No, the FAQ is suggesting posting early to a new story with only a few comments, not suggesting replying to a comment for better placement when you should be starting a new thread. In any event, when the offender posted his reply, there were only about 50 comments in the story total. A large portion of comments are usually -1 or 0, so it would not have been difficult for his post to be noticed by moderators if he'd done the right thing and started a new thread.
Um, no. I have mod points, but I'm not modding you up. Rather than modding you down, however, I'd like to point out a couple things that have been bugging me about a lot of Slashdot comments recently.
1) You felt the need to ASK to be modded up instead of letting the content of your comment stand on its own.
2) Your reply has sweet fuck all to do with the comment that you replied to and you did this solely to give your post higher placement in the comments. A sad tactic, and the one that I most often give out negative mod points for. Next time, start a new thread. If you feel that what you have to say is so important that it must reach the largest audience possible, take out a few banner ads. Don't further wreck the continually derailing train that is Slashdot commentry.
I can vouch for this, the KDE desktop and all of its apps are nice and snappy on my aging Athlon 750. To put this in perspective, Firefox--a widely acclaimed "small footprint" browser--feels like bloatware in comparison. I use it over Konqueror only because I can use the Adblock and Googlebar plugins with it.
Surprised that I didn't notice that anyone has mentioned what always seemed the most obvious to a computer geek like myself: Replace your bulky, inefficient CRT monitor with an LCD one.
LCDs use a fraction of the power of CRTs, take up far less space, are easier to read and just look much cooler. As cheap as they are now, there is really no good reason to buy a CRT monitor for a regular desktop machine.
However, I'm still waiting for this 19" behemoth CRT to hurry up and die since the above argument alone failed miserably on my wife...
Also, a few laptops actually use software to monitor the CPU temp and then speed up/slow down the fan as appropriate. Obviously, your laptop will overheat in any OS other than Windows and if Windows was reinstalled, the software might not have been installed.
Since this is an eMachines, I wouldn't doubt that this is the case for a second.
My suggestion to the guy: Get a real laptop. I have a low-end Dell Inspiron that always runs quiet and cool. It is well-supported by Linux and BSD and even outperformed a lot of similar machines that cost hundreds of dollars more. Thinkpads are supposed to be nice as well. If you buy eMachines or Packard Hell or any of those other rickety pieces of dogshit, well, you get what you pay for.
Hmm. This new GNOME looks awfully darn similar to KDE's Plastik theme, the new default for 3.4.
In fact, there are a lot of features in the upcoming GNOME that KDE already has. Many of them have even been around for a long time. Let's look at a few:
Integrated help browser w/ man and info support
Developer-friendly text editor
Nice GUI for sharing files
Freedesktop.org cross-desktop menu specification
Weather panel applet
Panel and applet transparency
An "new and improved" mixer (looks like kmix now)
Additionally, there are two contenders vying for the position of Official GNOME CD-Ripper. KDE needs no such thing, because you rip and encode audio tracks just by dragging and dropping them from the file manager.
Now, I'm not trying to bash GNOME here. I used GNOME for a long time before the Great Feature Removal of GNOME 2.0. But all of you GNOME zealots out there (you know who you are) who claim that KDE tries too hard to be like Windows need to wake up and realize that your desktop environment is now starting to borrow heavily from others.
Yes, but it doesn't say "Unix was the world standard before 1990 or so", just that it was "the world standard". Most people are going to assume that means today.
Yes and no... Using kernel compile times as a benchmark is categorically useless you quote the exact config file in the analysis.
A few weeks ago, I tried to compile a GNU/Debian Linux 2.6.x kernel on a Pentium III using the default kitchen-sink config. After about an hour and a half of just sitting there waiting for the damn thing to finish (this was on-site maintenance of a critical mail server), I halted the build and took my chances at configuring it by hand, hoping that I wouldn't forget some option that caused the machine not to boot. After paring it down, the new kernel plus a few modules were fully built in less than 10 minutes. (And it even booted fine.)
It has come to our attention that you have been willfully violating the Digital Millenium Copyright Act on the website Slashdot by posting detailed tutorials that explain how to circumvent proprietary copyright-protection technology. You are ordered to cease your discussions on said web site immediately, turn off your computer, and wait on your living room couch for our arrival at your residence where you will then be taken into custody.
Don't forget Penguicon in Novi, MI (near Detroit. It's a Linux/Sci-Fi con that's just a whole lot of fun with plenty of games, celebrities, panels, parties, and so on. Check it out if you're in the midwest.
I wouldn't call my post an argument per se, more like a pessimistic extrapolated prediction. However...
When Microsoft implements XAML into their browser many web developers will not use it, because it cuts out EVERYONE except those on IE. Everyone. 10% is a lot of people if you're Amazon.
That is true. Web sites like Amazon, eBay, Google, and so on are likely to continue to make sure their web sites work with 99.9% of the browsers out there. They would be simply throwing away customers if they didn't. But many web developers, and in particular web application developers, design systems that will see maybe a couple hundred hits a day at the most.
I used to access a lot of elaborate internal Air Force and DoD web sites that were built out of custom-written frameworks that *only* worked in IE. A college that I used to attend had online classes that you could only participate in if you used IE. My bank's online banking app, until recently, only worked in IE because their flashy javascript menu specifically checked for IE. Where I work, we're currently trying to port a.NET application to Mono. It was obviously only written to be used with IE because the layout is horrendous in anything else. (Yet the docs stress up and down that it was written with accessibility in mind.) I can't access web sites for indie bands, non-profits, small businesses and many others because I use Firefox and Konqueror exclusively.
Many web developers do a good job at building sites which adhere to standards but have to add a lot of cruft to support IE also. But there are a great many more that still believe it's not worth their time and money to go out of their way to support 5% of the browser market.
His motivation for registering the trademark might not have as much to do with defrauding the MAME community as the Slashdot article speculates... this guy is well known for taking down eBay auctions for roms and MAME-supported hardware that compete with his. If he is awarded this trademark, this would give him even more leverage, since no one would be able use the official MAME logo on any auction site or web store, even if they were just selling their own homebrew arcade stick.
I was about to disagree with you, but as I was finishing up my last witty jab at your argument, I realized that you were right... but for the wrong reasons.
Case study: Despite being proprietary and not bundled with any operating system or browser at the time, Flash took off quickly, and well before a significant portion of the world's population was able to browse the web. But upon seeing site after site that required Flash because of all the cool things it could do, people muddled their way through getting it onto their computers until it was popular enough that they didn't have to. Specifically, they didn't have to bring their computer into their dealer and say, "Excuse me, could you upgrade my gas tank, err, web browser please?" They just downloaded the software, hit "OK" and went to town.
Now, the real reason standards-based web forms won't catch on has nothing to do with this, and more to do with that fact that 95% of the browser market won't have an upgrade available. Microsft refuses to make its browser compatible with standards that are going on a full decade old. Even if they would just fix the bugs that plague the current implementation of what they SAY they support, web designers would offer endless gratitude, but MS won't even do that much for their users.
What they will instead do is this: Release the next version of Windows (Longhorn) with IE 7, an integrated web browser containing all of the bells and whistles that made Firefox semi-popular, including tabbed browsing and easy-to-write extensions, and improved web standards support. Also thrown in will probably be a new forms implementation. After the new OS has been out for 3 or 4 months, MS will release IE 6.9 or so for XP and Mac OS X that's really just IE 7 with a couple of key features (like tabbed browsing) removed.
Users will forget that Firefox ever existed because the new IE will do basically everything that Firefox did only faster. There will no longer be a big incentive to switch, even if it is relatively painless. IE will do what they need it to, and it's already there, so they'll use it. There's even a good chance that the new IEs will break many websites, but hardly anyone will complain. After all, people forgot pretty quickly when XP and it's SP2 broke hundreds of legacy applications, they certainly won't complain about websites which can be easily fixed overnight.
Once IEs 6.9 and 7 take over the lion's share of the browser market, web sites will host tutorials on how to use the new IE features (including MS Forms) and web developers will quickly adopt them in their own applications. The only catch is that many of these new IE features (such as the new forms) will be difficult or impossible to clone by third parties like Mozilla and Opera. These browsers that hold the minority in market share will be ignored by web application developers just like they are today because "everybody uses IE."
And Microsoft will have won the browser war again.
I have to agree. Most people never think to shop around for video rentals, but you'd be surprised what kind of value you can find just looking around. My wife and I got tired of Blockbuster's steep prices, short rental periods, and constantly out-of-stock new releases. So we tried Hollywood Video; same crap, different store. Finally, we ended up renting from a place called Family Video. Their rentals are only $2 and they never run out of new releases. They're a really decent chain, give them a shot if they're in your area. (BTW, of the three, they're also the only ones with a pr0n room.;)
I work on [sic] computer security. I don't like viruses, either in my code or in the liscencing.
I "work on" computer security too. The only virus that I see on a day-to-day basis is that expensive closed source operating system that lines some very deep pockets yet contains an unknown quantity of BSD code written by poor college students and volunteers.
P.S. a better idea would be to return this printer now while you still can. Buy a printer that supports postscript. That hits the bottom line of companies who pull these tricks and in the end is worth more to the linux comunity.
Except, of course, that it doesn't hit their bottom line because most printers with postscript support are priced higher than the new consumer-level lasers that are starting to come out.
I don't understand how companies can sell printers that don't support Postscript. On the other hand, this seems to be a case where a company heard complaints from its customers, and corrected thier bad practices (the toner issue, and Postscript support).
Consumer-grade lasers are something of a new market, one that manufacturers are being very careful about wading into. The more expensive business-class laser printers are big money and manufacturers don't want to see their business-class customers downgrade to the consumer-grade printers, even if the cheaper printers would still suit their needs just fine.
Case in point: I recently bought a Konica Minolta Magicolor 2300DL practically on impulse at the local Sam's Club for $400. "What a steal!" I thought. I should have done better research. As it turned out, the printer spoke some weird language, but luckily some guy did write an OSS driver for it. A few weeks later, I learned that the printer has a higher-priced brother that has almost all of the same hardware and the exact same specifications, but can do a bit more like uploading a PDF directly to the printer through its web interface for printing and Postscript 3 support. This better printer costs over $800. The difference between the two units? The much more expensive one comes with a hard disk and different firmware. That is all. (And the cheaper one can't be upgraded.)
I'm forced to conclude that this is a case of Konica Minolta deliberately trying to keep their markets (via features) separate even when the hardware is virtually identical. There's no practical reason my printer couldn't speak Postscript or do many of the other things that the more expensive one can, they just want people to pay more for those extra benefits.
A real comment in the MS-DOS 6.0 source code, cmd/fdisk/fdisk.c, line 77:
/* P.S. - To whoever winds up maintaining this, I will */ /* apoligize in advance. I had just learned 'C' when */ /* writing this, so out of ignorance of the finer points*/ /* of the langauge I did a lot of things by brute force.*/ /* Hope this doesn't mess you up too much - MT 5/20/86 */
And of course, slashdot is munging the whitespace in the preview...
Slashdot Mirror
I was with you until this last part. No need to add a point of hopelessness to your otherwise helpful comment.
You make a valid point. The comment came purely out of frustration and could have been omitted.
There are far too many offtopic posts critical of the form of people's comments rather than the substance.
Yes, I realize the hypocracy of that statement or perhaps it is irony. But it is meta hypocracy.
You're excused.
No, the FAQ is suggesting posting early to a new story with only a few comments, not suggesting replying to a comment for better placement when you should be starting a new thread. In any event, when the offender posted his reply, there were only about 50 comments in the story total. A large portion of comments are usually -1 or 0, so it would not have been difficult for his post to be noticed by moderators if he'd done the right thing and started a new thread.
Mod me up!
Um, no. I have mod points, but I'm not modding you up. Rather than modding you down, however, I'd like to point out a couple things that have been bugging me about a lot of Slashdot comments recently.
1) You felt the need to ASK to be modded up instead of letting the content of your comment stand on its own.
2) Your reply has sweet fuck all to do with the comment that you replied to and you did this solely to give your post higher placement in the comments. A sad tactic, and the one that I most often give out negative mod points for. Next time, start a new thread. If you feel that what you have to say is so important that it must reach the largest audience possible, take out a few banner ads. Don't further wreck the continually derailing train that is Slashdot commentry.
I can vouch for this, the KDE desktop and all of its apps are nice and snappy on my aging Athlon 750. To put this in perspective, Firefox--a widely acclaimed "small footprint" browser--feels like bloatware in comparison. I use it over Konqueror only because I can use the Adblock and Googlebar plugins with it.
Surprised that I didn't notice that anyone has mentioned what always seemed the most obvious to a computer geek like myself: Replace your bulky, inefficient CRT monitor with an LCD one.
LCDs use a fraction of the power of CRTs, take up far less space, are easier to read and just look much cooler. As cheap as they are now, there is really no good reason to buy a CRT monitor for a regular desktop machine.
However, I'm still waiting for this 19" behemoth CRT to hurry up and die since the above argument alone failed miserably on my wife...
Also, a few laptops actually use software to monitor the CPU temp and then speed up/slow down the fan as appropriate. Obviously, your laptop will overheat in any OS other than Windows and if Windows was reinstalled, the software might not have been installed.
Since this is an eMachines, I wouldn't doubt that this is the case for a second.
My suggestion to the guy: Get a real laptop. I have a low-end Dell Inspiron that always runs quiet and cool. It is well-supported by Linux and BSD and even outperformed a lot of similar machines that cost hundreds of dollars more. Thinkpads are supposed to be nice as well. If you buy eMachines or Packard Hell or any of those other rickety pieces of dogshit, well, you get what you pay for.
Hmm. This new GNOME looks awfully darn similar to KDE's Plastik theme, the new default for 3.4.
In fact, there are a lot of features in the upcoming GNOME that KDE already has. Many of them have even been around for a long time. Let's look at a few:
Additionally, there are two contenders vying for the position of Official GNOME CD-Ripper. KDE needs no such thing, because you rip and encode audio tracks just by dragging and dropping them from the file manager.
Now, I'm not trying to bash GNOME here. I used GNOME for a long time before the Great Feature Removal of GNOME 2.0. But all of you GNOME zealots out there (you know who you are) who claim that KDE tries too hard to be like Windows need to wake up and realize that your desktop environment is now starting to borrow heavily from others.
Yes, but it doesn't say "Unix was the world standard before 1990 or so", just that it was "the world standard". Most people are going to assume that means today.
From TFA:
"He was employee No. 5 at Sun Microsystems, which made Unix, the free software of the Web, the world standard."
Waitaminute. They're actually saying that:
Three complete falsehoods in one sentence! Is this country great or what?
Has the kernel really grown THAT much?
Yes and no... Using kernel compile times as a benchmark is categorically useless you quote the exact config file in the analysis.
A few weeks ago, I tried to compile a GNU/Debian Linux 2.6.x kernel on a Pentium III using the default kitchen-sink config. After about an hour and a half of just sitting there waiting for the damn thing to finish (this was on-site maintenance of a critical mail server), I halted the build and took my chances at configuring it by hand, hoping that I wouldn't forget some option that caused the machine not to boot. After paring it down, the new kernel plus a few modules were fully built in less than 10 minutes. (And it even booted fine.)
Dear Mr. LinearBob,
It has come to our attention that you have been willfully violating the Digital Millenium Copyright Act on the website Slashdot by posting detailed tutorials that explain how to circumvent proprietary copyright-protection technology. You are ordered to cease your discussions on said web site immediately, turn off your computer, and wait on your living room couch for our arrival at your residence where you will then be taken into custody.
We'll be seeing you soon, Terrorist,
The MPAA
ALERT!
Parent poster works for the MPAA!
(Alternatively, he may be an intern who's tired of sending out responses.)
Don't forget Penguicon in Novi, MI (near Detroit. It's a Linux/Sci-Fi con that's just a whole lot of fun with plenty of games, celebrities, panels, parties, and so on. Check it out if you're in the midwest.
I wouldn't call my post an argument per se, more like a pessimistic extrapolated prediction. However...
When Microsoft implements XAML into their browser many web developers will not use it, because it cuts out EVERYONE except those on IE. Everyone. 10% is a lot of people if you're Amazon.
That is true. Web sites like Amazon, eBay, Google, and so on are likely to continue to make sure their web sites work with 99.9% of the browsers out there. They would be simply throwing away customers if they didn't. But many web developers, and in particular web application developers, design systems that will see maybe a couple hundred hits a day at the most.
I used to access a lot of elaborate internal Air Force and DoD web sites that were built out of custom-written frameworks that *only* worked in IE. A college that I used to attend had online classes that you could only participate in if you used IE. My bank's online banking app, until recently, only worked in IE because their flashy javascript menu specifically checked for IE. Where I work, we're currently trying to port a
Many web developers do a good job at building sites which adhere to standards but have to add a lot of cruft to support IE also. But there are a great many more that still believe it's not worth their time and money to go out of their way to support 5% of the browser market.
His motivation for registering the trademark might not have as much to do with defrauding the MAME community as the Slashdot article speculates... this guy is well known for taking down eBay auctions for roms and MAME-supported hardware that compete with his. If he is awarded this trademark, this would give him even more leverage, since no one would be able use the official MAME logo on any auction site or web store, even if they were just selling their own homebrew arcade stick.
IIRC, copyright != trademark
copyright != trademark
I was about to disagree with you, but as I was finishing up my last witty jab at your argument, I realized that you were right... but for the wrong reasons.
Case study: Despite being proprietary and not bundled with any operating system or browser at the time, Flash took off quickly, and well before a significant portion of the world's population was able to browse the web. But upon seeing site after site that required Flash because of all the cool things it could do, people muddled their way through getting it onto their computers until it was popular enough that they didn't have to. Specifically, they didn't have to bring their computer into their dealer and say, "Excuse me, could you upgrade my gas tank, err, web browser please?" They just downloaded the software, hit "OK" and went to town.
Now, the real reason standards-based web forms won't catch on has nothing to do with this, and more to do with that fact that 95% of the browser market won't have an upgrade available. Microsft refuses to make its browser compatible with standards that are going on a full decade old. Even if they would just fix the bugs that plague the current implementation of what they SAY they support, web designers would offer endless gratitude, but MS won't even do that much for their users.
What they will instead do is this: Release the next version of Windows (Longhorn) with IE 7, an integrated web browser containing all of the bells and whistles that made Firefox semi-popular, including tabbed browsing and easy-to-write extensions, and improved web standards support. Also thrown in will probably be a new forms implementation. After the new OS has been out for 3 or 4 months, MS will release IE 6.9 or so for XP and Mac OS X that's really just IE 7 with a couple of key features (like tabbed browsing) removed.
Users will forget that Firefox ever existed because the new IE will do basically everything that Firefox did only faster. There will no longer be a big incentive to switch, even if it is relatively painless. IE will do what they need it to, and it's already there, so they'll use it. There's even a good chance that the new IEs will break many websites, but hardly anyone will complain. After all, people forgot pretty quickly when XP and it's SP2 broke hundreds of legacy applications, they certainly won't complain about websites which can be easily fixed overnight.
Once IEs 6.9 and 7 take over the lion's share of the browser market, web sites will host tutorials on how to use the new IE features (including MS Forms) and web developers will quickly adopt them in their own applications. The only catch is that many of these new IE features (such as the new forms) will be difficult or impossible to clone by third parties like Mozilla and Opera. These browsers that hold the minority in market share will be ignored by web application developers just like they are today because "everybody uses IE."
And Microsoft will have won the browser war again.
"The good thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from." -- Andrew S. Tanenbaum
I have to agree. Most people never think to shop around for video rentals, but you'd be surprised what kind of value you can find just looking around. My wife and I got tired of Blockbuster's steep prices, short rental periods, and constantly out-of-stock new releases. So we tried Hollywood Video; same crap, different store. Finally, we ended up renting from a place called Family Video. Their rentals are only $2 and they never run out of new releases. They're a really decent chain, give them a shot if they're in your area. (BTW, of the three, they're also the only ones with a pr0n room.
I work on [sic] computer security. I don't like viruses, either in my code or in the liscencing.
I "work on" computer security too. The only virus that I see on a day-to-day basis is that expensive closed source operating system that lines some very deep pockets yet contains an unknown quantity of BSD code written by poor college students and volunteers.
P.S. a better idea would be to return this printer now while you still can. Buy a printer that supports postscript. That hits the bottom line of companies who pull these tricks and in the end is worth more to the linux comunity.
Except, of course, that it doesn't hit their bottom line because most printers with postscript support are priced higher than the new consumer-level lasers that are starting to come out.
I don't understand how companies can sell printers that don't support Postscript. On the other hand, this seems to be a case where a company heard complaints from its customers, and corrected thier bad practices (the toner issue, and Postscript support).
Consumer-grade lasers are something of a new market, one that manufacturers are being very careful about wading into. The more expensive business-class laser printers are big money and manufacturers don't want to see their business-class customers downgrade to the consumer-grade printers, even if the cheaper printers would still suit their needs just fine.
Case in point: I recently bought a Konica Minolta Magicolor 2300DL practically on impulse at the local Sam's Club for $400. "What a steal!" I thought. I should have done better research. As it turned out, the printer spoke some weird language, but luckily some guy did write an OSS driver for it. A few weeks later, I learned that the printer has a higher-priced brother that has almost all of the same hardware and the exact same specifications, but can do a bit more like uploading a PDF directly to the printer through its web interface for printing and Postscript 3 support. This better printer costs over $800. The difference between the two units? The much more expensive one comes with a hard disk and different firmware. That is all. (And the cheaper one can't be upgraded.)
I'm forced to conclude that this is a case of Konica Minolta deliberately trying to keep their markets (via features) separate even when the hardware is virtually identical. There's no practical reason my printer couldn't speak Postscript or do many of the other things that the more expensive one can, they just want people to pay more for those extra benefits.
BTW, I found the whole thing here:
http://os2.in.ru/view/fdisk.c
Look at all those nested ifs!
A real comment in the MS-DOS 6.0 source code, cmd/fdisk/fdisk.c, line 77:And of course, slashdot is munging the whitespace in the preview...