - ready to work for less. Why in the world should a HR department pick you over the other guy?
If you have to compete with people with degrees who are willing to work for less money, the worst approach you can possibly take is to say "forget the college, you don't need it". Get yourself a higher degree, lower your offer, or do both.
Finally, the education is NEVER worthless. Even the "useless" knowledge, not directly related to what you might be doing one day, can come very handy when it comes to communicating with the customer who is not exactly a high school drop-out.
No offend, but this is rubish. What kind of education comes handy depends largely on what kind of job you are striving to get. If you are into system administration, I'm sure you'll do fine without a college degree. On the other hand, if you want to design and implement safety critical applications, you'd have a hard time if you never studied how to approach complex engineering problems, how to fight your way through piles of mediocre documentation, and separate the worthy information from the noise.
F***ed-up previous post, sorry. Flamebait/Troll mod option should really not be offered to everybody. How the hell does parent qualify as a flamebait??? There really are a *lot* complete systems out there with half-assed on-board graphic cards!
Flamebait/Troll mod
What are you doing here, then? :-)
Yes, they transferred the data between Linux and Windows using the USB memory stick as a work-around, while they were waiting for me to find some time and fix their /etc/fstab. But, what was the point of your question? How does the ability of Ubuntu to automatically mount a USB stick change the fact that there is no nice way to make a windows partition world-writeable? Besides, a few days ago, one of the computers stopped mounting the USB drive automatically, for whatever reason. Luckily, it was the relative's computer, and she is not afraid of mounting/unmounting the USB stick manually.
While my computer is a dual-boot machine, I boot windows inly 2-3 times a year. Besides, I do know how to set the umask in /etc/fstab. No problems here.
What I was talking about, is two computers, which I installed in a dual-boot fashion for a friend and for a relative, so that they don't have to worry about their windows environments getting infected by a virus/trojan/spyware/whatever over and over again, despite all installed patches and expensive anti-virus software. So far - so good, they are happily surfing and reading their mails via Linux for three months already.
Now, those people also use their computers for work. On one computer, there is a strong requirement for a specific CAD software not available for Linux, on the other one, it is MS Word (no, OpenOffice filters are not yet working perfectly). For these people, Windows is still a MUST. They use Linux in order to access Internet, and they *need* a nice way to make their windows partitions writeable from Linux. As time passes, you'll see more and more such Linux users. I was very surprised to see that there is no nice way in Ubuntu to achieve that.
It was funny, though, to see that they have accepted that something as trivial as that is not possible to do without my help, and are still very happy with their Ubuntu installations. If there is something we can thank Microsoft for, then it is lowering the people's expectations on what computers can and can not do (and how hard it can be to make them do something they are supposed to do).
I'm afraid you missed the subject completely. We are explicitely *not* talking about sucky implementations of the idea of communism, as we saw them all over the world, but rather of the idea per se. You might be very surprised to see that the very most of the points you presented here have nothing to do with the communist manifesto, regardless of what you keep hearing at those NRA meetings.
I know I'll regret asking, but I can't help myself: what in the world is wrong with free education for all children (your point #10)?
"Principle of Liberty" != "Libertarian Party".