Wish I could say the same. Google's junk mail filter used to be spectacular, but not anymore. I'm getting around 5-10 spam emails a day from the domain name "mailnvd01.net", all in English. I've reported each and every one as spam but every day there is more of them in my inbox; Gmail's spam filters have failed to catch them every time. That adds up to about 60 emails from this one spammer this week alone. With me reporting each of them you'd think the spam filter would get a clue. I'm beginning to think they must be paying Google to never tag their crap as spam. Makes sense, doesn't it? If you can't get rid of spam clogging up your servers, charge 'em for it.
When you have a problem with Google, try emailing them. Then you'll see how much more they care then MS or Apple. Experience has taught me that no major corporation really cares whether their stuff works as it should or not so long as profits are up; the only good customer service I've ever recieved was from small companies, with Newegg being the only exception.
I knew that would get modded as troll, but it's still a damn good point. There wouldn't be an Apple if it weren't for MS. (I'm a *nix-user, btw, not an MS fan.) So their smug, superior attitude and constant insults seem ungrateful at best. Suppose you lend someone a lot of money, they pay you back but still take that attitude towards you and insult you all the time? What would you call them?
Yeah that worked great at Tianneman Square, didn't it? You guys saying "just let the Chinese overthrow their oppressors" are forgetting that the Chinese government controls the military, which means they are far better armed than the citizenry. It would be a like large group with clubs trying to kill a smaller group with fully automatic weapons and a large supply of ammo. Since nerds have a reputation for playing RTS games, I'll leave you to figure out their chance of success.
Sure, the concept of life on a planet carrying out a "biological reset" might be a great concept for a science fantasy TV series like Star Trek, but it has no place in any kind of discussion of what might actually be happening on Earth right now.
How does this grab you then?
"THIS is evolution?!" "Survival of the fittest. Often the simplest organism is the strongest." From the movie Evolution
I don't know how your flamey post got modded up to +4, since you apparently missed the point. In a crisis the most fit creatures will survive -- usually the simplest, as pointed out above -- and then they will evolve again into more complex organisms. You can easily call that a "biological reset" if you aren't anal-retentive because that's what it essentially is.
The ratio of linux leeters who decry freespire or linspire, yet maintain a windows partition "for video games" or "well, my work makes me us blah blah so..." and other sorts of non-pure cop outs. How many are running some peripheral with a binary blob? I bet the hypocrisy ratio is quite high in that regard.
How many Windows-users pay for programs they know are free? Try this: charge a newbie Windows-user for something like the Gimp, pocket their money, point them to the official website where they can get it for free, explain what you did was perfectly legal and then watch their reaction. Think they'll pay you again? No matter how legal it is for Linspire to run their CnR thingie, *nix-users don't want to pay for free software and a great many view it as a (legal) scam, suckering clueless newbies who don't know that those programs are all free with other distros. Defending Linspire with a charge of hypocrisy at their critics seems like a case of pot vs. kettle. Most would argue that Linspire is the more hypocritical. After all, those who criticise them don't have to deal with them being convicted monopolists.
This isn't even a top-of-the-line system, but good (i.e., best customer-rated) memory is going to cost more than anything else. The cheapest on that page that is rated 5 out of 5 is $174.99, not including shipping.
you can't blame companies for using something that works.
Yes, I can. Why don't they make something that works on all OSes? They could code a gaming environment that runs on its own. Not easy, of course, but they could do it and not a single one is willing to try.
My European ancestors tended to live to be around 40, but my Native American ancestors tended to live to 75 years and beyond -- one Cherokee great-great-great-grandmother lived to be 107. Native Americans truly did tend to live longer, but I don't see many studies on it, despite the fact that this pretty well-known. Why, I don't know. But I can guess some of the reasons they lived longer: better eating, more excercise, and most espceially, not a smany chronic diseases such as cancer, heart disease and diabetes in their bloodlines.
Ok, I'm done with/. for a while, with arrogant, self-congratulatory and utter bullshit like this getting modded up. "or sign up for a couple community college classes" -- oh sure, they teach you in community colleges for free now, don't they? And the government stopped charging interst on student loans and gives them to everyone who applies? I have also seen college graduates wind up working at McDonald's but that's because they actually COULD NOT get another job. You really believe that everyoen who lives in poverty does so because they don't want to work? Most of them would not work a hell of a lot harder than you ever have in your life to make just half of what you probably do but would also be willing to have a limb apmutated simply to be hired. Don't believe me? Go work at a homeless shelter for a littel while, or even one of those places that just provide food -- that is, if you can stand to hob-nob with people who are so below you, that is. Especially take a gander at the sick ones who can't get social security despite many tries and have to spend every almost every penny they earn on medicine they have to have or die, and tell them they deserve their fate because they're lazy. Jerks like you deny the fact that they've been more fortunate than most and take the opportunity to be bigoted against anyone not as fortunate as themselves. "I'm successful because I earned it! Everyone else is just a lazy sack of shit so I'm better than them!" Many have worked harder and should've earned more but ended up with nothing because they apparently didn't get lucky like you have. Maybe when your luck runs out someday you'll learn.
you'd just be playing leapfrog with inflation that constantly creeps up to drive the real income of a minimum wage worker back down to what their work is actually worth to the market.
You make it sound as if inflation wouldn't drive up the cost of living anyway. It will, but the businesses charging more will simply give another excuse that amounts to "the wind shifted to the west". And then where would the minimum wage worker would be without the raise? In even dipper trouble. I'm 35 years old and I've seen this over and over again. The cost of living is constantly going up without a similar increase in the wages of anyone except the very rich.
Ballmer himself dressed in Andre the Giant's classic leotard.
Well, I might as well divorce my husband and join a convent after that mental image. Now, kindly send me your address in case my husband wants to... er, talk to you.
Unless vendors ever open-source their drivers, which hasn't happened yet, users will never be able to assume they can buy a device and it will work, with all features supported, when they take it home and plug it in to their Linux box.
That's a hell of a lot of the problem, yes, but it's not all of it. A great deal of the problem as I've heard over and over again is that many distros don't have a lot of the Linux drivers that are out there and work fine. Why does xxx work with Mepis but not with SuSE? is a very common question on Linux forums and chat channels. All too often *nix-users are using the distro that supports their hardware rather than the distro they'd prefer -- and many devs aren't listening.
Great hardware support is one reason why Mepis has gotten so popular even though many people don't like the way it's dev has handled... well, almost everything else, from sharing the GPL source in his distro to tying the pro version to your MAC address so you can't download updates without their permission. The huge dump of drivers from 2.4 to 2.6 did not help; it was supposed to only get rid of legacy hardware, right? Well, it got rid of more than that, such as support for my VIA 10/100 ethernet card. I hardly think any 10/100 ethernet qualifies as legacy hardware, let alone one that debuted less than 4 years ago, but all distros with a 2.4 kernel worked perfectly with it (including DSL, but not DSL-N) and virtually none with a 2.6 kernel work with it. I can only imagine how much other non-legacy hardware lost support with 2.6. Geeks love the latest and greatest hardware and take the mentality "just upgrade", but lots of people use older hardware as long as it still works. Continuing support for older hardware is one way in which Microsoft is going to win as far as the common user is concerned.
One good MECO sighting clearly cannot erase all black hole sightings unless those black hole sightings are wrong.
You're very close right there. If MECOs exist, then blak holes can't exist. So obviously, all those black hole sightings were MECO sightings.
I'm not a proponent of either theory, but what it all comes down to is that sightings of these objects have all been assumed to be black holes until now, simply because the black hole is the more popular theory. I frankly find this rather appalling. I've never heard of the MECO until now... so why weren't we taught about them in school too, along with black holes?
Yes, I'm sure piracy was a HUGE factor, just like it was in bringing down the recording industry when cassettes became standard and everyone could copy songs freely. I'm so sick of people immeditately blaming piracy for the downfall of this or that product just because it's become fashionable with the RIAA and the MPAA -- there's no evidence that piracy has truly ever hurt any market. I think if it did MS wouldn't be a powerful corporation because Windows was pirated a great deal even before 3.1 days and their target market was much smaller. So consider that: if piracy hurts businesses so much, how did Microsoft survive when Windows and Office were pirated so much and their target market was much, much smaller in those days?
From what I've heard over the years one of the problems the Dreamcast had is that it was made by Sega, and developing games for it was too costly because they got too greedy. I don't know for sure because I wasn't there but I've heard it too many times from different sources to just ignore it. Sucks, because I wanted one. I wish it hadn't been like that because I think console tech would be at a higher level now than it is, but of course, this is a matter of speculation.
First of all, with any other OS you can surf all the porn you want without problems like that. Second, you obviously know nothing about computing history. If the reason Windows has so many malware problems is solely due to it's popularity, where are all the Unix viruses? Unix existed decades before Windows and the entire internet is based around Unix. Until this year, Unix always outsold Windows as servers -- and all the *nix OSes combined still outsold Windows. If Unix was as vulnerable to malware as Windows there wouldn't be an internet; it would have been impossible to maintain because all of the servers would have been infected with loads of malware despite anitivirus. The reason that there aren't so many malware problems on *nix OSes isn't due to lack of popularity, it's because they are designed in such a way that it's very hard to write a program that can even infect them, let alone affect them. I see this "every other OS would be just as vulnerable as Windows if they were as popular" every other day. I wish to God people would learn a little something about what they're talking about before continuing to spout this ignorant nonsense.
This may be off-topic, but I wanted to bring this in context. It's not just "other" peoples who have been matrilineal. The Celts were matrilineal as well, and some notable families in Europe remained matrilineal even past the Middle Ages. Many, many Native American tribes are matrilineal. What changed this? Christianity brining decidedly Roman attitudes. So, if you have Native American and/or Celtic ancestry, your ancestors were matrilinral. That covers most people in the Americas and Western Europe.
Unfortunately, I don't know the profile of the average windows pirate, but I would assume that he doesn't know the things that we know
You're forgetting hardware. Sometimes you simply cannot afford to replace hardware that there is no driver for in *nix -- the kids need school supplies, maybe doctors need to be paid, medicine you literally cannot live without needs to be paid for, plus you need food and shelter to boot. Even some people who actually make a good amount of money have it tied up in medical bills; I've seen this before. These people are often still using a computer they bought before whatever financial problems they have set in and literally cannot replace hardware with *nix-friendly hardware.
And frankly, now, I don't know what to tell newbies even if they have compatible hardware. There's no OCE of Xandros 4 and they're using product activation now. Why bother to switch from Windows product activation to Linux product activation? Mepis has a reputation for supporting more hardware than any other distro, but the free version is ad-supported (install it and you'll find a sign-up to Earthlink icon on your desktop) and just getting a bit sleazier every time I hear anything about it IMO. The pro version of Mepis uses validation via your MAC address to make sure you're eligible for updates before you can download them. Again, why leave this crap behind on Windows just to put up with it on Linux? And (K)Ubuntu? Lots of people swear by it, but when I downloaded the latest version and tried to run it as a live cd, it couldn't mount the file system -- it just froze and did absolutely nothing. So I can't recommend it either. In addition, right now everything Debian-based is giving me trouble with internet access (slow as a 28.8 modem) and does it with different comptuers with different ethernet cards, so I can only conclude that their some kind of problem with my IPS's broadband servers and how Debian uses a browser (download speeds are the same as with Windows). MY ISP is the only broadband provider in this area so everyone I know with broadband will have the same problem. PCLinuxOS? Tried to isntall it once, very carefully. I couldn't log in as root because it claimed my root password was invalid -- using the same one I've used many times and having to had type twice I'm very sure it was valid -- and several paritions weren't writable. I know how to partition a hard drive as I've been doing so since years before PCLLinuxOS existed, so I don't think I would make such drastic mistakes. Thus, no PCLinuxOS either; great as a live cd, but no permanent installs. Linspire? Don't make me laugh. SuSE? Fedora? Mandriva? Those aren't as newbie-friendly as what I would need to recommed to others (I'm checking out Gentoo for myself).
If you've got any recommendations I'd love to hear it, especially if you can figure out what the browsing problem is with Debian. No one else has been able to help so far.
Cagel, while I agree with your post, I have to add as someone who regularly meta-mods, the troll mod is rarely used correctly at all. By "correctly" I mean posts like the GNAA crap and goatse links. Usually the troll mod is used by a mod who disagrees with the post, even though the post may be politely-worded and thoughtful. As a rough estimate, I'd say I see it used correctly only 1 in 7 times I see it used at all.
"Off-topic" and "redundant" are also over-used by modders. How is a post off-topic when it's about the subject of the article? Beats me, go ask the people who've modded such posts as "off-topic". I see that at least once a week, often more. And "redundant"? How is a post redundant if no one has has said what the commenter posted, nor is it in the article? Again, I don't know, but I see this one mis-used very often. All of these three, "troll", "off-topic" and "redundant", are most often used as "I disagree with you and are digging you down" moderations rather than how they're supposed to be.
I have no advice to give here, because frankly I'm sick of the moderation systems everywhere, even though I have mod points right now. I'm sick of everything I say being subject to the approval of others. It's that way everywhere on the internet; forums, chat, comments at various sites, you name it. It was nice to get back into having an actual social life simply because I could say what I wanted without my statement being modded. I understand the need for moderation because of actual trolls, but the moderation system creates more trolls by pissing people off -- and often enough they are quite justified in being pissed off about it, just not how they choose to act on it. But then they have no other recourse, do they? Meta-mods can't do anything about posts that were modded badly when they see them, only those they are given when they meta-mod. I suppose that could help, giving those who have meta-modded well the ability to "spot" meta-mod every once in a while. But as long as you have a moderation system on large site you will have those who abuse it freely. Go read the posts at -1 (all of them) to several articles and you will see what I mean very quickly. You will also see many, many posts about the moderations themselves, which almost invariabley get modded down as well. That's why I set my threshold to -1 with 0 for redundant and off-topic; after meta-modding I soon saw that I was missing a lot of good comments that were modded down for spite.
... Until recently. I got involved in an animal care charity and found out that my neighbor across the street was involved in it as well. Since then she and I have been hanging out together daily. Hell, she even gives me beer. You can't beat that. And I barely knew her before then. I still spend time on the internet but I've needed to prioritize it, so most of my online time is spent at DeviantArt. My neighbor friend is off to visit relatives today, which is why I'm at slashdot.
Go do something. Get involved with something you care about. Charities always need help. You'll both be making yourself useful and meeting people. I know this sounds like some kind of social awareness advert, but it's simply the truth.
Slashdot Mirror
Wish I could say the same. Google's junk mail filter used to be spectacular, but not anymore. I'm getting around 5-10 spam emails a day from the domain name "mailnvd01.net", all in English. I've reported each and every one as spam but every day there is more of them in my inbox; Gmail's spam filters have failed to catch them every time. That adds up to about 60 emails from this one spammer this week alone. With me reporting each of them you'd think the spam filter would get a clue. I'm beginning to think they must be paying Google to never tag their crap as spam. Makes sense, doesn't it? If you can't get rid of spam clogging up your servers, charge 'em for it.
No, no, no. You need a case of beer and a large bottle of hard liquor (bourbon, rum, etc.). Coffee makes you realize how little sense Access makes.
When you have a problem with Google, try emailing them. Then you'll see how much more they care then MS or Apple. Experience has taught me that no major corporation really cares whether their stuff works as it should or not so long as profits are up; the only good customer service I've ever recieved was from small companies, with Newegg being the only exception.
I knew that would get modded as troll, but it's still a damn good point. There wouldn't be an Apple if it weren't for MS. (I'm a *nix-user, btw, not an MS fan.) So their smug, superior attitude and constant insults seem ungrateful at best. Suppose you lend someone a lot of money, they pay you back but still take that attitude towards you and insult you all the time? What would you call them?
Yeah that worked great at Tianneman Square, didn't it? You guys saying "just let the Chinese overthrow their oppressors" are forgetting that the Chinese government controls the military, which means they are far better armed than the citizenry. It would be a like large group with clubs trying to kill a smaller group with fully automatic weapons and a large supply of ammo. Since nerds have a reputation for playing RTS games, I'll leave you to figure out their chance of success.
Astounding logiv indeed, since you're completely and totally ignoring the many, many cases of false positives. Funny how you didn't bring that up.
Maybe another universe.
How does this grab you then?
"THIS is evolution?!"
"Survival of the fittest. Often the simplest organism is the strongest."
From the movie Evolution
I don't know how your flamey post got modded up to +4, since you apparently missed the point. In a crisis the most fit creatures will survive -- usually the simplest, as pointed out above -- and then they will evolve again into more complex organisms. You can easily call that a "biological reset" if you aren't anal-retentive because that's what it essentially is.
How many Windows-users pay for programs they know are free? Try this: charge a newbie Windows-user for something like the Gimp, pocket their money, point them to the official website where they can get it for free, explain what you did was perfectly legal and then watch their reaction. Think they'll pay you again? No matter how legal it is for Linspire to run their CnR thingie, *nix-users don't want to pay for free software and a great many view it as a (legal) scam, suckering clueless newbies who don't know that those programs are all free with other distros. Defending Linspire with a charge of hypocrisy at their critics seems like a case of pot vs. kettle. Most would argue that Linspire is the more hypocritical. After all, those who criticise them don't have to deal with them being convicted monopolists.
Processor = $114
Mobo = $82.99 + $6.13 S&H
Video card = $155.99 + $5.64 S&H
600 watt power supply = $69.99 + $8.02 S&H
case = $64.99 + $16.21 S&H
20 gig hard drive = $79.99
2x1 gig memory? Here.
This isn't even a top-of-the-line system, but good (i.e., best customer-rated) memory is going to cost more than anything else. The cheapest on that page that is rated 5 out of 5 is $174.99, not including shipping.
Then you were far more niave than any other 12-year-old I've ever known. Hell, every 10-year-old I've ever known had a good idea what a rapist was.
Yes, I can. Why don't they make something that works on all OSes? They could code a gaming environment that runs on its own. Not easy, of course, but they could do it and not a single one is willing to try.
My European ancestors tended to live to be around 40, but my Native American ancestors tended to live to 75 years and beyond -- one Cherokee great-great-great-grandmother lived to be 107. Native Americans truly did tend to live longer, but I don't see many studies on it, despite the fact that this pretty well-known. Why, I don't know. But I can guess some of the reasons they lived longer: better eating, more excercise, and most espceially, not a smany chronic diseases such as cancer, heart disease and diabetes in their bloodlines.
Ok, I'm done with /. for a while, with arrogant, self-congratulatory and utter bullshit like this getting modded up. "or sign up for a couple community college classes" -- oh sure, they teach you in community colleges for free now, don't they? And the government stopped charging interst on student loans and gives them to everyone who applies? I have also seen college graduates wind up working at McDonald's but that's because they actually COULD NOT get another job. You really believe that everyoen who lives in poverty does so because they don't want to work? Most of them would not work a hell of a lot harder than you ever have in your life to make just half of what you probably do but would also be willing to have a limb apmutated simply to be hired. Don't believe me? Go work at a homeless shelter for a littel while, or even one of those places that just provide food -- that is, if you can stand to hob-nob with people who are so below you, that is. Especially take a gander at the sick ones who can't get social security despite many tries and have to spend every almost every penny they earn on medicine they have to have or die, and tell them they deserve their fate because they're lazy. Jerks like you deny the fact that they've been more fortunate than most and take the opportunity to be bigoted against anyone not as fortunate as themselves. "I'm successful because I earned it! Everyone else is just a lazy sack of shit so I'm better than them!" Many have worked harder and should've earned more but ended up with nothing because they apparently didn't get lucky like you have. Maybe when your luck runs out someday you'll learn.
You make it sound as if inflation wouldn't drive up the cost of living anyway. It will, but the businesses charging more will simply give another excuse that amounts to "the wind shifted to the west". And then where would the minimum wage worker would be without the raise? In even dipper trouble. I'm 35 years old and I've seen this over and over again. The cost of living is constantly going up without a similar increase in the wages of anyone except the very rich.
Well, I might as well divorce my husband and join a convent after that mental image. Now, kindly send me your address in case my husband wants to... er, talk to you.
That's a hell of a lot of the problem, yes, but it's not all of it. A great deal of the problem as I've heard over and over again is that many distros don't have a lot of the Linux drivers that are out there and work fine. Why does xxx work with Mepis but not with SuSE? is a very common question on Linux forums and chat channels. All too often *nix-users are using the distro that supports their hardware rather than the distro they'd prefer -- and many devs aren't listening.
Great hardware support is one reason why Mepis has gotten so popular even though many people don't like the way it's dev has handled... well, almost everything else, from sharing the GPL source in his distro to tying the pro version to your MAC address so you can't download updates without their permission. The huge dump of drivers from 2.4 to 2.6 did not help; it was supposed to only get rid of legacy hardware, right? Well, it got rid of more than that, such as support for my VIA 10/100 ethernet card. I hardly think any 10/100 ethernet qualifies as legacy hardware, let alone one that debuted less than 4 years ago, but all distros with a 2.4 kernel worked perfectly with it (including DSL, but not DSL-N) and virtually none with a 2.6 kernel work with it. I can only imagine how much other non-legacy hardware lost support with 2.6. Geeks love the latest and greatest hardware and take the mentality "just upgrade", but lots of people use older hardware as long as it still works. Continuing support for older hardware is one way in which Microsoft is going to win as far as the common user is concerned.
You're very close right there. If MECOs exist, then blak holes can't exist. So obviously, all those black hole sightings were MECO sightings.
I'm not a proponent of either theory, but what it all comes down to is that sightings of these objects have all been assumed to be black holes until now, simply because the black hole is the more popular theory. I frankly find this rather appalling. I've never heard of the MECO until now... so why weren't we taught about them in school too, along with black holes?
Then you should read here.
Yes, I'm sure piracy was a HUGE factor, just like it was in bringing down the recording industry when cassettes became standard and everyone could copy songs freely. I'm so sick of people immeditately blaming piracy for the downfall of this or that product just because it's become fashionable with the RIAA and the MPAA -- there's no evidence that piracy has truly ever hurt any market. I think if it did MS wouldn't be a powerful corporation because Windows was pirated a great deal even before 3.1 days and their target market was much smaller. So consider that: if piracy hurts businesses so much, how did Microsoft survive when Windows and Office were pirated so much and their target market was much, much smaller in those days?
From what I've heard over the years one of the problems the Dreamcast had is that it was made by Sega, and developing games for it was too costly because they got too greedy. I don't know for sure because I wasn't there but I've heard it too many times from different sources to just ignore it. Sucks, because I wanted one. I wish it hadn't been like that because I think console tech would be at a higher level now than it is, but of course, this is a matter of speculation.
First of all, with any other OS you can surf all the porn you want without problems like that. Second, you obviously know nothing about computing history. If the reason Windows has so many malware problems is solely due to it's popularity, where are all the Unix viruses? Unix existed decades before Windows and the entire internet is based around Unix. Until this year, Unix always outsold Windows as servers -- and all the *nix OSes combined still outsold Windows. If Unix was as vulnerable to malware as Windows there wouldn't be an internet; it would have been impossible to maintain because all of the servers would have been infected with loads of malware despite anitivirus. The reason that there aren't so many malware problems on *nix OSes isn't due to lack of popularity, it's because they are designed in such a way that it's very hard to write a program that can even infect them, let alone affect them. I see this "every other OS would be just as vulnerable as Windows if they were as popular" every other day. I wish to God people would learn a little something about what they're talking about before continuing to spout this ignorant nonsense.
This may be off-topic, but I wanted to bring this in context. It's not just "other" peoples who have been matrilineal. The Celts were matrilineal as well, and some notable families in Europe remained matrilineal even past the Middle Ages. Many, many Native American tribes are matrilineal. What changed this? Christianity brining decidedly Roman attitudes. So, if you have Native American and/or Celtic ancestry, your ancestors were matrilinral. That covers most people in the Americas and Western Europe.
You're forgetting hardware. Sometimes you simply cannot afford to replace hardware that there is no driver for in *nix -- the kids need school supplies, maybe doctors need to be paid, medicine you literally cannot live without needs to be paid for, plus you need food and shelter to boot. Even some people who actually make a good amount of money have it tied up in medical bills; I've seen this before. These people are often still using a computer they bought before whatever financial problems they have set in and literally cannot replace hardware with *nix-friendly hardware.
And frankly, now, I don't know what to tell newbies even if they have compatible hardware. There's no OCE of Xandros 4 and they're using product activation now. Why bother to switch from Windows product activation to Linux product activation? Mepis has a reputation for supporting more hardware than any other distro, but the free version is ad-supported (install it and you'll find a sign-up to Earthlink icon on your desktop) and just getting a bit sleazier every time I hear anything about it IMO. The pro version of Mepis uses validation via your MAC address to make sure you're eligible for updates before you can download them. Again, why leave this crap behind on Windows just to put up with it on Linux? And (K)Ubuntu? Lots of people swear by it, but when I downloaded the latest version and tried to run it as a live cd, it couldn't mount the file system -- it just froze and did absolutely nothing. So I can't recommend it either. In addition, right now everything Debian-based is giving me trouble with internet access (slow as a 28.8 modem) and does it with different comptuers with different ethernet cards, so I can only conclude that their some kind of problem with my IPS's broadband servers and how Debian uses a browser (download speeds are the same as with Windows). MY ISP is the only broadband provider in this area so everyone I know with broadband will have the same problem. PCLinuxOS? Tried to isntall it once, very carefully. I couldn't log in as root because it claimed my root password was invalid -- using the same one I've used many times and having to had type twice I'm very sure it was valid -- and several paritions weren't writable. I know how to partition a hard drive as I've been doing so since years before PCLLinuxOS existed, so I don't think I would make such drastic mistakes. Thus, no PCLinuxOS either; great as a live cd, but no permanent installs. Linspire? Don't make me laugh. SuSE? Fedora? Mandriva? Those aren't as newbie-friendly as what I would need to recommed to others (I'm checking out Gentoo for myself).
If you've got any recommendations I'd love to hear it, especially if you can figure out what the browsing problem is with Debian. No one else has been able to help so far.
Cagel, while I agree with your post, I have to add as someone who regularly meta-mods, the troll mod is rarely used correctly at all. By "correctly" I mean posts like the GNAA crap and goatse links. Usually the troll mod is used by a mod who disagrees with the post, even though the post may be politely-worded and thoughtful. As a rough estimate, I'd say I see it used correctly only 1 in 7 times I see it used at all.
"Off-topic" and "redundant" are also over-used by modders. How is a post off-topic when it's about the subject of the article? Beats me, go ask the people who've modded such posts as "off-topic". I see that at least once a week, often more. And "redundant"? How is a post redundant if no one has has said what the commenter posted, nor is it in the article? Again, I don't know, but I see this one mis-used very often. All of these three, "troll", "off-topic" and "redundant", are most often used as "I disagree with you and are digging you down" moderations rather than how they're supposed to be.
I have no advice to give here, because frankly I'm sick of the moderation systems everywhere, even though I have mod points right now. I'm sick of everything I say being subject to the approval of others. It's that way everywhere on the internet; forums, chat, comments at various sites, you name it. It was nice to get back into having an actual social life simply because I could say what I wanted without my statement being modded. I understand the need for moderation because of actual trolls, but the moderation system creates more trolls by pissing people off -- and often enough they are quite justified in being pissed off about it, just not how they choose to act on it. But then they have no other recourse, do they? Meta-mods can't do anything about posts that were modded badly when they see them, only those they are given when they meta-mod. I suppose that could help, giving those who have meta-modded well the ability to "spot" meta-mod every once in a while. But as long as you have a moderation system on large site you will have those who abuse it freely. Go read the posts at -1 (all of them) to several articles and you will see what I mean very quickly. You will also see many, many posts about the moderations themselves, which almost invariabley get modded down as well. That's why I set my threshold to -1 with 0 for redundant and off-topic; after meta-modding I soon saw that I was missing a lot of good comments that were modded down for spite.
... Until recently. I got involved in an animal care charity and found out that my neighbor across the street was involved in it as well. Since then she and I have been hanging out together daily. Hell, she even gives me beer. You can't beat that. And I barely knew her before then. I still spend time on the internet but I've needed to prioritize it, so most of my online time is spent at DeviantArt. My neighbor friend is off to visit relatives today, which is why I'm at slashdot.
Go do something. Get involved with something you care about. Charities always need help. You'll both be making yourself useful and meeting people. I know this sounds like some kind of social awareness advert, but it's simply the truth.