It's "RMS's brand of extremism" that is the reason the vast majority of free software even exists today, you ungrateful bastard.
Ungrateful bastard, eh? This is exactly what I'm talking about. Thank you for adding strength to my argument. I have seen RMS speak in public and have watched first hand as he acted beligerant, abrasive, and attempted to derail the whole thing any time someone disagreed with him by arguing pointlessly over semantics again and again rather than actually providing logical premises for most of the conclusions that he posited. Probably, "ungrateful bastard" may have escaped his lips once or twice.
Many open source conferenecs (such as Penguicon) won't invite him as a speaker because they know that their other guest speakers (such as ESR) will refuse to attend if RMS is there. LUGs don't often invite him to speak because RMS will insist that the group change its name before he'll even consider it. Finally, I should point out that even when all qualifications are met, RMS is is ungrateful and rude to his hosts. And yes, I can provide you will plenty of email addresses for people who will verify all of this.
Do you really think you'd be posting on slashdot from a 'Linux system' if RMS was cool with proprietary software?
Unless you have some special powers that I don't know about, we'll never know for sure and it would be pointless to speculate. But I do know that RMS was not the first person to ever conceive of free software and he certainly wasn't the only person working to promote it for 20 years no matter what he'll have you believe. Linus Torvalds did more in 10 years to popularize open source software than GNU did in double that and Linus didn't even try very hard. He just gave out some good code that worked well and treated everyone else as an equal, even those he didn't agree with. Granted, Linux uses GNU for the userland, but there is absolutely no reason that the original Linux developers couldn't have grown their own userland using Minix as a template even if it would have taken longer. Or they could have just waited a little while and used FreeBSD's.
I respect RMS for promoting free software. I don't respect him for being a jerk nor for telling people to fuck off who don't agree with each and every single one of his ideas. He's hurting the free software movement by scaring off 80% of the people and businesses that would otherwise line up behind him in support.
IBM sold OS/2 off and it became eComStation ("jointly developed" - whatever). I highly doubt big blue has exclusive rights to the code anymore.
Close... they only licensed OS/2 to eComStation. IBM still owns and supports OS/2 as a platform for "legacy Java applications" until the end of 2005. I don't know exactly where eComStation sits, but I don't think they "own" the code enough to open source it. It would be nice if IBM somehow managed to sell the complete set of OS/2 rights to some other company that could open it up, but that's pretty darn slim and there is simply no way that IBM is going to open themselves up to a(nother) Microsoft lawsuit.
very little of the old "I told you so"... very mature and honest.
"Very little"? Did you even read it? The whole thing was an "I told you so." He was the most vocal critic of BitKeeper since the beginning and that's about the same time he started most heavily adopting the "proprietary software is bad even when convenient" angle. Now that BitKeeper is gone, he's gone ranting about how right he was even though it was just one clause in the BitKeeper license that caused the whole snafu, not the fact that the software as a whole was proprietary.
Amongst all his gloating, he's very careful to criticise McVoy and place the blame for using BitKeeper squarely on those nebulous "Linux kernel developers," conveniently forgetting to mention it was ultimately Linus's decision to adopt BitKeeper. Not very honest.
"McVoy first blustered and threatened, but ultimately chose to go home and take his ball with him"
Here Stallman resorts to characterizing McVoy as a tantrum-throwing child. Not very mature. McVoy offered the use of BitKeeper for free on open source products and all the open source / free software community has done is bitch and moan since with RMS at the forefront.
Don't get me wrong, I use free software wherever I can for both practical and philosophical reasons. But on the other hand I'm not going to scream armageddon and bloody murder if I have to install a piece of gratis proprietary software here and there in order to get real work done. But its RMS's brand of extremism that hurts free software more than it helps it.
Now I'll grant that the BitKeeper anti-reverse-engineering clause was just plain stupid and I don't particularly agree with Linus choosing to use BitKeeper for official kernel development. But still, you're not going to get proprietary vendors to change their mind about open source if you kick them in the stomach after they've taken a step in the right direction.
Keep in mind, the original legislation did state that 85% of the TV viewership must be on digital TV before they will simply turn it off
Think about how many Americans subscribe to satellite or digital cable. The number might not be 85% but if you throw in the numbers for analog cable, you probably wind up with well over that. If Congress wanted to stick to the 2006 date so that they don't lose face, they could simply convince cable companies to switch their analog customers to digital and offer to subsidize it. Then 85% of viewership would be digital, the stations would be ordered to throw the switch, and the analog TV spectrum could be finally be sold to the highest bidders.
You've probably already noticed that we're not talking about 85% of broadcast television recipients, we're talking about 85% of American television viewership total, the vast majority of which will not be affected at all by the digital switchover. Sound sneaky? You bet it is. But look at the wording of the quote that the parent provided directly from the government's own digital television website:
"Under federal law, analog service will continue until most homes (85%) in an area are able to watch the DTV programming."
It does not say 85% of homes in an area that watch DTV, it says 85% of homes able to watch DTV which includes all satellite and cable customers. (And at this point I'm only assuming that the law uses similar wording.) Congress may have very clearly foresaw the popularity of digital cable and satellite and perhaps worded the law in this way intentionally. If this is indeed the case, then we could very well see analog TV go dark in just over a year and a half.
I know a lot of people who are going to be pissed when their TVs break.
Who puts a warning about not being aloud to read something at the bottom
At first it may seem rather daft, but think about it this way. If they put the message at the top, the recipient could legally stop reading the message after the blurb and later argue that they had no way of knowing 100% for sure whether or not they are the intended recipient without reading the rest of the message, which they were forbidden to do if they were not the intended recipient, and so on and so forth.
I've been seeing this message word-for-word on a lot of email coming from lawyers and other legal organizations and though I'm no laywer, the message seems more like a scare tactic than anything else (like most everything lawyers do or say). While the scenarios above are certainly not beyond the realm of possibility, I don't see how the message can carry any significant legal weight for a variety of reasons that I'd be willing discuss some other time.
iRate has always sounded like one of those highly innovative pieces of software that the open source community is known for.
The Java Web Start crud that it depends on, however, is not. And it's prevented me from checking out iRate every single time I've had the urge based on both technical and philosophical reasons.
Anyone else remember in ancient times (circa 1994 or 5) when Nintendo showed off the AWESOME GRIPPING 3D GRAPHICAL PROWESS of the upcoming Ultra 64 at E3? They were all smiles as the attendees' jaws dropped watching a 3D Mario walking around in a photo-realistic "virtual reality" and other extremely impressive 3D demos (for the time).
Of course, the smiles faded and Nintendo became the laughing stock of the convention when someone pulled up the table skirt to reveal a high-end SGI Onyx running the demos.
Attention Slashdot user gru3hunt3r, if that is your real name. You are guilty of:
* Referring to yourself as an "uber-admin"; * Complaining about people who never once blamed you for high TTLs by name; * Insisting that those who know enough to know what a TTL is are merely "wet behind the ears freaking junior admins"; * Making up two completely unrelated and inapplicable analogies; * Using "l3375p33k" in your nickname; * Butchering well-known English spelling, capitalization, grammar, and punctuation rules; and * Being an all-around dufus.
That is all. Return now to the games section. Moderation will be swift and painless. (For us.)
Ideally, you should have a cool server and and cool room. The two work in combination. If you have a hot room, then the server isn't going to be able to cool itself very well even with the best heatsinks and well-placed fans. Yes, you could use water cooling, but there are other important bits inside of a machine besides whatever the water touches. But a cool room does no good if your servers aren't setup with proper cooling themselves.
Additionally, Terraserver maps were very good quality, as in you could see woodsheds, driveways, cars, individual trees, and occasionally even a 5-pixel blob that might have been a person walking down the street. And these were from satellite photos taken a decade or more ago. Online satellite images from the normal outlets (Google now too) don't come anywhere close to that level of detail and are honestly pretty well useless next to a perfectly good roadmap.
The Keyhole project, however, is good stuff. But not free.:(
While warranty != lifespan, I think that if Seagate is going around puffing about their 5-year warranty, they're probably under some pressure from the bean counters to make them last at least that long.
Also, don't forget that the most important factors that affect a disk's lifespan (heat, vibration, power quality) are under your control. My experience has been that if a well cared-for disk works fine for the first 6 months, chances are very good that it will become hopelessly obsolete before it actually fails.
and when they wanted more, pointed out (very vocally and very angrily) that the price displayed was 39.95, not the higher amount,
Won't matter, they will just point out the little asterisk next to 39.95 that directs you further down to the fine print where they list the actual price of the item. If that asterisk and fine print were missing, then you would have a leg to stand on (and a legal one at that), but the fine print means everything. Is the practice theoretically deceptive? Yes, but you would still end up being the one ridiculed, not the peons who work there. They could really give a shit less what you were made to believe the price was. Plus, they usually have to put up with far worse than price misunderstandings on any given day.
If that's the case, I'm amused that he'd spend the time giving a collective "Fuck you, it's my site" to the readers.
In an interview that Malda gave a few years back, he openly admitted that the worst part of running Slashdot was all the incessant complaints, questions, and suggestions from people who were under the delusion he actually cares what they thought. Someone once asked why readers shouldn't be able to moderate stories the same way they moderate comments and his response was simply that the editors picked the stories they liked and that the site would never change from that while he was in charge.
I'm honestly curious. Taco and associates can't be so clueless as to think that the majority of the readership is pleased with the day's stories.
People continue to read and comment in them, don't they? Most webmasters dream all day long about owning a site like Slashdot where you have this large captive user base (some with paid subscriptions) and all you have to do is hire a couple of desk jockeys to post moderately interesting stories every hour or so. Marketing? None. Improvements? Hahahah. Managing? There's nothing to manage, it's a damn blog.
Admittedly, Slashdot April Fool's days have gone downhill every year. Next year, as an April Fool's gag, they should simply not post any April Fool's stories at all. Or even take the whole site down, not even under any humorous pretense or anything, just have a single page that says something like, "Sorry, we've all taken the day off. Why don't you update your software or flip through a newspaper if you've got extra time to kill?"
Headline: Microsoft Offers New Data-Security Scheme
I see a lock icon and a stapler icon attached to this story. But I don't see a foot. Where's the foot? C'mon, Slashdot editors, this is pure comedy gold and you know it!
Not only that, but it seems to be the status quo now where a new system's success is measured not by if it sells out in major outlets, but rather how quickly. Even the very day of the PSP launch, the mass media was producing stories saying that by noon, many retailers still had plenty of systems left? Excuse me? Still?
If these units where anything other than a video game system that sold out, most folks would stop to ask themselves why a particular retail chain didn't do their market demand research before placing such a miniscule order. They'd also ask how a company could spend millions or billions preparing for a product launch and then somehow simply forget a few zeros when they told the manufacturer how many to produce.
I tell you why the PSP didn't sell well. People are sick of the artificial scarcity tactic. The last five video game systems to be released all carried the same spiel and nobody's buying it anymore. They know full well that two or three weeks from now, you'll be able to waltz into any Walmart and grab one out of the dozens in stock.
You can not use regular cat* cable when wiring up an office and/or house but must use plenum rated cable.
I don't think this is right... why then would they even sell non-plenum solid-core cable if it's not legal to install it anywhere? (Or do you just mean AU?)
I've installed plenty of cat5 before and to my knowledge the only place you have to use plenum cable (which sells for like 5x the price of normal cable) is where you run the cable through air circulation ducts or spaces. Most of the time, this means drop ceilings too since they often function as an air return. By law, you need plenum cable here because when regular cat5 cable burns*, it gives off toxic fumes, whereas expensive plenum cable won't.
Nevermind the fact that everything else that's on fire will give off smoke and toxic fumes, your network infrastructure will be burning clean.
* That is, from a fire started by something else. You would need some extremely unusual circumstances to cause cat5 to burn of its own accord.
GTK developers: please stop depending on GNOME-specific packages!! when i want a cute little program for a slim little purpose to run on my less mainstream enlightenment setup, i *don't* want to install an entire DE that i never use!! please write programs independant of GNOME *and* KDE. both Qt and Gtk are perfectly fine libraries by themselves, without the additional bloat!
The problem here is that you're seeing everything from the end-user perspective. There's a whole heck of a lot more to GNOME and KDE than icons, panels, and menus. While GTK and Qt are full-featured widget libraries, that's about all they ever do. (Qt might do a bit more besides widgets, I honestly haven't checked.)
But let's say, for example, that I'm a developer running KDE on the desktop and I want to write a "cute little program". Qt plus an assortment of other libraries would do the trick just fine, of course. But If I instead decided to leverage the power of all the services that KDE provides, I could save myself a ton of work, have it nicely integrate into my existing desktop, and add a lot of nifty features later on with very little effort. Do I write it with Qt or with KDE?
The current KDE 3.0 API Reference lists a metric shedload of classes that could be highly useful even with the simplest of programs, including widget handling, pre-made dialogs, local file and network resource abstraction, a facility to pass messages between apps. Heck, you even drop entire KDE applications into your app with little effort. For example, KDE's answer to Outlook and Evolution, Kontact, is really just 5 or so other KDE programs bound together by a dinky little left-hand icon bar and this works extremely well. Sure does beats writing an entire office suite from scratch, doesn't it?
While Kontact is a testament to the power of KDE's overall integration and API (I'm sure GNOME has its shining example or two, as well), the author of some "cute litle program" probably doesn't want to go out reinventing more than they have to, and the GNOME and KDE APIs make writing these little apps a snap.
YES. DAMN YES AND AGREED. I can't stand even looking in the general direction of a 60Hz monitor. Hurts my eyes bad. And whenever I ask someone how they can stand it, they're like, "eh? I don't see any flicker." But I can't perceive any flicker at 75Hz or higher.
My boss had an old 21-inch Apple monitor that he ran at 60Hz and sat about a foot away from it. Right next to it was a 19" doing 75Hz or more. He sat in front of these things hours upon hours a day and couldn't even tell the difference. Would have driven me criminally insane.
Hmm, perhaps it depends on the organization. I know that our wing personnel are authorized to install certain commercial anti-virus software at PCs at home, but it stops there.
Is the airforce more important than say, nuclear power plant operators?
While it's concieveable there could sometimes be some advantage in releasing a beta version of a security fix, there is no advantage whatsoever in merely delaying the general release of a patch, so MS must have agreed to supply early versions of patches to the USAF.
It's not that the USAF needs those early patches more than anyone else, it's that the Air Force has standardized on nothing but Microsoft software for almost everything it does. Trust me on this, I'm *in* the Air Force. Even the PDAs and systems which handle classified information run plain old Windows. They forbid you from using any software that isn't installed by an admin (even stuff as benign as Firefox), and go to great lengths these days to explain that piracy is bad and that you'll go to federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison for taking that copy of Word home with you.
No, it wouldn't surprise me at all if the USAF was indeed Microsoft's biggest customer, period. Getting open source software in there to replace any Microsoft offering is going to be like convincing conservatives that it would be a really great idea to hold state-sponsored orgies in all capitol buildings on Sunday afternoons. It could happen in theory, but never in practice.
Slashdot Mirror
It's "RMS's brand of extremism" that is the reason the vast majority of free software even exists today, you ungrateful bastard.
Ungrateful bastard, eh? This is exactly what I'm talking about. Thank you for adding strength to my argument. I have seen RMS speak in public and have watched first hand as he acted beligerant, abrasive, and attempted to derail the whole thing any time someone disagreed with him by arguing pointlessly over semantics again and again rather than actually providing logical premises for most of the conclusions that he posited. Probably, "ungrateful bastard" may have escaped his lips once or twice.
Many open source conferenecs (such as Penguicon) won't invite him as a speaker because they know that their other guest speakers (such as ESR) will refuse to attend if RMS is there. LUGs don't often invite him to speak because RMS will insist that the group change its name before he'll even consider it. Finally, I should point out that even when all qualifications are met, RMS is is ungrateful and rude to his hosts. And yes, I can provide you will plenty of email addresses for people who will verify all of this.
Do you really think you'd be posting on slashdot from a 'Linux system' if RMS was cool with proprietary software?
Unless you have some special powers that I don't know about, we'll never know for sure and it would be pointless to speculate. But I do know that RMS was not the first person to ever conceive of free software and he certainly wasn't the only person working to promote it for 20 years no matter what he'll have you believe. Linus Torvalds did more in 10 years to popularize open source software than GNU did in double that and Linus didn't even try very hard. He just gave out some good code that worked well and treated everyone else as an equal, even those he didn't agree with. Granted, Linux uses GNU for the userland, but there is absolutely no reason that the original Linux developers couldn't have grown their own userland using Minix as a template even if it would have taken longer. Or they could have just waited a little while and used FreeBSD's.
I respect RMS for promoting free software. I don't respect him for being a jerk nor for telling people to fuck off who don't agree with each and every single one of his ideas. He's hurting the free software movement by scaring off 80% of the people and businesses that would otherwise line up behind him in support.
Sure wish I was flat broke with $40,000 on hand.
IBM sold OS/2 off and it became eComStation ("jointly developed" - whatever). I highly doubt big blue has exclusive rights to the code anymore.
Close... they only licensed OS/2 to eComStation. IBM still owns and supports OS/2 as a platform for "legacy Java applications" until the end of 2005. I don't know exactly where eComStation sits, but I don't think they "own" the code enough to open source it. It would be nice if IBM somehow managed to sell the complete set of OS/2 rights to some other company that could open it up, but that's pretty darn slim and there is simply no way that IBM is going to open themselves up to a(nother) Microsoft lawsuit.
very little of the old "I told you so"... very mature and honest.
"Very little"? Did you even read it? The whole thing was an "I told you so." He was the most vocal critic of BitKeeper since the beginning and that's about the same time he started most heavily adopting the "proprietary software is bad even when convenient" angle. Now that BitKeeper is gone, he's gone ranting about how right he was even though it was just one clause in the BitKeeper license that caused the whole snafu, not the fact that the software as a whole was proprietary.
Amongst all his gloating, he's very careful to criticise McVoy and place the blame for using BitKeeper squarely on those nebulous "Linux kernel developers," conveniently forgetting to mention it was ultimately Linus's decision to adopt BitKeeper. Not very honest.
"McVoy first blustered and threatened, but ultimately chose to go home and take his ball with him"
Here Stallman resorts to characterizing McVoy as a tantrum-throwing child. Not very mature. McVoy offered the use of BitKeeper for free on open source products and all the open source / free software community has done is bitch and moan since with RMS at the forefront.
Don't get me wrong, I use free software wherever I can for both practical and philosophical reasons. But on the other hand I'm not going to scream armageddon and bloody murder if I have to install a piece of gratis proprietary software here and there in order to get real work done. But its RMS's brand of extremism that hurts free software more than it helps it.
Now I'll grant that the BitKeeper anti-reverse-engineering clause was just plain stupid and I don't particularly agree with Linus choosing to use BitKeeper for official kernel development. But still, you're not going to get proprietary vendors to change their mind about open source if you kick them in the stomach after they've taken a step in the right direction.
Keep in mind, the original legislation did state that 85% of the TV viewership must be on digital TV before they will simply turn it off
Think about how many Americans subscribe to satellite or digital cable. The number might not be 85% but if you throw in the numbers for analog cable, you probably wind up with well over that. If Congress wanted to stick to the 2006 date so that they don't lose face, they could simply convince cable companies to switch their analog customers to digital and offer to subsidize it. Then 85% of viewership would be digital, the stations would be ordered to throw the switch, and the analog TV spectrum could be finally be sold to the highest bidders.
You've probably already noticed that we're not talking about 85% of broadcast television recipients, we're talking about 85% of American television viewership total, the vast majority of which will not be affected at all by the digital switchover. Sound sneaky? You bet it is. But look at the wording of the quote that the parent provided directly from the government's own digital television website:
"Under federal law, analog service will continue until most homes (85%) in an area are able to watch the DTV programming."
It does not say 85% of homes in an area that watch DTV, it says 85% of homes able to watch DTV which includes all satellite and cable customers. (And at this point I'm only assuming that the law uses similar wording.) Congress may have very clearly foresaw the popularity of digital cable and satellite and perhaps worded the law in this way intentionally. If this is indeed the case, then we could very well see analog TV go dark in just over a year and a half.
I know a lot of people who are going to be pissed when their TVs break.
Just as I suspected. Mod this parent up.
Who puts a warning about not being aloud to read something at the bottom
At first it may seem rather daft, but think about it this way. If they put the message at the top, the recipient could legally stop reading the message after the blurb and later argue that they had no way of knowing 100% for sure whether or not they are the intended recipient without reading the rest of the message, which they were forbidden to do if they were not the intended recipient, and so on and so forth.
I've been seeing this message word-for-word on a lot of email coming from lawyers and other legal organizations and though I'm no laywer, the message seems more like a scare tactic than anything else (like most everything lawyers do or say). While the scenarios above are certainly not beyond the realm of possibility, I don't see how the message can carry any significant legal weight for a variety of reasons that I'd be willing discuss some other time.
iRate has always sounded like one of those highly innovative pieces of software that the open source community is known for.
The Java Web Start crud that it depends on, however, is not. And it's prevented me from checking out iRate every single time I've had the urge based on both technical and philosophical reasons.
Anyone else remember in ancient times (circa 1994 or 5) when Nintendo showed off the AWESOME GRIPPING 3D GRAPHICAL PROWESS of the upcoming Ultra 64 at E3? They were all smiles as the attendees' jaws dropped watching a 3D Mario walking around in a photo-realistic "virtual reality" and other extremely impressive 3D demos (for the time).
Of course, the smiles faded and Nintendo became the laughing stock of the convention when someone pulled up the table skirt to reveal a high-end SGI Onyx running the demos.
Perhaps Nintendo does learn from some mistakes...
Attention Slashdot user gru3hunt3r, if that is your real name. You are guilty of:
* Referring to yourself as an "uber-admin";
* Complaining about people who never once blamed you for high TTLs by name;
* Insisting that those who know enough to know what a TTL is are merely "wet behind the ears freaking junior admins";
* Making up two completely unrelated and inapplicable analogies;
* Using "l3375p33k" in your nickname;
* Butchering well-known English spelling, capitalization, grammar, and punctuation rules; and
* Being an all-around dufus.
That is all. Return now to the games section. Moderation will be swift and painless. (For us.)
Ideally, you should have a cool server and and cool room. The two work in combination. If you have a hot room, then the server isn't going to be able to cool itself very well even with the best heatsinks and well-placed fans. Yes, you could use water cooling, but there are other important bits inside of a machine besides whatever the water touches. But a cool room does no good if your servers aren't setup with proper cooling themselves.
Er, beta?
Additionally, Terraserver maps were very good quality, as in you could see woodsheds, driveways, cars, individual trees, and occasionally even a 5-pixel blob that might have been a person walking down the street. And these were from satellite photos taken a decade or more ago. Online satellite images from the normal outlets (Google now too) don't come anywhere close to that level of detail and are honestly pretty well useless next to a perfectly good roadmap.
:(
The Keyhole project, however, is good stuff. But not free.
Give me a guaranteed 5-year lifespan on a drive, then you'll have my patronage... more gigs don't get my attention anymore.
http://5yrwarranty.seagatestorage.com/
While warranty != lifespan, I think that if Seagate is going around puffing about their 5-year warranty, they're probably under some pressure from the bean counters to make them last at least that long.
Also, don't forget that the most important factors that affect a disk's lifespan (heat, vibration, power quality) are under your control. My experience has been that if a well cared-for disk works fine for the first 6 months, chances are very good that it will become hopelessly obsolete before it actually fails.
and when they wanted more, pointed out (very vocally and very angrily) that the price displayed was 39.95, not the higher amount,
Won't matter, they will just point out the little asterisk next to 39.95 that directs you further down to the fine print where they list the actual price of the item. If that asterisk and fine print were missing, then you would have a leg to stand on (and a legal one at that), but the fine print means everything. Is the practice theoretically deceptive? Yes, but you would still end up being the one ridiculed, not the peons who work there. They could really give a shit less what you were made to believe the price was. Plus, they usually have to put up with far worse than price misunderstandings on any given day.
If that's the case, I'm amused that he'd spend the time giving a collective "Fuck you, it's my site" to the readers.
In an interview that Malda gave a few years back, he openly admitted that the worst part of running Slashdot was all the incessant complaints, questions, and suggestions from people who were under the delusion he actually cares what they thought. Someone once asked why readers shouldn't be able to moderate stories the same way they moderate comments and his response was simply that the editors picked the stories they liked and that the site would never change from that while he was in charge.
I'm honestly curious. Taco and associates can't be so clueless as to think that the majority of the readership is pleased with the day's stories.
People continue to read and comment in them, don't they? Most webmasters dream all day long about owning a site like Slashdot where you have this large captive user base (some with paid subscriptions) and all you have to do is hire a couple of desk jockeys to post moderately interesting stories every hour or so. Marketing? None. Improvements? Hahahah. Managing? There's nothing to manage, it's a damn blog.
Admittedly, Slashdot April Fool's days have gone downhill every year. Next year, as an April Fool's gag, they should simply not post any April Fool's stories at all. Or even take the whole site down, not even under any humorous pretense or anything, just have a single page that says something like, "Sorry, we've all taken the day off. Why don't you update your software or flip through a newspaper if you've got extra time to kill?"
Headline: Microsoft Offers New Data-Security Scheme
I see a lock icon and a stapler icon attached to this story. But I don't see a foot. Where's the foot? C'mon, Slashdot editors, this is pure comedy gold and you know it!
Not only that, but it seems to be the status quo now where a new system's success is measured not by if it sells out in major outlets, but rather how quickly. Even the very day of the PSP launch, the mass media was producing stories saying that by noon, many retailers still had plenty of systems left? Excuse me? Still?
If these units where anything other than a video game system that sold out, most folks would stop to ask themselves why a particular retail chain didn't do their market demand research before placing such a miniscule order. They'd also ask how a company could spend millions or billions preparing for a product launch and then somehow simply forget a few zeros when they told the manufacturer how many to produce.
I tell you why the PSP didn't sell well. People are sick of the artificial scarcity tactic. The last five video game systems to be released all carried the same spiel and nobody's buying it anymore. They know full well that two or three weeks from now, you'll be able to waltz into any Walmart and grab one out of the dozens in stock.
You can not use regular cat* cable when wiring up an office and/or house but must use plenum rated cable.
I don't think this is right... why then would they even sell non-plenum solid-core cable if it's not legal to install it anywhere? (Or do you just mean AU?)
I've installed plenty of cat5 before and to my knowledge the only place you have to use plenum cable (which sells for like 5x the price of normal cable) is where you run the cable through air circulation ducts or spaces. Most of the time, this means drop ceilings too since they often function as an air return. By law, you need plenum cable here because when regular cat5 cable burns*, it gives off toxic fumes, whereas expensive plenum cable won't.
Nevermind the fact that everything else that's on fire will give off smoke and toxic fumes, your network infrastructure will be burning clean.
* That is, from a fire started by something else. You would need some extremely unusual circumstances to cause cat5 to burn of its own accord.
GTK developers: please stop depending on GNOME-specific packages!! when i want a cute little program for a slim little purpose to run on my less mainstream enlightenment setup, i *don't* want to install an entire DE that i never use!! please write programs independant of GNOME *and* KDE. both Qt and Gtk are perfectly fine libraries by themselves, without the additional bloat!
The problem here is that you're seeing everything from the end-user perspective. There's a whole heck of a lot more to GNOME and KDE than icons, panels, and menus. While GTK and Qt are full-featured widget libraries, that's about all they ever do. (Qt might do a bit more besides widgets, I honestly haven't checked.)
But let's say, for example, that I'm a developer running KDE on the desktop and I want to write a "cute little program". Qt plus an assortment of other libraries would do the trick just fine, of course. But If I instead decided to leverage the power of all the services that KDE provides, I could save myself a ton of work, have it nicely integrate into my existing desktop, and add a lot of nifty features later on with very little effort. Do I write it with Qt or with KDE?
The current KDE 3.0 API Reference lists a metric shedload of classes that could be highly useful even with the simplest of programs, including widget handling, pre-made dialogs, local file and network resource abstraction, a facility to pass messages between apps. Heck, you even drop entire KDE applications into your app with little effort. For example, KDE's answer to Outlook and Evolution, Kontact, is really just 5 or so other KDE programs bound together by a dinky little left-hand icon bar and this works extremely well. Sure does beats writing an entire office suite from scratch, doesn't it?
While Kontact is a testament to the power of KDE's overall integration and API (I'm sure GNOME has its shining example or two, as well), the author of some "cute litle program" probably doesn't want to go out reinventing more than they have to, and the GNOME and KDE APIs make writing these little apps a snap.
Gentoo users have been able to install Adobe Reader 7.0 for two weeks now. (Though the firefox plugin didn't work properly until a week ago.)Loads fast, looks okay (GTK), and most importantly CLOSES WITH ONLY ONE MOUSE CLICK.
60 Hz is painful
YES. DAMN YES AND AGREED. I can't stand even looking in the general direction of a 60Hz monitor. Hurts my eyes bad. And whenever I ask someone how they can stand it, they're like, "eh? I don't see any flicker." But I can't perceive any flicker at 75Hz or higher.
My boss had an old 21-inch Apple monitor that he ran at 60Hz and sat about a foot away from it. Right next to it was a 19" doing 75Hz or more. He sat in front of these things hours upon hours a day and couldn't even tell the difference. Would have driven me criminally insane.
Hmm, perhaps it depends on the organization. I know that our wing personnel are authorized to install certain commercial anti-virus software at PCs at home, but it stops there.
Is the airforce more important than say, nuclear power plant operators?
While it's concieveable there could sometimes be some advantage in releasing a beta version of a security fix, there is no advantage whatsoever in merely delaying the general release of a patch, so MS must have agreed to supply early versions of patches to the USAF.
It's not that the USAF needs those early patches more than anyone else, it's that the Air Force has standardized on nothing but Microsoft software for almost everything it does. Trust me on this, I'm *in* the Air Force. Even the PDAs and systems which handle classified information run plain old Windows. They forbid you from using any software that isn't installed by an admin (even stuff as benign as Firefox), and go to great lengths these days to explain that piracy is bad and that you'll go to federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison for taking that copy of Word home with you.
No, it wouldn't surprise me at all if the USAF was indeed Microsoft's biggest customer, period. Getting open source software in there to replace any Microsoft offering is going to be like convincing conservatives that it would be a really great idea to hold state-sponsored orgies in all capitol buildings on Sunday afternoons. It could happen in theory, but never in practice.