Sorry, but I also have a real-life example to the contrary here.
I have managed a (small) Unix (mostly Solaris, one or two Linux machines) desktop network. It was painless and took up a tiny fraction of my time.
The most difficult part was convincing the users that no, they do not need root access and if they need an application installed anywhere but their home directories, I will gladly install the package for them.
Users without system access == users who cause you no trouble.
And that's where windos fails. You can't have happy users without system access. You need that access level for almost anything that's important. On a well-setup Unix machine, you don't need root.
bringing management of Linux desktops and servers on par with that of Windows desktops and servers.
Please don't. The nightmare of windos administration on Linux? There's a reason real professionals prefer Unix systems, and administration is a huge part of it.
This isn't a joke. At my 400 people company, there's half a dozen people employed just to keep the windos network running, plus another half dozen students and other cheap labor forces for simple stuff such as exchanging machines, etc. And I'm not saying it's running especially well.
On the other hand, four Unix admins keep several entire networks of production servers running.
Parent is right. I came out of the dotcom bubble with a nice appartment to my name. It's not a house, and there's still mortgage on it, it's not like I could buy it outright. Nevertheless, last year I bought my second appartment, this time as an investment (renting it out). Real estate may devalue, but it won't go from a million to worthless in a week's time.
How is it that a social/legal system can be designed to bankrupt and scare the shit out of people who share a few movies or songs but barely put a dent in the people sending out millions of useless, offensive, and content-bordering-on-the-illegal emails? Is there nothing wrong with this?
The problem is that spam is causing damage to the commons, and the commons have nobody to defend them. Everyone is affected, but everyone cares just so far. The movie companies, however, care deeply and focus on their legal offensive. There's no focus when it comes to common problems.
The story isn't that they got onto the mailing list.
The story is that they have sifted through huge amounts of data to extract the interesting parts, and essentially made an analysis of the history of biometric standards, and the respective attempts of NSA people to push it this way or that.
It's one thing to post "I think the NSA is influencing biometric companies" to/. and it's an entirely different thing to analyse thousands of postings to prove that and how they influence whom and when.
Like so many others, the first thing I did when they asked me to take this mobile at work was to set it to vibrate/silent and it's been there ever since. I have no idea why you'd even _want_ your phone to ring.
However, the whole ring tone industry is not aimed at people like you and me. The target group is _specifically_ ignorants - the elderly, the technophobes and the kids. The first two because they have no idea about technology and are easily fascinated with something they do grasp, such as selecting a ring tone or changing the desktop background. But the most important group are kids. A few years ago, having a mobile was what you needed to "be in". But now that everyone has a mobile, things get more complicated, and ring tones are what the current hype is. It's much like clothes - a long time ago, wearing jeans was considered cool. Quickly everyone did it and the focus shifted to brands - a jeans wasn't enough, it had to be Levis or whatever was hype in your town.
I hope it's a fad that'll blow over quickly. In case it doesn't - anyone know a good supplier of cell phone jammers in Europe?
The article linked doesn't say much about this "breakthrough technology", but from what I could gather, it looks rather like a cheap (and incomplete!) knock-off of OpenBSD's W^X (write-xor-execute). Anyone know more technical details?
If the company simply disappears and the suits are unresolved, it doen't really help Linux because the IP questions in the case would still be open, at least in a narrow, legal sense.
True, but don't you think that "the last company that tried this went out of business" is a pretty good deterent?
Nonsense. Device driver support is quite good and getting better. In fact, more devices work out-of-the-book now in Linux than in windos, and I don't have to bother with installing device drivers or any such nonsense.
T is already trademarked by the german Telekom, another industry giant who trademarks anything under the sun (including the colour pink and the word "hotspot" - I kid you not).
Ok, what's the full story on this? I personally think the USPTO has been out-sourced to the ape cages of the Washington zoo in 1997 or so, but they can not really have patented what's essentially &a!=&b, can they?
Back when my team achieved CAPP/EAL3 certification, the general attitude on Slashdot was, ``Great, but wake me up when we get EAL4.'' Well, now we've got EAL4.
And my eternal gratitude. Realize that many of the trolls here have at best a vague guess of what exactly EAL4 is.
EAL4 is a ton of work, documentation probably being the worst part. In fact, given the nature of the kernel alone I wasn't even sure you could do it.
So the end of it all is that I better design my webpage so that it works with absolutely no opening of new windows at all, because in the end we'll win that arms race by just disabling that function entirely and be done with it?
Another useful feature ruined by advertisers. Can we please just shoot them all?
Unfortunately, selection ability is a trait in itself, and if I may say so rather underdeveloped in many humans or a large number of us would not get any sex at all.
(that was the +1 funny part, now comes the +1 insightful)
The problem here is pairing. Since both sides screen, the top male and the top female will pair (in an ideal world), the 2nd and the 2nd and so forth. The problem is that there does not seem to be a cut-off point in a monogamous species. If there's 100 pairs, then the 55th male and female wil pair just as well as the 1st and the 100th of each. So in essence, the effect you describe doesn't appear. However, the spread widens, and both advantages and disadvantages will increase, either by adding up (i.e. both male and female have them and it is even stronger in the offspring) or by adding to (i.e. male has defect one, female has defect two, the offspring has both). Thus, fitness differences are amplified and the weak will die quicker.
Screening does apparently work in polygamous species, where in fact the low-end males don't get to spread their genes, because the alpha male has taken all the females for himself.
Moddings should be public so we can shoot whoever modded the parent "insightful".
Block every.fr domain? Yeah, right. As if the holders of.fr domains had anything to do with it. And no, they're not even responsible indirectly, as this isn't a government action, but a court action. Last I checked, courts in France were not elected by the people, much less by domain holders.
Same for the french government. Ever heard of the seperation of powers?
"Insightful". Yeah, right, mod. At what level of alcohol?
The point being that I'm one of the people who are natural problem solvers. Unfortunately, I can't "switch it off". So if there's a tricky problem, it haunts me into my spare time and even into sleep. That's not the bad part. The bad part is that I wake up when I've got a breakthrough (the solution, or an important intermediate step). That's not funny if it's early morning and I can neither get sleep again nor go to work to implement it (these days, most of my work has to do with other people - if it were a computer problem, I would and have in the past got up at 4 am, written a few hundred lines of code, and went back to sleep).
Stress at work is hell for me because I can't leave it at work. I don't mind having a full workday. I do mind not having a relaxing evening and not getting much sleep because of it.
Is it fair to compare an entire community to an individual? I'm sure there are individuals in the community who give more than Gates, if you go by percentage of wealth or income. I'm also sure there are many that give less.
Then again, most of us give in other coins. My most valuable resource isn't money, but time. And if you consider the time some of us spend writing Free Software as a donation, rated at a moderate hourly rate, the total would be huge, easily Bill's donations and then some.
This entire article just blew up my bullshit detector.
First, the Borg icon - this is the Gates Foundation, not Microsoft. As much as I despise Gates, his Foundation is doing a lot of good things.
Second, the business practice hit. Again, this is not Microsoft donating anything to anyone, it's the Gates Foundation. While Bill's money is largely M$ stuff, the shot is just cheap and unwarranted.
Three, the dig at the Open Source community. I'm sure if the community had as much money as Gates, we'd be matching his donation before the day is up, just to show it. But we don't. You can't compare the rich man's $1000 donation to the poor man's $100 donation. No matter how you compare it, in one way or the other it won't be fair.
Finally, the article as a whole - what the f*ck has this to do with "news for nerds" ??? And if it's "stuff that matters", how come we don't read about any similar donations made by other people or foundations?
Both the article author and the editor who let this through should be ashamed of themselves. I'm sure at least 20 more worthy articles were left out today.
The problem with water is that the interior of a plane isn't built water-tight. So if you have few hundred or thousand litres of it sloshing around, some of it will eventually get to some piece of important electronics.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, but I also have a real-life example to the contrary here.
I have managed a (small) Unix (mostly Solaris, one or two Linux machines) desktop network. It was painless and took up a tiny fraction of my time.
The most difficult part was convincing the users that no, they do not need root access and if they need an application installed anywhere but their home directories, I will gladly install the package for them.
Users without system access == users who cause you no trouble.
And that's where windos fails. You can't have happy users without system access. You need that access level for almost anything that's important. On a well-setup Unix machine, you don't need root.
bringing management of Linux desktops and servers on par with that of Windows desktops and servers.
Please don't. The nightmare of windos administration on Linux? There's a reason real professionals prefer Unix systems, and administration is a huge part of it.
This isn't a joke. At my 400 people company, there's half a dozen people employed just to keep the windos network running, plus another half dozen students and other cheap labor forces for simple stuff such as exchanging machines, etc. And I'm not saying it's running especially well.
On the other hand, four Unix admins keep several entire networks of production servers running.
Parent is right. I came out of the dotcom bubble with a nice appartment to my name. It's not a house, and there's still mortgage on it, it's not like I could buy it outright.
Nevertheless, last year I bought my second appartment, this time as an investment (renting it out). Real estate may devalue, but it won't go from a million to worthless in a week's time.
The story did renew my interest in a Mac emulator.
Those in the know - which one would you recommend, PearPC or MOL?
How is it that a social/legal system can be designed to bankrupt and scare the shit out of people who share a few movies or songs but barely put a dent in the people sending out millions of useless, offensive, and content-bordering-on-the-illegal emails? Is there nothing wrong with this?
The problem is that spam is causing damage to the commons, and the commons have nobody to defend them. Everyone is affected, but everyone cares just so far.
The movie companies, however, care deeply and focus on their legal offensive. There's no focus when it comes to common problems.
The story isn't that they got onto the mailing list.
/. and it's an entirely different thing to analyse thousands of postings to prove that and how they influence whom and when.
The story is that they have sifted through huge amounts of data to extract the interesting parts, and essentially made an analysis of the history of biometric standards, and the respective attempts of NSA people to push it this way or that.
It's one thing to post "I think the NSA is influencing biometric companies" to
Like so many others, the first thing I did when they asked me to take this mobile at work was to set it to vibrate/silent and it's been there ever since. I have no idea why you'd even _want_ your phone to ring.
However, the whole ring tone industry is not aimed at people like you and me. The target group is _specifically_ ignorants - the elderly, the technophobes and the kids. The first two because they have no idea about technology and are easily fascinated with something they do grasp, such as selecting a ring tone or changing the desktop background.
But the most important group are kids. A few years ago, having a mobile was what you needed to "be in". But now that everyone has a mobile, things get more complicated, and ring tones are what the current hype is. It's much like clothes - a long time ago, wearing jeans was considered cool. Quickly everyone did it and the focus shifted to brands - a jeans wasn't enough, it had to be Levis or whatever was hype in your town.
I hope it's a fad that'll blow over quickly. In case it doesn't - anyone know a good supplier of cell phone jammers in Europe?
A fitting name. In German, a Depp is another word for stupid idiot.
The article linked doesn't say much about this "breakthrough technology", but from what I could gather, it looks rather like a cheap (and incomplete!) knock-off of OpenBSD's W^X (write-xor-execute). Anyone know more technical details?
I've done my share, how's everyone else doing:
1 120850 55.17% Mozilla/5.0
2 76857 35.08% MSIE 6.0
3 5897 2.69% Opera 7.54
But - ah - different statistics. Same site, mind you, same logfiles, just a different tool doing the stats:
Firefox No 2287166 39.1 %
MS Internet Explorer No 2202449 37.6 %
Mozilla No 556825 9.5 %
Opera No 515143 8.8 %
Now that's a major difference, isn't it? Ah well, as long as Firefox is #1 there, I'm happy.
If the company simply disappears and the suits are unresolved, it doen't really help Linux because the IP questions in the case would still be open, at least in a narrow, legal sense.
True, but don't you think that "the last company that tried this went out of business" is a pretty good deterent?
Nonsense. Device driver support is quite good and getting better. In fact, more devices work out-of-the-book now in Linux than in windos, and I don't have to bother with installing device drivers or any such nonsense.
T is already trademarked by the german Telekom, another industry giant who trademarks anything under the sun (including the colour pink and the word "hotspot" - I kid you not).
Ok, what's the full story on this? I personally think the USPTO has been out-sourced to the ape cages of the Washington zoo in 1997 or so, but they can not really have patented what's essentially &a!=&b, can they?
so the OS did what it was supposed to.
Can I get some of what you're smoking? Since when is an OS supposed to crash hard just because a single application couldn't handle a divide-by-zero?
Back when my team achieved CAPP/EAL3 certification, the general attitude on Slashdot was, ``Great, but wake me up when we get EAL4.'' Well, now we've got EAL4.
And my eternal gratitude. Realize that many of the trolls here have at best a vague guess of what exactly EAL4 is.
EAL4 is a ton of work, documentation probably being the worst part. In fact, given the nature of the kernel alone I wasn't even sure you could do it.
So the end of it all is that I better design my webpage so that it works with absolutely no opening of new windows at all, because in the end we'll win that arms race by just disabling that function entirely and be done with it?
Another useful feature ruined by advertisers. Can we please just shoot them all?
True, though incomplete.
Unfortunately, selection ability is a trait in itself, and if I may say so rather underdeveloped in many humans or a large number of us would not get any sex at all.
(that was the +1 funny part, now comes the +1 insightful)
The problem here is pairing. Since both sides screen, the top male and the top female will pair (in an ideal world), the 2nd and the 2nd and so forth.
The problem is that there does not seem to be a cut-off point in a monogamous species. If there's 100 pairs, then the 55th male and female wil pair just as well as the 1st and the 100th of each. So in essence, the effect you describe doesn't appear.
However, the spread widens, and both advantages and disadvantages will increase, either by adding up (i.e. both male and female have them and it is even stronger in the offspring) or by adding to (i.e. male has defect one, female has defect two, the offspring has both). Thus, fitness differences are amplified and the weak will die quicker.
Screening does apparently work in polygamous species, where in fact the low-end males don't get to spread their genes, because the alpha male has taken all the females for himself.
Moddings should be public so we can shoot whoever modded the parent "insightful".
.fr domain? Yeah, right. As if the holders of .fr domains had anything to do with it. And no, they're not even responsible indirectly, as this isn't a government action, but a court action. Last I checked, courts in France were not elected by the people, much less by domain holders.
Block every
Same for the french government. Ever heard of the seperation of powers?
"Insightful". Yeah, right, mod. At what level of alcohol?
I can relate to that, given this morning.
The point being that I'm one of the people who are natural problem solvers. Unfortunately, I can't "switch it off". So if there's a tricky problem, it haunts me into my spare time and even into sleep. That's not the bad part. The bad part is that I wake up when I've got a breakthrough (the solution, or an important intermediate step). That's not funny if it's early morning and I can neither get sleep again nor go to work to implement it (these days, most of my work has to do with other people - if it were a computer problem, I would and have in the past got up at 4 am, written a few hundred lines of code, and went back to sleep).
Stress at work is hell for me because I can't leave it at work. I don't mind having a full workday. I do mind not having a relaxing evening and not getting much sleep because of it.
Depends.
Is it fair to compare an entire community to an individual? I'm sure there are individuals in the community who give more than Gates, if you go by percentage of wealth or income. I'm also sure there are many that give less.
Then again, most of us give in other coins. My most valuable resource isn't money, but time. And if you consider the time some of us spend writing Free Software as a donation, rated at a moderate hourly rate, the total would be huge, easily Bill's donations and then some.
This entire article just blew up my bullshit detector.
First, the Borg icon - this is the Gates Foundation, not Microsoft. As much as I despise Gates, his Foundation is doing a lot of good things.
Second, the business practice hit. Again, this is not Microsoft donating anything to anyone, it's the Gates Foundation. While Bill's money is largely M$ stuff, the shot is just cheap and unwarranted.
Three, the dig at the Open Source community. I'm sure if the community had as much money as Gates, we'd be matching his donation before the day is up, just to show it. But we don't. You can't compare the rich man's $1000 donation to the poor man's $100 donation. No matter how you compare it, in one way or the other it won't be fair.
Finally, the article as a whole - what the f*ck has this to do with "news for nerds" ??? And if it's "stuff that matters", how come we don't read about any similar donations made by other people or foundations?
Both the article author and the editor who let this through should be ashamed of themselves. I'm sure at least 20 more worthy articles were left out today.
Damn, no Linux version... :)
Seriously: Anyone know something similar that's cross-platform? Short of a Wiki, I have no idea.
You're allowed to send all the spam you want; that's your free speech.
No, it isn't. Spam has nothing whatsoever to do with free speech, and you're doing the community a huge disservice by alleging otherwise.
Spam is not free speech. Spam is forcing your speech on me. There is no freedom involved here, much to the contrary.
Posting your stuff on your website, now that is free speech.
In fact, I'd go so far to say Spam is the opposite of free speech - it is forced listening.
Actually, it's less dangerous.
The problem with water is that the interior of a plane isn't built water-tight. So if you have few hundred or thousand litres of it sloshing around, some of it will eventually get to some piece of important electronics.