What you've got to worry about is that Slashdot is very liberal on almost everything, yet there's still a good portion of it's readers that go 'bloodthirsty crazy' - what does that say about the (far less left-wing) rest of America?
Another half-dozen hours of dullness I'll be forced to sit through with my LotR-obsessed other half before I get to do anything interesting for Christmas.
Still, it's a nice early way to solve the problem of what to get her for Christmas - where do I pre-order? And why do I do this to myself every time one of these is released comes out? hmm, what? sexual favours? ah, that'll be it then. Thanks.
So much for the complexities of the male psyche...
Probably going to nuke my karma, but screw it, it's 3 in the morning and I'm ill, so here goes...
Hooray for/. managing to turn a story about a criminal (let's not forget this man is a criminal) into a way to bash Microsoft - sure, their software has exploitable bugs in it, but that doesn't make it alright to break them - My real-life windows are easily breakable with a brick 'exploit' and a robber could easily break in and steal my posessions, but that's not the fault of the glaziers. I wouldn't expect the Association of Master Craftsmen to cough up a $250,000 reward for finding a prolific robber in my neighbourhood, even less so if every few days they posted me new one-touch ready-to-fit materials to make my windows more secure.
People can whine and moan about how this is 'really the fault of Microsoft for releasing buggy code' but it really isn't - it's not like Windows creates this worm itself without any outside input, it's the person on the outside exploiting it causing the problems. Sure, Microsoft releases programs with exploits in, but anything can be exploited, and like in the real world, it's not the fault of the manufacturer if a criminal comes along and breaks it.
Personally I think Microsoft offering a reward was a good PR stunt, but not one they had to make. No, I'm not that new here, so yes I do know that any story that can be twisted to have an anti-Microsoft angle will be, but in terms of the whole "it's the fault of the coders" argument, let it die. When Windows crashes and takes your important work with it, that's MS's fault - when some 1337 scriptkiddie exploits a security hole for kicks, that's his fault - same as if my car exploded once a month without warning I'd blame the manufacturer, but if someone broke in and stole it, I'd blame the thief. Zealotry just seems to cloud judgement a little too much sometimes.
I see this sort of opinion piece a lot, and can't help thinking I must have been extraordinarily lucky with my Linux installs - I can honestly say I've had more trouble configuring a Windows installation correctly than I have a Linux one, and the most complex thing I've had to do to get my CD-ROMs working correctly was create a link to it via the KDE desktop context menu - Before I worked that out (right-click should have been my first option, but no, I felt techy) I did it by creating a link to do 'mount -t iso9660/dev/cdrom/mnt cdrom | konqueror/mnt/cdrom' - far more hassle than it would have been had I not had a techy moment, but certainly not complex - nowhere near as complex as trying to get my (network card/graphics card/soundcard - choose one) working under almost every Windows version I've used (from Win98 to Server 2003).
So have I just been lucky and (honestly - Linux gurus, try to think from the perspective of a total newbie like I was) Linux is far from complicated and this guy is just trolling? I'm surprised by the amount of Linux horror stories out there, as I dived straight into Debian without almost any prior Linux knowledge (2hrs on RedHat on a friend's system) and have only managed to wreck things twice (I once nuked my graphics drivers trying an update from CVS and it didn't work at all well - X refused to start, and much poking around with the command-line brought it back to life - I was quite impressed as that was a lot deeper into the CLI than I had been before, and the other time was when I loaded a corrupt theme that managed to nuke my KDE - going in as root to the directory and 'rm -rf.kde*'-ing solved it - thank you Google!). So am I alone in finding all these horror stories about hideously complex interfaces and disasterously misplaced 'rm -rf' commands? I don't think I'm the only one.
The point about Mandrake is well-founded - I didn't try it out until after I had aquired technical knowledge from curiousity making me poke around in Debian and I just found it extremely limiting - can't log in as root? that would have fucked me right up if I'd nuked my KDE like I did with Debian - I'd be left with no way to fix it on my single-user-and-root system, but Linux in itself is not hard - by the time you've practiced enough to be a Windows 'power user' you'd have acquired the ability to do three times as much under Linux - I'm not even going to mention security, I'm just talking about ability to do things and do them well in an ideal-world system (no viruses, worms, etc). I'm not even trying to plug Linux over Windows here, I like Windows, I still have an XP machine for games and the occasional nostalgia trip, and it is a good OS in many ways, but Linux hugely technical and impossible to use? No sir. I genuinely find it easier to use Linux than Windows now, and I've only had it on my main machine for a few months. I don't think I could have made that switch in reverse that fast - even after just 3 months on Debian I found Mandrake hugely restrictive, and believe me, I am far from a technical person (studying in Psychology, not a hugely computer-related field). I picked up a lot about Linux without even noticing, just poking around with a curious cursor or command or two. A few months on Linux and without even trying, I've acquired enough knowledge about the OS to do many things faster and better than Windows, and I wouldn't go back - Like I said, I like Windows XP, but I find I can now do so much more with my time.
So, Slashdotters, be honest with me - have I been lucky? do I have some sort of mysterious gift? or is Linux actually easy to get into?
Why don't you try watching Fahrenheit 911, then watch it again. If your eyes haven't been opened then they never will.
Please don't mention Farenheit 9/11 in a serious anti-American post. I agree with all your points, but I really do think Michael Moore is the worst kind of spokesman the left could ever possibly have. The left have the truth on their side, but people like Moore make us out to be as big a set of liars as Bush and co, only even less photogenic. This cannot be A Good Thing(tm)
The truth is the most powerful weapon we have. Don't weaken our position by relying on sensationalist lies of the sort Moore peddles.
This is probably going to roast my karma beyond belief, but I feel a rant coming on - Sickens you? why? was the Russian school massacre started because of a computer game? no, it was started by Al Queda encouraging Chechen forces already angry because of the brutally unfair treatment of their country by the Russian army. (for your information, far more Chechens have been killed in raids and bombings of towns and cities by the Russians than Chechens have killed in terrorist attacks - the Russians have no moral high ground in that conflict. The school massacre was organized by Al Queda using the name of Chechnya to further their murderous intent - if any Chechen leader was involved at all it will be Shamil Basayev, he has a history of violent attacks and seiges in the name of Chechnya which have more bearing on the desires of muslim extremists than the Chechen people).
So tell me, where do you get off comparing a violent video game which millions around the world have played with no significant increase in violent crime encouraged by it to the decade-long 'slaughter of innocents' on both sides of a drawn-out and brutal war? I'm sorry, it doesn't compare. You are following the media bullshit line of saying video games encourage violent behaviour, only now you're comparing it to terrorism, whereas I refuse to believe video games encourage violence at all - I have been playing violent games since I was 8 years old, I'm also a huge fan of Industrial Metal music and action/horror movies. If the world was the way the media portrays it, I would be a mass murderer by now, yet the most illegal thing I'm likely to do is download as song I shouldn't from a P2P network. I and the millions of other people that play games like GTA without as much as a spot on their real-life criminal record are living proof that the 'violent games cause real-life violence' argument is a lie. Suffering and oppression cause violence, not games - I doubt many Chechens have ever heard of Grand Theft Auto, let alone played it, and if Klebold and Harris hadn't been mercilessly bullied by their peers they wouldn't have shot anyone, reguardless of how much Doom they played. Blaming games is a hideous way to direct blame away from the real culprits, those being the problems that lie in real-life society and not on a disc you insert into your PC from time to time, but when you start comparing it to the suffering of hundreds of Russian families and the oppression of many thousands of Chechens... it just doesn't compare.
I'm yet to see proof that games encourage violence, if anything they provide a vent for inherent violent urges within a person - if I'm mad, what's better? Virtual violence or a build-up of real-life anger? From a psychological point of view violent games provide an outlet, not encouragement. Oppression and extremism encourages massacre, not the latest Rockstar release. Look for yourself and stop relying on media scapegoating and you'll see it too, but instead I expect with the little you now know about me you will sit smugly expecting me to turn up on the news having killed a few dozen chilren because I wear dark clothes and like GTA, when this is clearly not going to happen, but I'm a lone voice against the force of mass media, what can I do? I can't convince you - but please don't trivialise the Chechen conflict by using it to show how 'terrible' violent games are.
That's because the more academic or obscure the topic, the more academic or informed the submitter will be. I can't see there being many informed academics lecturing in 'beefs' at Harvard University, and I can't see many thugs taking the time to make sure the articles they submit are informative, academic and unbiased.
In a publicly-editable encyclopaedia, the articles are going to be edited by those with an interest in that subject, so of course the more academic articles are better-written, because they're written by academics. Articles about gangsta rappers are written by fanboys and as such are unlikely to be anywhere near as high-quality.
Trying to stay on-topic, I'm interested in one of these devices as I do a lot of travelling with my laptop, and when you're on a budget the places you end up in don't always have a TV... but the parent has a point - there is less and less point to buying a television, let alone a device to watch television when you're AWAY from the set - how many makeover programmes can you really watch in day? I could get one of these devices, sit it next to the regular 2 TVs in my house and put a different makeover/other 'reality TV' show on each of them every half hour and still not manage to see them all (shortly before I go insane at seeing Simon Cowell and sodding Sharon Osbourne pretending to argue with each other for the millionth time) - so the market for these in Britain is only going to get smaller as we get more and more cynical at the sheer amount of 'Big Brother'-esque shows that saturate our media.
In America I know you have far more channels so maybe you get more oppertunity to watch real programmes, but with just five terrestrial channels, your friends over the pond would basically be forced to watch Reality TV and daytime chatshows 24 hours a day... unless they're willing to strap a satellite dish to their notebook. The majority of the people who really can't get enough of their fix of reality TV wouldn't be able to set one of these up (no offence to any techy Big Brother fans reading this, I can only call 'em as I see 'em) even with the simplicity of 'Stick it in that hole and put the CD in, Keep clicking OK till it goes away'.
Even satellite's going the same way now - we have two or three (maybe more) channels solely dedicated to makeover shows - it's rediculous. It's not a fad that's going to go away either - it's incredibly cheap to produce and so the TV companies get the biggest slice of advertising funds funnelled into their pocket instead of back into programme development, and so we're screwed until a totally selfless media mogul comes in to rescue us and change the trend (like that's going to happen). The only channels I watch here are Paramount Comedy and UK Gold, which are both repeat channels of US and UK comedy shows respectively - Paramount has been showing two M*A*S*H episodes a day for as long as I can remember, and I must have seen every episode of that show 4 or 5 times over, and they're still funny - hundreds of times more so than Sharon Osbourne's latest attempt to remain famous by annoying the general populace.
Ladies and gentlemen, TV has died. Like every other outlet for the creative human mind, 'Reality', in one form or another, has killed it. Without satellite access, British viewers are screwed. One friend without a dish hasn't watched TV in months, others I know can go for weeks without watching a show, and those with satellite very often never touch terrestrial, so I (and they) certainly wouldn't pay money for yet another way to watch it that they're not going to use.
[END RANT]
Re:US currency Legal Tender
on
Make Money Fast
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Honestly- it should be illegal for businesses to refuse currency; I don't care about the inconvenience of them having to change a $50 or $100 bill; if it's all I've got and I need gas, food, or lodging, well, they should have to accept it
Nonsense. If you come up to me in the street and wave money in my face, I don't have to take it. Same goes for the guy working behind the counter in the average store. Most people are willing to change them up anyway, but the few that don't are perfectly within their rights to do so and it's a stupid thing to take away.
You didn't want the inconvenience of carrying around your change all day when you left the house in the morning, the guy behind the counter doesn't want the inconvenience of having to change your $100 bill so you can pay for your Happy Meal. What makes your convenience more important than what's convenient to the guy behind the counter?
If you've got a genuine reason and the guy's just being a jackass, you can go to the next store down or the store across the street - you shouldn't start spouting off about how it should be illegal for them to refuse currency. They can do whatever they want provided they're not ripping you off in any way, and that's the way it should stay - and do we really want another reason for people to start dancing around screaming 'lawsuit! lawsuit!'?
I don't really think the authorities go to the internet press to get their intelligence, and even if this was reported to them on any major scale, I'm pretty sure "terrorists are planning on hijacking planes and flying them into famous buildings" would be higher up the priority list than "OMG OMG T3H 1NTARWEB WILL BE HAXXORED!!"
One is at most a major inconvenience. The other is death and destruction for hundreds of people. I know which one I'd concentrate my resources on.
Maybe someone's fired up a script somewhere that hits the site constantly with a search for 'die Slashdotters'... or maybe someone deeply bored is taking the time to constantly hit 'Reload'...
or perhaps the owner of the search engine has just realised perhaps it wasn't capable of handling thousands of hits a second, and is a mite angry that we've turned their server room into a towering inferno...
I've always wondered how there's that many people who are worried about their penis size, enough to give out their credit card details to some obscure company over the internet? I understand that sending the emails out costs next to nothing and only one or two sales would cover it, but seriously, how much money are these companies making off poor insecure guys?
I just can't imagine there's that many insecure people around, I really can't. Can someone with more knowledge than I enlighten me on this?
From the site:
These three additions change the first equation to (3*13*17*4*3*17) variations, and boost the second equation to ( 192 x 3 x 192 x 13 x 192 x 17 x 192 x 4 x 192 x 3 x 192 x 17 x 192) = 1,300,925,111,156,286,160,896.
Thanks Greg, Ryan and SR, you helped push the total into the SEXTILLIONS!
Please don't tell me I'm the only one who finds it ironic that the number of different ways to spell it comes out as sextillions...
Re:Nice, but they've got it all wrong...
on
Linux Desktop Guide
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
i'm so sick of all this "new people don't want anything but windows" shit.
it's not that they don't want anything but Windows, it's that they're scared of using anything other than what the store sold them. What the store sold them just happens to be Windows.
My whole point is until stores start pushing Linux PCs (which they don't do here - I don't know about over in the US) then Linux will never take off with the average user. And to the poster below, my old school had not one solitary Mac, they were all Windows machines. Hundreds of them. My new college is much the same - except the Art department has maybe half a dozen Macs. This, again, is out of hundreds of machines.
Maybe Linux is making bigger inroads across the pond, but I'm seeing barely any forward movement on this side of the water...
Re:Nice, but they've got it all wrong...
on
Linux Desktop Guide
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
For the record, I wasn't bashing Linux - it definately is superior in almost every way to Windows (the only places it loses out are the old spectre, games - but that's the fault of developers rather than the OS, obviously) - I just don't think guides like this will accomplish anything.
My mother wouldn't run Linux even if Windows set her hair on fire once a week. The store she got her computer from told her to run Windows, and she will run it. No amount of 'Linux for the Beginner' guides will change that. She's scared to reinstall or update Windows even though it's 98SE and falling apart at the seams - she's not going to suddenly jump at the chance to switch to Linux just because of some flashy guide. Linux is still very much for the technically-minded and curious - the rest are going to run what they big companies tell them to run, and that's Windows.
Nice, but they've got it all wrong...
on
Linux Desktop Guide
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Does Linux have top home marketshare? No.
Does Linux have top education marketshare? No.
So is the chance that people's very first system will be Linux high? No.
Does this make this whole thing pointless? Yes.
What do stores sell a new user if they don't know what they want? Windows. Therefore they will learn Windows. The only way they'll find out about this report is if they go online and find it, and then if they're not a techy user, they're not going to want to install something like an OS for themselves. This is a pointless exercise to make the open-source community hope for an influx of new users, when the fact is while stores still sell Windows machines, while mummy and daddy still have a Windows machine in the living room, while little Johnny's school uses Windows machines... Microsoft's monopoly is self-sustaining.
It doesn't matter how many guides you put out for Linux aimed at the 'new user', there are no users who've never used a computer before who are likely to run Linux - they're going to run what the store tells them to run, or what the computers in their house already run - Windows. The monopoly self-sustains. Unless all us nerds train our kids from birth to use *nix, and they all train their kids, etc, etc, etc, only Microsoft can destroy their own monopoly. Our only hope is that a catastrophic worm makes it impossible to ever use Windows, as other than that, reguardless of how many 'Linux for Total Newbies' PDFs people put out, those 'total newbies' will be reading it from a Windows machine, and the vast majority of them will be too scared or too stubborn to switch.
This will probably get modded troll, but that's the way it is - this is the wrong approach to be taking, and for all the people us few thousand nerds convert (very few), there's going to be a few thousand more kids growing up using mummy and daddy's Windows machine, perpetuating Microsoft's mindshare. We need to find a way to deal with it, and this is not it.
Any recommendations on a balls-of-steel host that will serve 40GBytes+/mo on the reasonably cheap?
I don't know how much it would cost, but I'd play the spammers at their own game - register a domain somewhere out in eastern Europe and stick the information up there. It can't be too expensive and it would be poetic justice on spammers that use unscrupulous hosts to peddle their \/1@gr@...
...even presuming Yahoo's tool DOES spy then would you rather the average Windows user had ONE piece of software spying on them, or 10 or 20 others?
Educating people on this does not work, they're always going to install crap like this on their machines because it looks shiny and tells them what the weather's like or whatever - I'm the poor schmuck who has to fix my parents' and girlfriend's (and her parents' - hurrah) computers when they break due to the amount of crap they've heaped onto it, and I'd be more than happy to let Yahoo! do the hard work in exchange for a little browser snooping - I'm assuming Yahoo's bar doesn't break the computer like amassed spyware does.
You're right, we shouldnt have to tolerate it at all, but people are more likely to trust Yahoo telling them their weather program is evil incarnate than they are if I or you tell them. We all might be the 'techies in the family', but Yahoo has huge mindshare with net newbies - to people like my mother, their word is Gospel, and as Net Utopia aint comin' yet, we have to compromise - unless you want to be fixing half a dozen machines every few weeks.
I think it's important to remind everyone that even slashdot seems concerned about protecting it's copyrighted material -- despite the stories selected for posting by people like michael.
Fair point, but I don't think OSTG are going to sue a 12-year-old girl for telling a CowboyNeal joke at a slumber party...
Yes, I tested the German one, too, and with my limited knowledge of the language it sounded very natural, too - I think the English language poses a lot of problems to a computer trying to do this sort of thing because of the sheer number of different ways to pronounce certain syllables;
I'm sure most people have heard the one about how you can write 'fish' as 'ghoti', with 'gh' from 'rough' is pronounced 'f', 'o' from 'women' is pronounced 'i', and so on... (yes I know this example is not 100% accurate, but that's not really the point).
Well, I admit I was exaggerating on the cost, but it would come to near enough £1,000 to upgrade the computers in my house I use regularly to be able to run Doom 3 at a good level.
What I was saying was I'm not going to spend out a lot of money (I usually upgrade one component at a time on my systems) to be able to play Doom 3. To get it working on my main machine (let alone the others) I'd need more RAM, a better graphics card and probably a new soundcard. I'd also probably want to upgrade my ancient Gateway monitor. That's a lot to spend out that I wouldn't normally do, and if Doom's multiplayer isn't up to scratch and most of my PC gaming is done online, then even a more realistic price (still a few hundred pounds I don't have - most of my money goes on my consoles or music equipment) is too much to pay for a couple of dozen hours of play.
When the true next generation of games (the ones that will inevitably be running the Doom 3 engine) are released, then I will have a whole host of reasons to upgrade my computer, and a little longer to stagger the upgrades instead of doing them all at once.
Finally someone who isn't an Id fanboy.
Now I'm a huge fan of most of Id's products, but I won't buy a product just because it's made by Id - I go on the merits of the game, not those of the company.
I mostly play games multiplayer online, simply because I get through single-player games too fast and they get too repetitive to be fun anymore - shiny graphics engines are nothing up to constantly-changing game scenarios, and even the best AI is nothing compared to real human opponents - maybe it's the natural human competitive spirit, I don't know.
Doom 3 has been overhyped from the beginning - even if it was the Holy Grail of gaming it wouldn't justify the amounts of hype it's had thrown at it since it's announcement, and if they haven't come up trumps with the multiplayer, then I'm even less likely to shell out a few hundred pounds on my machine just for the privilige of playing the thing.
Shiny new technology be damned, I think I'll be sticking with Day of Defeat for the time being, thank you very much - I don't see why I should spend hundreds of pounds on an overhyped, over-shiny game when there are hugely entertaining games I can play on my current (and even much older) hardware without trouble - but then I think the Doom 3 phenomenon is a gamer fashion statement - you have to own it or you're just not 1337 enough......of course the big question is... was Hell purty?
I think it's a server problem rather than a Firefox client issue - Since OSDN turned into OSTG (why that change anyway? OSDN rolls much more nicely off the tongue) I think Slashdot's pipe has been reduced and it can't handle as many users as before, so it's basically Slashdotting itself.
Apologies if I'm wrong, though, maybe it's an issue somewhere else - but that's what it looks like to me.
How good are the ads then anyways if someone doesn't notice them? Isn't that the point?
He's not seeing them because he's not looking for them. They're ads, but they're easily ignorable if you're not looking to buy something - Google's strategy is simple and unobtrusive - I don't see their ads either, unless I'm specifically looking to buy something, and then I know the ads will be relevant and worth my time to read. Other sites try to force 'Punch the Monkey' or GIFs and Javascripts designed to look like Windows, well, windows on you that you're forced to SEE. With Google, if you're just searching and not looking to buy, the ads are so unobtrusive that your mind doesn't SEE them.
You are mistaking "is popular" with "can exist at all". And there is a big difference.
I was referring to the term 'crushed' - Netscape used to be the main browser, then Microsoft crushed it - it still exists, but it's used by so few people (compared to Internet Explorer) that it's just a minor annoyance to Microsoft instead of a real competitor.
Seeing as Netscape used to be the dominant browser and now even combined with it's offspring it struggles to get more than a couple of percentage points versus it's Microsoft equivalent, I'd say it was pretty crushed.
Slashdot Mirror
What you've got to worry about is that Slashdot is very liberal on almost everything, yet there's still a good portion of it's readers that go 'bloodthirsty crazy' - what does that say about the (far less left-wing) rest of America?
The numbers scare me.
Another half-dozen hours of dullness I'll be forced to sit through with my LotR-obsessed other half before I get to do anything interesting for Christmas.
Still, it's a nice early way to solve the problem of what to get her for Christmas - where do I pre-order? And why do I do this to myself every time one of these is released comes out? hmm, what? sexual favours? ah, that'll be it then. Thanks.
So much for the complexities of the male psyche...
Probably going to nuke my karma, but screw it, it's 3 in the morning and I'm ill, so here goes... Hooray for /. managing to turn a story about a criminal (let's not forget this man is a criminal) into a way to bash Microsoft - sure, their software has exploitable bugs in it, but that doesn't make it alright to break them - My real-life windows are easily breakable with a brick 'exploit' and a robber could easily break in and steal my posessions, but that's not the fault of the glaziers. I wouldn't expect the Association of Master Craftsmen to cough up a $250,000 reward for finding a prolific robber in my neighbourhood, even less so if every few days they posted me new one-touch ready-to-fit materials to make my windows more secure.
People can whine and moan about how this is 'really the fault of Microsoft for releasing buggy code' but it really isn't - it's not like Windows creates this worm itself without any outside input, it's the person on the outside exploiting it causing the problems. Sure, Microsoft releases programs with exploits in, but anything can be exploited, and like in the real world, it's not the fault of the manufacturer if a criminal comes along and breaks it.
Personally I think Microsoft offering a reward was a good PR stunt, but not one they had to make. No, I'm not that new here, so yes I do know that any story that can be twisted to have an anti-Microsoft angle will be, but in terms of the whole "it's the fault of the coders" argument, let it die. When Windows crashes and takes your important work with it, that's MS's fault - when some 1337 scriptkiddie exploits a security hole for kicks, that's his fault - same as if my car exploded once a month without warning I'd blame the manufacturer, but if someone broke in and stole it, I'd blame the thief. Zealotry just seems to cloud judgement a little too much sometimes.
...I'll bite anyway...
/dev/cdrom /mnt cdrom | konqueror /mnt/cdrom' - far more hassle than it would have been had I not had a techy moment, but certainly not complex - nowhere near as complex as trying to get my (network card/graphics card/soundcard - choose one) working under almost every Windows version I've used (from Win98 to Server 2003).
.kde*'-ing solved it - thank you Google!). So am I alone in finding all these horror stories about hideously complex interfaces and disasterously misplaced 'rm -rf' commands? I don't think I'm the only one.
I see this sort of opinion piece a lot, and can't help thinking I must have been extraordinarily lucky with my Linux installs - I can honestly say I've had more trouble configuring a Windows installation correctly than I have a Linux one, and the most complex thing I've had to do to get my CD-ROMs working correctly was create a link to it via the KDE desktop context menu - Before I worked that out (right-click should have been my first option, but no, I felt techy) I did it by creating a link to do 'mount -t iso9660
So have I just been lucky and (honestly - Linux gurus, try to think from the perspective of a total newbie like I was) Linux is far from complicated and this guy is just trolling? I'm surprised by the amount of Linux horror stories out there, as I dived straight into Debian without almost any prior Linux knowledge (2hrs on RedHat on a friend's system) and have only managed to wreck things twice (I once nuked my graphics drivers trying an update from CVS and it didn't work at all well - X refused to start, and much poking around with the command-line brought it back to life - I was quite impressed as that was a lot deeper into the CLI than I had been before, and the other time was when I loaded a corrupt theme that managed to nuke my KDE - going in as root to the directory and 'rm -rf
The point about Mandrake is well-founded - I didn't try it out until after I had aquired technical knowledge from curiousity making me poke around in Debian and I just found it extremely limiting - can't log in as root? that would have fucked me right up if I'd nuked my KDE like I did with Debian - I'd be left with no way to fix it on my single-user-and-root system, but Linux in itself is not hard - by the time you've practiced enough to be a Windows 'power user' you'd have acquired the ability to do three times as much under Linux - I'm not even going to mention security, I'm just talking about ability to do things and do them well in an ideal-world system (no viruses, worms, etc). I'm not even trying to plug Linux over Windows here, I like Windows, I still have an XP machine for games and the occasional nostalgia trip, and it is a good OS in many ways, but Linux hugely technical and impossible to use? No sir. I genuinely find it easier to use Linux than Windows now, and I've only had it on my main machine for a few months. I don't think I could have made that switch in reverse that fast - even after just 3 months on Debian I found Mandrake hugely restrictive, and believe me, I am far from a technical person (studying in Psychology, not a hugely computer-related field). I picked up a lot about Linux without even noticing, just poking around with a curious cursor or command or two. A few months on Linux and without even trying, I've acquired enough knowledge about the OS to do many things faster and better than Windows, and I wouldn't go back - Like I said, I like Windows XP, but I find I can now do so much more with my time.
So, Slashdotters, be honest with me - have I been lucky? do I have some sort of mysterious gift? or is Linux actually easy to get into?
Why don't you try watching Fahrenheit 911, then watch it again. If your eyes haven't been opened then they never will.
Please don't mention Farenheit 9/11 in a serious anti-American post. I agree with all your points, but I really do think Michael Moore is the worst kind of spokesman the left could ever possibly have. The left have the truth on their side, but people like Moore make us out to be as big a set of liars as Bush and co, only even less photogenic. This cannot be A Good Thing(tm)
The truth is the most powerful weapon we have. Don't weaken our position by relying on sensationalist lies of the sort Moore peddles.
Thanks,
The Sensible Left.
This is probably going to roast my karma beyond belief, but I feel a rant coming on - Sickens you? why? was the Russian school massacre started because of a computer game? no, it was started by Al Queda encouraging Chechen forces already angry because of the brutally unfair treatment of their country by the Russian army. (for your information, far more Chechens have been killed in raids and bombings of towns and cities by the Russians than Chechens have killed in terrorist attacks - the Russians have no moral high ground in that conflict. The school massacre was organized by Al Queda using the name of Chechnya to further their murderous intent - if any Chechen leader was involved at all it will be Shamil Basayev, he has a history of violent attacks and seiges in the name of Chechnya which have more bearing on the desires of muslim extremists than the Chechen people).
So tell me, where do you get off comparing a violent video game which millions around the world have played with no significant increase in violent crime encouraged by it to the decade-long 'slaughter of innocents' on both sides of a drawn-out and brutal war? I'm sorry, it doesn't compare. You are following the media bullshit line of saying video games encourage violent behaviour, only now you're comparing it to terrorism, whereas I refuse to believe video games encourage violence at all - I have been playing violent games since I was 8 years old, I'm also a huge fan of Industrial Metal music and action/horror movies. If the world was the way the media portrays it, I would be a mass murderer by now, yet the most illegal thing I'm likely to do is download as song I shouldn't from a P2P network. I and the millions of other people that play games like GTA without as much as a spot on their real-life criminal record are living proof that the 'violent games cause real-life violence' argument is a lie. Suffering and oppression cause violence, not games - I doubt many Chechens have ever heard of Grand Theft Auto, let alone played it, and if Klebold and Harris hadn't been mercilessly bullied by their peers they wouldn't have shot anyone, reguardless of how much Doom they played. Blaming games is a hideous way to direct blame away from the real culprits, those being the problems that lie in real-life society and not on a disc you insert into your PC from time to time, but when you start comparing it to the suffering of hundreds of Russian families and the oppression of many thousands of Chechens... it just doesn't compare.
I'm yet to see proof that games encourage violence, if anything they provide a vent for inherent violent urges within a person - if I'm mad, what's better? Virtual violence or a build-up of real-life anger? From a psychological point of view violent games provide an outlet, not encouragement. Oppression and extremism encourages massacre, not the latest Rockstar release. Look for yourself and stop relying on media scapegoating and you'll see it too, but instead I expect with the little you now know about me you will sit smugly expecting me to turn up on the news having killed a few dozen chilren because I wear dark clothes and like GTA, when this is clearly not going to happen, but I'm a lone voice against the force of mass media, what can I do? I can't convince you - but please don't trivialise the Chechen conflict by using it to show how 'terrible' violent games are.
That's because the more academic or obscure the topic, the more academic or informed the submitter will be. I can't see there being many informed academics lecturing in 'beefs' at Harvard University, and I can't see many thugs taking the time to make sure the articles they submit are informative, academic and unbiased. In a publicly-editable encyclopaedia, the articles are going to be edited by those with an interest in that subject, so of course the more academic articles are better-written, because they're written by academics. Articles about gangsta rappers are written by fanboys and as such are unlikely to be anywhere near as high-quality.
Trying to stay on-topic, I'm interested in one of these devices as I do a lot of travelling with my laptop, and when you're on a budget the places you end up in don't always have a TV... but the parent has a point - there is less and less point to buying a television, let alone a device to watch television when you're AWAY from the set - how many makeover programmes can you really watch in day? I could get one of these devices, sit it next to the regular 2 TVs in my house and put a different makeover/other 'reality TV' show on each of them every half hour and still not manage to see them all (shortly before I go insane at seeing Simon Cowell and sodding Sharon Osbourne pretending to argue with each other for the millionth time) - so the market for these in Britain is only going to get smaller as we get more and more cynical at the sheer amount of 'Big Brother'-esque shows that saturate our media.
In America I know you have far more channels so maybe you get more oppertunity to watch real programmes, but with just five terrestrial channels, your friends over the pond would basically be forced to watch Reality TV and daytime chatshows 24 hours a day... unless they're willing to strap a satellite dish to their notebook. The majority of the people who really can't get enough of their fix of reality TV wouldn't be able to set one of these up (no offence to any techy Big Brother fans reading this, I can only call 'em as I see 'em) even with the simplicity of 'Stick it in that hole and put the CD in, Keep clicking OK till it goes away'.
Even satellite's going the same way now - we have two or three (maybe more) channels solely dedicated to makeover shows - it's rediculous. It's not a fad that's going to go away either - it's incredibly cheap to produce and so the TV companies get the biggest slice of advertising funds funnelled into their pocket instead of back into programme development, and so we're screwed until a totally selfless media mogul comes in to rescue us and change the trend (like that's going to happen). The only channels I watch here are Paramount Comedy and UK Gold, which are both repeat channels of US and UK comedy shows respectively - Paramount has been showing two M*A*S*H episodes a day for as long as I can remember, and I must have seen every episode of that show 4 or 5 times over, and they're still funny - hundreds of times more so than Sharon Osbourne's latest attempt to remain famous by annoying the general populace.
Ladies and gentlemen, TV has died. Like every other outlet for the creative human mind, 'Reality', in one form or another, has killed it. Without satellite access, British viewers are screwed. One friend without a dish hasn't watched TV in months, others I know can go for weeks without watching a show, and those with satellite very often never touch terrestrial, so I (and they) certainly wouldn't pay money for yet another way to watch it that they're not going to use.
[END RANT]
Honestly- it should be illegal for businesses to refuse currency; I don't care about the inconvenience of them having to change a $50 or $100 bill; if it's all I've got and I need gas, food, or lodging, well, they should have to accept it
Nonsense. If you come up to me in the street and wave money in my face, I don't have to take it. Same goes for the guy working behind the counter in the average store. Most people are willing to change them up anyway, but the few that don't are perfectly within their rights to do so and it's a stupid thing to take away. You didn't want the inconvenience of carrying around your change all day when you left the house in the morning, the guy behind the counter doesn't want the inconvenience of having to change your $100 bill so you can pay for your Happy Meal. What makes your convenience more important than what's convenient to the guy behind the counter?
If you've got a genuine reason and the guy's just being a jackass, you can go to the next store down or the store across the street - you shouldn't start spouting off about how it should be illegal for them to refuse currency. They can do whatever they want provided they're not ripping you off in any way, and that's the way it should stay - and do we really want another reason for people to start dancing around screaming 'lawsuit! lawsuit!'?
I don't really think the authorities go to the internet press to get their intelligence, and even if this was reported to them on any major scale, I'm pretty sure "terrorists are planning on hijacking planes and flying them into famous buildings" would be higher up the priority list than "OMG OMG T3H 1NTARWEB WILL BE HAXXORED!!"
One is at most a major inconvenience. The other is death and destruction for hundreds of people. I know which one I'd concentrate my resources on.
Maybe someone's fired up a script somewhere that hits the site constantly with a search for 'die Slashdotters'... or maybe someone deeply bored is taking the time to constantly hit 'Reload'...
or perhaps the owner of the search engine has just realised perhaps it wasn't capable of handling thousands of hits a second, and is a mite angry that we've turned their server room into a towering inferno...
I've always wondered how there's that many people who are worried about their penis size, enough to give out their credit card details to some obscure company over the internet? I understand that sending the emails out costs next to nothing and only one or two sales would cover it, but seriously, how much money are these companies making off poor insecure guys?
I just can't imagine there's that many insecure people around, I really can't. Can someone with more knowledge than I enlighten me on this?
With the server slowing down under the load, maybe they'll be inspired to adapt the technology to a line of temporary high-intensity CPU heatsinks.
Or maybe they could just strap a few of the self-cooling cans to them instead?
From the site: These three additions change the first equation to (3*13*17*4*3*17) variations, and boost the second equation to ( 192 x 3 x 192 x 13 x 192 x 17 x 192 x 4 x 192 x 3 x 192 x 17 x 192) = 1,300,925,111,156,286,160,896. Thanks Greg, Ryan and SR, you helped push the total into the SEXTILLIONS!
Please don't tell me I'm the only one who finds it ironic that the number of different ways to spell it comes out as sextillions...
i'm so sick of all this "new people don't want anything but windows" shit.
it's not that they don't want anything but Windows, it's that they're scared of using anything other than what the store sold them. What the store sold them just happens to be Windows.
My whole point is until stores start pushing Linux PCs (which they don't do here - I don't know about over in the US) then Linux will never take off with the average user. And to the poster below, my old school had not one solitary Mac, they were all Windows machines. Hundreds of them. My new college is much the same - except the Art department has maybe half a dozen Macs. This, again, is out of hundreds of machines.
Maybe Linux is making bigger inroads across the pond, but I'm seeing barely any forward movement on this side of the water...
For the record, I wasn't bashing Linux - it definately is superior in almost every way to Windows (the only places it loses out are the old spectre, games - but that's the fault of developers rather than the OS, obviously) - I just don't think guides like this will accomplish anything.
My mother wouldn't run Linux even if Windows set her hair on fire once a week. The store she got her computer from told her to run Windows, and she will run it. No amount of 'Linux for the Beginner' guides will change that. She's scared to reinstall or update Windows even though it's 98SE and falling apart at the seams - she's not going to suddenly jump at the chance to switch to Linux just because of some flashy guide. Linux is still very much for the technically-minded and curious - the rest are going to run what they big companies tell them to run, and that's Windows.
Does Linux have top home marketshare? No.
Does Linux have top education marketshare? No.
So is the chance that people's very first system will be Linux high? No.
Does this make this whole thing pointless? Yes.
What do stores sell a new user if they don't know what they want? Windows. Therefore they will learn Windows. The only way they'll find out about this report is if they go online and find it, and then if they're not a techy user, they're not going to want to install something like an OS for themselves. This is a pointless exercise to make the open-source community hope for an influx of new users, when the fact is while stores still sell Windows machines, while mummy and daddy still have a Windows machine in the living room, while little Johnny's school uses Windows machines... Microsoft's monopoly is self-sustaining.
It doesn't matter how many guides you put out for Linux aimed at the 'new user', there are no users who've never used a computer before who are likely to run Linux - they're going to run what the store tells them to run, or what the computers in their house already run - Windows. The monopoly self-sustains. Unless all us nerds train our kids from birth to use *nix, and they all train their kids, etc, etc, etc, only Microsoft can destroy their own monopoly. Our only hope is that a catastrophic worm makes it impossible to ever use Windows, as other than that, reguardless of how many 'Linux for Total Newbies' PDFs people put out, those 'total newbies' will be reading it from a Windows machine, and the vast majority of them will be too scared or too stubborn to switch.
This will probably get modded troll, but that's the way it is - this is the wrong approach to be taking, and for all the people us few thousand nerds convert (very few), there's going to be a few thousand more kids growing up using mummy and daddy's Windows machine, perpetuating Microsoft's mindshare. We need to find a way to deal with it, and this is not it.
Any recommendations on a balls-of-steel host that will serve 40GBytes+/mo on the reasonably cheap? I don't know how much it would cost, but I'd play the spammers at their own game - register a domain somewhere out in eastern Europe and stick the information up there. It can't be too expensive and it would be poetic justice on spammers that use unscrupulous hosts to peddle their \/1@gr@...
...even presuming Yahoo's tool DOES spy then would you rather the average Windows user had ONE piece of software spying on them, or 10 or 20 others?
Educating people on this does not work, they're always going to install crap like this on their machines because it looks shiny and tells them what the weather's like or whatever - I'm the poor schmuck who has to fix my parents' and girlfriend's (and her parents' - hurrah) computers when they break due to the amount of crap they've heaped onto it, and I'd be more than happy to let Yahoo! do the hard work in exchange for a little browser snooping - I'm assuming Yahoo's bar doesn't break the computer like amassed spyware does.
You're right, we shouldnt have to tolerate it at all, but people are more likely to trust Yahoo telling them their weather program is evil incarnate than they are if I or you tell them. We all might be the 'techies in the family', but Yahoo has huge mindshare with net newbies - to people like my mother, their word is Gospel, and as Net Utopia aint comin' yet, we have to compromise - unless you want to be fixing half a dozen machines every few weeks.
I think it's important to remind everyone that even slashdot seems concerned about protecting it's copyrighted material -- despite the stories selected for posting by people like michael.
Fair point, but I don't think OSTG are going to sue a 12-year-old girl for telling a CowboyNeal joke at a slumber party...
Yes, I tested the German one, too, and with my limited knowledge of the language it sounded very natural, too - I think the English language poses a lot of problems to a computer trying to do this sort of thing because of the sheer number of different ways to pronounce certain syllables;
I'm sure most people have heard the one about how you can write 'fish' as 'ghoti', with 'gh' from 'rough' is pronounced 'f', 'o' from 'women' is pronounced 'i', and so on... (yes I know this example is not 100% accurate, but that's not really the point).
Well, I admit I was exaggerating on the cost, but it would come to near enough £1,000 to upgrade the computers in my house I use regularly to be able to run Doom 3 at a good level.
What I was saying was I'm not going to spend out a lot of money (I usually upgrade one component at a time on my systems) to be able to play Doom 3.
To get it working on my main machine (let alone the others) I'd need more RAM, a better graphics card and probably a new soundcard. I'd also probably want to upgrade my ancient Gateway monitor. That's a lot to spend out that I wouldn't normally do, and if Doom's multiplayer isn't up to scratch and most of my PC gaming is done online, then even a more realistic price (still a few hundred pounds I don't have - most of my money goes on my consoles or music equipment) is too much to pay for a couple of dozen hours of play.
When the true next generation of games (the ones that will inevitably be running the Doom 3 engine) are released, then I will have a whole host of reasons to upgrade my computer, and a little longer to stagger the upgrades instead of doing them all at once.
Finally someone who isn't an Id fanboy. Now I'm a huge fan of most of Id's products, but I won't buy a product just because it's made by Id - I go on the merits of the game, not those of the company. I mostly play games multiplayer online, simply because I get through single-player games too fast and they get too repetitive to be fun anymore - shiny graphics engines are nothing up to constantly-changing game scenarios, and even the best AI is nothing compared to real human opponents - maybe it's the natural human competitive spirit, I don't know. Doom 3 has been overhyped from the beginning - even if it was the Holy Grail of gaming it wouldn't justify the amounts of hype it's had thrown at it since it's announcement, and if they haven't come up trumps with the multiplayer, then I'm even less likely to shell out a few hundred pounds on my machine just for the privilige of playing the thing. Shiny new technology be damned, I think I'll be sticking with Day of Defeat for the time being, thank you very much - I don't see why I should spend hundreds of pounds on an overhyped, over-shiny game when there are hugely entertaining games I can play on my current (and even much older) hardware without trouble - but then I think the Doom 3 phenomenon is a gamer fashion statement - you have to own it or you're just not 1337 enough... ...of course the big question is... was Hell purty?
I think it's a server problem rather than a Firefox client issue - Since OSDN turned into OSTG (why that change anyway? OSDN rolls much more nicely off the tongue) I think Slashdot's pipe has been reduced and it can't handle as many users as before, so it's basically Slashdotting itself.
Apologies if I'm wrong, though, maybe it's an issue somewhere else - but that's what it looks like to me.
How good are the ads then anyways if someone doesn't notice them? Isn't that the point?
He's not seeing them because he's not looking for them. They're ads, but they're easily ignorable if you're not looking to buy something - Google's strategy is simple and unobtrusive - I don't see their ads either, unless I'm specifically looking to buy something, and then I know the ads will be relevant and worth my time to read. Other sites try to force 'Punch the Monkey' or GIFs and Javascripts designed to look like Windows, well, windows on you that you're forced to SEE. With Google, if you're just searching and not looking to buy, the ads are so unobtrusive that your mind doesn't SEE them.
You are mistaking "is popular" with "can exist at all". And there is a big difference.
I was referring to the term 'crushed' - Netscape used to be the main browser, then Microsoft crushed it - it still exists, but it's used by so few people (compared to Internet Explorer) that it's just a minor annoyance to Microsoft instead of a real competitor.
Seeing as Netscape used to be the dominant browser and now even combined with it's offspring it struggles to get more than a couple of percentage points versus it's Microsoft equivalent, I'd say it was pretty crushed.