So when one person spends $5 million into the economy, that's somehow better than when a million people each spend $5 into the economy?
Did you ever consider that the one millionaire may not spend it into the economy? He already has everything he needs and may end up just investing it overseas (where he will get a better ROI, especially in the last few years)
That children have access to educational opportunities outside the traditional classroom, or, That minors have access to pornography."
You seem incapable of understanding this, but this is not about the children. This is about the Federal government and the Bill of Rights. Protecting the children is not an automatic argument winner.
If you don't want your children to see or hear certain things, it is YOUR responsibility to supervise them, NOT the Federal government's. Trying to usurp our government in order to have it become a surrogate parent for your children is unacceptable.
And take that holier-than-thou 'only religious people can be moral' attitude and stuff it. Suffering from a mass delusion does not make you more moral.
The iApps use standard protocols and formats. iCal uses iCalender (and soon CalDAV), Mail uses SMTP or IMAP, Address Book uses vCard, etc. etc.
Given that, I don't see that it would be a big deal getting it working with Win/Lin. Whether Apple has an out of the box story for non-Mac users is another question.
Slashdot is just an electronic version of a bulletin board, which has centuries of history in the western world. You know, the people that invented the printing press?
(half joking, but I'm definitely 100% sick of people trying to start fads like this in order to hawk overpriced services and 'consulting')
Obviously Windows shouldn't be used in a production environment, given its susceptibility to this sort of thing. The real mistake was Apple allowing their contractors to use unprofessional tools. In the future hopefully they'll insist on the use of Macs or Linux, or embedded systems.
Begs the question (in my mind) of how much it costs our economy to be reliant on Windows.
Well, if Chinese work harder than Americans or Europeans, and there are more of them, yet their GDP is a fraction of the others, then that can only mean one thing: the worst worker productivity in the world. Think on that for awhile before bragging next time.
Admitting that our government spies on it's own citizens 'give adversaries of this country valuable insight into the government's intelligence activities'?
Propaganda levels are approaching Soviet era Moscow.
If by 'some recourse' you mean armed conflict with the federal government, then you're laughably deluded. If you took up arms, all the personal firearms in the world won't save you from a cruise missile, M1A1 tank, F-16, etc. The only thing that would save you would be military personnel refusing orders. Which in turn would lead to armed conflict between the two hypothetical factions of the military. In which conflict you and your pop guns would be wholly irrelevant, except as a possible collateral casualty.
Look, I'm not saying I want your guns taken away from you, but the anti-government rationale went out the window a long time ago. Stick to the home defense or sporting arguments. It's too bad we didn't nip the massive standing army in the bud after WW2, but we're stuck with it now.
> Maybe I need those nvidia drivers.
Umm, yeah, if you don't have the video card drivers then you aren't going to get OpenGL hardware support. Any modern distribution will do this with a click, and if you have to get it off NVidia's site, its built-in installer will handle it no problem. Even when I was installing from tarball and had to compile for my particular kernel, this was all handled through a text-based front end.
Suse 10.1 doesn't have a 1-click nvidia driver installer. Neither does Ubuntu 6. I think Suse Enterprise Desktop might have a 1-click installer, but I'm testing OpenSuse
> It won't use the native resolution of my widescreen LCD.
What resolution? 1440x900? I know my laptop widescreen 1440x1050 has been supported since 2002 at least, and I'm sure it was configurable to arbitrary res.
1680x1050. Using the nv driver that came with Suse I tried rebooting to init level 3, running sax2, which tells me the right rez. So I click 'OK', it asks me if I want to test the config, I click 'Test', and even though in the previous window 1680x1050 was selected, the test window shows 1280x1024. I click cancel, then click Save without testing. Theoretically it's written 1680x1050 to the x config file. Who knows, I didn't feel like checking - I've already done more than should be necessary at this point.
Anyways, a reboot and a login and the desktop is still using 1280x1024.
I spent the hour or so to download the driver from the nvidia site, compile it, and install it, and that fixed the problem. My goal here was not to get a working system, however, but to check on the progress of Linux to see how close it's come to a usable personal desktop environment.
> I was really hopeful this time too, because I (erroneously) hoped that Xen would let me run Windows off my main partition, but apparently Xen doesn't support "full virtualization" without (unspecified) hardware that I don't have. What hardware, I wonder?
The newest AMD and Intel CPUs have hardware instructions so that OSes without special virtualization support can be run. Otherwise, you can only run OSes that have been specially modified to support it. Since Windows is proprietary, you need the hardware support to run it from Linux, since we can't modify the Windows kernel.
Yes, I know, and my point was that the documentation system is pointing to a missing file. Anyways, after I downloaded the nvidia driver and got it installed, I spent some more time downloading the free VMWare environment and tried to get that working. What I wanted to do was keep a dual boot system, and run the Windows environment in a VM while in Linux.
After some reading of installation guides and manuals, I got to the point where VMWare would begin a boot of WinXP which promptly blue-screened. I'm not sure if I have to install a driver in Windows or what. The VMWare docs are very hazy about how well supported this config is. And I don't have space on the Linux drive to image the Windows drive into a VMWare virtual drive.
> When Linux recognizes my network printer
I don't see why it wouldn't, since this isn't even a driver issue; if it's hooked to another computer, that computer drives it. You just send it postscript.
It's actually a USB printer plugged into a wireless router with USB printer sharing.
I don't know why you have such horrible luck doing this stuff that I have been doing for years. Do you know anyone who runs Linux? They can probably give you a hand.
Thanks for the reply. I'll keep watching and trying as new releases come along.
Because I couldn't get it to work. Seriously, I try installing Linux on my x86 desktop every few months but Linux always fails. It won't use the native resolution of my widescreen LCD. It won't install the nVidia drivers. Hell, last time I tried to install Ubuntu (when 6 came out) it couldn't even partition the 40GB IDE drive that I use just for testing out Linux. At least Suse was able to do that.
I couldn't even find the "3D Desktop" settings that I was supposed to find, so I have no idea if it would impress me. Maybe I need those nvidia drivers. I read the documentation for downloading, patching (!!!), compiling, and installing the driver. It wasn't worth the effort at this point.
I was really hopeful this time too, because I (erroneously) hoped that Xen would let me run Windows off my main partition, but apparently Xen doesn't support "full virtualization" without (unspecified) hardware that I don't have. What hardware, I wonder? Clicking the help button was no use, it brought up a help window that said "couldn't open file". My guess is that I need a CPU that has virtualization support, but I would never know that from using the software.
When Linux recognizes my network printer, widescreen LCD, and installs flawlessly, and lets me run Windows in a VM, I'll switch. Until then I'll keep that 40GB in the machine, unused, waiting for another try.
We'd have a plurality of systems: 33% Windows, 33% Mac, 33% Linux. Or even 60-20-20. Or any combination. The more the better. Diversity breeds resistance.
AND
We'd have more secure OSes. Microsoft is already borrowing from OS X and Linux, which is good
AND
We'd have better educated users. This takes patience and persistence. People need to keep plinking away at friends/family.
What about ripping/managing CDs? (library topping 30GB now, wouldn't want to wait for that to finish transferring over my 256k uplink) Editing home movies? (a single DV tape is what? 60GB?) Ripping DVDs? (I don't let my daughter play the originals, only burned copies) Fooling around with GarageBand? Video chatting with relatives in other states? (might work but why share limited bandwidth with the "OS"?)
There are a lot of other things that people do besides watch HDTV or play Grand Theft Auto that would never work over a typical home broadband connection.
Sweatshopping and child labor didn't end in this country until the government enacted labor laws (a.k.a. regulation of the labor market.) Yes I sad the dreaded 'r' word, bane of all libertarians. I can just hear the smoke whistling out of your ears now.
Anyone care to place bets on when the Chinese government will step in and enact similar laws?
Up until now, access to phone records required a subpoena, which requires a judge's signature, which is effective oversight of what info is being obtained, for what purpose, and by whom.
This NSA business has no judicial oversight and is in effect a blanket intelligence gathering operation without demonstrated probable cause.
Besides, would any serious terrorist speak in unencrypted, uncoded phrases oven an unprotected medium??
Yep, exactly right, which is why it's bullshit that this is about terrorism. This is about spying on Americans. They want to know who is leaking things like Abu Ghraib photos, or info about the torture camps in Eastern Europe.
So America's savior is a company that is entirely dependent on advertising revenue? Does Cringely remember 1999? Has he read anything about Google's problems with spammers hacking the PageRank algorithms, and polluting Google's cache with useless auto-generated sites?
No offense to Google - I'm a regular user - but I'm not pinning the entire nation's future to this one tech company. That's absurd hyperbole. Something that we know to expect from Cringely (and Dvorak, et al.)
Modern Unix-like systems (Linux, *BSD, Mac OS X) use a hybrid model, where the user is asked to authenticate before a potentially dangerous action is completed. This is not coincidentally the model MS seems to want to follow for future versions of Windows.
It's been hashed over several times before on/., maybe do a search.
Slashdot Mirror
So when one person spends $5 million into the economy, that's somehow better than when a million people each spend $5 into the economy?
Did you ever consider that the one millionaire may not spend it into the economy? He already has everything he needs and may end up just investing it overseas (where he will get a better ROI, especially in the last few years)
"Which is more important?
That children have access to educational opportunities outside the traditional classroom, or,
That minors have access to pornography."
You seem incapable of understanding this, but this is not about the children. This is about the Federal government and the Bill of Rights. Protecting the children is not an automatic argument winner.
If you don't want your children to see or hear certain things, it is YOUR responsibility to supervise them, NOT the Federal government's. Trying to usurp our government in order to have it become a surrogate parent for your children is unacceptable.
And take that holier-than-thou 'only religious people can be moral' attitude and stuff it. Suffering from a mass delusion does not make you more moral.
The iApps use standard protocols and formats. iCal uses iCalender (and soon CalDAV), Mail uses SMTP or IMAP, Address Book uses vCard, etc. etc.
Given that, I don't see that it would be a big deal getting it working with Win/Lin. Whether Apple has an out of the box story for non-Mac users is another question.
Slashdot is just an electronic version of a bulletin board, which has centuries of history in the western world. You know, the people that invented the printing press?
(half joking, but I'm definitely 100% sick of people trying to start fads like this in order to hawk overpriced services and 'consulting')
Obviously Windows shouldn't be used in a production environment, given its susceptibility to this sort of thing. The real mistake was Apple allowing their contractors to use unprofessional tools. In the future hopefully they'll insist on the use of Macs or Linux, or embedded systems.
Begs the question (in my mind) of how much it costs our economy to be reliant on Windows.
Isn't arming everyone supposed to make us safer?
Well if MS is to be believed, IE is an 'integral part of the Windows OS'. And yes, the price of Windows has been going up.
Actually it sounded like he was making the point that manufacturing the Blu Ray drive mechanism will get cheaper due to economies of scale.
Well, if Chinese work harder than Americans or Europeans, and there are more of them, yet their GDP is a fraction of the others, then that can only mean one thing: the worst worker productivity in the world. Think on that for awhile before bragging next time.
Also, don't confuse subservience for work ethic.
Before the grammar nazis jump on my case.
Admitting that our government spies on it's own citizens 'give adversaries of this country valuable insight into the government's intelligence activities'?
Propaganda levels are approaching Soviet era Moscow.
If by 'some recourse' you mean armed conflict with the federal government, then you're laughably deluded. If you took up arms, all the personal firearms in the world won't save you from a cruise missile, M1A1 tank, F-16, etc. The only thing that would save you would be military personnel refusing orders. Which in turn would lead to armed conflict between the two hypothetical factions of the military. In which conflict you and your pop guns would be wholly irrelevant, except as a possible collateral casualty.
Look, I'm not saying I want your guns taken away from you, but the anti-government rationale went out the window a long time ago. Stick to the home defense or sporting arguments. It's too bad we didn't nip the massive standing army in the bud after WW2, but we're stuck with it now.
> Maybe I need those nvidia drivers.
Umm, yeah, if you don't have the video card drivers then you aren't going to get OpenGL hardware support. Any modern distribution will do this with a click, and if you have to get it off NVidia's site, its built-in installer will handle it no problem. Even when I was installing from tarball and had to compile for my particular kernel, this was all handled through a text-based front end.
Suse 10.1 doesn't have a 1-click nvidia driver installer. Neither does Ubuntu 6. I think Suse Enterprise Desktop might have a 1-click installer, but I'm testing OpenSuse
> It won't use the native resolution of my widescreen LCD.
What resolution? 1440x900? I know my laptop widescreen 1440x1050 has been supported since 2002 at least, and I'm sure it was configurable to arbitrary res.
1680x1050. Using the nv driver that came with Suse I tried rebooting to init level 3, running sax2, which tells me the right rez. So I click 'OK', it asks me if I want to test the config, I click 'Test', and even though in the previous window 1680x1050 was selected, the test window shows 1280x1024. I click cancel, then click Save without testing. Theoretically it's written 1680x1050 to the x config file. Who knows, I didn't feel like checking - I've already done more than should be necessary at this point.
Anyways, a reboot and a login and the desktop is still using 1280x1024.
I spent the hour or so to download the driver from the nvidia site, compile it, and install it, and that fixed the problem. My goal here was not to get a working system, however, but to check on the progress of Linux to see how close it's come to a usable personal desktop environment.
> I was really hopeful this time too, because I (erroneously) hoped that Xen would let me run Windows off my main partition, but apparently Xen doesn't support "full virtualization" without (unspecified) hardware that I don't have. What hardware, I wonder?
The newest AMD and Intel CPUs have hardware instructions so that OSes without special virtualization support can be run. Otherwise, you can only run OSes that have been specially modified to support it. Since Windows is proprietary, you need the hardware support to run it from Linux, since we can't modify the Windows kernel.
Yes, I know, and my point was that the documentation system is pointing to a missing file. Anyways, after I downloaded the nvidia driver and got it installed, I spent some more time downloading the free VMWare environment and tried to get that working. What I wanted to do was keep a dual boot system, and run the Windows environment in a VM while in Linux.
After some reading of installation guides and manuals, I got to the point where VMWare would begin a boot of WinXP which promptly blue-screened. I'm not sure if I have to install a driver in Windows or what. The VMWare docs are very hazy about how well supported this config is. And I don't have space on the Linux drive to image the Windows drive into a VMWare virtual drive.
> When Linux recognizes my network printer
I don't see why it wouldn't, since this isn't even a driver issue; if it's hooked to another computer, that computer drives it. You just send it postscript.
It's actually a USB printer plugged into a wireless router with USB printer sharing.
I don't know why you have such horrible luck doing this stuff that I have been doing for years. Do you know anyone who runs Linux? They can probably give you a hand.
Thanks for the reply. I'll keep watching and trying as new releases come along.
Because I couldn't get it to work. Seriously, I try installing Linux on my x86 desktop every few months but Linux always fails. It won't use the native resolution of my widescreen LCD. It won't install the nVidia drivers. Hell, last time I tried to install Ubuntu (when 6 came out) it couldn't even partition the 40GB IDE drive that I use just for testing out Linux. At least Suse was able to do that.
I couldn't even find the "3D Desktop" settings that I was supposed to find, so I have no idea if it would impress me. Maybe I need those nvidia drivers. I read the documentation for downloading, patching (!!!), compiling, and installing the driver. It wasn't worth the effort at this point.
I was really hopeful this time too, because I (erroneously) hoped that Xen would let me run Windows off my main partition, but apparently Xen doesn't support "full virtualization" without (unspecified) hardware that I don't have. What hardware, I wonder? Clicking the help button was no use, it brought up a help window that said "couldn't open file". My guess is that I need a CPU that has virtualization support, but I would never know that from using the software.
When Linux recognizes my network printer, widescreen LCD, and installs flawlessly, and lets me run Windows in a VM, I'll switch. Until then I'll keep that 40GB in the machine, unused, waiting for another try.
We'd have a plurality of systems: 33% Windows, 33% Mac, 33% Linux. Or even 60-20-20. Or any combination. The more the better. Diversity breeds resistance.
AND
We'd have more secure OSes. Microsoft is already borrowing from OS X and Linux, which is good
AND
We'd have better educated users. This takes patience and persistence. People need to keep plinking away at friends/family.
What about ripping/managing CDs? (library topping 30GB now, wouldn't want to wait for that to finish transferring over my 256k uplink)
Editing home movies? (a single DV tape is what? 60GB?)
Ripping DVDs? (I don't let my daughter play the originals, only burned copies)
Fooling around with GarageBand?
Video chatting with relatives in other states? (might work but why share limited bandwidth with the "OS"?)
There are a lot of other things that people do besides watch HDTV or play Grand Theft Auto that would never work over a typical home broadband connection.
Aren't those are unenforceable in California?
You think it's strange? Corporate Welfare has been going on for a long, long time. Just ask Lee Iacocca. Or Haliburton, for a more recent example.
BeOS had BeFS. That's off the top of my head. There probably have been others.
You're kidding right? Hit wikipedia and look up antitrust law. That will get you started, anyways.
Also see: FTC, Department of Commerce, SBA.
Sweatshopping and child labor didn't end in this country until the government enacted labor laws (a.k.a. regulation of the labor market.) Yes I sad the dreaded 'r' word, bane of all libertarians. I can just hear the smoke whistling out of your ears now.
Anyone care to place bets on when the Chinese government will step in and enact similar laws?
Up until now, access to phone records required a subpoena, which requires a judge's signature, which is effective oversight of what info is being obtained, for what purpose, and by whom.
This NSA business has no judicial oversight and is in effect a blanket intelligence gathering operation without demonstrated probable cause.
Besides, would any serious terrorist speak in unencrypted, uncoded phrases oven an unprotected medium??
Yep, exactly right, which is why it's bullshit that this is about terrorism. This is about spying on Americans. They want to know who is leaking things like Abu Ghraib photos, or info about the torture camps in Eastern Europe.
So America's savior is a company that is entirely dependent on advertising revenue? Does Cringely remember 1999? Has he read anything about Google's problems with spammers hacking the PageRank algorithms, and polluting Google's cache with useless auto-generated sites?
No offense to Google - I'm a regular user - but I'm not pinning the entire nation's future to this one tech company. That's absurd hyperbole. Something that we know to expect from Cringely (and Dvorak, et al.)
Modern Unix-like systems (Linux, *BSD, Mac OS X) use a hybrid model, where the user is asked to authenticate before a potentially dangerous action is completed. This is not coincidentally the model MS seems to want to follow for future versions of Windows.
/., maybe do a search.
It's been hashed over several times before on