Next I'd like to see the use of mobile phones being given the same social status as smoking i.e. not allowed in enclosed public places such as pubs, restaurants, theatres, buses etc. etc.
If you want to make or receive calls you can go outside with the smokers. (Actually wait a minute I'm a smoker so fsck that, they'll have to have the other side of the entrance)
In the case of trains there should be a single carriage in which you can send and receive calls.
For fucks sake society functioned perfectly well before these intrusive, obnoxious devices. If I were to start carrying round a trumpet and intermittently playing it tunelessly and loudly then shouting away to myself I'd get arrested/battered pretty quickly.
As usual its not the technologys fault but the fucking morons who are misusing it...
Now what I'd really like is a portable, unobtrusive, mobile jammer that would put a 5 metre "Phone disruptor" screen around myself.
If the Xorg folk keep going at their current rate then I'm confident that Linux graphics will eventually (shortly ?) become the best in the business.
Similarly if the work of freedesktop org/Linux Standards Base can get enough Linux distros to start putting out packages that install consistently then the "ease of installation" part of OSX will be covered in the free software world (here I musn't forget to mention how nice it would be to get completely standard cut & paste between ALL GUI apps etc. etc:)
But... whilst an X86 version of OSX would be tempting it wouldn't be free software and I'd not buy it.
My reasons for this are simple and reflect the reason I got interested in GNU/Linux in the first place which was:
1 Over several years I spent well over £ 3,000 (uk) on emagics Creator/Logic software. First for the Atari and then the Windows platforms.
2 A few years ago I got burned when, shortly after paying £ 100 plus for an upgrade, emagic anounced they were going to stop supporting Windows. They did offer me the chance of a "subsidised" upgrade to a MAC but this would have been over £ 1,000. A sum I could ill afford.
At this point I was left with working software but, as it's closed source, I will never receive further upgrades. Nor would I have an opportunity either to continue work on the Windows software myself or (more realistically) to pay someone else to do the job.
Following that I simply said FUCK proprietary closed source shite.
So now I run free software wherever possible. I do still have a Windows box (which runs Logic & Sound Forge) but I will never again pay money for closed source software.
It's not that I'm tight as I am/will be quite happy to pay for software. Just so long as the source is provided and with a licence which would allow it to be forked should the vendor/developer stop supporting it.
So no thanks, OSX may be nice but it's still closed source poison. Never again.....
The day I'll vote (I'm a UK citizen) is when the following apply:
1 It's free for a candidate to stand for election, not the £ 1000 plus as it is now. Too many frivolous candidates ? If people want to stand on a daft platform that's their right.
2 There's a mandatory box on the ballot paper that says "none of the above"
If the majority of citizens nationwide vote for "none of the above" then government should be put on hold for four years. i.e. all current laws/taxes etc. are kept "as is" but nothing new can get implemented and nothing can be changed.
That way there'd be some incentive for the corrupt, self serving, bastards that end up as MPs to actually promote something positive. If they don't then nobody cares and they don't get to be an MP.
Personally I think all politicians are shite. As soon as somebody stands up and says "listen to me, I'll lead you" they should be shot, burned, hacked to bits and fed to pigs. Then take the remains and bury 'em in a garlic patch to stop the undead bastards rising up.
Democracy ? What democracy ? Pah.
It's all "feather the nest and fuck the rest" (as some rather apt Killing Joke lyrics would say)
Re:there will be no personal any more
on
SUSE 9.2 Released
·
· Score: 1
Well Alta-Vista translated that as
"A personnel edition does not give it since version 9.2 to no more!"
I would imagine that most computer literate folk know about msconfig but why is the functionality not available from control panel ?
After all that's the central point from which you're supposed to be able to control your Windows computer.
Ah Windows.... If only Microsoft would sit down and DESIGN the bloody thing to operate in a consistent, logical & secure fashion (the latter would be helped immensely by implementing the former two)
And for any UK residents who don't know about it you can get on our equivalent of the "Do Not Call" list by using the Telephone Preference Service (TPS) website at:
http://www.tpsonline.org.uk/tps/
"Yes you do have the right to free speech but if you do it in my face I'll bite your fucking nose off".
Well you've obviously never been to http://www.linuxquestions.org then.
The people there definitely know how to "setup a linux box from source" and I've never failed to get a good detailed answer to my sometimes "dumb" questions.
Personally I find it's the opposite way round in that the more someone knows the more they seem willing to share their knowledge.
It's the people who don't really know, or who only know a small part of something really well, who seem reluctant to share knowledge.
Finally as for educating noobs I do it all the time. In the past year I've given away over 50 (self burnt) CDs containing Firefox, Ad-Aware, Zone Alarm, Spybot etc. etc. and have even been round to peoples houses to install them.
After all a zombied XP machine is a nuisance for all internet users.
So maybe you just haven't been asking the right people ?
Well it wouldn't suprise me if Sony are starting to treat their entertainment division as simply providers of "software" (in the form of songs, films etc.) for their electronics division.
If they want to filter stuff they should simply get together and build a server/server(s) with the requisite filtering tools in place. If no current tools are available they can either write their own or pay someone else to do it for them.
All those who wish to can then use said server(s) as a proxy for their internet access which will block anything demmed "adult" or offensive. Hell they can even pay for the pleasure (thereby funding said server farm/coders etc.)
The rest of us can then carry on looking at porn etc. as normal.
As for the idea of making a state tax other people to fund this crap... Get fucking real !
If they are Christians then it even gives them some good advice in their own good book:
Unfortunately we found that they mostly spew out loud, ignorant, blaring, mindless rubbish so we smashed them with hammers and went back to our "trusty" radios.
Well I'd like at least 3 Tb (possibly 6) on removable disks. One for in the player plus one for current backup, plus one for offsite backup.
That way I could rip to WAV as I for one can hear the difference between a WAV and an MP3 (even encoded at high bit rates)
That way I would finally be bothered to digitise my entire music collection which comprises all sorts of stuff including vinyl (even a few 78s !), CDs, DAT, Cassette and 1/4 inch reel to reel.
I'd second this but I use Slackware instead of Gentoo;)
I'm running a 533MHz Mini-ITX mobo (£ 70 UK) with a 120 Gb Seagate Barracuda hard drive (£ 56 UK) and 512 Mb RAM (£ 50 UK and a bit O.T.T !) all held in a knackered old case which has a 150 watt P.S.U.
Apart from the PSU fan (which is slightly noisy) it's practically silent and just well... it just works.
But when I get some spare cash I'll be looking to get a DC wall wart to replace the current PSU after which it should become all nice 'n' silent (as usual these are very expensive in the UK)
But all in all I'd agree that mini-itx is the way to go. At least until someone comes out with a "cheap as chips" "intelligent" hard drive which comes with a tiny embedded Linux O/S ROM on it and which is purposely designed to act as a home server.
I'd also second that it should open as a new toolbar on the top of the screen.
After all every other firefox control is at the top of the screen and that's where users would expect it to be. I've always thought it bad UI design to make the user start trawling the mouse all over the screen (depite being a hardcore "keyboard only" man myself)
So I'd second that it's a splendid feature but I think the UI is slightly wrong.
Well speaking as "Joe Sixpack" myself (actually more like "Joe Gallon" as I'm in the UK) I found Slackware to be the easiest Linux distro to get my head round.
Most of my computing experience has been with mainframes (running ICL, now Fujitsus, VME) but I'd been using Winders at home for years (to run audio software)
So getting heartily sick of Windows about two years ago I thought I'd try out Linux and before settling on Slackware I tried Suse & Red Hat and I simply found their GUIS confusing and hard to figure out - especially when something went wrong.
In comparison Slackware is a treat. Need to change a setting ? look to the relevant config file. Need to know what's going on ? Look at the logs.
So this beer swilling eejit found Slackware to be the easiest of the lot to start learning Linux with !
In fact after having about a year playing with Slackware I've put SuSE on a box I acquired and I now realise that it is actually a very good distro. But I need the knowledge gained from using Slackware to realise this !
If you want a decent graphical front end for setting up iptables I can recommend guarddog.
http://www.simonzone.com/software/guarddog/
It certainly did a good job of helping me set up the firewall on my little "learning" server after which I (temporarily) turned off my routers firewall and did a quick test with "shields up" at:
https://grc.com/x/ne.dll?bh0bkyd2
This showed only the ports I wanted open to the internet were in fact open but I can still do other stuff on my local network.
Now I've just got to work out what the feck the entries in the iptables config file mean;)
Just thinking of music software makes my blood boil....
Over the last 10 years I paid out well over £ 2,000 (UK) for software from emagic (starting with the original C-Lab Creator on my old Atari 1040 then moving on to Logic Audio and Sound Diver on a Windows box - all the way up from the original to v5.5)
So how did they reward my customer loyalty ? Very soon after getting me to part with yet another large wad of cash for an upgrade they stopped making their software for Windows.
And it was down to the fact that they supported Windows that made me buy a fucking Windows box in the first place as I was very poor at the time and simply couldn't afford a MAC (the price difference at the time was enormous)
So following this I will NEVER pay for a piece of software again. If I can't get an OSS tool to do the job then fuck it.
Emagic are a bunch of CUNTS and it made me very happy to find out about the Oxygen crack of Logic that's floating around - despite the fact I'd have no use for it as I've still got my fully working, dongled slowly becoming obsolete copy of Logic.
Stars ? STARS ! Now that would've been luxury. My family have lived in a hole in the ground for 7 generations (covered by the obligatory piece of musty tarpaulin) and you only got to surface 'n' see the stars on a Sunday (and then only if you'd been good)
To confound it all we had to "abacus" using grandpas Dougals propietary "ninary" system (He lost a finger in a scything accident) and all our figgurin' was done based round his high fallutin' new age "digital" system. The old galloot used to charge use a turnip each time we used it too ("that there's my intarlektual property son")
As for yer fancy Winders system and it's twenty minutes uptime well, when I was a lad we had to go out 'n' git our own viruses by kissin' Girls (and sailors). And that took a bit longer than 20 minutes I'll tell you (admittedly not much longer as the sailors round these parts have always been rather keen)
Pah. My abacus (which has been handed down through 3 generations) has had an uptime of nearly 100 years. And apart from missing a few of the counters (I was a curious child) it still works great.
Surely there's already a very good rule for all this in that silly old book called the Bible ?
"If thine eye offends thee, pluck it out"
You Americans are crazy. One day one of you will attempt to sue the rest of the world because "my life didn't turn out perfect so it must be all your fault".
Egad ! we also have Special K breakfast cereal but it's mostly thrown at the wall by irate cider drinkers who've sent their better half out to do the shopping (due to being too "refreshed" to go themselves;)
Well I like cider, beer and spirits (usually in that order throughout the day. No matter what them namby pamby do gooders tell you, you simply can't beat a good breakfast scrumpy)
In fact I like cider so much I once adapted the (old cartoon) Spiderman theme song to be more to my liking....
All together now a 1, a 2, a 1, 2, 3, 4:
Ciderman, Ciderman, Drinks whatever cider he can, Is he pissed ? 'course he is, To stay awake he necks some whizz, Look out! Here comes the Ciderman
Is he wrecked ? Listen bud, He's got Diamond White 'stead of blood, Can he swig from a can ? He'd drink from a frying pan, Hey there, There goes the Ciderman.
In the chill of night, At the scene of a club, Bouncers throw him out, 12 pints was enough.
Ciderman, Ciderman, Drunken woebegone Ciderman, Wealth and fame He's ignored, Special K's his reward.
Hey there, life is a one big piss up, Wherever there's a piss up, You'll find the Cider man.
o.k. I'll get mi coat (the pubs open and it's happy hour all week)
P.S. For all you non UK residents "Diamond White" and "Special K" are military grade ciders much loved by teenagers, dropouts and the unemployed.
Slashdot Mirror
This is an excellent first step.
Next I'd like to see the use of mobile phones being given the same social status as smoking i.e. not allowed in enclosed public places such as pubs, restaurants, theatres, buses etc. etc.
If you want to make or receive calls you can go outside with the smokers. (Actually wait a minute I'm a smoker so fsck that, they'll have to have the other side of the entrance)
In the case of trains there should be a single carriage in which you can send and receive calls.
For fucks sake society functioned perfectly well before these intrusive, obnoxious devices. If I were to start carrying round a trumpet and intermittently playing it tunelessly and loudly then shouting away to myself I'd get arrested/battered pretty quickly.
As usual its not the technologys fault but the fucking morons who are misusing it...
Now what I'd really like is a portable, unobtrusive, mobile jammer that would put a 5 metre "Phone disruptor" screen around myself.
Well it would be tempting apart from...
:)
If the Xorg folk keep going at their current rate then I'm confident that Linux graphics will eventually (shortly ?) become the best in the business.
Similarly if the work of freedesktop org/Linux Standards Base can get enough Linux distros to start putting out packages that install consistently then the "ease of installation" part of OSX will be covered in the free software world (here I musn't forget to mention how nice it would be to get completely standard cut & paste between ALL GUI apps etc. etc
But... whilst an X86 version of OSX would be tempting it wouldn't be free software and I'd not buy it.
My reasons for this are simple and reflect the reason I got interested in GNU/Linux in the first place which was:
1 Over several years I spent well over £ 3,000 (uk) on emagics Creator/Logic software. First for the Atari and then the Windows platforms.
2 A few years ago I got burned when, shortly after paying £ 100 plus for an upgrade, emagic anounced they were going to stop supporting Windows. They did offer me the chance of a "subsidised" upgrade to a MAC but this would have been over £ 1,000. A sum I could ill afford.
At this point I was left with working software but, as it's closed source, I will never receive further upgrades. Nor would I have an opportunity either to continue work on the Windows software myself or (more realistically) to pay someone else to do the job.
Following that I simply said FUCK proprietary closed source shite.
So now I run free software wherever possible. I do still have a Windows box (which runs Logic & Sound Forge) but I will never again pay money for closed source software.
It's not that I'm tight as I am/will be quite happy to pay for software. Just so long as the source is provided and with a licence which would allow it to be forked should the vendor/developer stop supporting it.
So no thanks, OSX may be nice but it's still closed source poison. Never again.....
Sigh...
1984 the book has FUCK ALL to do with 1984 the date. It could have been set in the middle ages or 1023484 and still have made the same points.
I wish old George had given it a different title as people seem to have endless trouble differentiating the title with the idea.
Oh well. I suppose I should just be pleased that people know that it's a book...
Cheers !
;)
But I did really guess that's what it meant, I just liked the translation (I'm quite a fan of such stuff)
ho ho ho
The day I'll vote (I'm a UK citizen) is when the following apply:
1 It's free for a candidate to stand for election, not the £ 1000 plus as it is now. Too many frivolous candidates ? If people want to stand on a daft platform that's their right.
2 There's a mandatory box on the ballot paper that says "none of the above"
If the majority of citizens nationwide vote for "none of the above" then government should be put on hold for four years. i.e. all current laws/taxes etc. are kept "as is" but nothing new can get implemented and nothing can be changed.
That way there'd be some incentive for the corrupt, self serving, bastards that end up as MPs to actually promote something positive. If they don't then nobody cares and they don't get to be an MP.
Personally I think all politicians are shite. As soon as somebody stands up and says "listen to me, I'll lead you" they should be shot, burned, hacked to bits and fed to pigs. Then take the remains and bury 'em in a garlic patch to stop the undead bastards rising up.
Democracy ? What democracy ? Pah.
It's all "feather the nest and fuck the rest" (as some rather apt Killing Joke lyrics would say)
Well Alta-Vista translated that as
;)
"A personnel edition does not give it since version 9.2 to no more!"
So I'm still in the dark
Das is nix gut !
I would imagine that most computer literate folk know about msconfig but why is the functionality not available from control panel ?
After all that's the central point from which you're supposed to be able to control your Windows computer.
Ah Windows.... If only Microsoft would sit down and DESIGN the bloody thing to operate in a consistent, logical & secure fashion (the latter would be helped immensely by implementing the former two)
And for any UK residents who don't know about it you can get on our equivalent of the "Do Not Call" list by using the Telephone Preference Service (TPS) website at:
http://www.tpsonline.org.uk/tps/
"Yes you do have the right to free speech but if you do it in my face I'll bite your fucking nose off".
You forgot the best bit about cycling...
You can stop at the pub on the way home and have a few pints without worrying about losing your driving licence !
Hell I even used to carry an "emergency" can of Stella Artois on my water bottle rack during my 17 mile round trip commuting days.
"When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race." ~H.G. Wells
Well you've obviously never been to http://www.linuxquestions.org then.
The people there definitely know how to "setup a linux box from source" and I've never failed to get a good detailed answer to my sometimes "dumb" questions.
Personally I find it's the opposite way round in that the more someone knows the more they seem willing to share their knowledge.
It's the people who don't really know, or who only know a small part of something really well, who seem reluctant to share knowledge.
Finally as for educating noobs I do it all the time. In the past year I've given away over 50 (self burnt) CDs containing Firefox, Ad-Aware, Zone Alarm, Spybot etc. etc. and have even been round to peoples houses to install them.
After all a zombied XP machine is a nuisance for all internet users.
So maybe you just haven't been asking the right people ?
Well it wouldn't suprise me if Sony are starting to treat their entertainment division as simply providers of "software" (in the form of songs, films etc.) for their electronics division.
Well it should be very simple.
If they want to filter stuff they should simply get together and build a server/server(s) with the requisite filtering tools in place. If no current tools are available they can either write their own or pay someone else to do it for them.
All those who wish to can then use said server(s) as a proxy for their internet access which will block anything demmed "adult" or offensive. Hell they can even pay for the pleasure (thereby funding said server farm/coders etc.)
The rest of us can then carry on looking at porn etc. as normal.
As for the idea of making a state tax other people to fund this crap... Get fucking real !
If they are Christians then it even gives them some good advice in their own good book:
"If thine eye offends thee pluck it out"
Get plucking retards.
Flame on !!!
Yes, we have indeed got TVs over here.
Unfortunately we found that they mostly spew out loud, ignorant, blaring, mindless rubbish so we smashed them with hammers and went back to our "trusty" radios.
TV... Do your brain a favour - just turn it off.
Well I'd like at least 3 Tb (possibly 6) on removable disks. One for in the player plus one for current backup, plus one for offsite backup.
;)
That way I could rip to WAV as I for one can hear the difference between a WAV and an MP3 (even encoded at high bit rates)
That way I would finally be bothered to digitise my entire music collection which comprises all sorts of stuff including vinyl (even a few 78s !), CDs, DAT, Cassette and 1/4 inch reel to reel.
Anything less just isn't an option
I'd second this but I use Slackware instead of Gentoo ;)
I'm running a 533MHz Mini-ITX mobo (£ 70 UK) with a 120 Gb Seagate Barracuda hard drive (£ 56 UK) and 512 Mb RAM (£ 50 UK and a bit O.T.T !) all held in a knackered old case which has a 150 watt P.S.U.
Apart from the PSU fan (which is slightly noisy) it's practically silent and just well... it just works.
But when I get some spare cash I'll be looking to get a DC wall wart to replace the current PSU after which it should become all nice 'n' silent (as usual these are very expensive in the UK)
But all in all I'd agree that mini-itx is the way to go. At least until someone comes out with a "cheap as chips" "intelligent" hard drive which comes with a tiny embedded Linux O/S ROM on it and which is purposely designed to act as a home server.
I'd also second that it should open as a new toolbar on the top of the screen.
After all every other firefox control is at the top of the screen and that's where users would expect it to be. I've always thought it bad UI design to make the user start trawling the mouse all over the screen (depite being a hardcore "keyboard only" man myself)
So I'd second that it's a splendid feature but I think the UI is slightly wrong.
Well speaking as "Joe Sixpack" myself (actually more like "Joe Gallon" as I'm in the UK) I found Slackware to be the easiest Linux distro to get my head round.
Most of my computing experience has been with mainframes (running ICL, now Fujitsus, VME) but I'd been using Winders at home for years (to run audio software)
So getting heartily sick of Windows about two years ago I thought I'd try out Linux and before settling on Slackware I tried Suse & Red Hat and I simply found their GUIS confusing and hard to figure out - especially when something went wrong.
In comparison Slackware is a treat. Need to change a setting ? look to the relevant config file. Need to know what's going on ? Look at the logs.
So this beer swilling eejit found Slackware to be the easiest of the lot to start learning Linux with !
In fact after having about a year playing with Slackware I've put SuSE on a box I acquired and I now realise that it is actually a very good distro. But I need the knowledge gained from using Slackware to realise this !
Oh well time to open another beer... pffft...
If you want a decent graphical front end for setting up iptables I can recommend guarddog.
;)
http://www.simonzone.com/software/guarddog/
It certainly did a good job of helping me set up the firewall on my little "learning" server after which I (temporarily) turned off my routers firewall and did a quick test with "shields up" at:
https://grc.com/x/ne.dll?bh0bkyd2
This showed only the ports I wanted open to the internet were in fact open but I can still do other stuff on my local network.
Now I've just got to work out what the feck the entries in the iptables config file mean
Just thinking of music software makes my blood boil....
Over the last 10 years I paid out well over £ 2,000 (UK) for software from emagic (starting with the original C-Lab Creator on my old Atari 1040 then moving on to Logic Audio and Sound Diver on a Windows box - all the way up from the original to v5.5)
So how did they reward my customer loyalty ? Very soon after getting me to part with yet another large wad of cash for an upgrade they stopped making their software for Windows.
And it was down to the fact that they supported Windows that made me buy a fucking Windows box in the first place as I was very poor at the time and simply couldn't afford a MAC (the price difference at the time was enormous)
So following this I will NEVER pay for a piece of software again. If I can't get an OSS tool to do the job then fuck it.
Emagic are a bunch of CUNTS and it made me very happy to find out about the Oxygen crack of Logic that's floating around - despite the fact I'd have no use for it as I've still got my fully working, dongled slowly becoming obsolete copy of Logic.
Closed source ? Up yer arse.
I'd like my light source to be of low(ish) intensity and to come from the bottom of the screen.
That would make for a really great "Hammer House Of Horror" sort of desktop.
At last the desktop is mine... Mwa ha ha ha...
Well to reply to y'all then what can I say.
Stars ? STARS ! Now that would've been luxury. My family have lived in a hole in the ground for 7 generations (covered by the obligatory piece of musty tarpaulin) and you only got to surface 'n' see the stars on a Sunday (and then only if you'd been good)
To confound it all we had to "abacus" using grandpas Dougals propietary "ninary" system (He lost a finger in a scything accident) and all our figgurin' was done based round his high fallutin' new age "digital" system. The old galloot used to charge use a turnip each time we used it too ("that there's my intarlektual property son")
As for yer fancy Winders system and it's twenty minutes uptime well, when I was a lad we had to go out 'n' git our own viruses by kissin' Girls (and sailors). And that took a bit longer than 20 minutes I'll tell you (admittedly not much longer as the sailors round these parts have always been rather keen)
6 years uptime on a VAX. I ask you...
Uptime of 6 years ?
Pah. My abacus (which has been handed down through 3 generations) has had an uptime of nearly 100 years. And apart from missing a few of the counters (I was a curious child) it still works great.
Them thar 'puters are just new fangled junk.
Surely there's already a very good rule for all this in that silly old book called the Bible ?
"If thine eye offends thee, pluck it out"
You Americans are crazy. One day one of you will attempt to sue the rest of the world because "my life didn't turn out perfect so it must be all your fault".
Egad ! we also have Special K breakfast cereal but it's mostly thrown at the wall by irate cider drinkers who've sent their better half out to do the shopping (due to being too "refreshed" to go themselves ;)
Well I like cider, beer and spirits (usually in that order throughout the day. No matter what them namby pamby do gooders tell you, you simply can't beat a good breakfast scrumpy)
In fact I like cider so much I once adapted the (old cartoon) Spiderman theme song to be more to my liking....
All together now a 1, a 2, a 1, 2, 3, 4:
Ciderman, Ciderman,
Drinks whatever cider he can,
Is he pissed ? 'course he is,
To stay awake he necks some whizz,
Look out!
Here comes the Ciderman
Is he wrecked ?
Listen bud,
He's got Diamond White 'stead of blood,
Can he swig from a can ?
He'd drink from a frying pan,
Hey there,
There goes the Ciderman.
In the chill of night,
At the scene of a club,
Bouncers throw him out,
12 pints was enough.
Ciderman, Ciderman,
Drunken woebegone Ciderman,
Wealth and fame
He's ignored,
Special K's his reward.
Hey there, life is a one big piss up,
Wherever there's a piss up,
You'll find the Cider man.
o.k. I'll get mi coat (the pubs open and it's happy hour all week)
P.S. For all you non UK residents "Diamond White" and "Special K" are military grade ciders much loved by teenagers, dropouts and the unemployed.