Yes yes, but, despite the "news for nerds" tagline, Slashdot is really more of a dicussion site than a news site. If you really just want the latest in tech news, try someplace like http://freshnews.org/ where you can get everything consolidated into a nice digest for you, including the ancient slashdot headlines. If you want a discussion forum for geek chatting, stupid memes, repetitive jokes and overall fun, then read slashdot.
Personally, despite some of the crap on slashdot, I still stick around, mostly for the commentary and the interesting angles I find other people view things from.
"Candidate must have a BS in Computer Science, and 20 years of experience in the following technologies"
Man, if that ain't the truth. I'm a senior in college, graduating in less than a month. I am currently working an internship in London (England, not Ohio) at a Linux consulting place, doing systems administration stuff. I'm also looking for my first job.
It has been absolutely astounding to me how much places are asking you to know for an entry level job! They want to pay you 40,000 a year to know three programming languages, be familiar with Linux, Unix, Mac OS, Windows, and have three years experience with
This is absolutely insane for an entry level position, and I can only hope for my sake that they don't actually look for all that experience on the resume!
Yeah, I remember that...it was a little before I moved to Linux, and I wrote a little batch file to block the AIM ad servers (that served that audio ads) with the hosts file.
It was a limited time thing, as I remember, it was a 2 week(month?) trial of audio ads to see what the response was. Though I can't be 100% sure since I don't use Windows or AIM, I'm pretty sure those audio ads are no longer in service because the response was overwhelmingly horrible.
-Jay
With the current DRM system, the technically minded among us find ways around it, while other people put up with it. All you're really pointing out is that marking each track with an id tag has the same issues as DRMed tracks.
The positive side to a unique id inside the track is that it allows someone like me, who honestly just wants their music and isn't interested in putting in on P2P network, to download it and use it without being restricted in how I use it. I have no problem with being accountable for it, I just don't like being told where I can play it and with what software, etc.
While some people will break the unique ids, and create software that does it for you, etc - those same people are cracking DRMed tracks anyway, so the manufacturers wouldn't lose or gain any more than they do with DRM, but the consumer would gain a lot of freedom to use their purchased tracks. I would definitely support this as an alternative to crippled music tracks (which are the reason I don't download any music from anyone).
The negative side (from the RIAA standpoint) of the unique id tag is that it turns the protection from active protection where the companies prevent it from being released or copied to passive protection where they have to chase you down after the track is released. Again, however, they're running into the same problems with the current system.
Overall, I find this a log less objectionable than DRM tracks, and I'd actually be in favor of something like this.
I have a theory that there's a specific posture inherent in a computer chair and keyboard-using position. This posture subsequently causes a load shift, causing the person's brain to slide downwards to approximately the region of their feet, where lack of oxygenated blood causes reduced processing ability and intelligence.
Geeks avoid this through bad posture and stimulants such as caffeine to stimulate blood flow.
True enough...and to add to what you said, KDE at the very least does include a crash reporting feature, identical to the windows/apple versions. When anything in KDE crashes, I get a dialog pop-up asking me if I would like to report or debug etc.
bigot: "A bigot is a prejudiced person who is intolerant of any opinions differing from his own"
(From the dictionary)
Believing that something is wrong is not the same as being intolerant. I also believe that it's wrong, but I am not intolerant. I will not discriminate against or take hateful action against someone because of their sexual, religious or political preference.
You're right; being a Christian is not a free pass. Neither does disagreement constitute bigotry or intolerance; simply disagreement.
So...you're saying marriage is a Christian institution, but other people have extended it outside Christianity, so now we should "leave religion out of it" and the definition of marriage is now up for grabs because other people have decided to appropriate it?
I'm not even agreeing or disagreeing with either side of this debate, I just think that's terrible logic.
absolutely 100% agreed...if it weren't for that kidney transplant, I wouldn't have my mom around at all. And even with the complications, it's a lot better than the old dialysis days!
Well, I'm really glad for you that it's only one pill, but in my mother's case, it's still a handful of pills taken multiple times a day (hey, still better than dialysis). She had a kidney transplant as well, and it was successful, but she is still required to take various immune suppressants and steroids, and she got a really bad case of shingles thanks to the immune system suppression. (to the point where she's going to be in a medical textbook).
It's different for every person, but most of the cases I've heard of required more than one pill a day...you've been lucky with yours and I'm glad for you, as I certainly wish it were that simple for my mom. It's hard to watch her go through so many side effects.
Taking those tough medication after organ transplants does not exactly cheer one up, but the dose gets reduced, over time. Eventuelly you can live without the medication.
My mother had a kidney transplant and has been on anti-rejection drugs for the last ten years or so. I beg to differ with your comment. Yes, the dosage has dropped some, but she's also had to switch medications, deal with all kinds of side effects (osteoporosis and hair loss due to the steroids you take to suppress the immune system, for example). This kind of thing is par for the course for people who have to take anti-rejection drugs. You have complications, side effects, and you ALWAYS have to take them. You never wean completely off the drugs...I wish you did, because it would be a lot easier on my mom and she wouldn't have to be getting a hip replacement at 40 years old from taking so many steroids to keep her kidney from rejecting.
I often think about this very topic...if someone or someones would come along and put the pedal to the medal on polishing those things off, Linux would become one hell of a competitor.
I think it comes down to the hacker mindset, where the interesting problem is king. No one wants to work on the "boring" tasks like cleaning up GUI buttons and interface text. They'd rather work out exotic new gut level kernel code or rough out the next great feature. We're always questing for the next feature and getting it sketched into the system, and never quite get around to inking everything in. I think eventually, this will happen, at least to some degree. In some places it IS happening, but it's going to take time.
Especially now that they've got the Shuffle, they won't want to drop the price of the regular iPod much more. If you really want an iPod, you either catch a deal such as the Audible 100 off any "audible compatible player" or go the freeiPods.com route. Your only other option is probably ebay but I found ebay to be nearly as expensive as the apple store.
It's an unfortunate part (at least for us consumers) of Apple's business model that their price point stays the same. They tend to keep the price fairly steady but increase features over time - see the iPod Photo for an example of this in action. There's a chance a solid capacity iPod might be cheap(er) someday, but it's going to be a while...as long as they can rake in the cash selling iPods and iPod Mini and iPod Shuffle at the current price, they will.
This brings to mind the scene in Office Space, where you first find out that Michael's full name is "Michael Bolton", and that he hates that the famous singer has ruined the name for everyone else.
"Why not just go by Mike?"
"No way, why should I change? He's the one who sucks."
A friend of mine and I have decided that Bill Toohey's comment that arresting a man for spending $2 dollar bills is
"
a sign that we're all a little nervous in the post-9/11 world."
instates two things;
1) Toohey's corollary to Godwin's Law: "once such a comparison [to 9/11] is made, the thread is over, and whoever mentioned 9/11 has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress"
2) The Toohey Coronary: "when you hear something so stupid, it kills you"
Actually, the competition has two categories..."Explorer" and "Ranger". Explorer class is almost all colleges and universities, while Ranger is for the high school students. These kids competed in the Explorer class because the teachers assumed they'd lose, so they might as well lose to some good teams...go figure
-Jay
No, it doesn't...read the entire article and you'll see that though they came in third in the events, they won the overall, as well as the design and technical writing awards, and a special award for achievement.
Slashdot Mirror
just out of curiosity, where do you work now that you get to work with Python?
-Jay
Yes yes, but, despite the "news for nerds" tagline, Slashdot is really more of a dicussion site than a news site. If you really just want the latest in tech news, try someplace like http://freshnews.org/ where you can get everything consolidated into a nice digest for you, including the ancient slashdot headlines. If you want a discussion forum for geek chatting, stupid memes, repetitive jokes and overall fun, then read slashdot.
Personally, despite some of the crap on slashdot, I still stick around, mostly for the commentary and the interesting angles I find other people view things from.
-Jay
Man, if that ain't the truth. I'm a senior in college, graduating in less than a month. I am currently working an internship in London (England, not Ohio) at a Linux consulting place, doing systems administration stuff. I'm also looking for my first job.
It has been absolutely astounding to me how much places are asking you to know for an entry level job! They want to pay you 40,000 a year to know three programming languages, be familiar with Linux, Unix, Mac OS, Windows, and have three years experience with
This is absolutely insane for an entry level position, and I can only hope for my sake that they don't actually look for all that experience on the resume!
-Jay
wow, that sucks...one more reason to avoid AIM...if only I could get everyone I know to use Jabber or something so I could get off AIM completely.
-Jay
Yeah, I remember that...it was a little before I moved to Linux, and I wrote a little batch file to block the AIM ad servers (that served that audio ads) with the hosts file. It was a limited time thing, as I remember, it was a 2 week(month?) trial of audio ads to see what the response was. Though I can't be 100% sure since I don't use Windows or AIM, I'm pretty sure those audio ads are no longer in service because the response was overwhelmingly horrible. -Jay
There is a linux port for AIM already, has been for quite a while.
http://www.aim.com/get_aim/linux/latest_linux.adp
-Jay
You make a good point, however:
With the current DRM system, the technically minded among us find ways around it, while other people put up with it. All you're really pointing out is that marking each track with an id tag has the same issues as DRMed tracks.
The positive side to a unique id inside the track is that it allows someone like me, who honestly just wants their music and isn't interested in putting in on P2P network, to download it and use it without being restricted in how I use it. I have no problem with being accountable for it, I just don't like being told where I can play it and with what software, etc.
While some people will break the unique ids, and create software that does it for you, etc - those same people are cracking DRMed tracks anyway, so the manufacturers wouldn't lose or gain any more than they do with DRM, but the consumer would gain a lot of freedom to use their purchased tracks. I would definitely support this as an alternative to crippled music tracks (which are the reason I don't download any music from anyone).
The negative side (from the RIAA standpoint) of the unique id tag is that it turns the protection from active protection where the companies prevent it from being released or copied to passive protection where they have to chase you down after the track is released. Again, however, they're running into the same problems with the current system.
Overall, I find this a log less objectionable than DRM tracks, and I'd actually be in favor of something like this.
-Jay
well, maybe if they spelled her name right....
I have a theory that there's a specific posture inherent in a computer chair and keyboard-using position. This posture subsequently causes a load shift, causing the person's brain to slide downwards to approximately the region of their feet, where lack of oxygenated blood causes reduced processing ability and intelligence.
Geeks avoid this through bad posture and stimulants such as caffeine to stimulate blood flow.
-Jay
True enough...and to add to what you said, KDE at the very least does include a crash reporting feature, identical to the windows/apple versions. When anything in KDE crashes, I get a dialog pop-up asking me if I would like to report or debug etc.
-Jay
bigot: "A bigot is a prejudiced person who is intolerant of any opinions differing from his own"
(From the dictionary)
Believing that something is wrong is not the same as being intolerant. I also believe that it's wrong, but I am not intolerant. I will not discriminate against or take hateful action against someone because of their sexual, religious or political preference.
You're right; being a Christian is not a free pass. Neither does disagreement constitute bigotry or intolerance; simply disagreement.
-Jay
So...you're saying marriage is a Christian institution, but other people have extended it outside Christianity, so now we should "leave religion out of it" and the definition of marriage is now up for grabs because other people have decided to appropriate it?
I'm not even agreeing or disagreeing with either side of this debate, I just think that's terrible logic.
-Jay
absolutely 100% agreed...if it weren't for that kidney transplant, I wouldn't have my mom around at all. And even with the complications, it's a lot better than the old dialysis days!
-Jay
Well, I'm really glad for you that it's only one pill, but in my mother's case, it's still a handful of pills taken multiple times a day (hey, still better than dialysis). She had a kidney transplant as well, and it was successful, but she is still required to take various immune suppressants and steroids, and she got a really bad case of shingles thanks to the immune system suppression. (to the point where she's going to be in a medical textbook).
It's different for every person, but most of the cases I've heard of required more than one pill a day...you've been lucky with yours and I'm glad for you, as I certainly wish it were that simple for my mom. It's hard to watch her go through so many side effects.
-Jay
My mother had a kidney transplant and has been on anti-rejection drugs for the last ten years or so. I beg to differ with your comment. Yes, the dosage has dropped some, but she's also had to switch medications, deal with all kinds of side effects (osteoporosis and hair loss due to the steroids you take to suppress the immune system, for example). This kind of thing is par for the course for people who have to take anti-rejection drugs. You have complications, side effects, and you ALWAYS have to take them. You never wean completely off the drugs...I wish you did, because it would be a lot easier on my mom and she wouldn't have to be getting a hip replacement at 40 years old from taking so many steroids to keep her kidney from rejecting.
Jay
I often think about this very topic...if someone or someones would come along and put the pedal to the medal on polishing those things off, Linux would become one hell of a competitor.
I think it comes down to the hacker mindset, where the interesting problem is king. No one wants to work on the "boring" tasks like cleaning up GUI buttons and interface text. They'd rather work out exotic new gut level kernel code or rough out the next great feature. We're always questing for the next feature and getting it sketched into the system, and never quite get around to inking everything in. I think eventually, this will happen, at least to some degree. In some places it IS happening, but it's going to take time.
-Jay
Yeah, those bastards...giving money to charity. They should give it to the government, who never wastes money.
Especially now that they've got the Shuffle, they won't want to drop the price of the regular iPod much more. If you really want an iPod, you either catch a deal such as the Audible 100 off any "audible compatible player" or go the freeiPods.com route. Your only other option is probably ebay but I found ebay to be nearly as expensive as the apple store.
It's an unfortunate part (at least for us consumers) of Apple's business model that their price point stays the same. They tend to keep the price fairly steady but increase features over time - see the iPod Photo for an example of this in action. There's a chance a solid capacity iPod might be cheap(er) someday, but it's going to be a while...as long as they can rake in the cash selling iPods and iPod Mini and iPod Shuffle at the current price, they will.
-Jay
You may already know about this, or be a Linux user like me, but just in case, I thought I'd pass it along.
-Jay
Yeah, but they cheated by ganging up!
-Jay
This brings to mind the scene in Office Space, where you first find out that Michael's full name is "Michael Bolton", and that he hates that the famous singer has ruined the name for everyone else.
"Why not just go by Mike?"
"No way, why should I change? He's the one who sucks."
-Jay
1) Toohey's corollary to Godwin's Law: "once such a comparison [to 9/11] is made, the thread is over, and whoever mentioned 9/11 has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress"
2) The Toohey Coronary: "when you hear something so stupid, it kills you"
-Jay
Yeah, but your peanut butter and jelly sandwiches don't have crimped edges!
-Jay
Actually, the competition has two categories..."Explorer" and "Ranger". Explorer class is almost all colleges and universities, while Ranger is for the high school students. These kids competed in the Explorer class because the teachers assumed they'd lose, so they might as well lose to some good teams...go figure -Jay
No, it doesn't...read the entire article and you'll see that though they came in third in the events, they won the overall, as well as the design and technical writing awards, and a special award for achievement.
-Jay