But there's not much thinking to the job and I feel a little starved for a challenge...
Not to offend, criticize, or otherwise upset you, but I find it a little difficult to believe that there's no challenge to be had in your current job as a system administrator.
If we lived in a Microsoft-only world of computers, and you worked in an environment with a strict budget, I could understand the boredom. In order to do anything new, the organization would have to shell out cash for new hardware and software licenses and most organizations are not likely to do that for technology that couldn't be asbsolutely proven beyond any shadow of a doubt to be worth the cost.
But today we have open source software which costs nothing to use. Companies routinely pitch outdated desktops that, when running open source software, are plenty powerful enough for an enormous range of useful things. An experienced SysAdmin could do more with OSS, and a raft of old P2s (plus the odd new system here or there) than most Windows Admins could with $100,000 of brand-new equipment and licenses.
It's true that in many jobs you have to actively avoid boredom and seek out challenges on your own, but (forgive me here) I don't see how that's even theoretically possible in the SysAdmin field unless you're only doing the things that you're told or you're actively avoiding doing any work.
I'll assume that the latter is not true in your case. I don't know enough about your situation to offer any useful advice, however, so I'll just hope that you either come up with some ideas to spruce things up or enjoy ECE more than you enjoyed sytems administration.
Before everyone does the kneejerk censorhip response, this seems no different than what goes on in real life
Before you do the kneejerk kneejerk response, remember that the current system is exactly the same as what goes on in real life. You're free to view a web page without someone looking over your shoulder and you're free to buy any magazine you want at the store. But child pornographers and molesters are put away because those things are ALREADY illegal.
Another slashdot poster already noted that the software that BT is using is capable of blocking sites about religion and medical information and that much more than child pornography is blocked in an out-of-the-box configuration. It isn't a huge leap to imagine that since they their customers to agree to the blocking proxy under guise of blocking kiddie porn (nobody ever got fired for that), it would be all too easy for BT to toggle a checkbox for a different topic in the future.
And the funny thing about censorship is that the those being sheilded never have any way of knowing WHAT they're being sheilded from. Kiddie porn? Medical information? News? They can't tell. All they see is a page that says, "You can't view that."
See my sig for the rest of why your argument is invalid.
BUT it is a good thing, this means that no one can, ACCIDENTLY go onto a child porn site.
Everyone here who's ever mistakenly run across a child porn site during normal, regular web browsing raise their hand....
Thought so.
In 8+ solid years of browsing the web I have NEVER seen so much as the suggestion of actual kiddie porn on any web site I've ever been to, whether I visited it inadvertently or not. But watching the news on television, you'd think every other web site hosted by a non-corporate entity was constantly plotting to serve pre-teen lolita hardcore to unsuspecting old ladies everywhere.
Re:Caution 0.9 will break ALL your extensions
on
A New Look For Firefox
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· Score: 4, Insightful
once again backwards compatibility has been sacrificed (and we are not even at 1.0 yet)
Uh, hello? How did this get modded up?
Rather than feeding this relatively obvious troll, I'll simply remind folks that the whole POINT of the pre-1.0 development cycle is to break things. And nobody's forcing anyone else to use Firefox, stable or not. End of story.
1) Buy a legal copy of Windows XP or dig up an unused key that you already own.
2) Download a pirated copy of Windows XP that has product activation disabled.
3) Install the pirated copy of XP, but use the legal key.
This works for me. You don't have to worry about the product activation debacle/kludge and service packs work, and you can silence the holier-than-thou ethical right because you did indeed pay the company for their product and services.
When I read this guy's spiel, I seriously believed that it was all some kind of Onionesque joke and that the slashdot editors unintentionally put it in the Science category. The first half of it contained some fairly ridiculous statements and very obvious misuse of statistics. For example, he keeps calling natural death the biggest catastrophe that mankind has ever seen and then estimates that natural death causes a loss of trillions of dollars a year. (Would YOU put an arbitrary price on life?) He's definitely not a real scientist because he doesn't seem to understand that eventual death is one of the biggest (if not THE biggest) that evolution works and that he and you and I are all sitting here debating this issue today.
Explain to me again what the benefits of NOT having a graphical installer are again?
You don't have to worry whether the video card is properly supported by the installer. You can install on a headless server via serial port. Many distros (and FreeBSD) use the same application for initial installation and post-installation configuration. You wouldn't be able to ssh in to change something later. A non-GUI installer is faster. A non-GUI installer is simpler and therefore less likely to break.
But EVERY application should also have both a text mode and Gui installer. This installer should default to options for the most ignorant who want to "next next next finish" through an install and have moderate and advanced mode options (moderate allowing the user to choose things like static locations, various sensible configuration overrides.
No, every application should require exactly one mouse click or shell command to install. For example, a FreeBSD user can install one of over 10,000 third-party software packages just by going to a particular directory in the filesystem and typing "make install clean". The OS downloads, patches, compiles, and installs the software. If the software had any compile-time options, the OS sets them for you. And it just works, unlike the rpm/apt/yum trainwreck that most Linux distros these days are reduced to. Installation is just copying files onto the hard disk. No binary package should ever have to come with its own installer.
Basically I mean an install shield wizard type of thing that auto detects if running from he cli or gui and is 100% statically linked for it's own libs.
What you really want is a graphical front-end to the package management systems that exist today. Unfortunately, a decent one doesn't yet exist.
Some type of central application for removing programs is also needed, this can just read the list from the package manager if needed but should have a simple wizard type uninstall.
One exists and it's called/bin/rm. Removing a program is usually just a matter of deleting the same files that were copied to the disk on installation. All of the package managers that I've ever used save this list and simply pipe it to rm when the user issues the appropriate command.
Something like Kudzu is hardly ideal, it takes about 20-30 seconds to run on my P4.
You must have some hardware that requires weird probes or something. Kudzu takes about 5 seconds on my 2GHz Celeron laptop. I've always felt that Kudzu was a bad workaround for new hardware detection, but I haven't been able to think up anything better.
Hardware detection in general is something which shouldn't be solved on the distro level though. There needs to be a central web based database where the community can work on getting this together and the distro's can contribute. X module for X kernel makes hardware with X string in proc work. That kind of thing.
Err, most distros "steal" these kind of features from each other on a regular basis. I believe most of this is already implemented in the Linux kernel anyway, not at the distro level.
It makes sense to group similar hardware together and use common code in a single module.
Yes, and the authors do this wherever they can. They certainly don't want to waste their time writing code that already exists and Linus doesn't accept patches that are too similar to existing code. But the fact is that two different ethernet cards, even if they do the same thing and have the exact same features, can have an entirely different architecture and therefore require entirely different driver code. Writing one module to support them both would be far uglier than writing two modules that support them individually, for a number of obvious reasons. There's something to be said for NVIDIA's unified driver architecture, but there are significant drawbacks as well. If ethernet drivers came packaged like this, Linux
Like McCarthy. He wasn't targeting all the communist pinkos. He only targeted the ones who personally got under his skin.
Actually, McCarthy never unearthed a single communist in the US government. (Or, at least, never produced any kind of viable evidence against one.) What he did instead was create a political soapbox for himself and ruined the lives of hundreds of innocent politicians and civilian government workers.
These planes may have been *developed* in CA, but in all likelihood, they were tested in a much more remote and easily-monitored location, such as in the middle of the desert. The U.S. government and military have consistently chosen the southwest as the favored testing grounds for super-secret technology that was actually developed at locations around the whole country.
Ah, you pointed out something that I was *thinking* when I wrote this, but forgot to actually say. That is, the exchange of money is certainly allowed if there's a significant financial investment on the part of the person doing the favor. (But, as you mentioned, usually at a discount rate due to the friendship factor.)
I apologize for this oversight, but once you look beyond that, we are indeed saying the same thing.
Now these are people I've known all my life. One time I discussed, with a third-party friend, the possibility of offering my services for a fee. We both agreed,"Look, if you try to charge them for it not only will they decline, but they'll redouble their computer complaints, everyone will have to listen to it, and you'll be lucky if they offer you a beer next time you're over to watch the football game."
You'd think this would be common sense, but unfortunately for some, it isn't.
Unless doing so would significantly set you back financially, you NEVER CHARGE A FRIEND FOR WORK. If he or she is a real friend, they will find ways to pay you back for the favors you do for them. If they don't, they aren't your friend and you need to stop pretending they are. If all of your friends are like this, then you're a push-over and need to straighten up and find new friends.
So I cleaned their computers and set up their wireless AP with full WEP and MAC filtering for free. Sure I got a few beers and a chicken dinner out of it but it's still a bit of a kick in the pants. I save them $200 and I get the luxury of watching the football game with them?
This is both short-sighted and egotistical. Like I said above, if they were *real* friends, they will find ways to pay you back. These ways might be very subtle, too. Little things like paying for the booze during get-togethers. Or by including you in good times and experiences that you wouldn't have had otherwise. Or referrals to jobs or projects that DO make you money. These things add up.
I've probably saved my friends and family thousands of dollars just on computer help, manual labor, and advice alone and I've no doubt that I'm a lot better off in my life than I would be without them. But I've also encountered more than a few people who obviously just trying to be my buddy so they could borrow my things. Those people aren't counted among my friends and I tend to avoid them wherever possible.
But my real friends, those are the ones I stick with. If I asked my friend for some help with something I couldn't do on my own, and then he started itemizing the number of hours that he worked versus the cost of a bucket of chicken, he would be out the door, pronto.
I wrote a tutorial a while back on building one of these control panels, and also building a cabinet to go with it. It's really very easy to wire up, you can see the buttons on the page linked in the story.
There are also lots of examples to follow on Build Your Own Arcade Controls. The pages linked from here run the gamut from throwing a joystick and a few buttons into an old 1970's speakerbox to elaborate 4-player setups with plexiglass and full-color artwork that look like they were hand-crafted by the engineers at Capcom. If any of you out there are entertaining the idea of building a joystick or arcade cabinet, BYOAC is a must-read even if some of it is outdated.
Please check it out, because it's a great project to do, and it's very simple,
Not necessarily. It can be a lot of work if you want it to come out looking nice. OTOH, if beauty is no object, you can indeed slap one together in an evening in the woodshop.
these X-Arcade and Hotrod guys are just raping people; you can build one of these dual sticks for about 20 dollars, and it's a lot of fun.
Yes, I will agree that building your own control panel is a lot of fun. I built a one-player panel a few months ago and I love it. It came out much better than I anticipated and looks very professional.
However, I'm going to flat-out disagree that a stick like the X-Arcade costs $20 to make. If you set out to build your own like it, you'd find that just the joysticks and buttons alone are going to cost more than $20. Now figure in the cost of lumber, formica, keyboard encoder (at least $30 there), and any tools that you don't already own and you're looking at up to around $200 for a sturdy, nice-looking 2-player control panel. And even that isn't counting what your time would be worth.
I did the math before I built my stick and I found that buying 2-player X-Arcade would have been a lot cheaper than building my own single-player version. But would I be able to glance at it every now and then and go, "damn, that looks nice and I even built it myself"? No. Would I get to build something cool and a little geeky from scratch with my own two hands? No.
These things were important to me, but there are probably lots of other people out there who just want an arcade joystick to play on. For them, the X-Arcade is practically a bargain.
I want to agree with the other respondents in this thread and also offer an anecdote of my own.
Our local Linux user group was hosting an all-volunteer set of Linux classes for the community earlier this year. We had an Athlon 2400 (or close) server with a gig of RAM running K12 LTSP with 12 Pentium II-class thin clients. Now, K12 LTSP at the time ran Red Hat 9.0. The default RH9 desktop is not exactly light on resources for even *one* machine, but we had people on all 12 terminals doing things like web browsing and running commands all at the same time with NO noticable speed issues.
One night, we had a fellow there who was relatively new to Linux. He mentioned a couple times how interesting Linux seemed and the neat things it could do. Towards the end of the session, he started asking about the hardware that we were using. When we explained to him the server and thin-client setup, he practically refused to believe it. He couldn't comprehend how the speedy, full-featured desktop that he was using was being run, along with all the others, entirely from the server. He literally thought we were trying to mess with him. We had to open up the computer he was sitting at and show him the lack of hard drive just to prove ourselves. All together, it took us a good 1/2 hour just to convince him that it was even *possible* and after that he walked away astounded.
This has me convinced me just how far modern hardware and software companies have pushed our culture towards the idea that everyone has to have an dedicated top-of-the-line system sitting on their very own desktop just to get any work done. I can't even imagine the amount of money wasted every time some executive demands to have his or her "outdated" 1ghz machine swapped out for a brand-new $3000 Dell system when all they do is read email and write documents.
The thin client is an outright dangerous idea to companies like Dell who sell huge quantities of high-end desktop systems. For other companies, there is literally a killing to be made in convincing companies to switch their employees over to running thin clients on the desktop. This is the tip of the iceberg here. The reintroduction of client/server systems on a wide scale not only makes sense with today's technology, but it will save a TON of money and manpower. Just don't think that PC manufacturers are going to take it lying down.
Star Trek has been formulaic ever since TNG hit the screens. Just watching reruns of Voyager, you can see the same patterns over and over again, that were in TNG, DS9 and the original.
So... wouldn't that mean that Voyager is the one reformulating old TNG, DS9, and TNG ideas?
I partly agree with you here. Voyager was a bunch of starched, polictically-correct garbage. It had a few good episodes, but those were unfortunately rare. DS9 had a lot more "edge" to it then the other series. (And for awhile, had a bit of creative freedom while the traditional "Star Trek" crew were concentrating on wrapping up the TNG series.) But it had plenty of crappy episodes too. For example, last night I watched yet another one of those "ohmygod, the station/ship is going to self destruct and we've got only miliseconds until the commander/captain does something daringly heroic to save us all from imminent doom" episodes. Although I wouldn't know first-hand, I can imagine how hard it would be to have *every single* episode be refreshing and original. It's really the ratio between original vs formulaic episodes that counts, and TNG and DS9 are the clear winners in the Star Trek franchise.
Meanwhile, truely groundbreaking and interesting programs like Firefly only last for one series before being axed:(
Despite the hokey western motif, I probably would have become a rabid fan of Firefly. The shear idiocy of cancelling what might have been one of the most promising shows of the entire decade is staggering. The chacters were simply genius and I can recall more than a few spots where I said to myself, "woah, Star Trek would *never* have done that." The Out of Gas episode beats, hands down, almost every single one of the top Star Trek episode I have ever seen. And I'm a trekkie.
Is uncooked really that important? I really like steammed veggies.
Steamed is probably okay. I'm think I recall reading a few times that cooked vegetables lose a lot of their vitamins. Steamed veggies don't get as cooked as boiled ones. For me, fresh cool veggies are more appetizing than cooked, but that's just a personal taste.
Oh and eat more fish. The good ones halabit, salmon, tuna (ahi or yellowfin), and swordfish are quite similar to steak
Heh, I would no problem with that, but finding a place to buy decent seafood without living near the ocean is very close to impossible. And my wife essentially grew up on a farm, which means her idea of fish for dinner is deep-fried pieces of cod. I've tried to get her to enjoy grilled salmon and other types of fish prepared in different ways, but no luck so far.:(
I want to add to this: Eat lots and lots of uncooked vegetables. You seriously can't have too many. Most of us are familiar with eating habits that tend to go with the geek lifestyle: TV dinners, ramen, spaghetti-o's, fast food, and soda (pop) by the truckload.
However, when I made a conscious effort to start eating raw vegetables with *every* meal (and not just a carrot or so a day), I noticed that I started having fewer headaches, had more energy, and just generally felt all-around healthier. Now, if I don't eat my veggies, I find that those symptoms come right back. Carrots, celery, lettuce, and green peppers are almost always staples in my fridge.
Another thing while I'm on the soapbox: Drink water in lieu of pop and fruit juice. Almost any sweet beverage you can buy at the supermarket will dehydrate you more than it will hydrate you thanks to all the added sugar they put in those things. If you have frequent headaches and your pee doesn't come almost clear 9 times out of 10, then you're chronically dehydrated. Gatorade is okay, but only after a good workout. Otherwise, water is going to hydrate you best.
I was going to mod you up, but a quick grep on the web page you've referenced matches nothing for "USB" (except in "husband"). Either YOU are the one who is karma-whoring or you need to point out which one of the dozens of anecdotes was actually stolen.
That said, most of the thousands of anecdotes on the Computer Stupidities page are for more amusing than anything I've read yet in this thread.
I resisted the urge to reply as this is almost a troll. But a more thorough read of it shows that it is just more uninformed than anything else.
I'd love for Apple to release OS X on x86. There are some rumours of an x86 version being developed inside Apple for the day that they might switch to Intel.
I recall reading at one point that Apple has indicated that they do indeed maintain a nearly complete x86 port of OS X. But it will never, and I do mean never, be released. They use it only to verify the integrity of the codebase and to catch bugs that would be difficult or impossible to easily spot otherwise.
For those of you that say that Apple will die if they switch to x86, I think that you are wrong. People don't care about the processor.
In all likelihood, neither does Apple. But they won't switch for the following reasons:
1) They would piss off nearly every Mac user in the world by instantly dropping backward compatibility with current software. They're never going to support two different product lines either, especially when the difference is only in the CPU, so the chip would have to be fully compatible with both the x86 and PPC and such a beast would be ghastly to develop and manufacture. Maybe Transmeta could do it, but they focus on small, power-saving processors, not high-end desktop and server CPUs (assuming their architecture could even scale high enough and quick enough to compete with current high-end CPUs).
2) It would cost them far more money to switch their whole development, engineering, and manufacturing to a new architecture than it would to stay with the one they have. In bulk, the cost of a PPC CPU is not much greater than an x86 CPU. In other words, the cost of switching would far outweigh the cost of the silicon. Oh, and they'd piss off their engineers and developers, which are their main asset.
And Apple has stated that it will never get into the clone business again, so the rest of the system would still be as tightly controlled as now. Even if Macs ran x86s, you still couldn't go out and build your own $400 beige box and slap OS X on it.
When people buy a Mac, they buy the whole package: - the good looking monitor - the good looking tower - the good looking keyboard - the good looking mouse - the good looking speakers - the good looking OS X. I believe that they can get a lot of the market if the lower the price and switch to x86.
Your first sentence is the explanation of why the second is wrong. Apple hardware would still cost a lot of money because the price of an Apple system is all in the R&D to make a solid, easy-to-maintain, and stylish desktop computer. The cost of the silicon is siginificant, but not so much that switching to x86 would make it worthwhile.
In the past few months they have sold more iPods than macs, this should be a red flag that they have to do something about those prices.
Uh, iPods cost less than Macs and have a completely different function. Apples and oranges here, so to speak. Apple does quite well with their sales of computers. Just because there isn't one in every home doesn't mean their not making any money on them.
We all know that the hardware price is a ripoff.
If all you're buying it for is the hardware, yes. If you're buying a complete, solid, usable, good-looking, top-of-the-line system then most, inclusing myself, would argue an authoritative "no".
What I am wondering is if there is a scheme where the price from hardware goes to sofware. OS X comes with a ton of software for $130, while XP $300 comes with a crappy browser and notepad. They might be making the sofware look cheap and put hidden charges in the hardware.
The price of the hardware goes to developing the hardware. I have no earthy idea why Apple charges as much as they do for OS X except maybe because they know people will pay for it. I believe that they would have a lot more fans if they put each incremental upgrade o
Nylon rubbing against cotton in a dry environment is a midget lightning storm, quite suitable for igniting gasoline vapor (or any other explosive vapor mixture). Women wear full-leg nylon stockings or pantyhose under loose cotton dresses MUCH more often than men. B-)
IIRC, the going theory in regards to the statistic of women causing more gas pump fires was that they were far more likely to get back in the car during refueling on a cold day. When it's cold out, the air is also usually quite dry and this pretty much guarantees a hefty static discharge. I'm a male and practically get shocked to death during the winter when I emerge from my vehicle in the winter and/or dry climates.
When I read this article, I was thinking to myself, "Plogging? How quaint. We already do that where I work and we didn't even need a cool catchphrase and Slashdot submission."
At the small company I work for part-time, our project and task-tracking is done via Bugzilla. Bugzilla, though designed and almost exclusively used for tracking software bugs, turns out to be one heck of an issue tracker. All you need to do is substitute the word "task" for "bug" and everything works grand. My boss enters a "bug" that says "Upgrade Apache on so-and-so FreeBSD jail" and I go to town, using the comment feature to "plog" my progress on the "bug" until it's "fixed".
I've often thought it would be an entertaining bit of humor and ego-flaunting to release a fork of Bugzilla called Taskzilla that's really just a single patch replacing all instances of "bug" in the tarball with "task". The sad thing is that a lot of pointy-hair types would probably not notice this at first and go "wow, this free software works better than $commercial_solution!"
We're also using an internal wiki, not as project management, but to document our experiences with systems and software that we work with on a daily basis. It's working okay right now since it only has a few dozen pages, but will quickly careen out of control if someone doesn't step in and do some extreme reorganization. I've half-volunteered to do it, much to my chagrin, but thankfully I'm being kept gainfully employed on other projects for now.
Erm, close but no cigar. C+ for effort, though. I looked at as much of the thread as I could and at that point in time there seemed to be the following facts:
1) FedEx delivered something and the scammer got confused and a bit angry. But c'mon, this is hardly proof that he opened up the p-p-p-powerbook. This is London after all.
2) Efforts to recover the p-p-p-powerbook by half-assed trash- and dumpster-diving were unsuccessful.
Is it just me, or is this an incomplete prank? I read through the entire PDF and found, to my surprise, that it ended with them waiting for the package to be delivered. Hello? This would be just a little more amusing if there were some sort of punchline. The whole point to this is to get the guy's reaction in some form. So have they waited two weeks without hearing anything more from the scammer? Are there still people staking out the barbershop? WHAT'S GOING ON?
Amusing little prank, but it's just a little prank as long as nobody knows what happened in the end. C'mon, I could send someone a marked-up binder in lieu of a computer anytime I wanted. For those of you who haven't read it yet, don't waste your time. The pictures of the P-P-P-Powerbook itself are worth a giggle but that's pretty much the climax of the whole scenario.
Slashdot Mirror
But there's not much thinking to the job and I feel a little starved for a challenge...
Not to offend, criticize, or otherwise upset you, but I find it a little difficult to believe that there's no challenge to be had in your current job as a system administrator.
If we lived in a Microsoft-only world of computers, and you worked in an environment with a strict budget, I could understand the boredom. In order to do anything new, the organization would have to shell out cash for new hardware and software licenses and most organizations are not likely to do that for technology that couldn't be asbsolutely proven beyond any shadow of a doubt to be worth the cost.
But today we have open source software which costs nothing to use. Companies routinely pitch outdated desktops that, when running open source software, are plenty powerful enough for an enormous range of useful things. An experienced SysAdmin could do more with OSS, and a raft of old P2s (plus the odd new system here or there) than most Windows Admins could with $100,000 of brand-new equipment and licenses.
It's true that in many jobs you have to actively avoid boredom and seek out challenges on your own, but (forgive me here) I don't see how that's even theoretically possible in the SysAdmin field unless you're only doing the things that you're told or you're actively avoiding doing any work.
I'll assume that the latter is not true in your case. I don't know enough about your situation to offer any useful advice, however, so I'll just hope that you either come up with some ideas to spruce things up or enjoy ECE more than you enjoyed sytems administration.
Only Mac addicts would get all hot and bothered over brand new shiny vertically-oriented memory modules.
Before everyone does the kneejerk censorhip response, this seems no different than what goes on in real life
Before you do the kneejerk kneejerk response, remember that the current system is exactly the same as what goes on in real life. You're free to view a web page without someone looking over your shoulder and you're free to buy any magazine you want at the store. But child pornographers and molesters are put away because those things are ALREADY illegal.
Another slashdot poster already noted that the software that BT is using is capable of blocking sites about religion and medical information and that much more than child pornography is blocked in an out-of-the-box configuration. It isn't a huge leap to imagine that since they their customers to agree to the blocking proxy under guise of blocking kiddie porn (nobody ever got fired for that), it would be all too easy for BT to toggle a checkbox for a different topic in the future.
And the funny thing about censorship is that the those being sheilded never have any way of knowing WHAT they're being sheilded from. Kiddie porn? Medical information? News? They can't tell. All they see is a page that says, "You can't view that."
See my sig for the rest of why your argument is invalid.
BUT it is a good thing, this means that no one can, ACCIDENTLY go onto a child porn site.
Everyone here who's ever mistakenly run across a child porn site during normal, regular web browsing raise their hand.
Thought so.
In 8+ solid years of browsing the web I have NEVER seen so much as the suggestion of actual kiddie porn on any web site I've ever been to, whether I visited it inadvertently or not. But watching the news on television, you'd think every other web site hosted by a non-corporate entity was constantly plotting to serve pre-teen lolita hardcore to unsuspecting old ladies everywhere.
once again backwards compatibility has been sacrificed (and we are not even at 1.0 yet)
Uh, hello? How did this get modded up?
Rather than feeding this relatively obvious troll, I'll simply remind folks that the whole POINT of the pre-1.0 development cycle is to break things. And nobody's forcing anyone else to use Firefox, stable or not. End of story.
Sorry, links to Bugzilla from Slashdot are disabled.
I'd like to add my solution:
1) Buy a legal copy of Windows XP or dig up an unused key that you already own.
2) Download a pirated copy of Windows XP that has product activation disabled.
3) Install the pirated copy of XP, but use the legal key.
This works for me. You don't have to worry about the product activation debacle/kludge and service packs work, and you can silence the holier-than-thou ethical right because you did indeed pay the company for their product and services.
When I read this guy's spiel, I seriously believed that it was all some kind of Onionesque joke and that the slashdot editors unintentionally put it in the Science category. The first half of it contained some fairly ridiculous statements and very obvious misuse of statistics. For example, he keeps calling natural death the biggest catastrophe that mankind has ever seen and then estimates that natural death causes a loss of trillions of dollars a year. (Would YOU put an arbitrary price on life?) He's definitely not a real scientist because he doesn't seem to understand that eventual death is one of the biggest (if not THE biggest) that evolution works and that he and you and I are all sitting here debating this issue today.
Explain to me again what the benefits of NOT having a graphical installer are again?
/bin/rm. Removing a program is usually just a matter of deleting the same files that were copied to the disk on installation. All of the package managers that I've ever used save this list and simply pipe it to rm when the user issues the appropriate command.
You don't have to worry whether the video card is properly supported by the installer.
You can install on a headless server via serial port.
Many distros (and FreeBSD) use the same application for initial installation and post-installation configuration. You wouldn't be able to ssh in to change something later.
A non-GUI installer is faster.
A non-GUI installer is simpler and therefore less likely to break.
But EVERY application should also have both a text mode and Gui installer. This installer should default to options for the most ignorant who want to "next next next finish" through an install and have moderate and advanced mode options (moderate allowing the user to choose things like static locations, various sensible configuration overrides.
No, every application should require exactly one mouse click or shell command to install. For example, a FreeBSD user can install one of over 10,000 third-party software packages just by going to a particular directory in the filesystem and typing "make install clean". The OS downloads, patches, compiles, and installs the software. If the software had any compile-time options, the OS sets them for you. And it just works, unlike the rpm/apt/yum trainwreck that most Linux distros these days are reduced to. Installation is just copying files onto the hard disk. No binary package should ever have to come with its own installer.
Basically I mean an install shield wizard type of thing that auto detects if running from he cli or gui and is 100% statically linked for it's own libs.
What you really want is a graphical front-end to the package management systems that exist today. Unfortunately, a decent one doesn't yet exist.
Some type of central application for removing programs is also needed, this can just read the list from the package manager if needed but should have a simple wizard type uninstall.
One exists and it's called
Something like Kudzu is hardly ideal, it takes about 20-30 seconds to run on my P4.
You must have some hardware that requires weird probes or something. Kudzu takes about 5 seconds on my 2GHz Celeron laptop. I've always felt that Kudzu was a bad workaround for new hardware detection, but I haven't been able to think up anything better.
Hardware detection in general is something which shouldn't be solved on the distro level though. There needs to be a central web based database where the community can work on getting this together and the distro's can contribute. X module for X kernel makes hardware with X string in proc work. That kind of thing.
Err, most distros "steal" these kind of features from each other on a regular basis. I believe most of this is already implemented in the Linux kernel anyway, not at the distro level.
It makes sense to group similar hardware together and use common code in a single module.
Yes, and the authors do this wherever they can. They certainly don't want to waste their time writing code that already exists and Linus doesn't accept patches that are too similar to existing code. But the fact is that two different ethernet cards, even if they do the same thing and have the exact same features, can have an entirely different architecture and therefore require entirely different driver code. Writing one module to support them both would be far uglier than writing two modules that support them individually, for a number of obvious reasons. There's something to be said for NVIDIA's unified driver architecture, but there are significant drawbacks as well. If ethernet drivers came packaged like this, Linux
Like McCarthy. He wasn't targeting all the communist pinkos. He only targeted the ones who personally got under his skin.
Actually, McCarthy never unearthed a single communist in the US government. (Or, at least, never produced any kind of viable evidence against one.) What he did instead was create a political soapbox for himself and ruined the lives of hundreds of innocent politicians and civilian government workers.
These planes may have been *developed* in CA, but in all likelihood, they were tested in a much more remote and easily-monitored location, such as in the middle of the desert. The U.S. government and military have consistently chosen the southwest as the favored testing grounds for super-secret technology that was actually developed at locations around the whole country.
Ah, you pointed out something that I was *thinking* when I wrote this, but forgot to actually say. That is, the exchange of money is certainly allowed if there's a significant financial investment on the part of the person doing the favor. (But, as you mentioned, usually at a discount rate due to the friendship factor.)
I apologize for this oversight, but once you look beyond that, we are indeed saying the same thing.
Now these are people I've known all my life. One time I discussed, with a third-party friend, the possibility of offering my services for a fee. We both agreed,"Look, if you try to charge them for it not only will they decline, but they'll redouble their computer complaints, everyone will have to listen to it, and you'll be lucky if they offer you a beer next time you're over to watch the football game."
You'd think this would be common sense, but unfortunately for some, it isn't.
Unless doing so would significantly set you back financially, you NEVER CHARGE A FRIEND FOR WORK. If he or she is a real friend, they will find ways to pay you back for the favors you do for them. If they don't, they aren't your friend and you need to stop pretending they are. If all of your friends are like this, then you're a push-over and need to straighten up and find new friends.
So I cleaned their computers and set up their wireless AP with full WEP and MAC filtering for free. Sure I got a few beers and a chicken dinner out of it but it's still a bit of a kick in the pants. I save them $200 and I get the luxury of watching the football game with them?
This is both short-sighted and egotistical. Like I said above, if they were *real* friends, they will find ways to pay you back. These ways might be very subtle, too. Little things like paying for the booze during get-togethers. Or by including you in good times and experiences that you wouldn't have had otherwise. Or referrals to jobs or projects that DO make you money. These things add up.
I've probably saved my friends and family thousands of dollars just on computer help, manual labor, and advice alone and I've no doubt that I'm a lot better off in my life than I would be without them. But I've also encountered more than a few people who obviously just trying to be my buddy so they could borrow my things. Those people aren't counted among my friends and I tend to avoid them wherever possible.
But my real friends, those are the ones I stick with. If I asked my friend for some help with something I couldn't do on my own, and then he started itemizing the number of hours that he worked versus the cost of a bucket of chicken, he would be out the door, pronto.
I wrote a tutorial a while back on building one of these control panels, and also building a cabinet to go with it. It's really very easy to wire up, you can see the buttons on the page linked in the story.
There are also lots of examples to follow on Build Your Own Arcade Controls. The pages linked from here run the gamut from throwing a joystick and a few buttons into an old 1970's speakerbox to elaborate 4-player setups with plexiglass and full-color artwork that look like they were hand-crafted by the engineers at Capcom. If any of you out there are entertaining the idea of building a joystick or arcade cabinet, BYOAC is a must-read even if some of it is outdated.
Please check it out, because it's a great project to do, and it's very simple,
Not necessarily. It can be a lot of work if you want it to come out looking nice. OTOH, if beauty is no object, you can indeed slap one together in an evening in the woodshop.
these X-Arcade and Hotrod guys are just raping people; you can build one of these dual sticks for about 20 dollars, and it's a lot of fun.
Yes, I will agree that building your own control panel is a lot of fun. I built a one-player panel a few months ago and I love it. It came out much better than I anticipated and looks very professional.
However, I'm going to flat-out disagree that a stick like the X-Arcade costs $20 to make. If you set out to build your own like it, you'd find that just the joysticks and buttons alone are going to cost more than $20. Now figure in the cost of lumber, formica, keyboard encoder (at least $30 there), and any tools that you don't already own and you're looking at up to around $200 for a sturdy, nice-looking 2-player control panel. And even that isn't counting what your time would be worth.
I did the math before I built my stick and I found that buying 2-player X-Arcade would have been a lot cheaper than building my own single-player version. But would I be able to glance at it every now and then and go, "damn, that looks nice and I even built it myself"? No. Would I get to build something cool and a little geeky from scratch with my own two hands? No.
These things were important to me, but there are probably lots of other people out there who just want an arcade joystick to play on. For them, the X-Arcade is practically a bargain.
I want to agree with the other respondents in this thread and also offer an anecdote of my own.
Our local Linux user group was hosting an all-volunteer set of Linux classes for the community earlier this year. We had an Athlon 2400 (or close) server with a gig of RAM running K12 LTSP with 12 Pentium II-class thin clients. Now, K12 LTSP at the time ran Red Hat 9.0. The default RH9 desktop is not exactly light on resources for even *one* machine, but we had people on all 12 terminals doing things like web browsing and running commands all at the same time with NO noticable speed issues.
One night, we had a fellow there who was relatively new to Linux. He mentioned a couple times how interesting Linux seemed and the neat things it could do. Towards the end of the session, he started asking about the hardware that we were using. When we explained to him the server and thin-client setup, he practically refused to believe it. He couldn't comprehend how the speedy, full-featured desktop that he was using was being run, along with all the others, entirely from the server. He literally thought we were trying to mess with him. We had to open up the computer he was sitting at and show him the lack of hard drive just to prove ourselves. All together, it took us a good 1/2 hour just to convince him that it was even *possible* and after that he walked away astounded.
This has me convinced me just how far modern hardware and software companies have pushed our culture towards the idea that everyone has to have an dedicated top-of-the-line system sitting on their very own desktop just to get any work done. I can't even imagine the amount of money wasted every time some executive demands to have his or her "outdated" 1ghz machine swapped out for a brand-new $3000 Dell system when all they do is read email and write documents.
The thin client is an outright dangerous idea to companies like Dell who sell huge quantities of high-end desktop systems. For other companies, there is literally a killing to be made in convincing companies to switch their employees over to running thin clients on the desktop. This is the tip of the iceberg here. The reintroduction of client/server systems on a wide scale not only makes sense with today's technology, but it will save a TON of money and manpower. Just don't think that PC manufacturers are going to take it lying down.
Star Trek has been formulaic ever since TNG hit the screens. Just watching reruns of Voyager, you can see the same patterns over and over again, that were in TNG, DS9 and the original.
So... wouldn't that mean that Voyager is the one reformulating old TNG, DS9, and TNG ideas?
I partly agree with you here. Voyager was a bunch of starched, polictically-correct garbage. It had a few good episodes, but those were unfortunately rare. DS9 had a lot more "edge" to it then the other series. (And for awhile, had a bit of creative freedom while the traditional "Star Trek" crew were concentrating on wrapping up the TNG series.) But it had plenty of crappy episodes too. For example, last night I watched yet another one of those "ohmygod, the station/ship is going to self destruct and we've got only miliseconds until the commander/captain does something daringly heroic to save us all from imminent doom" episodes. Although I wouldn't know first-hand, I can imagine how hard it would be to have *every single* episode be refreshing and original. It's really the ratio between original vs formulaic episodes that counts, and TNG and DS9 are the clear winners in the Star Trek franchise.
Meanwhile, truely groundbreaking and interesting programs like Firefly only last for one series before being axed
Despite the hokey western motif, I probably would have become a rabid fan of Firefly. The shear idiocy of cancelling what might have been one of the most promising shows of the entire decade is staggering. The chacters were simply genius and I can recall more than a few spots where I said to myself, "woah, Star Trek would *never* have done that." The Out of Gas episode beats, hands down, almost every single one of the top Star Trek episode I have ever seen. And I'm a trekkie.
Is uncooked really that important? I really like steammed veggies.
Steamed is probably okay. I'm think I recall reading a few times that cooked vegetables lose a lot of their vitamins. Steamed veggies don't get as cooked as boiled ones. For me, fresh cool veggies are more appetizing than cooked, but that's just a personal taste.
Oh and eat more fish. The good ones halabit, salmon, tuna (ahi or yellowfin), and swordfish are quite similar to steak
Heh, I would no problem with that, but finding a place to buy decent seafood without living near the ocean is very close to impossible. And my wife essentially grew up on a farm, which means her idea of fish for dinner is deep-fried pieces of cod. I've tried to get her to enjoy grilled salmon and other types of fish prepared in different ways, but no luck so far.
(a) Eating nutritiously and sparingly,
I want to add to this: Eat lots and lots of uncooked vegetables. You seriously can't have too many. Most of us are familiar with eating habits that tend to go with the geek lifestyle: TV dinners, ramen, spaghetti-o's, fast food, and soda (pop) by the truckload.
However, when I made a conscious effort to start eating raw vegetables with *every* meal (and not just a carrot or so a day), I noticed that I started having fewer headaches, had more energy, and just generally felt all-around healthier. Now, if I don't eat my veggies, I find that those symptoms come right back. Carrots, celery, lettuce, and green peppers are almost always staples in my fridge.
Another thing while I'm on the soapbox: Drink water in lieu of pop and fruit juice. Almost any sweet beverage you can buy at the supermarket will dehydrate you more than it will hydrate you thanks to all the added sugar they put in those things. If you have frequent headaches and your pee doesn't come almost clear 9 times out of 10, then you're chronically dehydrated. Gatorade is okay, but only after a good workout. Otherwise, water is going to hydrate you best.
I was going to mod you up, but a quick grep on the web page you've referenced matches nothing for "USB" (except in "husband"). Either YOU are the one who is karma-whoring or you need to point out which one of the dozens of anecdotes was actually stolen.
That said, most of the thousands of anecdotes on the Computer Stupidities page are for more amusing than anything I've read yet in this thread.
I resisted the urge to reply as this is almost a troll. But a more thorough read of it shows that it is just more uninformed than anything else.
I'd love for Apple to release OS X on x86. There are some rumours of an x86 version being developed inside Apple for the day that they might switch to Intel.
I recall reading at one point that Apple has indicated that they do indeed maintain a nearly complete x86 port of OS X. But it will never, and I do mean never, be released. They use it only to verify the integrity of the codebase and to catch bugs that would be difficult or impossible to easily spot otherwise.
For those of you that say that Apple will die if they switch to x86, I think that you are wrong. People don't care about the processor.
In all likelihood, neither does Apple. But they won't switch for the following reasons:
1) They would piss off nearly every Mac user in the world by instantly dropping backward compatibility with current software. They're never going to support two different product lines either, especially when the difference is only in the CPU, so the chip would have to be fully compatible with both the x86 and PPC and such a beast would be ghastly to develop and manufacture. Maybe Transmeta could do it, but they focus on small, power-saving processors, not high-end desktop and server CPUs (assuming their architecture could even scale high enough and quick enough to compete with current high-end CPUs).
2) It would cost them far more money to switch their whole development, engineering, and manufacturing to a new architecture than it would to stay with the one they have. In bulk, the cost of a PPC CPU is not much greater than an x86 CPU. In other words, the cost of switching would far outweigh the cost of the silicon. Oh, and they'd piss off their engineers and developers, which are their main asset.
And Apple has stated that it will never get into the clone business again, so the rest of the system would still be as tightly controlled as now. Even if Macs ran x86s, you still couldn't go out and build your own $400 beige box and slap OS X on it.
When people buy a Mac, they buy the whole package: - the good looking monitor - the good looking tower - the good looking keyboard - the good looking mouse - the good looking speakers - the good looking OS X. I believe that they can get a lot of the market if the lower the price and switch to x86.
Your first sentence is the explanation of why the second is wrong. Apple hardware would still cost a lot of money because the price of an Apple system is all in the R&D to make a solid, easy-to-maintain, and stylish desktop computer. The cost of the silicon is siginificant, but not so much that switching to x86 would make it worthwhile.
In the past few months they have sold more iPods than macs, this should be a red flag that they have to do something about those prices.
Uh, iPods cost less than Macs and have a completely different function. Apples and oranges here, so to speak. Apple does quite well with their sales of computers. Just because there isn't one in every home doesn't mean their not making any money on them.
We all know that the hardware price is a ripoff.
If all you're buying it for is the hardware, yes. If you're buying a complete, solid, usable, good-looking, top-of-the-line system then most, inclusing myself, would argue an authoritative "no".
What I am wondering is if there is a scheme where the price from hardware goes to sofware. OS X comes with a ton of software for $130, while XP $300 comes with a crappy browser and notepad. They might be making the sofware look cheap and put hidden charges in the hardware.
The price of the hardware goes to developing the hardware. I have no earthy idea why Apple charges as much as they do for OS X except maybe because they know people will pay for it. I believe that they would have a lot more fans if they put each incremental upgrade o
Nylon rubbing against cotton in a dry environment is a midget lightning storm, quite suitable for igniting gasoline vapor (or any other explosive vapor mixture). Women wear full-leg nylon stockings or pantyhose under loose cotton dresses MUCH more often than men. B-)
IIRC, the going theory in regards to the statistic of women causing more gas pump fires was that they were far more likely to get back in the car during refueling on a cold day. When it's cold out, the air is also usually quite dry and this pretty much guarantees a hefty static discharge. I'm a male and practically get shocked to death during the winter when I emerge from my vehicle in the winter and/or dry climates.
Even though I don't live in Europe, my initial reaction to the headline was probably similar to most everyone elses:
"Ah, fuck."
When I read this article, I was thinking to myself, "Plogging? How quaint. We already do that where I work and we didn't even need a cool catchphrase and Slashdot submission."
At the small company I work for part-time, our project and task-tracking is done via Bugzilla. Bugzilla, though designed and almost exclusively used for tracking software bugs, turns out to be one heck of an issue tracker. All you need to do is substitute the word "task" for "bug" and everything works grand. My boss enters a "bug" that says "Upgrade Apache on so-and-so FreeBSD jail" and I go to town, using the comment feature to "plog" my progress on the "bug" until it's "fixed".
I've often thought it would be an entertaining bit of humor and ego-flaunting to release a fork of Bugzilla called Taskzilla that's really just a single patch replacing all instances of "bug" in the tarball with "task". The sad thing is that a lot of pointy-hair types would probably not notice this at first and go "wow, this free software works better than $commercial_solution!"
We're also using an internal wiki, not as project management, but to document our experiences with systems and software that we work with on a daily basis. It's working okay right now since it only has a few dozen pages, but will quickly careen out of control if someone doesn't step in and do some extreme reorganization. I've half-volunteered to do it, much to my chagrin, but thankfully I'm being kept gainfully employed on other projects for now.
conclusion here.
Erm, close but no cigar. C+ for effort, though. I looked at as much of the thread as I could and at that point in time there seemed to be the following facts:
1) FedEx delivered something and the scammer got confused and a bit angry. But c'mon, this is hardly proof that he opened up the p-p-p-powerbook. This is London after all.
2) Efforts to recover the p-p-p-powerbook by half-assed trash- and dumpster-diving were unsuccessful.
3) Scammer had not sent a reply email.
Is it just me, or is this an incomplete prank? I read through the entire PDF and found, to my surprise, that it ended with them waiting for the package to be delivered. Hello? This would be just a little more amusing if there were some sort of punchline. The whole point to this is to get the guy's reaction in some form. So have they waited two weeks without hearing anything more from the scammer? Are there still people staking out the barbershop? WHAT'S GOING ON?
Amusing little prank, but it's just a little prank as long as nobody knows what happened in the end. C'mon, I could send someone a marked-up binder in lieu of a computer anytime I wanted. For those of you who haven't read it yet, don't waste your time. The pictures of the P-P-P-Powerbook itself are worth a giggle but that's pretty much the climax of the whole scenario.