I'm curious how big the webcam in question is, since the article didn't really say unless I missed it on two read-throughs. (Early in the morning, you see.)
Ah, so you're tired and possibly groggy/having a hard time paying attention...
Considering that I'm about to go out and do the same thing using $100,000+ in hardware today on a couple of patients
Conspiracy theory: Google records all the clickthroughs on their searches to record every piece of information about you for the Government spy agencies and evil spyware marketing.
Realistic theory: What better way to rank a page's relevancy than by determining which links are chosen by the searchers for a given keyword or set of keywords? This helps eliminate the dross from a search, since you know which of the search results previous searchers found at least interesting enough to click through.
It was only a matter of time before they released something with new features to stay competitive with the offerings from other companies. It's just too bad none of this has any bearing on us Linux and BSD users.
Tell my auto-syncing mobile phone that. Keeps my calendar, tasks & contacts in sync with zero effort, I use IMAP for the mail. It "just works" and I've yet to see anything better from anyone else. Oh, and the same setup keeps by work and home PCs in sync, using the same phone. Lose/break the phone? Back to usuable in less than five minutes on fresh device. Show me a Linux setup that does half this and I'll consider it.
That has nothing to do with Linux, Exchange, or Outlook, and everything to do with what your PHONE manufacturer designed the syncing software to work with. It's not any more difficult to support a full sync of your email, contact, tasks and calendar to Kontact in KDE than Outlook on Windows XP, but the phone/pda manufacturers are choosing to support the most common setup.
It's actually really complicated, and pretty much none of the antivirus companies use more than one or two parts of it, but if you're really interested in digging up more info, those links should be more than adequate:)
cool to see you on slashdot, I didn't know you were a member! I've recommended your hosts file to several people, and I've used it on my Linux desktop too (though that required some conversion to unix friendly formatting)
For companies and organizations that switch to Open Source, it's rarely about just the money. The bottom line is that while Linux and OSS can be "free" the problem is support. It's not as easy (or cheap) to get a *nix admin as opposed to a Windows admin, and most places aren't even looking to hire anyone new. They expect that their current IT staff will handle the new system - and they don't. A Windows IT staff is not prepared for a whole new system without extensive training. Training costs money. Basically, it will still cost you to switch to open source, even if you use free software.
However, what Open Source does offer you is absolute freedom. Freedom to modify the source and extend the software to your needs, flexibility to adapt the system to your environment. It also gives you a safety net, knowing that no single vendor or company holds the fate of your system. Even if all the vendors go out of business, you can theoretically use the source code to maintain the appplication yourself or hire someone to do it, etc. You're not locked in or tied to the fate of a third party.
In situations like this one, where the switch is made purely for monetary reasons, the end result is often unsuccessful. If you're going to use OSS, the reasons have to include ethical, moral, idealogical, or practical (based around your flexibility needs, etc) concerns. If financial is the only reason on your list, then you're very likely to fail, because you'll be expecting the OSS to work exactly the way your previous system did and when it doesn't, you'll have no reason to stick it out.
Open source isn't for everyone, and not for every situation. Deploying it for the right reasons and with the right backbone of support and knowledge is key to success.
In return, maybe there is something you can help me with. Whenever these types of stories turn up here, there is a flood of posts from the US saying there is no problem, its all a liberal plot, etc.
I'm pretty sure that's not related to the geographic location or culture of the US. For one thing, there are high proportion of American slashdot readers, so there's likely to be more posts from the U.S. overall. Secondly, dumb comments aren't isolated to the U.S.A.
There are plenty of people in the UK worried about the Charles and Camilla wedding (yes I know that's over now, it's just an example), or what David Beckham is up to in his bedroom, while there are people starving to death all over the world. The fact is, people don't focus only on the important things, and plenty of them ignore some pretty critical issues daily.
As to nitpicking over some small data point and bending it to "construct some alternative view of the world" - well, again, that's certainly not unique to the U.S.
I looked at your past posts, and you seem to spend a lot of time pointing out that the U.S. and Americans are hypocritical, unintelligent, illogical, etc.
I'd like to ask you on behalf of all Americans to stop generalizing about our country. We (citizens of the U.S.) are not all politicians, some of us DO care about other nations and people, and lots of us don't agree with things that our government does or that happen in our country. Guess what? I don't agree with the Iraq war, even though I live in the U.S. I don't think global warming isn't a problem, and I don't think it's all a "liberal plot" either. That's because I'm an individual with my own ideas about the universe, regardless of where I may choose to be a citizen.
Look at it this way: there are plenty of stupid people out there in the world, and they come from all different countries and ethnic backgrounds, religions, and age groups. There's no need to lump them by categories, and you only come off as arrogant, elitist, and foolish for trying. If there's one thing that my time abroad taught me, it's that stupid people exist everywhere, and there's certainly no U.S. monopoly on that.
No to pick on you, but you're about the one hundredth post that's made comments to the effect that "yeah, until your kid breaks it or loses it"
Maybe I'm unique, but I don't break or lose things any more - or less - now than I did at 16. I had a laptop through high school (my dad got two of them as loaners from work, so I got to use one), and I also got my first personal laptop in college. I can honestly say that there's very little difference in the amount of mishaps I've had in all that time.
Sure, I'm a bit klutzy at times, and very forgetful - but it has nothing to do with my age. Kids aren't magically more likely to break something or lose it than an adult, and I don't think it's really fair to single them out. There are PLENTY of adults who are far more abusive to their laptops and desktops than any high school or college student I know, and vice versa. Frankly, what it really comes down to is the individual, not the age group. You'd have to make the decision based not on the age of your child(ren) but on the maturity level, responsibility, and particular needs.
I don't have children, but when I do, I can tell you that the computer will be as much a part of their lives as is appropriate. If I have a son interested in programming, I'm going to encourage that. If that means he needs a fast desktop to compile and multitask, fine. If it means it's most convenient to him to have a laptop he can cart around to his study halls, community college programming courses, etc, then fine. If I have a kid whose only interest in the computer is IM, they can use the family PC in the basement/office, whatever. It's a question of the individual situation and the relative merit of a laptop versus a desktop - or no computer at all, for that matter.
I vote with my wallet and my feet. Yelling and screaming just gets you written-off as a whackjob. Telling the manager why you're taking your business elsewhere, and then doing so, punishes the crummy vendor and rewards the competitor who doesn't have the crappy policy.
Unfortunately, that has the same problem as I was discussing in my original post - the store manager doesn't care either, in most cases. The store manager in a major chain gets paid a few dollars more an hour than the cashier, has a lot more rules and some more resonsibilities, maybe even a set of 'manager keys'.
What he STILL doesn't have, is a stake in the business. If you leave and go elsewhere to make a purchase, so what? Yeah, it loses the store money, but as a store/shift/dept manager, he'll still get paid, and the odds are extremely slim that it will affect him in any meaningful way.
I'm not saying it's totally pointless, but don't kid yourself into thinking you're putting the hurt on the store and they're going to feel bad about it.
Look, I appreciate the sentiment - I don't like handing out my phone number or personal information for stupid reasons either.
However, PLEASE try and remember something. The people you talk to and buy things from are not the store owners. In fact, they're lucky if they've ever even met the franchise owner of the store, let alone the owner of the company.
You are taking out your annoyance on someone who has:
a) No real interest whatsoever in whether or not you buy X piece of crap (unless they get commissions on sales) and
b) No control over the policy, the system, and in most cases, the cash register either. They might be able to get around it (as the clerk did in the OP's post), but that's not the point
The point I'm making here is this: don't get pissed at some clerk or manager at a chain store for following store policy, or expect them to change it for you, even if it's a dumb policy.
I've worked at department stores and grocery stores, etc - it sucks. And you know what? The only people I ever really disliked when I worked any retail job were the people who thought it was MY store and MY decision to harass them for a phone number/address, whatever. These are the people that expect you to break the rules for them (c'mon, you can just give me the discount, I forgot my coupons), then treat you like shit when you follow the rules of the company that puts the paycheck in your hand at the end of the week.
It was store policy to ask for a phone number, the register prompted for it, and we're supposed to ask. If we got shopped by a "secret shopper" or a manager caught us ignoring it, that's our ass, not the customer's. On behalf of all past, present and future retail employees: We don't care what your personal information is. We care about our paycheck and about following the rules of the job.
I agree that it should only take one polite refusal to avoid having to give out your information. Just keep in mind that the manager may have to give approval, and in the larger chains, even the manager may not have the power to negate store policy. Either way, the bottom line is even if the manager has the ability to counteract the policy, they don't care. The manager at Best Buy is not sitting at home in a deep depression because you bought your printer at Circuit City instead.
Interesting....see, I went to London for a semester, and the ONE thing I noticed without fail was that the Coke/Pepsi/Dr Pepper sucked.
Maybe I'm just used to the corn syrup, but both my fiancee and I noticed immediately that the cola sodas in Europe tasted "funky".
My personal impression was that it was the quality/flavor of the water in it, since it tasted like bad tap water - but maybe that was the sugar instead of the corn syrup. Anyway, I just thought it was interesting that you and I had exactly opposite experiences.
While I understand where you are coming from, I think you - and the parent - are missing a key point.
Natalie Portman starred in the new Star Wars movies and thousands of geeks (including a lot here on/.) have a huge crush on her.
Bruce Campbell is the star of such geek classics as Evil Dead (Army of Darkness).
So yes, you're right, Hollywood celebrities are on/. - but they're celebrities that lots of us geeks are familiar with and fans of. I'd argue that it does count as "news for (some) nerds", "stuff that matters (to some)".
I get these all the time on every system that's internet accessible, including on my cable internet connection. It's pretty clearly lots of different people using similar scripts, since they always try the username "Patrick", for instance.
As others have noted, changing the port makes them stop, and it's a good idea to use the AllowUsers directive in sshd_config to only allow access for people that absolutely need it. Don't allow root access from ssh directly, because if they do somehow get your ssh password, it's better that they don't get root at the same time at least. Lots of other people were arguing over the value of disallowing direct root logins, but for me it's as simple as separating the break-in from the privilege escalation.:)
However, if your running a 32bit OS on a 64bit machine, something is not right.
Not that I don't agree with your statement, however:
I own an AMD64 machine, and I have for quite a while. However, it runs 32bit versions of Linux and always has, for two reasons:
Linux in 64bit wasn't available (for free) in my first OS of choice at the time. I've since switched distros
When I did finally run 64bit Linux on it, I ended up reinstalling the 32bit version after three days. Libraries weren't easily available, and other things like firefox and certain multimedia codecs didn't exist at all. You could run the 32bit Firefox, sure, but when it came to codecs, your only option was to run a chroot environment with 32bit binaries and libs inside your 64bit OS. Pardon me for not being geeky enough here, but I prefer "apt-get install w32codecs" when I want to watch some videos.
I agree, you ought to run a 64bit OS to take fulle advantage of your hardware...but sometimes it's not always that feasible. I'll give you another example. The company I work for makes a enterprise level software product that is only supported in 32bit environments (and indeed, at the moment only compiles properly in 32bit). Companies have expensive contracts to run our software, so they run 32bit OSes, regardless of the hardware, until we can port our product.
I have to agree. I spent a semester in London recently and we used the Tube daily. There is no way that this can be effective. The Tube was a nightmare around rush hours already, and if everyone has to be scanned through security checkpoints I can't imagine how bad it will get. They keep trying to encourage people to use public transportation in London - this would only drive more people to avoid public transport.
These scanners are an illusion of security, and that is ALL. London has had to deal with bombs from the IRA for a long time. People learned to watch for unattended bags, they adapted to carrying their trash home instead of having rubbish bins in public places (a favorite bomb-planting location). They kept the terrorist attacks off the news, effectively taking away the motivation for the attacks.
I can only hope that the people and politicians of London will respond to this in a better way than installing useless scanners in Tube stations.
Fair enough it's difficult for open source projects like Linux to get these things to work, since it often involves reverse-engineering and the like, but this is not the user's fault, and blaming them for not wanting to use something that's horrible to use is far from productive.
Agreed. However, there's another side to this too. When you choose your hardware to run Linux on, you have to know what you are choosing.
I'll give you an example from personal experience. I once had a wireless desktop PCI card, purchased before I started using Linux. This card turned out to have four different revisions of the same model, and three different possible chipsets, some of which worked without fiddling, others of which required some firmware-loading, driver-compiling hackery to function. I spent a week or so with no internet access and eventually got it working, but when I decided to reinstall Linux with a new distro, I knew what to do. I went to google, found a site with the manpage for one of the most well supported wireless drivers under linux/*bsd and read the list of cards it was known to work with out of the box. I went to ebay, purchased one for around 30 dollars, and from then on I have had zero problems with wireless under every version of Linux I've run on it since. The only configuration I've had to do is a WEP key when one is needed.
The point is, things "just work" on a Mac because they are programmed well and polished so that they do so, but they also work with a MUCH smaller hardware set. You wouldn't go out and buy just any old piece of hardware and expect to plug it into your Mac and have it "just work" - you'd make sure it had Apple software or drivers first, wouldn't you? Linux as a whole does its best to come up with at least SOME kind of support for the majority of the hardware out there, but the quality varies as much as the hardware itself.
If you decide Linux is for you, then make the decision to buy hardware that you can be sure will work well under Linux. I have had almost no issues since the day I figured out that it was worth thirty dollars to me not to spend hours screwing with my wireless card. Take the time to find out if your hardware is going to be a beast to work with, and if it is, consider whether A) it's worth it to you to screw with it, B) it's worth it to you to buy something else that you know will work without hacking it, or C) it's worth it to you to run Linux instead of Windows (or buy yourself a Mac), if neither A nor B is an option.
Seriously, for people that claim to know Linux inside & out and be extremely bright IT professionals, if you can't keep WinXP running smoothly then your knowledge is seriously lacking.
Isn't that sort of silly to expect a Linux expert to know how to run Windows smoothly? You certainly wouldn't expect a Windows admin to run Linux smoothly either.
On another note, I've seen more than a few BSODs on XP, but to be fair as far as I can tell it's usually either hardware or a driver problem, and almost never an application. I don't have issues with Windows stability, but I do have issues with the security, the closed nature of the code/specs, and the interface flexibility.
I've used more than my share of Windows and worked as a Windows repair tech, etc. I've seen more than enough of it, and I just can't find what I'm looking for in Windows. Linux fits my personality. Windows apparently fits yours. To each his own...as much as I like Linux, I don't expect everyone to agree with me. Zealot though I may be, we're not all jerks about it;)
In America, something like 75% people are self-declared Christians. And you practically can't get elected in this country without being a Christian of some sort. To suggest that Christians are being persecuted is laughable.
Not that I want to get into any kind of argument over this but: if the majority (as you claim) are Christians, wouldn't it make sense that they want to elect a leader who holds the same values?
Anyway, the real reason I replied was just to point out that I wasn't saying Christians are persecuted. I was just saying that on slashdot there happens to be a highly vocal majority that dislike Christianity and its ideas.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm curious how big the webcam in question is, since the article didn't really say unless I missed it on two read-throughs. (Early in the morning, you see.)
:)
Ah, so you're tired and possibly groggy/having a hard time paying attention...
Considering that I'm about to go out and do the same thing using $100,000+ in hardware today on a couple of patients
Boy am I glad I'm not one of those patients...
Conspiracy theory: Google records all the clickthroughs on their searches to record every piece of information about you for the Government spy agencies and evil spyware marketing.
Realistic theory: What better way to rank a page's relevancy than by determining which links are chosen by the searchers for a given keyword or set of keywords? This helps eliminate the dross from a search, since you know which of the search results previous searchers found at least interesting enough to click through.
It was only a matter of time before they released something with new features to stay competitive with the offerings from other companies. It's just too bad none of this has any bearing on us Linux and BSD users.
That has nothing to do with Linux, Exchange, or Outlook, and everything to do with what your PHONE manufacturer designed the syncing software to work with. It's not any more difficult to support a full sync of your email, contact, tasks and calendar to Kontact in KDE than Outlook on Windows XP, but the phone/pda manufacturers are choosing to support the most common setup.
The naming sceme was designed by CARO (Computer Antivirus Researchers Organization). The naming convention is documented on the caro website:g Scheme/
I d=1/
I d=2/
:)
http://www.caro.org/tiki-index.php?page=CaroNamin
and the original conference paper for the naming scheme:
http://www.caro.org/tiki-read_article.php?article
and there is a new naming convention being proposed as well, see:
http://www.caro.org/tiki-read_article.php?article
It's actually really complicated, and pretty much none of the antivirus companies use more than one or two parts of it, but if you're really interested in digging up more info, those links should be more than adequate
cool to see you on slashdot, I didn't know you were a member! I've recommended your hosts file to several people, and I've used it on my Linux desktop too (though that required some conversion to unix friendly formatting)
Thanks for providing your hosts file to all of us
-Jay
For companies and organizations that switch to Open Source, it's rarely about just the money. The bottom line is that while Linux and OSS can be "free" the problem is support. It's not as easy (or cheap) to get a *nix admin as opposed to a Windows admin, and most places aren't even looking to hire anyone new. They expect that their current IT staff will handle the new system - and they don't. A Windows IT staff is not prepared for a whole new system without extensive training. Training costs money. Basically, it will still cost you to switch to open source, even if you use free software.
However, what Open Source does offer you is absolute freedom. Freedom to modify the source and extend the software to your needs, flexibility to adapt the system to your environment. It also gives you a safety net, knowing that no single vendor or company holds the fate of your system. Even if all the vendors go out of business, you can theoretically use the source code to maintain the appplication yourself or hire someone to do it, etc. You're not locked in or tied to the fate of a third party.
In situations like this one, where the switch is made purely for monetary reasons, the end result is often unsuccessful. If you're going to use OSS, the reasons have to include ethical, moral, idealogical, or practical (based around your flexibility needs, etc) concerns. If financial is the only reason on your list, then you're very likely to fail, because you'll be expecting the OSS to work exactly the way your previous system did and when it doesn't, you'll have no reason to stick it out.
Open source isn't for everyone, and not for every situation. Deploying it for the right reasons and with the right backbone of support and knowledge is key to success.
I'm pretty sure that's not related to the geographic location or culture of the US. For one thing, there are high proportion of American slashdot readers, so there's likely to be more posts from the U.S. overall. Secondly, dumb comments aren't isolated to the U.S.A.
There are plenty of people in the UK worried about the Charles and Camilla wedding (yes I know that's over now, it's just an example), or what David Beckham is up to in his bedroom, while there are people starving to death all over the world. The fact is, people don't focus only on the important things, and plenty of them ignore some pretty critical issues daily.
As to nitpicking over some small data point and bending it to "construct some alternative view of the world" - well, again, that's certainly not unique to the U.S.
I looked at your past posts, and you seem to spend a lot of time pointing out that the U.S. and Americans are hypocritical, unintelligent, illogical, etc.
I'd like to ask you on behalf of all Americans to stop generalizing about our country. We (citizens of the U.S.) are not all politicians, some of us DO care about other nations and people, and lots of us don't agree with things that our government does or that happen in our country. Guess what? I don't agree with the Iraq war, even though I live in the U.S. I don't think global warming isn't a problem, and I don't think it's all a "liberal plot" either. That's because I'm an individual with my own ideas about the universe, regardless of where I may choose to be a citizen.
Look at it this way: there are plenty of stupid people out there in the world, and they come from all different countries and ethnic backgrounds, religions, and age groups. There's no need to lump them by categories, and you only come off as arrogant, elitist, and foolish for trying. If there's one thing that my time abroad taught me, it's that stupid people exist everywhere, and there's certainly no U.S. monopoly on that.
No to pick on you, but you're about the one hundredth post that's made comments to the effect that "yeah, until your kid breaks it or loses it"
Maybe I'm unique, but I don't break or lose things any more - or less - now than I did at 16. I had a laptop through high school (my dad got two of them as loaners from work, so I got to use one), and I also got my first personal laptop in college. I can honestly say that there's very little difference in the amount of mishaps I've had in all that time.
Sure, I'm a bit klutzy at times, and very forgetful - but it has nothing to do with my age. Kids aren't magically more likely to break something or lose it than an adult, and I don't think it's really fair to single them out. There are PLENTY of adults who are far more abusive to their laptops and desktops than any high school or college student I know, and vice versa. Frankly, what it really comes down to is the individual, not the age group. You'd have to make the decision based not on the age of your child(ren) but on the maturity level, responsibility, and particular needs.
I don't have children, but when I do, I can tell you that the computer will be as much a part of their lives as is appropriate. If I have a son interested in programming, I'm going to encourage that. If that means he needs a fast desktop to compile and multitask, fine. If it means it's most convenient to him to have a laptop he can cart around to his study halls, community college programming courses, etc, then fine. If I have a kid whose only interest in the computer is IM, they can use the family PC in the basement/office, whatever. It's a question of the individual situation and the relative merit of a laptop versus a desktop - or no computer at all, for that matter.
Depends...is it tough love?
Here: "Now we know who writes all those cryptic error messages and the dialoge for clippy!"
Unfortunately, that has the same problem as I was discussing in my original post - the store manager doesn't care either, in most cases. The store manager in a major chain gets paid a few dollars more an hour than the cashier, has a lot more rules and some more resonsibilities, maybe even a set of 'manager keys'.
What he STILL doesn't have, is a stake in the business. If you leave and go elsewhere to make a purchase, so what? Yeah, it loses the store money, but as a store/shift/dept manager, he'll still get paid, and the odds are extremely slim that it will affect him in any meaningful way.
I'm not saying it's totally pointless, but don't kid yourself into thinking you're putting the hurt on the store and they're going to feel bad about it.
However, PLEASE try and remember something. The people you talk to and buy things from are not the store owners. In fact, they're lucky if they've ever even met the franchise owner of the store, let alone the owner of the company.
You are taking out your annoyance on someone who has: a) No real interest whatsoever in whether or not you buy X piece of crap (unless they get commissions on sales) and b) No control over the policy, the system, and in most cases, the cash register either. They might be able to get around it (as the clerk did in the OP's post), but that's not the point
The point I'm making here is this: don't get pissed at some clerk or manager at a chain store for following store policy, or expect them to change it for you, even if it's a dumb policy.
I've worked at department stores and grocery stores, etc - it sucks. And you know what? The only people I ever really disliked when I worked any retail job were the people who thought it was MY store and MY decision to harass them for a phone number/address, whatever. These are the people that expect you to break the rules for them (c'mon, you can just give me the discount, I forgot my coupons), then treat you like shit when you follow the rules of the company that puts the paycheck in your hand at the end of the week.
It was store policy to ask for a phone number, the register prompted for it, and we're supposed to ask. If we got shopped by a "secret shopper" or a manager caught us ignoring it, that's our ass, not the customer's. On behalf of all past, present and future retail employees: We don't care what your personal information is. We care about our paycheck and about following the rules of the job.
I agree that it should only take one polite refusal to avoid having to give out your information. Just keep in mind that the manager may have to give approval, and in the larger chains, even the manager may not have the power to negate store policy. Either way, the bottom line is even if the manager has the ability to counteract the policy, they don't care. The manager at Best Buy is not sitting at home in a deep depression because you bought your printer at Circuit City instead.
Er....I ran BeOs 5 pro on a 450mhz pentium with an 8mb video card to try it out a while back and it ran ok.
ah, well, I'm only 21 so I guess I missed out :)
I agree, and it's a good principle, one worth living by.
Interesting....see, I went to London for a semester, and the ONE thing I noticed without fail was that the Coke/Pepsi/Dr Pepper sucked.
Maybe I'm just used to the corn syrup, but both my fiancee and I noticed immediately that the cola sodas in Europe tasted "funky".
My personal impression was that it was the quality/flavor of the water in it, since it tasted like bad tap water - but maybe that was the sugar instead of the corn syrup. Anyway, I just thought it was interesting that you and I had exactly opposite experiences.
Ahhh, so you saw Batman Begins too?
While I understand where you are coming from, I think you - and the parent - are missing a key point.
/.) have a huge crush on her.
/. - but they're celebrities that lots of us geeks are familiar with and fans of. I'd argue that it does count as "news for (some) nerds", "stuff that matters (to some)".
Natalie Portman starred in the new Star Wars movies and thousands of geeks (including a lot here on
Bruce Campbell is the star of such geek classics as Evil Dead (Army of Darkness).
So yes, you're right, Hollywood celebrities are on
I get these all the time on every system that's internet accessible, including on my cable internet connection. It's pretty clearly lots of different people using similar scripts, since they always try the username "Patrick", for instance.
:)
As others have noted, changing the port makes them stop, and it's a good idea to use the AllowUsers directive in sshd_config to only allow access for people that absolutely need it. Don't allow root access from ssh directly, because if they do somehow get your ssh password, it's better that they don't get root at the same time at least. Lots of other people were arguing over the value of disallowing direct root logins, but for me it's as simple as separating the break-in from the privilege escalation.
I own an AMD64 machine, and I have for quite a while. However, it runs 32bit versions of Linux and always has, for two reasons:
- Linux in 64bit wasn't available (for free) in my first OS of choice at the time. I've since switched distros
- When I did finally run 64bit Linux on it, I ended up reinstalling the 32bit version after three days. Libraries weren't easily available, and other things like firefox and certain multimedia codecs didn't exist at all. You could run the 32bit Firefox, sure, but when it came to codecs, your only option was to run a chroot environment with 32bit binaries and libs inside your 64bit OS. Pardon me for not being geeky enough here, but I prefer "apt-get install w32codecs" when I want to watch some videos.
I agree, you ought to run a 64bit OS to take fulle advantage of your hardware...but sometimes it's not always that feasible. I'll give you another example. The company I work for makes a enterprise level software product that is only supported in 32bit environments (and indeed, at the moment only compiles properly in 32bit). Companies have expensive contracts to run our software, so they run 32bit OSes, regardless of the hardware, until we can port our product.These scanners are an illusion of security, and that is ALL. London has had to deal with bombs from the IRA for a long time. People learned to watch for unattended bags, they adapted to carrying their trash home instead of having rubbish bins in public places (a favorite bomb-planting location). They kept the terrorist attacks off the news, effectively taking away the motivation for the attacks.
I can only hope that the people and politicians of London will respond to this in a better way than installing useless scanners in Tube stations.
Agreed. However, there's another side to this too. When you choose your hardware to run Linux on, you have to know what you are choosing.
I'll give you an example from personal experience. I once had a wireless desktop PCI card, purchased before I started using Linux. This card turned out to have four different revisions of the same model, and three different possible chipsets, some of which worked without fiddling, others of which required some firmware-loading, driver-compiling hackery to function. I spent a week or so with no internet access and eventually got it working, but when I decided to reinstall Linux with a new distro, I knew what to do. I went to google, found a site with the manpage for one of the most well supported wireless drivers under linux/*bsd and read the list of cards it was known to work with out of the box. I went to ebay, purchased one for around 30 dollars, and from then on I have had zero problems with wireless under every version of Linux I've run on it since. The only configuration I've had to do is a WEP key when one is needed.
The point is, things "just work" on a Mac because they are programmed well and polished so that they do so, but they also work with a MUCH smaller hardware set. You wouldn't go out and buy just any old piece of hardware and expect to plug it into your Mac and have it "just work" - you'd make sure it had Apple software or drivers first, wouldn't you? Linux as a whole does its best to come up with at least SOME kind of support for the majority of the hardware out there, but the quality varies as much as the hardware itself.
If you decide Linux is for you, then make the decision to buy hardware that you can be sure will work well under Linux. I have had almost no issues since the day I figured out that it was worth thirty dollars to me not to spend hours screwing with my wireless card. Take the time to find out if your hardware is going to be a beast to work with, and if it is, consider whether A) it's worth it to you to screw with it, B) it's worth it to you to buy something else that you know will work without hacking it, or C) it's worth it to you to run Linux instead of Windows (or buy yourself a Mac), if neither A nor B is an option.
Isn't that sort of silly to expect a Linux expert to know how to run Windows smoothly? You certainly wouldn't expect a Windows admin to run Linux smoothly either.
On another note, I've seen more than a few BSODs on XP, but to be fair as far as I can tell it's usually either hardware or a driver problem, and almost never an application. I don't have issues with Windows stability, but I do have issues with the security, the closed nature of the code/specs, and the interface flexibility.
I've used more than my share of Windows and worked as a Windows repair tech, etc. I've seen more than enough of it, and I just can't find what I'm looking for in Windows. Linux fits my personality. Windows apparently fits yours. To each his own...as much as I like Linux, I don't expect everyone to agree with me. Zealot though I may be, we're not all jerks about it ;)
Not that I want to get into any kind of argument over this but: if the majority (as you claim) are Christians, wouldn't it make sense that they want to elect a leader who holds the same values?
Anyway, the real reason I replied was just to point out that I wasn't saying Christians are persecuted. I was just saying that on slashdot there happens to be a highly vocal majority that dislike Christianity and its ideas.