You should have quoted "Mailing lists have most of the advantages of Newsgroups" but then you wouldn't have had a nit to pick, since the things that you mention are clearly things that aren't coverd by that "most."
Unless you consider the features of Newsgroups that you cited to be the downside . . .
Usenet is largely dead. Mailing lists have picked up the slack.
Mailing lists have most of the advantages of Newsgroups while being easy to keep free of spam, address harvesting, and (undesired) automated posts. Add an archive and FTP and you have a total Newsgroup replacement, with none of the downside.
If your computer came with (i.e. you paid for) a year's supply of dog food, but they waited for your check to clear and then told you that you have to take their dog that shits on your rug in order to get the food, would you expect any recourse?
"Sir I'm veeerry sorrry that the connection isn't working . . . but if you mention it again I'll have to put you in handcuffs, sir."
The next time I meet an airline employee who is even marginally helpful will be the first time. Every time I have interacted with one he or she was at best totally indifferent, and at worst actively trying to piss me off or fuck up my trip.
The only expert you are ever going to see in the cabin is the pilot on a trip to the john. Remember, these are the same SOBs who would have their customers breath filthy, disgusting air in order to save fuel.
Ahh, you have taken me right back to High School. Our computer lab was full of (hard) diskless . . . I think 286es, maybe 386sxes, with one "big bad" 486 upstairs running the Novell 286 network. Must have saved the school a small fortune in hard disks.
Ah, the hours spent playing Tank Wars off a floppy. The godlike sysop powers I was granted. Ramdisks. 10Base2. Word Perfect 5.1.
I'm not an old school UNIX guy, and I was never into BBSes. This was my early geekdom.
I had a 286 with a 287, and I think two megs, maybe four, of bus ram. Oh, and a bus mouse. And I upgraded to an RLL controller and got 50% more space on my disks. Then, of course I had to re-optimize my interleave with the Norton Disk Utilites . . .
God those were the days. Thanks for sending me down memory lane!
I think that NCs will get a niche. Secretaries, POS, stuff that is better off centralized and doesn't benefit from being local.
Out side of that, I think that they are doomed to fail as a mainstream "PC replacement" for a reason I haven't seen anyone else cite. That reason is; PCs are cheap. By the time you buy 10 NCs, with displays, and a bad-ass 4 (or more) way server to service them, you may as well have bought the same 10 displays and 11 PCs, the 11th for file/print sharing.
And I think that NCs have a negative economy of scale. I.e., if you have 100 desks instead of 10 you need 10 times what I described above, plus a SAN, and a bunch of network upgrades to handle the load.
Or, I suppose, you could do a shoddy job. Only buy enough processor power to handle average load. (And have human beings sitting around waiting for the system at peak times. That ain't cheap.) And sit the whole thing on whatever network infrastructure you happen to have. (Hope you've got 100Mb switched, buddy.) Leaving you with a crappy system that cost as much as giving everyone a PC.
And don't give me a bunch of TCO crap. You aren't going to convince me that the army of real admins that will be needed to keep all those terminal servers going is going to be cheaper than running a helpdesk with a Ghost image on hair a trigger.
-Peter
Re:But why support Athlon first?
on
nVidia nForce
·
· Score: 2
Well, I don't know squat about how processors really work. Allow me to display my ignorance . . .
It seems that even reasonably "optimized" code will only see a significant clock-for-clock performance gain on a PIV when it is "lucky" to need the right work done to keep the pipeline filled.
Am I wrong here? Clearly the PIV could do some incredible stuff with the right synthetic benchmark, but do you really think that it is going to have a significant (again, clock-for-clock) advantage in real world apps once compilers catch up? If so, I think this is the minority opinion. Or am I wrong about that too?
-Peter
Re:But why support Athlon first?
on
nVidia nForce
·
· Score: 2
Maybe because the PIV is a piece of junk?
Intel tends to slump from time to time, but the i810 fiacso (including RAMBUS) followed by the PIV is very worrisome.
I think that AMD stands to hit is big with the right chipset. This may just be it.
You know, it takes 15 seconds to make a girl pregnant.
Hey, speak for yourself on that one!;-)
[I]f a thirteen year old becomes pregnant it is the parent who has failed. But in my opinion, it is more likely that the parent has failed to grant privacy when s/he should have.
Hmm, I think there is a phenomenon that you are describing here that you don't really understand. It is when a child is too SHELTERED that this happens, not too supervised.
It is VERY important that a child be exposed to things as he grows up. Keeping a child in a bubble until 18 then letting him loose on the world is just as unfair as letting him loose on the world at seven. You see, it is the SAME problem, he doesn't have the EXPERIENCE to make good decisions.
Where we seem to disagree is that I think that it is parents' job to see to it that this experience happens in a controlled way, stepping in before something that isn't easily undone happens.
You seem to think that kids will just know how to do the right thing if you don't bug them too much. I think you are dead wrong.
I can't disagree strongly enough. Kids should be able to EARN some privacy by displaying responsible behavior, but what they are ENTITLED to is adult supervision.
A responsible sixteen year old should have a fair bit of privacy. The question was about an eleven year old, who should have virtually none. (outside the obvious, showering, dressing, etc.)
Don't forget we are talking about the Internet here. The Internet at its best is a useful research tool, a place to build communities, and a powerful way for people to understand each other better. At its worse, it is a red-light district minus cops and a reasonable ability to guess how old patrons are.
Bottom line, what kids ARE entitled to is parents to supervise them, and don't give them enough freedom to make major mistakes until they are old enough to handle that freedom.
When a thirteen year old becomes pregnant it is the parent who has failed. Unfortunately it is the child who lives with the consequences. It is also the child who is MOST in need of being molded who is now treated as an adult, because she has a child of her own.
It is your ethical duty TO monitor your kids. That is what parents are there to do, monitor, guide, and mold their children. If you AREN'T monitoring them your are failing them.
Now, it is obviously good to build trust with your kids, but it is better for your kids to think your too nosy than to end up dead in a ditch.
I don't know why, but people seem to think that 1. kids are small adults and 2. that parents are supposed to be a built in best friend.
Your kids should respect you. If you treat them like miniature adults that are your best buddy they won't. And you are setting them up for problems.
Today's unsupervised eleven year old is tomorrow's "out of control teen" on daytime TV.
That's weird. I thought the same thing as the original poster (that 80dpi is ass.)
When I saw your post my bullshit detector went off. "No way that a monitor is only 72dpi. My old HP LJIII was 300dpi and it was good, but not great (like the 1200dpi ones today) a monitor looks almost as good.
So, I whipped out my mad trig skills.
17in, 1024x768 ~= 75.29dpi.
Gotta' get that bullshit detector fixed.
Anyway, why is it that my monitor (20in at 1024x768, so the dpi is less than 75) looks almost as good as that old LJIII output?
Cannot focus the beam, as the reflector is inside the LED itself
Couldn't they just point the LED the "wrong" way (toward the batteries) and an external reflector? Then just twist to change the position of the LED relative the reflector . . .
Of course things cost money. I don't think anyone here disagrees with you.
The problem is that this company offered a service, people signed up for it, and then the company changed the rules.
I think that we can all agree that the company should have set terms it could live with at the outset. Since they didn't do that, they are now in the position of having to alienate its customers or run at a loss, and they have no one but themselves to blame.
Of course, they probably would have thought this out better if they weren't a monopoly (and, therefore, alienating customers would harm their business.)
You miss my point entirely. Sure, most companies have a department called "Human Resources." Maybe I have a problem with that too.
What I was saying, however, is that in the original post the poster refers to a person as "the resource" on two occasions.
Now, I'm not into a bunch of hippie crap, but I think that it makes good business sense (not to mention that it is the right thing to do) for companies (i.e. management) to treat people like <gasp> human beings.
I think that referring to a person as "a resource" 1. implies ownership 2. implies that a person does not have unique qualities, that he is simply a cog in the machine.
What it doesn't imply is respect for the person as a human being.
I think that any company that treats people this way deserves to (and inevitably will) have employees that behave like mindless drones. I don't know of any management team that would state that they want "mindless drones" for their workforce.
Finally, I don't find the word resource insulting, but words reflect values and attitudes. I believe that I have expressed above what I find insulting about the attitude expressed in the original post.
I hope that any company that (1) Thinks in terms of "let[ing]" people leave the company and (2) refers to an employee (i.e. a human being) as a "resource" gets the sort of productivity out of those resources that it deserves. None.
Obviously she can't call the guys at GNOME for customer support, or the guys at KDE to ask why Konqueror isn't rending a webpage properly. It these things that are preventing it from being a true workstation for the masses.
When is the last time you called MS for support? If you are like most users, the answer is "never."
I think that this argument is functionally equivalent to the "who are you going to sue" argument. There is no real safety (or in this case support) there, but there is a psychological difference in running software "backed" (read any MS EULA to see why I put the word backed in quotes) by a multi-billion dollar company.
MS pushes most of the support out to OEMs. The question, I suppose, is when is the advantage of having "the standard" (what I bastardization of the word) OS/Office/etc out weighed by the ridiculousness of paying for the privilege of supporting MS stuff vs. supporting Free stuff.
This point is being passed in the Intel based server market right now.
Or, are you talking about paid support? There is plenty of that for Linux, and is, in my experience, of better quality. Again, when is the last time you called MS support?
Then the common answer for people that are struggling with Linux and always asking questions is "RTFM", well guess what, there are people out there that don't want to learn about a computer, but just use it. And futher more, I doubt this person has a book on GNOME, and people trying to learn GNOME aren't going to know GNOME has built in documentation
This argument is hollow. The GNOME help system is functionally identical to the windows help system, as is the KDE help system. If there is any difference here it is in third party products (video professor, teach yourself MS office in 28 days, etc.)
Not only that, Linux tries to mix Server and Workstation too much.. Once again, the average geek will like this, but most people don't care if they have a telnet server running, in fact its a huge security risk for the average home user.
This is a problem in general, but try an "all defaults" install of Redhat 7.1. It is easily as secure as a "windows power user's" box with black ice or whatever, and is easier to install. (given like installs. Installing RH 7.1 in a single boot, stock install is no harder than the Win98 equivalent. Much easier than the original Win95 on a system with PIXII and USB.)
I hate to nitpick one of the only people who understands that I'm not talking about 5.25s but . . .
720k floppies are "double density" 1.44s are "high density" (Look for the groovy HD logo printed on (or more often molded into) the disk.
Couldn't get my cool ASCII art past the lameness filter:-(
You are absolutely right about the media being different though. The coercivity is different. In fact, if I recall correctly the fields are aligned 90 degrees out (but that may be 2.88s.)
I'm pretty sure all PC drives read both sides, no flipping.
Slashdot Mirror
You quoted the wrong part.
You should have quoted "Mailing lists have most of the advantages of Newsgroups" but then you wouldn't have had a nit to pick, since the things that you mention are clearly things that aren't coverd by that "most."
Unless you consider the features of Newsgroups that you cited to be the downside . . .
-Peter
Usenet is largely dead. Mailing lists have picked up the slack.
Mailing lists have most of the advantages of Newsgroups while being easy to keep free of spam, address harvesting, and (undesired) automated posts. Add an archive and FTP and you have a total Newsgroup replacement, with none of the downside.
-Peter
I think a more accurate analogy would be:
If your computer came with (i.e. you paid for) a year's supply of dog food, but they waited for your check to clear and then told you that you have to take their dog that shits on your rug in order to get the food, would you expect any recourse?
I would.
-Peter
Have you ever flown?
"Sir I'm veeerry sorrry that the connection isn't working . . . but if you mention it again I'll have to put you in handcuffs, sir."
The next time I meet an airline employee who is even marginally helpful will be the first time. Every time I have interacted with one he or she was at best totally indifferent, and at worst actively trying to piss me off or fuck up my trip.
The only expert you are ever going to see in the cabin is the pilot on a trip to the john. Remember, these are the same SOBs who would have their customers breath filthy, disgusting air in order to save fuel.
Ahh, you have taken me right back to High School. Our computer lab was full of (hard) diskless . . . I think 286es, maybe 386sxes, with one "big bad" 486 upstairs running the Novell 286 network. Must have saved the school a small fortune in hard disks.
Ah, the hours spent playing Tank Wars off a floppy. The godlike sysop powers I was granted. Ramdisks. 10Base2. Word Perfect 5.1.
I'm not an old school UNIX guy, and I was never into BBSes. This was my early geekdom.
I had a 286 with a 287, and I think two megs, maybe four, of bus ram. Oh, and a bus mouse. And I upgraded to an RLL controller and got 50% more space on my disks. Then, of course I had to re-optimize my interleave with the Norton Disk Utilites . . .
God those were the days. Thanks for sending me down memory lane!
-Peter
left the cashiers asking customers how much they usually spent on groceries, and charging them that amount.
Geez, the differences between the English and Americans never fails to blow me away. I can't imagine this happening in the US.
Here some smartass 17 year-old chickie would just stare at you while your ice cream melted until you became so disgusted you left.
The other day some guy was talking about "fagging" like that was some everyday thing and I should, naturally, know what it is.
"Smaller than a VCR"? That dosen't sound like much. Do you mean smaller than a VHS tape? That would be something.
-Peter
I think that NCs will get a niche. Secretaries, POS, stuff that is better off centralized and doesn't benefit from being local.
Out side of that, I think that they are doomed to fail as a mainstream "PC replacement" for a reason I haven't seen anyone else cite. That reason is; PCs are cheap. By the time you buy 10 NCs, with displays, and a bad-ass 4 (or more) way server to service them, you may as well have bought the same 10 displays and 11 PCs, the 11th for file/print sharing.
And I think that NCs have a negative economy of scale. I.e., if you have 100 desks instead of 10 you need 10 times what I described above, plus a SAN, and a bunch of network upgrades to handle the load.
Or, I suppose, you could do a shoddy job. Only buy enough processor power to handle average load. (And have human beings sitting around waiting for the system at peak times. That ain't cheap.) And sit the whole thing on whatever network infrastructure you happen to have. (Hope you've got 100Mb switched, buddy.) Leaving you with a crappy system that cost as much as giving everyone a PC.
And don't give me a bunch of TCO crap. You aren't going to convince me that the army of real admins that will be needed to keep all those terminal servers going is going to be cheaper than running a helpdesk with a Ghost image on hair a trigger.
-Peter
Well, I don't know squat about how processors really work. Allow me to display my ignorance . . .
It seems that even reasonably "optimized" code will only see a significant clock-for-clock performance gain on a PIV when it is "lucky" to need the right work done to keep the pipeline filled.
Am I wrong here? Clearly the PIV could do some incredible stuff with the right synthetic benchmark, but do you really think that it is going to have a significant (again, clock-for-clock) advantage in real world apps once compilers catch up? If so, I think this is the minority opinion. Or am I wrong about that too?
-Peter
Maybe because the PIV is a piece of junk?
Intel tends to slump from time to time, but the i810 fiacso (including RAMBUS) followed by the PIV is very worrisome.
I think that AMD stands to hit is big with the right chipset. This may just be it.
-Peter
You know, it takes 15 seconds to make a girl pregnant.
;-)
Hey, speak for yourself on that one!
[I]f a thirteen year old becomes pregnant it is the parent who has failed. But in my opinion, it is more likely that the parent has failed to grant privacy when s/he should have.
Hmm, I think there is a phenomenon that you are describing here that you don't really understand. It is when a child is too SHELTERED that this happens, not too supervised.
It is VERY important that a child be exposed to things as he grows up. Keeping a child in a bubble until 18 then letting him loose on the world is just as unfair as letting him loose on the world at seven. You see, it is the SAME problem, he doesn't have the EXPERIENCE to make good decisions.
Where we seem to disagree is that I think that it is parents' job to see to it that this experience happens in a controlled way, stepping in before something that isn't easily undone happens.
You seem to think that kids will just know how to do the right thing if you don't bug them too much. I think you are dead wrong.
-Peter
I can't disagree strongly enough. Kids should be able to EARN some privacy by displaying responsible behavior, but what they are ENTITLED to is adult supervision.
A responsible sixteen year old should have a fair bit of privacy. The question was about an eleven year old, who should have virtually none. (outside the obvious, showering, dressing, etc.)
Don't forget we are talking about the Internet here. The Internet at its best is a useful research tool, a place to build communities, and a powerful way for people to understand each other better. At its worse, it is a red-light district minus cops and a reasonable ability to guess how old patrons are.
Bottom line, what kids ARE entitled to is parents to supervise them, and don't give them enough freedom to make major mistakes until they are old enough to handle that freedom.
When a thirteen year old becomes pregnant it is the parent who has failed. Unfortunately it is the child who lives with the consequences. It is also the child who is MOST in need of being molded who is now treated as an adult, because she has a child of her own.
What's ethical about that?
-Peter
I hate to chime in so late but . . .
I take issue with the premise of the question.
It is your ethical duty TO monitor your kids. That is what parents are there to do, monitor, guide, and mold their children. If you AREN'T monitoring them your are failing them.
Now, it is obviously good to build trust with your kids, but it is better for your kids to think your too nosy than to end up dead in a ditch.
I don't know why, but people seem to think that 1. kids are small adults and 2. that parents are supposed to be a built in best friend.
Your kids should respect you. If you treat them like miniature adults that are your best buddy they won't. And you are setting them up for problems.
Today's unsupervised eleven year old is tomorrow's "out of control teen" on daytime TV.
-Peter
That's weird. I thought the same thing as the original poster (that 80dpi is ass.)
When I saw your post my bullshit detector went off. "No way that a monitor is only 72dpi. My old HP LJIII was 300dpi and it was good, but not great (like the 1200dpi ones today) a monitor looks almost as good.
So, I whipped out my mad trig skills.
17in, 1024x768 ~= 75.29dpi.
Gotta' get that bullshit detector fixed.
Anyway, why is it that my monitor (20in at 1024x768, so the dpi is less than 75) looks almost as good as that old LJIII output?
-Peter
Cannot focus the beam, as the reflector is inside the LED itself
Couldn't they just point the LED the "wrong" way (toward the batteries) and an external reflector? Then just twist to change the position of the LED relative the reflector . . .
I'm afraid that I'm not really following you.
If you are saying that the word "the" in front of GPL in unnecessary, I would disagree.
Read both of the following, aloud:
"This software is licensed under GNU Public License."
"This software is licensed under the GNU Public License."
-Peter
The press release refers to "licensing terms", but the license is the GPL.
What in the world does this mean? The GPL was a license and had several terms last time I checked.
-Peter
Of course things cost money. I don't think anyone here disagrees with you.
The problem is that this company offered a service, people signed up for it, and then the company changed the rules.
I think that we can all agree that the company should have set terms it could live with at the outset. Since they didn't do that, they are now in the position of having to alienate its customers or run at a loss, and they have no one but themselves to blame.
Of course, they probably would have thought this out better if they weren't a monopoly (and, therefore, alienating customers would harm their business.)
-Peter
You miss my point entirely. Sure, most companies have a department called "Human Resources." Maybe I have a problem with that too.
What I was saying, however, is that in the original post the poster refers to a person as "the resource" on two occasions.
Now, I'm not into a bunch of hippie crap, but I think that it makes good business sense (not to mention that it is the right thing to do) for companies (i.e. management) to treat people like <gasp> human beings.
I think that referring to a person as "a resource" 1. implies ownership 2. implies that a person does not have unique qualities, that he is simply a cog in the machine.
What it doesn't imply is respect for the person as a human being.
I think that any company that treats people this way deserves to (and inevitably will) have employees that behave like mindless drones. I don't know of any management team that would state that they want "mindless drones" for their workforce.
Finally, I don't find the word resource insulting, but words reflect values and attitudes. I believe that I have expressed above what I find insulting about the attitude expressed in the original post.
-Peter
I hope that any company that (1) Thinks in terms of "let[ing]" people leave the company and (2) refers to an employee (i.e. a human being) as a "resource" gets the sort of productivity out of those resources that it deserves. None.
Or am I feeding a troll?
-Peter
Obviously she can't call the guys at GNOME for customer support, or the guys at KDE to ask why Konqueror isn't rending a webpage properly. It these things that are preventing it from being a true workstation for the masses.
When is the last time you called MS for support? If you are like most users, the answer is "never."
I think that this argument is functionally equivalent to the "who are you going to sue" argument. There is no real safety (or in this case support) there, but there is a psychological difference in running software "backed" (read any MS EULA to see why I put the word backed in quotes) by a multi-billion dollar company.
MS pushes most of the support out to OEMs. The question, I suppose, is when is the advantage of having "the standard" (what I bastardization of the word) OS/Office/etc out weighed by the ridiculousness of paying for the privilege of supporting MS stuff vs. supporting Free stuff.
This point is being passed in the Intel based server market right now.
Or, are you talking about paid support? There is plenty of that for Linux, and is, in my experience, of better quality. Again, when is the last time you called MS support?
Then the common answer for people that are struggling with Linux and always asking questions is "RTFM", well guess what, there are people out there that don't want to learn about a computer, but just use it. And futher more, I doubt this person has a book on GNOME, and people trying to learn GNOME aren't going to know GNOME has built in documentation
This argument is hollow. The GNOME help system is functionally identical to the windows help system, as is the KDE help system. If there is any difference here it is in third party products (video professor, teach yourself MS office in 28 days, etc.)
Not only that, Linux tries to mix Server and Workstation too much.. Once again, the average geek will like this, but most people don't care if they have a telnet server running, in fact its a huge security risk for the average home user.
This is a problem in general, but try an "all defaults" install of Redhat 7.1. It is easily as secure as a "windows power user's" box with black ice or whatever, and is easier to install. (given like installs. Installing RH 7.1 in a single boot, stock install is no harder than the Win98 equivalent. Much easier than the original Win95 on a system with PIXII and USB.)
-Peter
Offtopic?!?!
Flamebiat? Maybe. Troll? Probably.
But it was most certainly on topic.
Don't moderate people as off topic if you aren't familiar with the subject.
By way of explanation, the "inner secret" of Scientology is reportedly (right here on slashdot) that people are a bunch of aliens all stuck together.
So my comment was right on topic.
I'm off topic? You're off topic! The whole moderation system is off topic! (But then you probably won't get that reference, either.)
-Peter
. . . if I had a bunch of aliens stuck to me.
-Peter
I hate to nitpick one of the only people who understands that I'm not talking about 5.25s but . . .
:-(
720k floppies are "double density" 1.44s are "high density" (Look for the groovy HD logo printed on (or more often molded into) the disk.
Couldn't get my cool ASCII art past the lameness filter
You are absolutely right about the media being different though. The coercivity is different. In fact, if I recall correctly the fields are aligned 90 degrees out (but that may be 2.88s.)
I'm pretty sure all PC drives read both sides, no flipping.
-Peter
I wasn't allowed to touch my dad's C64 (with disk drive) I was relegated to the VIC-20 with (audio)tape drive.
I did use the 5.25 trick in my Jr. High AppleSoft BASIC class, though.
-Peter