I think that all right-thinking people in this country are sick and tired of being told that ordinary decent people are fed up in this country with being sick and tired. I'm certainly not. But I'm sick and tired of being told that I am.
My biggest gripe with all "big screen" laptops is that tiny keyboard stuck in the middle of the huge room of the bottom part. So instead of giving us correctly placed arrow keys, full-size enter, Ins/Del placed conveniently, just for websurfing and games on bigscreen, they stuff the remaining rum with numpad. Yeah, great for widescreen accounting and displaying several columns extra in Excel, isn't it? Oh, and yes, and since the numpad took some extra place, and the rest of horizontal space was wasted with inch-wide margins on both sides and some extra column of "custom" keys, stuff all the keys that in a normal laptop fit in a column right from enter, just below it right Control, where you rest your wrists.
Depends on what you want. Linux is mainstream and will remain mainstream. NetBSD is a narrow side road that can help you learning a lot of philosophy of the system, is a rather pleasant experience, but doesn't lead too far. So if you feel like investing some of your time in learning a new skill that comes in handy if you are facing obscure marginal architectures and obsolete-but-good hardware, NetBSD is definitely worth a try. But as all marginal stuff, there's a good chance you will never face it, and installing NetBSD on anything with better than 500MHz CPU is some kind of mistake. It's good for some computer necromancy and surely teaches a thing or two about the workings of the net and Unices in general, but by itself it's too -small- to be of significant value by itself. Although it obviously makes some nice simple servers or comfortable "thin clients".
Most of Windows "administrators" do. Been there, done that, 8 classes, about 25 pupils each, adding a single entry taking about 5 mins of mostly mindless clicking the same options again and again. I searched help for options on automation of this process. "Automatic mass-editing of user database is available in Enterprise Edition of the package. Small Business and educational versions don't support this feature." No, my loathing for Microsoft got only slightly deeper then.
Come on, man, this IS ugly in the PERL-UGLY style. It's not "because it's the first parameter" but because you can omit the designations as long as you give the parameters in "predefined" order. Would you like to be forced to use echo --output-string "hello world" or ls --directory=. ?
I'm on page 6 already and I must say I start liking msh more and more. It's completely un-microsoftish! - It's very easy to shoot yourself in the foot. Extremely easy - anything that is not a command is an expression that is evaluated, so a typo may pass unnoticed and without a warning. - It provides lots of sweet syntactic sugar making things easy and terse while not overly obscuring them. - It takes some of the best from lots of other languages. Shamelessly too. ($_, select, | etc) - It makes some evilly hack-friendly assumptions ("current instance" is the current directory) - It will likely suck as an interactive shell, but makes simple scripts to automate system tasks obscenely easy. Likely, no more repeating 1000 times "click add user, type username, type password twice, mark 'Password never expires', enter Groups, select 'staff', click 'add group', click OK, click OK".
It really looks like the project was created by the programmers while the management was on vacations, then all the details hidden and managers just fed with marketspeech while programmers worked on a tool that would finally make THEIR OWN life easier, instead of just appealing to managers of customer companies and making programmers' life more painful.
Add to that: One booster fails to fire on launch of the shuttle: The shuttle, in a wide arc, propelled with the remaining thruster, crashes and explodes. One booster fails to fire here: The astronauts use the ladder to get back down because the rocket doesn't move an inch.
NetBSD. I've found myself in similar situation once, Linux or Solaris wouldn't fit with reasonable amount of useful stuff on a 200M harddrive of an old SUN. Then I managed to fit most of the NetBSD distro, with 2 desktop managers, Netscape Navigator (pre-Moz times), bunch of servers for running a remote diskless workstation and still managed to cut 40M of diskspace for swap memory for that remote workstation:)
Install it on PentiumII 200MHZ with 64M RAM and 4GB hdd and see how long you can go without a reboot. I'm surfing the net from similar a configs on daily basis, with W98SE, WinNT4.0 and Linux and they are all pretty stable and fast. Meantime, a Celeron 1.5GHZ with 128M RAM and 40GB hdd, running XP Home Edition needs to be rebooted every few hours, as it slows down to a crawl.
Yeah, switch to "googlebot" and have free access to all these pay-for-registration sites.
Re:Can common/civil law override these licenses?
on
End User License Gems
·
· Score: 1
One guy killed, cooked and ate the other guy in Germany. With full consent, approval and by wish of the other guy. With all this on paper and with witnesses. Still, he got charged with murder. The papers, with consent for being killed, didn't override the country's law that prohibits killing people, no matter what.
By clicking the Big Red Button you agree that All Your Base Are Belong To Us!
Isn't God trying to tell us something?
on
Tier One ISPs Dying
·
· Score: -1, Troll
Isn't God trying to tell us something? I mean, look. WTC, the Tsunami, hurricanes, and now this. The egyptian plagues started off mildly and were getting more and more nasty too!
It's a natural bias. Media Writers use apple. And Media Writers are biased towards Media Writers. Just as there are so many movies about movies, how the content of the Internet is biased towards computers, how so much Hip-Hop is about making Hip-Hop, how journalists make a sensational news from a journalist being assaulted. Just see such rage from journalists if, say, laws of a farmer get broken that way!
It's a natural bias, that authors of given media are creating works about their media. And since media writers use macs, they write about macs. Nothing strange here.
Assuming the Nigerian admin will know it. Sand him to Microsoft training centre. Provide network access. Service the computers. Provide media for backups. Train the users. There's way more to TCO than salaries. BTW, the 8% figure came from a Microsoft expert, so take it with a grain of salt:)
I doubt it. Have you seen the training of a Microsoft Certified admin? They aren't taught the underlying concepts and understanding of the problem. They are taught to click that and enter this kind of value into that field. It's more like training monkeys than studies. Such people are no danger for Microsoft, because unless they learned by themselves from other sources, they can't click their way out of "Internet Settings" without a manual.
The key sentence of TFA is "Microsoft has claimed the cost of software is not an important issue in the developing world."
And while you might attack it on how wrong it is, it's mostly true. Piracy is high enough in these countries that real cost of the software is nowhere near the cost of purchase, and even with near 0% piracy, the cost of purchase is still about 8% of TCO, no matter what software. So where is Microsoft wrong?
Governments of developing countries, or all countries for that matter, need Free Software. Not necessarily "gratis". But "free": Transparent for government (no backdoors - open source) Transparent for citizens (no illegal activity by government - open source) Free to integrate with the country's infrastructure (open standards) No vendor lock-in (Supportable by anyone - open specs, open standards, open source) Customizable at will (Open Source) Freely accessible for all the citizens (GPL or other non-locking license) Providing opportunities for local economy (Open source)
Most of it can't be assured by proprietary software from big overseas corporations. All of it is provided by Free Software. And cost is almost irrelevant in this kind of consideration, so Microsoft claiming their software is not worse because cost is not an important issue makes a moot point.
Sure. The article doesn't say anything special. The special stuff is written between the lines. "the average annual salary in the West African country is only $160", so the only way to gain any profit from the market is to lock them in now. Train them for free, give the copies away for free, and when they are developed enough, they will know only Microsoft and buy only from them. If some big corporations decided to support Linux in Africa, train people in using it, help installing it - they would very likely help them more, reducing total cost for the countries now and later, provide them with open formats, free from vendor lock-in etc. All the good stuff, but there's no big money for the corporations for doing this, so they aren't interested in such noble, charitable enterprise. Meantime doping the suckers into using our crap now, and they will pay us to use it later... that's what Microsoft does.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that all right-thinking people in this country are sick and
tired of being told that ordinary decent people are fed up in this
country with being sick and tired. I'm certainly not. But I'm
sick and tired of being told that I am.
Yeah, they are meant for these people who fly 1st class. :P
My biggest gripe with all "big screen" laptops is that tiny keyboard stuck in the middle of the huge room of the bottom part. So instead of giving us correctly placed arrow keys, full-size enter, Ins/Del placed conveniently, just for websurfing and games on bigscreen, they stuff the remaining rum with numpad. Yeah, great for widescreen accounting and displaying several columns extra in Excel, isn't it? Oh, and yes, and since the numpad took some extra place, and the rest of horizontal space was wasted with inch-wide margins on both sides and some extra column of "custom" keys, stuff all the keys that in a normal laptop fit in a column right from enter, just below it right Control, where you rest your wrists.
Depends on what you want. Linux is mainstream and will remain mainstream. NetBSD is a narrow side road that can help you learning a lot of philosophy of the system, is a rather pleasant experience, but doesn't lead too far. So if you feel like investing some of your time in learning a new skill that comes in handy if you are facing obscure marginal architectures and obsolete-but-good hardware, NetBSD is definitely worth a try. But as all marginal stuff, there's a good chance you will never face it, and installing NetBSD on anything with better than 500MHz CPU is some kind of mistake. It's good for some computer necromancy and surely teaches a thing or two about the workings of the net and Unices in general, but by itself it's too -small- to be of significant value by itself. Although it obviously makes some nice simple servers or comfortable "thin clients".
Most of Windows "administrators" do.
Been there, done that, 8 classes, about 25 pupils each, adding a single entry taking about 5 mins of mostly mindless clicking the same options again and again. I searched help for options on automation of this process. "Automatic mass-editing of user database is available in Enterprise Edition of the package. Small Business and educational versions don't support this feature."
No, my loathing for Microsoft got only slightly deeper then.
Come on, man, this IS ugly in the PERL-UGLY style. It's not "because it's the first parameter" but because you can omit the designations as long as you give the parameters in "predefined" order. Would you like to be forced to use echo --output-string "hello world" or ls --directory=. ?
I'm on page 6 already and I must say I start liking msh more and more.
It's completely un-microsoftish!
- It's very easy to shoot yourself in the foot. Extremely easy - anything that is not a command is an expression that is evaluated, so a typo may pass unnoticed and without a warning.
- It provides lots of sweet syntactic sugar making things easy and terse while not overly obscuring them.
- It takes some of the best from lots of other languages. Shamelessly too. ($_, select, | etc)
- It makes some evilly hack-friendly assumptions ("current instance" is the current directory)
- It will likely suck as an interactive shell, but makes simple scripts to automate system tasks obscenely easy. Likely, no more repeating 1000 times "click add user, type username, type password twice, mark 'Password never expires', enter Groups, select 'staff', click 'add group', click OK, click OK".
It really looks like the project was created by the programmers while the management was on vacations, then all the details hidden and managers just fed with marketspeech while programmers worked on a tool that would finally make THEIR OWN life easier, instead of just appealing to managers of customer companies and making programmers' life more painful.
Add to that: One booster fails to fire on launch of the shuttle: The shuttle, in a wide arc, propelled with the remaining thruster, crashes and explodes. One booster fails to fire here: The astronauts use the ladder to get back down because the rocket doesn't move an inch.
See? It's Minix 3 already, while Linux is still in 2.x! ;)
NetBSD. :)
I've found myself in similar situation once, Linux or Solaris wouldn't fit with reasonable amount of useful stuff on a 200M harddrive of an old SUN. Then I managed to fit most of the NetBSD distro, with 2 desktop managers, Netscape Navigator (pre-Moz times), bunch of servers for running a remote diskless workstation and still managed to cut 40M of diskspace for swap memory for that remote workstation
All the fake "I'm MSIE" Opera ID strings contain "(Opera)" by the end, so any self-respecting stats program should register them correctly.
Install it on PentiumII 200MHZ with 64M RAM and 4GB hdd and see how long you can go without a reboot. I'm surfing the net from similar a configs on daily basis, with W98SE, WinNT4.0 and Linux and they are all pretty stable and fast. Meantime, a Celeron 1.5GHZ with 128M RAM and 40GB hdd, running XP Home Edition needs to be rebooted every few hours, as it slows down to a crawl.
Yeah, switch to "googlebot" and have free access to all these pay-for-registration sites.
One guy killed, cooked and ate the other guy in Germany. With full consent, approval and by wish of the other guy. With all this on paper and with witnesses. Still, he got charged with murder. The papers, with consent for being killed, didn't override the country's law that prohibits killing people, no matter what.
By clicking the Big Red Button you agree that All Your Base Are Belong To Us!
Isn't God trying to tell us something? I mean, look. WTC, the Tsunami, hurricanes, and now this. The egyptian plagues started off mildly and were getting more and more nasty too!
Luckily, seems no. At least this happens way more rarely than a Broken Arrow to get a name.
Empty caches, histories, lookup databases etc. Wait a week and it will be the same.
It's a natural bias. Media Writers use apple. And Media Writers are biased towards Media Writers. Just as there are so many movies about movies, how the content of the Internet is biased towards computers, how so much Hip-Hop is about making Hip-Hop, how journalists make a sensational news from a journalist being assaulted. Just see such rage from journalists if, say, laws of a farmer get broken that way!
It's a natural bias, that authors of given media are creating works about their media. And since media writers use macs, they write about macs. Nothing strange here.
Assuming the Nigerian admin will know it. Sand him to Microsoft training centre. Provide network access. Service the computers. Provide media for backups. Train the users. :)
There's way more to TCO than salaries. BTW, the 8% figure came from a Microsoft expert, so take it with a grain of salt
I doubt it. Have you seen the training of a Microsoft Certified admin? They aren't taught the underlying concepts and understanding of the problem. They are taught to click that and enter this kind of value into that field. It's more like training monkeys than studies. Such people are no danger for Microsoft, because unless they learned by themselves from other sources, they can't click their way out of "Internet Settings" without a manual.
Sure, so let's teach them how to service OUR tractors that cost thrice the price of competition and break down twice as often...
The key sentence of TFA is "Microsoft has claimed the cost of software is not an important issue in the developing world."
And while you might attack it on how wrong it is, it's mostly true. Piracy is high enough in these countries that real cost of the software is nowhere near the cost of purchase, and even with near 0% piracy, the cost of purchase is still about 8% of TCO, no matter what software. So where is Microsoft wrong?
Governments of developing countries, or all countries for that matter, need Free Software. Not necessarily "gratis". But "free":
Transparent for government (no backdoors - open source)
Transparent for citizens (no illegal activity by government - open source)
Free to integrate with the country's infrastructure (open standards)
No vendor lock-in (Supportable by anyone - open specs, open standards, open source)
Customizable at will (Open Source)
Freely accessible for all the citizens (GPL or other non-locking license)
Providing opportunities for local economy (Open source)
Most of it can't be assured by proprietary software from big overseas corporations. All of it is provided by Free Software. And cost is almost irrelevant in this kind of consideration, so Microsoft claiming their software is not worse because cost is not an important issue makes a moot point.
RTFA. Or RTTOTFA (...title of...).
That's ZDNET who said that.
Sure. The article doesn't say anything special. The special stuff is written between the lines. "the average annual salary in the West African country is only $160", so the only way to gain any profit from the market is to lock them in now. Train them for free, give the copies away for free, and when they are developed enough, they will know only Microsoft and buy only from them.
If some big corporations decided to support Linux in Africa, train people in using it, help installing it - they would very likely help them more, reducing total cost for the countries now and later, provide them with open formats, free from vendor lock-in etc. All the good stuff, but there's no big money for the corporations for doing this, so they aren't interested in such noble, charitable enterprise. Meantime doping the suckers into using our crap now, and they will pay us to use it later... that's what Microsoft does.