about the sentence "Microsoft Flirts with Open Source" is that it's like the 5 year old's love:
In the kindergarden little boys try to get the attention of little girls by being rude and abusive towards the little girl.
Now a bit seriously, I'm not saying that MS is like a 5 year old - although you could find a lot of examples like that, but the flirting part doesn't hold up either.
"Hang on, wait a second. First of all, you're defining knowing what a codec is (and where to get it, and how to install it), as "essential knowledge." I'd argue with that one. But even granting that, how can something be essential knowldge required to operate a computer when the single most commonly used OS doesn't require someone to know it? Neither does OSX for that matter. Doesn't sound particularly essential to me..."
Where did you get this codec talk from? Neither me nor the article mentioned it. Sounds like a strawman argument to me. About your statement that windows doesn't require to know it, I seem to recall the necessity of codec packs to install to get every kind of multimedia working. Debian doesn't have mplayer in it's repository for licensing reasons, but a new repository can be added and you just have to install mplayer and mplayer-codecs gets installed with it automatically. Doesn't sound too advanced to me, compared to the hoops you have to jump through to get the same functionality from Windows.
"These days though, a basic XP-SP2 system with IE7 can do pretty much whatever you want to do. So can a Linux system. So can OSX. The difference is in the complexity that they expose to their users."
The problem with windows is that it hides complexity in a flawed way, sometimes making default choices where knowledge and user action would be required, essentially hiding essential information. It's inconsistent.
"In this case, the complexity of Linux when asked to perform what, for a large number of people, are the core tasks that they use a computer for -- was high. Attacking the author of the article as you have done is not particularly helpful, and indeed makes it seem as if you realize the issues and have no useful solution for them."
Why was this so called complexity high? Can't it be that Linux does things differently than windows and that confuses users, who blame it on complexity?
Let me clarify though, I wasn't attacking the author, I was just pointing out that his expectations to have Linux work as windows is wrong. If he wants to use Linux he should learn how Linux works - I don't mean the inner details of kernel programming, but rather the big architectural details like the UNIX philosophy and how the GUI is just another layer, etc.
I think though that the author wasn't especially competent in writing an article like that. Not because he wasn't an IT expert, but because he asked the wrong question. To be honest it's a broader problem than the author, because many people think the two questions, "Can ordinary pc users ditch windows for Linux?" and "Can ordinary users use Linux?" is equivalent. The answer to the first question is that Linux isn't Windows and you can't treat it so. The answer to the second question is yes.
Linux is not a drop-in windows replacement. It is not supposed to work like windows.
It is not supposed to route around basic, essential knowledge required to operate a computer like windows does.
Also the claim that anybody can switch from Linux to windows is true. But I don't think it means what you think it means. It doesn't mean that you don't have to "unlearn" the windows way of doing things or that you're not required to learn how to operate Linux properly.
"While solutions may exist to almost every problem I encountered, I was willing to invest only a limited amount of time as a system administrator."
Dear journalist, please continue using your tricicle then on your way to work, because obviously a car requires more expertise and attention. Obviously it is not ready for most people.
P.S.: I talk about Linux, where I obviously mean some distribution of Linux. Also the car analogy is flawed as I spend much less time administrating my debian desktop I'm writing this post from as I'd spend with fighting windows to do what I want. This installation is over 4 years old and absolutely tweaked for my needs.
Oh really? That's interesting because Osama Bin Laden denied the involvement with 9/11 THREE times. The confession tape you're talking about has several problems: first, the guy on the video is right handed, Osama is left according to the FBI. A guy on the video wears a golden ring, which is forbidden by islam. The guy on the video is not Osama because the ratios of eye-eye, eye-ear, eye-nose distance don't match. That is the exact procedure a software recognition system identifies people, which are used with security cameras, and apart from hiding the whole face it doesn't matter if someone tried to mask himself or not. The quality of the tape is also a very poor, and an expert in the field also identified the tape as 95% probability fake. So where did you hear Osama take credit for 9/11 again?
Al-Qaeda may take credit for the violence in Iraq but that doesn't mean they did 9/11 and I'm not even convinced of these claims. Al-Qaeda is too much of a boogie man to be taken seriously anymore, as supposedly they did the Madrid and London bombings too, despite no such evidence in that direction.
Now there is the WTF moment of mine. How does the czechen terrorists come into this whole thing? They are fighting for independence just like the IRA did for Northen Ireland, the Basks do for Bask independence in Spain, they've got nothing to do with anything apart from that. Also the gross incompetence of how the Russians handled the Beslan affair costs a lot of lifes aswell.
How will you explain when Bush makes a public announcement proclaiming himself the son of God and throwing cocain all over the press conference? See, it's easy! I can make ludicrous statements too about future events that are supposed to happen and you should therefor explain! As things tend now I consider my version of the future more likely.
Funny you should talk about drugs though, as the opiate market, supposedly one of the reasons for going into Afghanistan, is booming - while the USA troops are there doing what exactly?
"And you're paranoid too. Are you actually suggesting that the gov't is orchestrating terrorist attacks to consolidate its power?"
The first time they started using this tactic was Pearl Harbor, where they only let it happen.
Since then throughout US history, they orchestrated several dozen attacks on foreign soil under the guise of extremist groups. 9/11 was merely the first bigger attack on US soil in the 21th century.
Just about 9/11 there are thousands of little details and facts that make it impossible to believe any Al-Quaeda scenarios and point to the government staging the whole thing. Please do your research. I'd be the first to dismiss conspiracy theories normally, but this isn't one. It's just not the accepted version that your government wants you to believe. Perception is after all, everything.
The answer I'm interested in is, do they actually realise what's going on and just cannot be bothered to do something about it, or they don't even realise it and are comforting themselves in the managed news they hear from the mainstream media?
Randomly snatching up people from the streets and interrogating them would give more security than this!
Where is the hard data that secretly/unconstitutionally violating a whole nation's rights would have any positive effects? If anything the whole thing just encourages rogue groups serving their own interests to exploit everything they can and without being accountable to anyone. There is a reason we have (had) privacy and it's not because the state is so kind to us, but because in the long run, it makes economic sense! So basically by allowing this, people are causing at the very least damage to the economy so to everyone in the USA.
"can not be anything else in that place for millions of years."
That's like saying you can't stack stuff on the third dimension because there is something at some particular point.
The question is not where you can put something at an arbitary place (point in time), but whether you can put infinitely many things at at least one place (point in time). Time fulfills that.
Also, the regular shape you talk about is basically existant because of human concepts/constrains. We EXIST in 4 dimensions, we can't observe 4 dimensions directly with common human sense because of that. We can only observe 1,2 and 3 dimensions.
"it's a psychological state leading to quite irrational behavior, and stress from long work days can have psychological effects. Not commiting suicide is clearly one measure of health to me."
To get a bit philosophical a bit, you'd have to know if life is worth living for that particular person thinking about suicide first. Suicide may be irrational by "common sense"/instincts, but there are deeper philosophical questions about it. Everyone dies once anyway.
Of course, you're quite correct to assume that being suicidal most likely has some irrational reason, but that doesn't mean everyone is like that.
Anyway, I just ment to provoke some thoughts and highlight some by my post. If it insults you, just calmly disregard it.
I think there were less victims of terrorism in the last 50 years in the USA than the number of people wiretapped. What are the odds that I (or any one of us) has to worry about being killed this year? I don't think the odds are high enough to worry about.
On the tangent a bit, according to some results 100k+ people have died in the last few years thanks to the war in Iraq. Oh, but they weren't roman^Wamerican citizens, so we don't talk about them and it makes it all right, right?
My point is, why the craze about terrorism and not about sufferings caused by actions supposedly taken against terrorism? The answer is simple, currently most of the media runs "managed" news. They don't "censor", just set a very low weight to otherwise important news, that is their biggest power not leaning/bending opinions with words.
Basically the idea is that you hash the previous line and the line you write contains the log info and the hash of the previous line. This means you cannot take entries (lines) out of the logfile without breaking the hashes at some point, which of course can be detected. For example banks use this to validate their logs.
If you've got an entry you can predict, like when you know that your visitation to the site will get logged, then you know that something is fishy if either the hash is wrong or the logfile is missing.
Of course you can recreate the checksums for the whole set of logs, but then that becomes a time/effort issue.
Otherwise please tell me how Japan managed their 100mbit/1gbit fiber to their users or if you want to bore us with the "but but Japan is much smaller and that can't be done in the USA" myth, then explain how Sweden - a huge country with relatively low population count - managed to get fibre to even small villages god knows where (A friend of mine in Sweden has fiber in a village of 500 people and according to him its not an exceptional thing).
Exactly. Article writer has no knowledge in the area.
If C library functions would be unsafe then pretty much other languages would be unsafe aswell.
Yes, we all know about buffer overflows, and that stupid programmers use strcpy without bounds checking, but what more can you do that tell in the documentation explicitly to use strncpy, a new function added just to combat this problem of stupid/lazy programmers who doesn't check bounds properly.
Slashdot Mirror
Did you mean to say "..capitalists defend other capitalists' and their own right to profit by harming consumers."?
They make the hardware to do heavy shaping of service after all.
about the sentence "Microsoft Flirts with Open Source" is that it's like the 5 year old's love:
In the kindergarden little boys try to get the attention of little girls by being rude and abusive towards the little girl.
Now a bit seriously, I'm not saying that MS is like a 5 year old - although you could find a lot of examples like that, but the flirting part doesn't hold up either.
As soon as someone comes up with a good looking GUI for it.
"Oooh shiny!" [click] [click]
So, how are you doing on the penal colonies?
;)
Your friendly slashdot user from good old Europe
"Hang on, wait a second. First of all, you're defining knowing what a codec is (and where to get it, and how to install it), as "essential knowledge." I'd argue with that one. But even granting that, how can something be essential knowldge required to operate a computer when the single most commonly used OS doesn't require someone to know it? Neither does OSX for that matter. Doesn't sound particularly essential to me..."
Where did you get this codec talk from? Neither me nor the article mentioned it. Sounds like a strawman argument to me. About your statement that windows doesn't require to know it, I seem to recall the necessity of codec packs to install to get every kind of multimedia working. Debian doesn't have mplayer in it's repository for licensing reasons, but a new repository can be added and you just have to install mplayer and mplayer-codecs gets installed with it automatically. Doesn't sound too advanced to me, compared to the hoops you have to jump through to get the same functionality from Windows.
"These days though, a basic XP-SP2 system with IE7 can do pretty much whatever you want to do. So can a Linux system. So can OSX. The difference is in the complexity that they expose to their users."
The problem with windows is that it hides complexity in a flawed way, sometimes making default choices where knowledge and user action would be required, essentially hiding essential information. It's inconsistent.
"In this case, the complexity of Linux when asked to perform what, for a large number of people, are the core tasks that they use a computer for -- was high. Attacking the author of the article as you have done is not particularly helpful, and indeed makes it seem as if you realize the issues and have no useful solution for them."
Why was this so called complexity high? Can't it be that Linux does things differently than windows and that confuses users, who blame it on complexity?
Let me clarify though, I wasn't attacking the author, I was just pointing out that his expectations to have Linux work as windows is wrong. If he wants to use Linux he should learn how Linux works - I don't mean the inner details of kernel programming, but rather the big architectural details like the UNIX philosophy and how the GUI is just another layer, etc.
I think though that the author wasn't especially competent in writing an article like that. Not because he wasn't an IT expert, but because he asked the wrong question. To be honest it's a broader problem than the author, because many people think the two questions, "Can ordinary pc users ditch windows for Linux?" and "Can ordinary users use Linux?" is equivalent. The answer to the first question is that Linux isn't Windows and you can't treat it so. The answer to the second question is yes.
Linux is not windows.
These "problems" are our _features_.
The problem is user mentality expecting things to work like on windows. The hard thing is getting rid of that mentality.
Linux is not a drop-in windows replacement. It is not supposed to work like windows.
It is not supposed to route around basic, essential knowledge required to operate a computer like windows does.
Also the claim that anybody can switch from Linux to windows is true. But I don't think it means what you think it means. It doesn't mean that you don't have to "unlearn" the windows way of doing things or that you're not required to learn how to operate Linux properly.
"While solutions may exist to almost every problem I encountered, I was willing to invest only a limited amount of time as a system administrator."
Dear journalist, please continue using your tricicle then on your way to work, because obviously a car requires more expertise and attention. Obviously it is not ready for most people.
P.S.: I talk about Linux, where I obviously mean some distribution of Linux. Also the car analogy is flawed as I spend much less time administrating my debian desktop I'm writing this post from as I'd spend with fighting windows to do what I want. This installation is over 4 years old and absolutely tweaked for my needs.
Oh really? That's interesting because Osama Bin Laden denied the involvement with 9/11 THREE times. The confession tape you're talking about has several problems: first, the guy on the video is right handed, Osama is left according to the FBI. A guy on the video wears a golden ring, which is forbidden by islam. The guy on the video is not Osama because the ratios of eye-eye, eye-ear, eye-nose distance don't match. That is the exact procedure a software recognition system identifies people, which are used with security cameras, and apart from hiding the whole face it doesn't matter if someone tried to mask himself or not. The quality of the tape is also a very poor, and an expert in the field also identified the tape as 95% probability fake. So where did you hear Osama take credit for 9/11 again?
Al-Qaeda may take credit for the violence in Iraq but that doesn't mean they did 9/11 and I'm not even convinced of these claims. Al-Qaeda is too much of a boogie man to be taken seriously anymore, as supposedly they did the Madrid and London bombings too, despite no such evidence in that direction.
Now there is the WTF moment of mine. How does the czechen terrorists come into this whole thing? They are fighting for independence just like the IRA did for Northen Ireland, the Basks do for Bask independence in Spain, they've got nothing to do with anything apart from that. Also the gross incompetence of how the Russians handled the Beslan affair costs a lot of lifes aswell.
How will you explain when Bush makes a public announcement proclaiming himself the son of God and throwing cocain all over the press conference? See, it's easy! I can make ludicrous statements too about future events that are supposed to happen and you should therefor explain! As things tend now I consider my version of the future more likely.
Funny you should talk about drugs though, as the opiate market, supposedly one of the reasons for going into Afghanistan, is booming - while the USA troops are there doing what exactly?
I've got the dvd version of Loose Change. Thanks for bringing the documentary up anyway, there might be others who are interested in seeing it.
"And you're paranoid too. Are you actually suggesting that the gov't is orchestrating terrorist attacks to consolidate its power?"
The first time they started using this tactic was Pearl Harbor, where they only let it happen.
Since then throughout US history, they orchestrated several dozen attacks on foreign soil under the guise of extremist groups. 9/11 was merely the first bigger attack on US soil in the 21th century.
Just about 9/11 there are thousands of little details and facts that make it impossible to believe any Al-Quaeda scenarios and point to the government staging the whole thing. Please do your research. I'd be the first to dismiss conspiracy theories normally, but this isn't one. It's just not the accepted version that your government wants you to believe. Perception is after all, everything.
...where I get fucking pissed at those incompetent fools in office.
As far as I'm concerned that data shouldn't even exist at the disposal of my own country, let alone foreign interests.
Correction: "We all know these programs will not be used for only terrorism, but for everyday profiteering. Will people care then?"
Do you honestly think that they want to solve crimes?
You sir, an idiot and I'm proud to have you on my freaks list.
The answer I'm interested in is, do they actually realise what's going on and just cannot be bothered to do something about it, or they don't even realise it and are comforting themselves in the managed news they hear from the mainstream media?
I'm proud of Zonk for seeing the issue crystal clearly.
:)
Now, if he could do that with dupes too, please?
Randomly snatching up people from the streets and interrogating them would give more security than this!
Where is the hard data that secretly/unconstitutionally violating a whole nation's rights would have any positive effects? If anything the whole thing just encourages rogue groups serving their own interests to exploit everything they can and without being accountable to anyone. There is a reason we have (had) privacy and it's not because the state is so kind to us, but because in the long run, it makes economic sense! So basically by allowing this, people are causing at the very least damage to the economy so to everyone in the USA.
"can not be anything else in that place for millions of years."
That's like saying you can't stack stuff on the third dimension because there is something at some particular point.
The question is not where you can put something at an arbitary place (point in time), but whether you can put infinitely many things at at least one place (point in time). Time fulfills that.
Also, the regular shape you talk about is basically existant because of human concepts/constrains. We EXIST in 4 dimensions, we can't observe 4 dimensions directly with common human sense because of that. We can only observe 1,2 and 3 dimensions.
The current administration already patented it.
Just look at the issue of presidential accountability.
"considering we (the US) are still the richest country in the world"
Surely not per capita. Sadly, only per capita matters in healthcare.
"it's a psychological state leading to quite irrational behavior, and stress from long work days can have psychological effects. Not commiting suicide is clearly one measure of health to me."
To get a bit philosophical a bit, you'd have to know if life is worth living for that particular person thinking about suicide first. Suicide may be irrational by "common sense"/instincts, but there are deeper philosophical questions about it. Everyone dies once anyway.
Of course, you're quite correct to assume that being suicidal most likely has some irrational reason, but that doesn't mean everyone is like that.
Anyway, I just ment to provoke some thoughts and highlight some by my post. If it insults you, just calmly disregard it.
I think there were less victims of terrorism in the last 50 years in the USA than the number of people wiretapped. What are the odds that I (or any one of us) has to worry about being killed this year? I don't think the odds are high enough to worry about.
On the tangent a bit, according to some results 100k+ people have died in the last few years thanks to the war in Iraq. Oh, but they weren't roman^Wamerican citizens, so we don't talk about them and it makes it all right, right?
My point is, why the craze about terrorism and not about sufferings caused by actions supposedly taken against terrorism? The answer is simple, currently most of the media runs "managed" news. They don't "censor", just set a very low weight to otherwise important news, that is their biggest power not leaning/bending opinions with words.
Basically the idea is that you hash the previous line and the line you write contains the log info and the hash of the previous line. This means you cannot take entries (lines) out of the logfile without breaking the hashes at some point, which of course can be detected. For example banks use this to validate their logs.
If you've got an entry you can predict, like when you know that your visitation to the site will get logged, then you know that something is fishy if either the hash is wrong or the logfile is missing.
Of course you can recreate the checksums for the whole set of logs, but then that becomes a time/effort issue.
Don't give them ideas! They are going to mandate chaining the logfiles with a hash...
The barrier is a political/greed-based one.
Otherwise please tell me how Japan managed their 100mbit/1gbit fiber to their users or if you want to bore us with the "but but Japan is much smaller and that can't be done in the USA" myth, then explain how Sweden - a huge country with relatively low population count - managed to get fibre to even small villages god knows where (A friend of mine in Sweden has fiber in a village of 500 people and according to him its not an exceptional thing).
Exactly. Article writer has no knowledge in the area.
If C library functions would be unsafe then pretty much other languages would be unsafe aswell.
Yes, we all know about buffer overflows, and that stupid programmers use strcpy without bounds checking, but what more can you do that tell in the documentation explicitly to use strncpy, a new function added just to combat this problem of stupid/lazy programmers who doesn't check bounds properly.