... noticeably Excel and Word, for which there are no viable replacements at this time for serious users (please don't say Open Office, it's like saying The Gimp is a viable alternative to Photoshop for professionals).
LaTeX my friend, saying Word is a viable replacement for serious professionals is laughable.
Everybody uses these all the time, and I note he didn't mention nice or renice - the ones nobody ever uses.
So not true, lots of folks re-nice the spamassassin daemon to keep it from chewing up resources. Though, I do agree that they deserve a mention even though the article seems to be targeted at beginners. To be fair, the Slashdot title was a bit misleading - even compared to the summary.
Wow, we've had great success working with HP's warranty folks. I'm on a committee in charge of handing out ~65 tables to Physics juniors and we loaded ALL our tablets dual-boot with Ubuntu and Windows XP Tablet PC Edition. We've had warranty take care of broken pens, monitors, keyboards, hard-drives, and batteries all with very little hassle. All of their diagnostic tools are in the BIOS so they haven't cared what OS is on the machine.
While I'll admit that support needs to get better, you can still run Wine on 64-bit. For Ubuntu this means you need to download the ".deb" file for the Wine release and install the package like this:
I'm not in Colorado, so I don't know their particular statute of frauds, but in general it requires a contract, signed, in writing for things over $500.
Colorado is a verbal contract state, you don't have to write anything down or have any witnesses.
With all due respect Mr. Hawking, calculate the number of permutations necessary for just _one_ of those bubbles to account for the perfect symbiosis between entropy, gravity, mass, and everything else which keeps this Universe and life intact after an expulsion from the birth canals of mother void.
Low probability * infinite time * large simultaneous occurrence = certainty
We just observe from the vantage point of a successful universe. Take a course on Thermal Physics and you'll likely discuss this topic.
So long as they don't create a black hole somewhere.:) It wouldn't matter, tiny black holes go away on their own. The derivation is not listed here (it's just stated) but I can assure you that it's loads of fun to calculate.
As it is we have no choice but to cope with a world where Motorola is relegated to handhelds, HP has partnered with Compaq and become just another x86 retailer, and Microsoft holds a betting majority of the chips when it comes to influencing the direction of software development and globally recognized protocols.
That's not entirely true. There are people fighting back, you do have a choice. I know everyone hates it when you pull out the "Linux" card, but from my perspective it is a perfectly viable alternative for many people. Let's look at the checklist:
Email: Check
Web browsing: Check
Word Processing: Check
Simple games (Solitaire, Web Games): Check
Simple GUI (for some): Check
Complicated command-line (for others): Check
Commercial Games: Depends
Yeah, that list is pretty short but what do most people do on their computers? Not much.
And gaming is currently where Linux falls short. I think if more games (that people want to play) were available with native Linux support, more people would be willing to switch.
In my experience, people don't care if it's native support or not - if people can run their games under Wine then they're just as happy. Wine effectively runs a lot of games these days (like World of Warcraft and Command and Conquer: Generals) and isn't far from supporting the latest and greatest (for example, the Command and Conquer 3 demo is completely playable but crashes after several minutes).
(a) They identified the infringer's IP address correctly but are mistaken in thinking it was assigned to you during the relevant time window; or
This is more complicated than you make it out to be - just because your ISP assigns you an IP address doesn't mean you have to use it. You can very easily spoof someone else's IP, and if you were up to something inappropriate (say, a huge file sharer) you might want to do that. Before you move on and say "but then you can check the MAC address", you can change your MAC address too - it's not that hard.
One of the networks I connect to regularly registers and tracks computers based on MAC address, where you must fill out a form to use the internet. In order to not have to fill out the damn form every time I'm using a new computer, or switch from using a hard-line to the wireless, I've registered the address DE:AD:CA:FE:BA:BE. So, I can easily change the MAC address of whatever computer I'm using to an already registered MAC. However, that MAC is "mine" and is personally registered to me - if someone on the same network wanted to do something illicit then they could easily dump the DHCP or ARP traffic on the network and randomly pick someone else's MAC address. You can do this with your home ISP as well, it's like identity theft for computers and it's not hard at all.
Re:Does Vista have anything we need?
on
Is Vista a Trap?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Wine is great and all, but that's really just not going to cut it. Like it or not, you are going to need Vista for DirectX10...there's no doubt about that.
"Rumor" is that DirectX 10 is very similar to DirectX 9, there has even been some discussion that Wine will make a Windows XP port of the DirectX 10 libraries (once they're done of course).
A botnet could e designed to get the install key and send it back to someone who could maintain a database of valid keys.
And if it didn't do anything particularly insidious then it could pass off in the background for some time before anyone even noticed, and by the time anyone noticed MS would have a major problem on their hands.
People who want linux preloaded also want professional grade support.
Not necessarily, I voted for it and I can honestly say that as long as they sell a reasonably complete "works with linux" package I'd be happy. I would prefer that I can select an option to have it preloaded with Ubuntu and all the proprietary drivers but I definitely don't need "professional grade support". I plan on buying a new system this summer and I'm hoping that I can get it pre-built (cost of individual components relative to a pre-built system is getting kinda ridiculous). When I looked for systems that meet my needs on Dell's website I ran into the following problems:
1) No high-end AMD systems (their instruction set is better supported on Linux)
2) High-end systems do not provide an option for high-end nVidia cards (their drivers work better on linux)
3) All high-end systems require purchase of MS Windows
These problems are unacceptable and force me to look for alternative manufacturers. If you know of someone that will actually build a good linux system (desktop system, thank you very much) then let me know, otherwise I'm going to end up doing it myself again - and honestly, that's getting irritating.
Realtime support has been included in the mainline kernel for almost a whole four months now. I can't fathom why they aren't already using it on warships...
Realtime support has been included in several distributions (free and paid) for some time, the RTLinux project has been around since 1998. My understanding is that, for the most part, large changes don't get included into the mainline kernel until the've been independently proven to work without significant problems.
Try submitting to a scientific journal without it, or try writing a textbook (you ever wonder why they all look the same?), and you'll get back a list of organizations that you can pay to TeX your document for you. Since LaTeX easily outputs to PostScript and PDF it's also very easy to hand off your document to people that don't understand TeX.
This attack may come from someone who cracks the system and uses it to spy on others, or the attack may come from law-suits which (for whatever reason I can't currently imagine) demand that TiVo turn over records of what a particular person was watching. Or maybe this attack will never come.
You mean like the government deciding that some things are inappropriate to watch and they want a record of what you've been watching? They do the same thing already with books if they think you're a "suspicious" person.
The idea that corporations are "artificial persons" (slightly different wording, same basic idea) originated in England well before the U.S. was formed.
Is correct, however the "artificial persons" concept is more limited than that of a "corporate personhood" (at least according to the Wikipedia article). For example, in the United States a corporate personhood is entitled to basic human rights (where most other countries draw a distinction since corporations are not humans).
And, FYI, they aren't "practically indistinguishable" either, they have a distinct subset of the abilities of a regular person.
Sure, they can't vote or hold office. They can however:
* be found guilty of a crime
* be sentenced to pay restitution
* petition the government as a citizen
* not have their charter revoked by the state (killed)
and a host of other things. From my (admittedly limited) viewpoint of the subject I would consider that "practically indistinguishable" under our law.
It also might have something to do with that in the US we consider a corporation to be a "corporate personhood". So a corporation is practically indistinguishable from a person under our laws.
WTF? My, you're cruel - why don't you just come clean and tell your friend his CDROM drive won't play DVDs... Blaming it on not having Vista - sheesh! That's a good one.
He could mean DRMed DVDs, you have to install decss for that.
Oh, and Ubuntu doesn't run on 286s, either. Time for your friend to upgrade...
Here I totally agree with you, Windows barely runs on new machines when I've succeed in installing Ubuntu (headless) on a 386 (286 would not be possible since the instruction set is different, but even Windows 3.1 required an "80386 or higher processor").
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, we've had great success working with HP's warranty folks. I'm on a committee in charge of handing out ~65 tables to Physics juniors and we loaded ALL our tablets dual-boot with Ubuntu and Windows XP Tablet PC Edition. We've had warranty take care of broken pens, monitors, keyboards, hard-drives, and batteries all with very little hassle. All of their diagnostic tools are in the BIOS so they haven't cared what OS is on the machine.
We just observe from the vantage point of a successful universe. Take a course on Thermal Physics and you'll likely discuss this topic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole#Black_hol
Yeah, that list is pretty short but what do most people do on their computers? Not much.
In my experience, people don't care if it's native support or not - if people can run their games under Wine then they're just as happy. Wine effectively runs a lot of games these days (like World of Warcraft and Command and Conquer: Generals) and isn't far from supporting the latest and greatest (for example, the Command and Conquer 3 demo is completely playable but crashes after several minutes).
One of the networks I connect to regularly registers and tracks computers based on MAC address, where you must fill out a form to use the internet. In order to not have to fill out the damn form every time I'm using a new computer, or switch from using a hard-line to the wireless, I've registered the address DE:AD:CA:FE:BA:BE. So, I can easily change the MAC address of whatever computer I'm using to an already registered MAC. However, that MAC is "mine" and is personally registered to me - if someone on the same network wanted to do something illicit then they could easily dump the DHCP or ARP traffic on the network and randomly pick someone else's MAC address. You can do this with your home ISP as well, it's like identity theft for computers and it's not hard at all.
1) No high-end AMD systems (their instruction set is better supported on Linux)
2) High-end systems do not provide an option for high-end nVidia cards (their drivers work better on linux)
3) All high-end systems require purchase of MS Windows
These problems are unacceptable and force me to look for alternative manufacturers. If you know of someone that will actually build a good linux system (desktop system, thank you very much) then let me know, otherwise I'm going to end up doing it myself again - and honestly, that's getting irritating.
* be found guilty of a crime
* be sentenced to pay restitution
* petition the government as a citizen
* not have their charter revoked by the state (killed)
and a host of other things. From my (admittedly limited) viewpoint of the subject I would consider that "practically indistinguishable" under our law.
It also might have something to do with that in the US we consider a corporation to be a "corporate personhood". So a corporation is practically indistinguishable from a person under our laws.