"The main problem is the publishers' DRM formats lock the book to the reader, so you either can't get the file off your reader, or when you transfer the file to your friends, they can't read, because their reader isn't "authorized". "
Oh, I agree with you completely - anything in a closed format, let alone DRM'd, shouldn't even be allowed to use the term 'book' in the name without attracting a legal penalty for fraud. If it's that locked, it isn't a book any more, it's barely better than sky-writing.
To date the bulk of my work has been articles in journals where I've had to sign over copyright ownership to the journal (to my frustration). As I understand it, books are the same - to publish, you have to sign over copyright to the publisher. However, sign-overs for articles often make allowances for individual distribution, which is why I'm able to at least create websites with articles as pdfs - I'm the 'P.Davidson' on the following, for example: https://php10.ucsf.edu/ufostudy/ufo_pubs.html. However, I'm expecting to retain full copyright to the next couple of articles I have in the pipe as the research involved was funded by the US National Institutes of Health, which is mandating that research it pays for must be free to access within 1 year and that authors retain copyright (giving authors the ability to release or re-release under whatever license they choose). I'll happily re-release those works under an attribution license.
I disagree that copyright itself is a useless hindrance to academics though - what's more problematic is loss of control of copyright simply because of an historic need for physical distribution by a third party. I wrote it; I (think) I should get to decide how it gets distributed for the next couple of years, since the way it is distributed affects me (allowing others in the same field to use my work without attribution is a problem in a discipline which ranks people on how often people cite ideas, for example). For me that means finished work should be available to anyone who wants it under an attribution license; work in progress should be able to be distributed to interested parties but not further without the author's permission. If I was in another field, attribution might not be as important but some other aspect of 'classic' copyright might be. The notion of copyright is not useless - the GPL and CC and so on are all extremely powerful *uses* of copyright; the problem as I see it is abuses of duration and ownership of copyright. I should not have to sign over copyright simply to distribute my work; nor should I retain some absolute right over a work decades after publication.
a) I'm bothered that the parent is still sitting there with the default 2 mod points. The fact that there's so many articulate, high-modded responses shows that the parent has made meaningful points, so much so that they need articulate responses. Mods, do your damn jobs, mod the parent up even if you disagree with it.
b) that said..
"For entertainment purposes, it's almost inconceivable that you read more than one book at once... so what's the benefit in having a device that lets you store multiple books? "
I regularly have more than one book 'on the go' for entertainment purposes. Something serious for when I'm ready and willing to engage in a serious text that demands concentration (such as lit from another time where half the challenge is making sense of the syntax or looking up every second word - Chaucer anyone?); something light for the end of a tiring day (Terry Pratchett?); something in between for when I'm in between (currently a history of Los Angeles since I've recently moved there).
"The book is on your shelf, it's more secure that way, you can always get to it whenever you want. Your dead tree book can't fail you, the batteries cannot die. No one really wants to steal it, and it's easily replaced, you can take it in public without fear."
I lost a bunch of books that were precious to me in the Katherine flood in 1998 (http://www.ourterritory.com/Katherine_NT/katherine_flood.htm). The pdfs (ok, I refuse to call anything not locked to uselessness by drm an 'ebook') I have now are backed up in multiple physical locations.
"It's easy to lend to friends.. just hand them the book."
Yeaaaaahh.. Ok, that really is the killer. I've lost more books to friends than to the above flood. Including first editions. Yeah, I'm talking to *you*, Gary, you thieving fucker. Bring it back and all is forgiven. 'Loaning' a pdf or other digital format is a gift, not a loan, and you don't have to keep track of your flaky friends and their propensities to forget where they got books from. *I* don't have to remember that I've borrowed that book someone suggested I really need to read (six months ago). You've just tipped the balance in my mind toward the advantages of digital formats. Thanks.
"Authors don't usually make much money from the publishers anyway, and do the writing to further their own career, rather than for cash.
I can definitely add an 'amen' to this. As a newly-minted phd in a field in which book publication is a normal part of achieving tenure, here's how it works (in the US anyway; other countries vary slightly): you get your first academic job. In 4-6 years you go up for tenure review, at which time you've either met publication requirements for tenure at your institution (varies widely, but "two articles and a book" is pretty common at a teaching-oriented institution), in which case you get tenure and a $10-20k salary bump. Or you didn't meet tenure and you get fired. So the pressure to publish is, shall we say, quite high. Because it's assumed your book will be an academic book, and as such probably only of interest to other scholars in your sub-field, tenure committees pay absolutely no attention to book sales. A book on the role of the western crop weevil on the Tongan famine of 1832 which sold 1000 copies (mostly to academic libraries) 'counts' just as much toward tenure as a book on the contemporary opium trade in Afghanistan which, being of interest to policy makers and journalists as well as academics, might sell 10,000 copies. In either case, royalties for academic books are negligible - you'd be lucky to make a couple of thousand on any book, even a reasonably well respected one. However, as I mentioned, getting published does have a large financial impact in that it contributes significantly toward getting tenure and other steps up the academic career path. In short, getting a book published is potentially worth tens of thousands of dollars to you, but with almost zero connection between this fiscal impact and the number of copies sold.
From my point of view as an academic writer, I want the ideas expressed in my articles and books to be available to anyone who is interested in them - having those books or articles cost money does not significantly benefit me, and actually blocks access to my ideas. Given that the cheapest way to make work available to everyone is to put it on the web, the only motivation I still have to go through a publisher is this publication process (and the peer review which goes with it) is necessary for my work to 'count' to tenure committees and the like.
"Why aren't they running a product like Websense?"
Why install garbage which will inevitably interfere with someone doing their actual job at some point when the real question is: how could someone do *nothing* for 331 days and not be noticed? There's a million ways to goof off both online and offline, and blocking porn sites is barely the tip of the iceberg.
If, as others have noted, he was just checking porn sites once a day for 331 days of the year then it's the same as any random 'take a small break' activity as long as his office etc is arranged such that others can't see it (which could potentially make someone feel like they're in a harassing or hostile work environment which is a) not nice, and b) illegal in the US). And again, installing some pointless and potentially intrusive nonsense like websense is gross overkill.
I had to admit to a moment of hesitation as I wrote the comment - I'm an Australian who has lived in the US for the last 10 years, and the idea of the US Federal government managing to expand the NPR/PBS system (let alone create something from scratch) into something with the national significance of the BBC/ABC/CBC while retaining the relative political independence of one of those seemed, well, unlikely.. The very notion of what a government is and what it does is too different.
I guess it's not too much of a surprise that on an American-based and dominated website people aren't remembering the major media role played by the government in many other parts of the free world - think BBC, ABC (Australian Broadcasting Commission, not the US network), CBC etc. Most of whom provide extremely high quality reporting for very very little money (in the late 1980s the ABC cost Australians 2 cents per day each in tax revenue), and deliver most of it without advertising.
"ONE day in 1996 the lights went off in a classroom in Georgia so that the students could watch a video. Wendy Whitaker, a 17-year-old pupil at the time, was sitting near the back. The boy next to her suggested that, since it was dark, she could perform oral sex on him without anyone noticing. She obliged. And that single teenage fumble wrecked her life.
Her classmate was three weeks shy of his 16th birthday. That made Ms Whitaker a criminal. She was arrested and charged with sodomy, which in Georgia can refer to oral sex. She met her court-appointed lawyer five minutes before the hearing. He told her to plead guilty. She did not really understand what was going on, so she did as she was told.
She was sentenced to five years on probation. Not being the most organised of people, she failed to meet all the conditions, such as checking in regularly with her probation officer. For a series of technical violations, she was incarcerated for more than a year, in the county jail, the state women's prison and a boot camp. "I was in there with people who killed people. It's crazy," she says.
She finished her probation in 2002. But her ordeal continues. Georgia puts sex offenders on a public registry. Ms Whitaker's name, photograph and address are easily accessible online, along with the information that she was convicted of "sodomy". The website does not explain what she actually did. But since it describes itself as a list of people who have "been convicted of a criminal offence against a victim who is a minor or any dangerous sexual offence", it makes it sound as if she did something terrible to a helpless child. She sees people whispering, and parents pulling their children indoors when she walks by."
So we want to tell this woman she also can't use facebook? Good one.
a) It's an analogy - the point is the relative rapidity of the transition from universal use to niche use. Anything to do with computers seems to happen a lot faster anyway.
b) The first working automobile to ubiquity was a moderately long time, however it was a long time before it became clear the automobile was actually a serious contender to replace horses (half the science fiction writers of the late C19 thought we'd all be commuting via balloons and aeroplanes). Who knows which of hundreds of prototypes or beta applications already out there will later be recognized as a real contender for obsoleting word. A better timeframe would be first mass-produced vehicle (the object that actually replaced horses, as opposed to earlier bespoke automobiles) to horse obsolescence, and for that we're probably talking 15 years tops.
"Horses and buggies have too large an installed base and there is too much inertia for people to change. Somewhere near 600 million to 1 billion people know how to use horses. Their use might not die. Even if it does it wont die swiftly. "
Like a lot of other posters, I'd also encourage more education as a basic good thing for long term career advancement and job satisfaction.
One of the differences between your undergraduate degree and a graduate degree such as a masters is the university will generally be willing to take more time to answer questions you have about the degree, such as ``where have recent graduates from this program ended up working? Can I talk to some of them?'' While they'll probably point you to some people who did well out of it, those people will often be willing to tell you something about how others who did the course with them are doing, and whether they feel the jobs they got are pretty normal for those who did the program or if they were unusually lucky or had other experience/skills which helped them get the position above and beyond the masters itself. The other thing you'll find is you get a gut feeling about whether the kind of work they describe doing sounds like a good fit or a bad fit for you. Shop around - masters programs from different universities tend to be different from one another, and the experience you get from one will often be quite different from the experience you get from another, even if they superficially look the same on paper. It's worth finding one that will prepare you for work that you'd actually want to do.
I had the same problem. A little googling later, here was the solution (and yes, I agree, this is absurd and I hope it's either already fixed or will be by next release):
Get rid of dhcp client:
$sudo apt-get remove dhcp3-client
Change interfaces to match your static IP setup:
$sudo vi/etc/network/interfaces
and (assuming your primary interface is eth0) change it to:
I think the problem most reporters have is that they have a big struggle to get their editors to let them cover almost *anything* beyond a 3 column inch piece about something on the police blotter. The idea of adding yet another layer of `approval' to any story they're interested in doing real work on is enough to make them want to shoot themselves. ``I'm sorry Jane, the plebs have voted down your investigative report on the financial links between city council members and that corporation currently seeking exemption from planning processes - you'll need to toss the last two months work you've been doing on it. They voted up more stories about Britney.''
Silver was the `universal commodity' for most of the last 5000 years. Gold is a Johnny-come-lately from the last 400 years at best.
The actual `use value' of gold (as decoration, malleable flexible material, conductor) is about US$80 an ounce. The other $900 is fluff value we've assigned to it because a few currencies were based on it for a while.
And I say this as someone who did drill & blast for ten years in gold mines in Australia, and hence has a health appreciation of the dot-com mentality that periodically envelops the industry every time there's a run on the stuff. Driller's pay-per-metre isn't called `silly money' for noting.
Re:The pluses and the minuses from two weeks' usag
on
Ubuntu 9.04 RC Released
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The 'Lightning' add-on for Thunderbird lets you subscribe to multiple Google calendars & shows them as a sidebar to Thunderbird's mail window. Not quite the same as having it in Gnome panel, but I thought you might be curious to check it out if you weren't already aware of it.
Gimp vs Photoshop: intended end-use is everything. Gimp saves a lot of people the bother of either paying money or committing copyright infringement to do 97% of image manipulation. Photoshop is an indispensable tool for a professional operating in a world geared around that tool and/or the 3% of end-users who are actually doing something that Gimp can't do and Photoshop can. That's not most of us.
Blender vs unnamed "big-boys stuff": You tried a complex piece of software for "30 seconds" and expected, I don't know, what? The software to read your mind and render amazing 3-d porn on the fly? We'll skip the Freudian analysis of what's going on for you around "the big-boys stuff". But in short, your "30 second" comparison is irrelevant.
Postgres vs Oracle: the two main comparison points between these two these days seem to be 'we've built an infrastructure around Oracle and switching is dangerous/a huge waste of time' (an attitude I completely support); and Oracle's putative 'richer feature set'. Some people also say that for really huge databases (hundreds of millions of rows), Oracle is superior. Once again, it's what your end-use is that decides whether you want a multi-thousand dollar Oracle seats vs free Postgres seats. You'll note that slashdot (between 10,000 and 40,000 hits per second) uses *mysql* - it fits their fairly specific needs. I work with behavioral data from thousands of respondents at the University of California, San Francisco, and I use postgres and mysql because it suits my very specific needs just fine (and I would happily use Oracle if that was what was needed to manage and analyze my data, but it'd be expensive overkill, so I don't).
Apache vs IIS. Well, whatever. You're comparing a webserver which serves 106 million sites vs IIS's 67 million (http://netcraft.com, accessed April 10, 2009); once again, if you need something tightly integrated with Windows servers, IIS is a decent product and possibly even worth paying money for. For the other 106 million of us, Apache is a more apt product.
I'll stop there. It's my bedtime, and I'm sure someone else will take you to task on the rest of your list.
Google 'operation ore'. From wikipedia: "Operation Ore was a British police operation that commenced in 1999, following information from USA law enforcement, and it intended to prosecute thousands of users of websites reportedly featuring child pornography. In the United Kingdom, it has led to 7,250 suspects identified, 4,283 homes searched, 3,744 arrests, 1,848 charged, 1,451 convictions, 493 cautioned, 879 investigations underway, 140 children removed from suspected dangerous situations (although the definition of what constitutes such, has varied and remains vague)[1] and at least 35 suicides.[2] While Ore did catch a number of sex offenders, it turned out that original access data turn out to be faulty resulting in number of false investigation, which ruined life and appear to caused number of suicide. [3] "
So I guess this means that that complete idiot in the building across town who insists on bccing 2/3 of the organization to let us all know there's leftover cake in room 3b will shortly be promoted to head of innovative activities.
Oh, and that I'll be fired because 90% of the ideas I'm working on began as (completely undocumented) conversations with people from random other departments at the local bar, not as email conversations.
Anyway, time to start polishing the CV and looking for another place to work which isn't driven by total idiocy..
Re:You Got Your Blinders On
on
Why TV Lost
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
You could have said the same thing about the web in 1995 - I was 'technical elite'; my parents saw no point whatsoever in paying for modem dialup for that interweb thing. 10 years later, my parents see always-on broadband as a basic essential of life just as I do.
Right now, I'm (allegedly) the 'technical elite' in that I watch what little TV programming I watch online without ads and can't remember the last time I bought a physical music CD; my parents don't see the point of internet-delivered TV and still feel the need to 'own' a physical CD when they buy music. In ten years..
Slashdot Mirror
"The main problem is the publishers' DRM formats lock the book to the reader, so you either can't get the file off your reader, or when you transfer the file to your friends, they can't read, because their reader isn't "authorized". "
Oh, I agree with you completely - anything in a closed format, let alone DRM'd, shouldn't even be allowed to use the term 'book' in the name without attracting a legal penalty for fraud. If it's that locked, it isn't a book any more, it's barely better than sky-writing.
To date the bulk of my work has been articles in journals where I've had to sign over copyright ownership to the journal (to my frustration). As I understand it, books are the same - to publish, you have to sign over copyright to the publisher. However, sign-overs for articles often make allowances for individual distribution, which is why I'm able to at least create websites with articles as pdfs - I'm the 'P.Davidson' on the following, for example: https://php10.ucsf.edu/ufostudy/ufo_pubs.html. However, I'm expecting to retain full copyright to the next couple of articles I have in the pipe as the research involved was funded by the US National Institutes of Health, which is mandating that research it pays for must be free to access within 1 year and that authors retain copyright (giving authors the ability to release or re-release under whatever license they choose). I'll happily re-release those works under an attribution license.
I disagree that copyright itself is a useless hindrance to academics though - what's more problematic is loss of control of copyright simply because of an historic need for physical distribution by a third party. I wrote it; I (think) I should get to decide how it gets distributed for the next couple of years, since the way it is distributed affects me (allowing others in the same field to use my work without attribution is a problem in a discipline which ranks people on how often people cite ideas, for example). For me that means finished work should be available to anyone who wants it under an attribution license; work in progress should be able to be distributed to interested parties but not further without the author's permission. If I was in another field, attribution might not be as important but some other aspect of 'classic' copyright might be. The notion of copyright is not useless - the GPL and CC and so on are all extremely powerful *uses* of copyright; the problem as I see it is abuses of duration and ownership of copyright. I should not have to sign over copyright simply to distribute my work; nor should I retain some absolute right over a work decades after publication.
a) I'm bothered that the parent is still sitting there with the default 2 mod points. The fact that there's so many articulate, high-modded responses shows that the parent has made meaningful points, so much so that they need articulate responses. Mods, do your damn jobs, mod the parent up even if you disagree with it.
b) that said..
"For entertainment purposes, it's almost inconceivable that you read more than one book at once... so what's the benefit in having a device that lets you store multiple books? "
I regularly have more than one book 'on the go' for entertainment purposes. Something serious for when I'm ready and willing to engage in a serious text that demands concentration (such as lit from another time where half the challenge is making sense of the syntax or looking up every second word - Chaucer anyone?); something light for the end of a tiring day (Terry Pratchett?); something in between for when I'm in between (currently a history of Los Angeles since I've recently moved there).
"The book is on your shelf, it's more secure that way, you can always get to it whenever you want. Your dead tree book can't fail you, the batteries cannot die. No one really wants to steal it, and it's easily replaced, you can take it in public without fear."
I lost a bunch of books that were precious to me in the Katherine flood in 1998 (http://www.ourterritory.com/Katherine_NT/katherine_flood.htm). The pdfs (ok, I refuse to call anything not locked to uselessness by drm an 'ebook') I have now are backed up in multiple physical locations.
"It's easy to lend to friends.. just hand them the book."
Yeaaaaahh.. Ok, that really is the killer. I've lost more books to friends than to the above flood. Including first editions. Yeah, I'm talking to *you*, Gary, you thieving fucker. Bring it back and all is forgiven. 'Loaning' a pdf or other digital format is a gift, not a loan, and you don't have to keep track of your flaky friends and their propensities to forget where they got books from. *I* don't have to remember that I've borrowed that book someone suggested I really need to read (six months ago). You've just tipped the balance in my mind toward the advantages of digital formats. Thanks.
"Authors don't usually make much money from the publishers anyway, and do the writing to further their own career, rather than for cash.
I can definitely add an 'amen' to this. As a newly-minted phd in a field in which book publication is a normal part of achieving tenure, here's how it works (in the US anyway; other countries vary slightly): you get your first academic job. In 4-6 years you go up for tenure review, at which time you've either met publication requirements for tenure at your institution (varies widely, but "two articles and a book" is pretty common at a teaching-oriented institution), in which case you get tenure and a $10-20k salary bump. Or you didn't meet tenure and you get fired. So the pressure to publish is, shall we say, quite high. Because it's assumed your book will be an academic book, and as such probably only of interest to other scholars in your sub-field, tenure committees pay absolutely no attention to book sales. A book on the role of the western crop weevil on the Tongan famine of 1832 which sold 1000 copies (mostly to academic libraries) 'counts' just as much toward tenure as a book on the contemporary opium trade in Afghanistan which, being of interest to policy makers and journalists as well as academics, might sell 10,000 copies. In either case, royalties for academic books are negligible - you'd be lucky to make a couple of thousand on any book, even a reasonably well respected one. However, as I mentioned, getting published does have a large financial impact in that it contributes significantly toward getting tenure and other steps up the academic career path. In short, getting a book published is potentially worth tens of thousands of dollars to you, but with almost zero connection between this fiscal impact and the number of copies sold.
From my point of view as an academic writer, I want the ideas expressed in my articles and books to be available to anyone who is interested in them - having those books or articles cost money does not significantly benefit me, and actually blocks access to my ideas. Given that the cheapest way to make work available to everyone is to put it on the web, the only motivation I still have to go through a publisher is this publication process (and the peer review which goes with it) is necessary for my work to 'count' to tenure committees and the like.
"Why aren't they running a product like Websense?"
Why install garbage which will inevitably interfere with someone doing their actual job at some point when the real question is: how could someone do *nothing* for 331 days and not be noticed? There's a million ways to goof off both online and offline, and blocking porn sites is barely the tip of the iceberg.
If, as others have noted, he was just checking porn sites once a day for 331 days of the year then it's the same as any random 'take a small break' activity as long as his office etc is arranged such that others can't see it (which could potentially make someone feel like they're in a harassing or hostile work environment which is a) not nice, and b) illegal in the US). And again, installing some pointless and potentially intrusive nonsense like websense is gross overkill.
You could always film/photograph porn with, you know, real people or something. Some of us even find that more of a turn on than photoshopped barbies.
I had to admit to a moment of hesitation as I wrote the comment - I'm an Australian who has lived in the US for the last 10 years, and the idea of the US Federal government managing to expand the NPR/PBS system (let alone create something from scratch) into something with the national significance of the BBC/ABC/CBC while retaining the relative political independence of one of those seemed, well, unlikely.. The very notion of what a government is and what it does is too different.
I guess it's not too much of a surprise that on an American-based and dominated website people aren't remembering the major media role played by the government in many other parts of the free world - think BBC, ABC (Australian Broadcasting Commission, not the US network), CBC etc. Most of whom provide extremely high quality reporting for very very little money (in the late 1980s the ABC cost Australians 2 cents per day each in tax revenue), and deliver most of it without advertising.
From this week's Economist:
"ONE day in 1996 the lights went off in a classroom in Georgia so that the students could watch a video. Wendy Whitaker, a 17-year-old pupil at the time, was sitting near the back. The boy next to her suggested that, since it was dark, she could perform oral sex on him without anyone noticing. She obliged. And that single teenage fumble wrecked her life.
Her classmate was three weeks shy of his 16th birthday. That made Ms Whitaker a criminal. She was arrested and charged with sodomy, which in Georgia can refer to oral sex. She met her court-appointed lawyer five minutes before the hearing. He told her to plead guilty. She did not really understand what was going on, so she did as she was told.
She was sentenced to five years on probation. Not being the most organised of people, she failed to meet all the conditions, such as checking in regularly with her probation officer. For a series of technical violations, she was incarcerated for more than a year, in the county jail, the state women's prison and a boot camp. "I was in there with people who killed people. It's crazy," she says.
She finished her probation in 2002. But her ordeal continues. Georgia puts sex offenders on a public registry. Ms Whitaker's name, photograph and address are easily accessible online, along with the information that she was convicted of "sodomy". The website does not explain what she actually did. But since it describes itself as a list of people who have "been convicted of a criminal offence against a victim who is a minor or any dangerous sexual offence", it makes it sound as if she did something terrible to a helpless child. She sees people whispering, and parents pulling their children indoors when she walks by."
So we want to tell this woman she also can't use facebook? Good one.
a) It's an analogy - the point is the relative rapidity of the transition from universal use to niche use. Anything to do with computers seems to happen a lot faster anyway.
b) The first working automobile to ubiquity was a moderately long time, however it was a long time before it became clear the automobile was actually a serious contender to replace horses (half the science fiction writers of the late C19 thought we'd all be commuting via balloons and aeroplanes). Who knows which of hundreds of prototypes or beta applications already out there will later be recognized as a real contender for obsoleting word. A better timeframe would be first mass-produced vehicle (the object that actually replaced horses, as opposed to earlier bespoke automobiles) to horse obsolescence, and for that we're probably talking 15 years tops.
"Horses and buggies have too large an installed base and there is too much inertia for people to change. Somewhere near 600 million to 1 billion people know how to use horses. Their use might not die. Even if it does it wont die swiftly. "
Fixed that for you.
Like a lot of other posters, I'd also encourage more education as a basic good thing for long term career advancement and job satisfaction.
One of the differences between your undergraduate degree and a graduate degree such as a masters is the university will generally be willing to take more time to answer questions you have about the degree, such as ``where have recent graduates from this program ended up working? Can I talk to some of them?'' While they'll probably point you to some people who did well out of it, those people will often be willing to tell you something about how others who did the course with them are doing, and whether they feel the jobs they got are pretty normal for those who did the program or if they were unusually lucky or had other experience/skills which helped them get the position above and beyond the masters itself. The other thing you'll find is you get a gut feeling about whether the kind of work they describe doing sounds like a good fit or a bad fit for you. Shop around - masters programs from different universities tend to be different from one another, and the experience you get from one will often be quite different from the experience you get from another, even if they superficially look the same on paper. It's worth finding one that will prepare you for work that you'd actually want to do.
Good luck.
Don't forget to write a very polite letter to them explaining why you're not accepting their offer.
To finish your analogy, "and Word is a hammer"..
I had the same problem. A little googling later, here was the solution (and yes, I agree, this is absurd and I hope it's either already fixed or will be by next release):
Get rid of dhcp client:
$sudo apt-get remove dhcp3-client
Change interfaces to match your static IP setup:
$sudo vi /etc/network/interfaces
and (assuming your primary interface is eth0) change it to:
# The primary network interface
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
address [static ip]
netmask [netmask]
network [network address]
broadcast [broadcast address]
gateway [gateway address]
replacing [static ip] with your actual ip address eg 172.16.1.33 and so on..
To set DNS without it being overwritten by resolvconf every time you reboot, create
$sudo vi /etc/resolvE.conf
# DNS
nameserver [nameserver 1 address]
nameserver [nameserver 2 address]
then create an init script to copy this file to resolv.conf at boot:
$sudo vi /etc/init.d/fixresolv
#!/bin/bash /etc/resolvE.conf /etc/resolv.conf
cp
and use update-rc.d to create the init script links:
$sudo update-rc.d fixresolv defaults
Run it once immediately so you don't have to reboot just to set DNS right now:
$sudo /etc/init.d/./fixresolv
Finally, restart network services:
sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart
If all went well, you'll now be up on a static IP with working DNS which will continue to come up properly next time you need to reboot.
I think the problem most reporters have is that they have a big struggle to get their editors to let them cover almost *anything* beyond a 3 column inch piece about something on the police blotter. The idea of adding yet another layer of `approval' to any story they're interested in doing real work on is enough to make them want to shoot themselves. ``I'm sorry Jane, the plebs have voted down your investigative report on the financial links between city council members and that corporation currently seeking exemption from planning processes - you'll need to toss the last two months work you've been doing on it. They voted up more stories about Britney.''
Caveat: ReFit works on any *intel* mac. No PPCs.
The oxygen bar in San Francisco started selling sushi as well. then alcohol. then went out of business. Now it's a rapidly failing wine bar.
Silver was the `universal commodity' for most of the last 5000 years. Gold is a Johnny-come-lately from the last 400 years at best.
The actual `use value' of gold (as decoration, malleable flexible material, conductor) is about US$80 an ounce. The other $900 is fluff value we've assigned to it because a few currencies were based on it for a while.
And I say this as someone who did drill & blast for ten years in gold mines in Australia, and hence has a health appreciation of the dot-com mentality that periodically envelops the industry every time there's a run on the stuff. Driller's pay-per-metre isn't called `silly money' for noting.
The 'Lightning' add-on for Thunderbird lets you subscribe to multiple Google calendars & shows them as a sidebar to Thunderbird's mail window. Not quite the same as having it in Gnome panel, but I thought you might be curious to check it out if you weren't already aware of it.
I mean, really, html as a 'skill'?
Gimp vs Photoshop: intended end-use is everything. Gimp saves a lot of people the bother of either paying money or committing copyright infringement to do 97% of image manipulation. Photoshop is an indispensable tool for a professional operating in a world geared around that tool and/or the 3% of end-users who are actually doing something that Gimp can't do and Photoshop can. That's not most of us.
Blender vs unnamed "big-boys stuff": You tried a complex piece of software for "30 seconds" and expected, I don't know, what? The software to read your mind and render amazing 3-d porn on the fly? We'll skip the Freudian analysis of what's going on for you around "the big-boys stuff". But in short, your "30 second" comparison is irrelevant.
Postgres vs Oracle: the two main comparison points between these two these days seem to be 'we've built an infrastructure around Oracle and switching is dangerous/a huge waste of time' (an attitude I completely support); and Oracle's putative 'richer feature set'. Some people also say that for really huge databases (hundreds of millions of rows), Oracle is superior. Once again, it's what your end-use is that decides whether you want a multi-thousand dollar Oracle seats vs free Postgres seats. You'll note that slashdot (between 10,000 and 40,000 hits per second) uses *mysql* - it fits their fairly specific needs. I work with behavioral data from thousands of respondents at the University of California, San Francisco, and I use postgres and mysql because it suits my very specific needs just fine (and I would happily use Oracle if that was what was needed to manage and analyze my data, but it'd be expensive overkill, so I don't).
Apache vs IIS. Well, whatever. You're comparing a webserver which serves 106 million sites vs IIS's 67 million (http://netcraft.com, accessed April 10, 2009); once again, if you need something tightly integrated with Windows servers, IIS is a decent product and possibly even worth paying money for. For the other 106 million of us, Apache is a more apt product.
I'll stop there. It's my bedtime, and I'm sure someone else will take you to task on the rest of your list.
Regards, Pete
Google 'operation ore'. From wikipedia: "Operation Ore was a British police operation that commenced in 1999, following information from USA law enforcement, and it intended to prosecute thousands of users of websites reportedly featuring child pornography. In the United Kingdom, it has led to 7,250 suspects identified, 4,283 homes searched, 3,744 arrests, 1,848 charged, 1,451 convictions, 493 cautioned, 879 investigations underway, 140 children removed from suspected dangerous situations (although the definition of what constitutes such, has varied and remains vague)[1] and at least 35 suicides.[2] While Ore did catch a number of sex offenders, it turned out that original access data turn out to be faulty resulting in number of false investigation, which ruined life and appear to caused number of suicide. [3] "
So I guess this means that that complete idiot in the building across town who insists on bccing 2/3 of the organization to let us all know there's leftover cake in room 3b will shortly be promoted to head of innovative activities.
Oh, and that I'll be fired because 90% of the ideas I'm working on began as (completely undocumented) conversations with people from random other departments at the local bar, not as email conversations.
Anyway, time to start polishing the CV and looking for another place to work which isn't driven by total idiocy..
You could have said the same thing about the web in 1995 - I was 'technical elite'; my parents saw no point whatsoever in paying for modem dialup for that interweb thing. 10 years later, my parents see always-on broadband as a basic essential of life just as I do.
Right now, I'm (allegedly) the 'technical elite' in that I watch what little TV programming I watch online without ads and can't remember the last time I bought a physical music CD; my parents don't see the point of internet-delivered TV and still feel the need to 'own' a physical CD when they buy music. In ten years..