Did humans thousands of years ago have really bad teeth, therefore, since there were no dentists?
Humans in pre-historic times only lived till around the age of 30-35. Probably one of the main reasons they died so early would have been their difficulty in eating the tough unprepared food brought back by the tribe's hunters. So yes they did have really bad teeth in later life but weren't around long enough to suffer from it.
So you're saying that the fact that many creatures have apparent faults in their 'design' is a way to disprove ID? If this is so then intelligent design is disproven, since there is no doubt that creatures on earth are imperfect - they all have faults, and there's no need to have these stupid arguments about it being a science anymore.
the military will make it damn clear not to fuck with national security
What national security? If he was able to get in so easily then there is no security to speak of on these networks. If he was an American I could understand if they put him in jail for 2 or 3 years as a detterent. But going to all this trouble to prosecute a foreign citizen for 70 years(!!) is just stupid - they should get him on the phone and ask his advice on how they can secure this network.
Maybe a good rule would be for every year worked, the company must pay a pension of 2.5% of that years salary, adjusted for inflation
And what if that company collapses during the intervening 30 years? Or you change jobs? Don't you Americans have compulsory superannuation funds? In Australia 9% of your salary every pay is contributed by the employer.
I don't understand how Americans plan to live once they retire if they have no super? I can't imagine living off a government pension would be much fun.
Just bring an old computer alongside (which has a floppy drive power connector), and connect the floppy power connector from the old computer to the new one.
Connect the IDE cable from the floppy into the new machine. I had to do this for a server at work - it worked, although it looked incredibly dodgy:)
It will need to install on machines next to Window, leaving that completely intact and easy to return to, and carry over all or nearly all of the user's data and settings
This is probably the only good point in the article, but still the lack of 'one-click' migration like there is in Firefox isn't the death knell of Linux on the desktop.
doesn't require the user jump through hoops when they want to download a new application from download.com
This tired old argument. How many times does it have to be said that you need to use the package management thingo (urpmi/yum/apt whatever) that came with your distro? Then software is a simple 'one-click' install away.
Regular People shouldn't have to (guess or learn enough to) choose between Gnome and KDE
Honestly this is the most stupid argument I've ever heard against Linux. The distro you use will have a default (either KDE or GNOME), either is good enough now for the average user. Perhaps the user will become interested in the system and see what the other one looks like, if not then so what - all their programs will still run just fine.
I mean do people not choose Windows because they have the choice between Windows Media Player and Winamp to play their MP3s? Do power-user's heads explode at the decision between photoshop, paint shop pro and corel painter?
Gedit has about 30 user preferences spread across 5 tabs in a preferences window -- Notepad has about three
And Notepad is the worst text editor ever written. Its simply useless for anything you would want to use a text editor for - like editing any reasonable complex text file. I like the fact that Open Source apps have lots of options and buttons and features. I also like the fact that the defaults chosen are usually pretty good so the average user need never confuse themself in a sea of choices if all they want to do is use the system.
Regular people do not know what it means to "mount a drive" and they shouldn't have to
Any modern desktop-oriented distro automounts drives for you
Regular People don't want their OK and Cancel buttons reversed
You'll get used to it in a few days
Regular People shouldn't have to learn what/home means or how it differs from My Documents.
'Home is that folder that has all my stuff in it'. Gee that's hard isn't it, esp. when KDE and GNOME both have pre-configured shortcuts to it that say 'Home' with a little icon of a house on it. I wonder how many Windows users can explain the function of the 'Documents and Settings' folder, despite the name.
Regular People don't want two clipboards that seem to constantly overwrite each other
What the normal ctrl+c/right-click->Copy clipboard and the mouse clipboard? They don't overwrite each other. Methinks you need to learn to co-ordinate your hands a bit better - remember which is on the keyboard and which is on the mouse.
Linux UI fundamentals need a reworking to match the habits that Windows users have been building over the last decade
Why? Linux is not a clone of Windows and shouldn't try to be.
This article is typical of the poorly written 'here's what I think is holding back Linux from the desktop' articles popping up everywhere. Its full of flawed arguments and half-understood concepts that make it look like it was written by someone who's installed Linux, saw it isn't exactly like Windows then blogged about their misconceptions without taking the time to learn something about the new OS.
So an OS is a desktop OS because it sits under your desk? And Plan9 is a valid desktop OS even though it has none of the essential GUI apps necessary for desktop use such as office software and browsers?
I wasn't trying to put Plan9 down - I think its great that there's research going on into something new, I was just saying there's no sense in suggesting it as a desktop OS in place of a Linux distro or Windows XP.
about the 70s concepts, it's rather known that linux views of network aren't what they could be
What are you suggesting these 'views' could be? Keep in mind that just about all the basic networking protocols/standards (IP, TCP/UDP/ICMP, ethernet etc.) where designed during or before the 70's, therefore any OS which uses them will embody '70's concepts'.
Not very inventive, but what's to expect from a 1970s OS anyway?
And I suppose you also deride modern cars with the line "not very inventive but what's to expect from an 1890's design anyway?"
Take a look at Plan9
Plan9 is used for research into new concepts in OS design. Its not a replacement for Windows or Suse because its not designed for desktop use at all. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs
"With 10 billion [euros], we could build 10,000MW offshore windfarms, delivering electricity for 7.5 million European households," said Jan Vande Putte of Greenpeace International. [From the BBC story linked with the article]
I think that just shows how ridiculous their position on this is. 10 billion to power just 7.5 million homes. How many people are there in the EU? About 400 million? Even assuming 3 people per household that's still only 22.5 million people out of 400 million.
If I was an EU taxpayer I'd rather see my 10 billion go to something that is actually targeted at the kind of large-scale power generation our society needs. Its only extremists like Greenpeace who think that every or $ available should be desperately plowed into any scheme with the word 'renewable' on it wether its able or not, in practice, to produce the levels of energy that we need.
For god's sake Greenpeace look past your noses and give up your religious and irrational fear of the 'N' word. You're head's are as far into the sand of pure ideaology as the 'if I can't see it its not happening' US Republican party is towards global warming..
I was talking about human actions to decrease population as the GGP was saying that new medical treatments like this should be witheld for over-population reasons.
RTFA this is not an immortality treatment - they reckon it can be used to help save people who have suffered severe blood loss. By your logic that we should just let people die because of population concerns we should strip all our hospitals of life-support machines too.
Given that the largest war in history (World War 2) only killed 50-100 million ppl I don't see how holding back medical treatments is going to have any significant affect on population growth or decline. Its been proven time and time again that the only way to control population is through sensible family planning.
You'd probably be quite surprised at the number of legal copies of Windows that are in use
You'd be quite surprised at the number of illegal copies too. Everybody I know who didn't get WinXP with a new PC has simply pirated it, most people just don't talk about it or post about it on message boards. I fear the day when all these machines (including, I'll admit, the non-Linux machines in my house) can't get security updates. There will be vast numbers of spam-bots, virus spreaders and DDoS zombies, even more so than now.
A rootkit is software that an attacker installs *manually* *after* he's already cracked your machine to make his life easier. A virus is a *self-replicating* program that compromises your machine in some way and therefore by definition is automatic and doesn't require your machine to already be compromised.
Both ridiculous and rid have the same pronunciation for their rid part. According to the Pronunciation Key this is how you'd use the 'i' in 'pit'. Reed has a different pronunciation entirely which is given as being like 'bee' in the Key.
When I was struggling to get a part-time job in uni I looked at those rent-a-coder sites, which are the same idea as computerrepair.com except for developers. I began to realise it might not be my thing when I saw a job to create a firewall program that was 'like Zone Alarm' listed as '$1000 or less'.
What a joke, if I could create a firewall program of similar quality to Zone Alarm for $1000 (or the equivalent labour time, even at say $10/hour) I'd be in business competing against Zone Alarm in a heartbeat. Most of the rest of the jobs were undervalued, many just as ridiculously, as this one.
I soon began to get the impression that the people who actually completed jobs on this site were mostly Indian techies desperate for any pittance of money, no matter how small.
Wow, well I don't know much about phonetics but I do know that in Australia we're taught, and pronounce it, as 'ridiculous'. Ie. with the 'rid' bit pronounced like you'd say 'rid' in "get rid of it", not "get red of it". Maybe its an American thing, I dunno.
There's no easy way of installing software like apt-get install
Except for 'urpmi foo' and the GUI equivalent in the Mandrake Control Centre
Or having segfaults all the time while using Mandrake 10.1
What segfaults? The kernel? kde? some app you downloaded off the net? It works fine for the majority of people.
KDE 3.2 when 3.3 is out just because the guys have screwed something up
Nobody screwed KDE up - 3.3 was released only just before 10.1 was released so there wasn't time to integrate it into the distro (at that time Mandriva was following 6 monthly release cycles). There was no attempt to fork KDE - you pulled that out of your arse.
And is Lycoris Debian-based or does it use RPM?
It sounds like you used it for a grand total of about 5 minutes and then gave up.
In my experiences the 'community' distros were terrible - they were actually beta versions and should have been named as such. Fortunately the equivalent official versions were a major improvement when they came out.
The problem with LSB at the moment is that it doesn't go far enough to specify all that's needed for a desktop Linux system. The reason you can install everything on Windows 2000 or Windows XP is that the whole Windows system is a monolithic entity from kernel right up to desktop. You can rely on a lot stuff being there and not changing for 3 or 4 years.
Having said that I disagree with the GP that installing software on Linux is user-unfriendly. In distros like Mandriva it is extremely easy and simple to install software - the catch being that it has to be packaged in one of the repositories for your distro.
Linux distro's have automatic updates too and the distro maintainer assumes the role of testing the application with the new patch applied.
The GP was only half-right by saying that 'a patch can be released right away and users can compile in the new sources themselves' is a strength of OSS. In reality only small numbers of users do this themselves, most simply get it through their distro's auto update feature after its been tested and qa'd by the distro maintainers.
pop a CD in the drive, boot Linux, spend next 2-4 hours with user: 'this is where Word is now' 'oh no it looks different' 'well that's because... and this is where you're documents are' 'why are they in this 'Home Folder' thing, where's My Documents gone' 'Well that's because.. and in Linux we have them here..and..' etc.etc.
1. Install Windows XP 2. Defragment drive 3. Run Mandriva installation and select 'automatic partitioning' during install 4. Reboot PC 5. Profit!.. oh wait
You may laugh, but to me it's absolutely incredible that a foreign Government has been forced to pay a private company for alleged copyright violation and promise to be a good consumer in the future
Indonesia as a sovereign country can do what it wants - they can say 'we won't have anymore copyright laws and all versions of Windows will be free'. Of course if they do that other countries won't trade with them as much so its a decision they have to make - ie. evaluate the costs/benefits to themselves. Imagine the fines if you were a private business and the BSA software nazis audited you and found that level of piracy.
Free software has these advantages for Indonesia
..and that's exactly why Microsoft has given them a big hug and said "all is forgiven" in this case - so they won't have an incentive to look at FOSS.
Slashdot Mirror
Did humans thousands of years ago have really bad teeth, therefore, since there were no dentists?
Humans in pre-historic times only lived till around the age of 30-35. Probably one of the main reasons they died so early would have been their difficulty in eating the tough unprepared food brought back by the tribe's hunters. So yes they did have really bad teeth in later life but weren't around long enough to suffer from it.
So you're saying that the fact that many creatures have apparent faults in their 'design' is a way to disprove ID? If this is so then intelligent design is disproven, since there is no doubt that creatures on earth are imperfect - they all have faults, and there's no need to have these stupid arguments about it being a science anymore.
the military will make it damn clear not to fuck with national security
What national security? If he was able to get in so easily then there is no security to speak of on these networks. If he was an American I could understand if they put him in jail for 2 or 3 years as a detterent. But going to all this trouble to prosecute a foreign citizen for 70 years(!!) is just stupid - they should get him on the phone and ask his advice on how they can secure this network.
Maybe a good rule would be for every year worked, the company must pay a pension of 2.5% of that years salary, adjusted for inflation
And what if that company collapses during the intervening 30 years? Or you change jobs? Don't you Americans have compulsory superannuation funds? In Australia 9% of your salary every pay is contributed by the employer.
I don't understand how Americans plan to live once they retire if they have no super? I can't imagine living off a government pension would be much fun.
Just bring an old computer alongside (which has a floppy drive power connector), and connect the floppy power connector from the old computer to the new one.
:)
Connect the IDE cable from the floppy into the new machine. I had to do this for a server at work - it worked, although it looked incredibly dodgy
The tobacco industry also employs lots of people but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to get people to stop smoking
It will need to install on machines next to Window, leaving that completely intact and easy to return to, and carry over all or nearly all of the user's data and settings
/home means or how it differs from My Documents.
This is probably the only good point in the article, but still the lack of 'one-click' migration like there is in Firefox isn't the death knell of Linux on the desktop.
doesn't require the user jump through hoops when they want to download a new application from download.com
This tired old argument. How many times does it have to be said that you need to use the package management thingo (urpmi/yum/apt whatever) that came with your distro? Then software is a simple 'one-click' install away.
Regular People shouldn't have to (guess or learn enough to) choose between Gnome and KDE
Honestly this is the most stupid argument I've ever heard against Linux. The distro you use will have a default (either KDE or GNOME), either is good enough now for the average user. Perhaps the user will become interested in the system and see what the other one looks like, if not then so what - all their programs will still run just fine.
I mean do people not choose Windows because they have the choice between Windows Media Player and Winamp to play their MP3s? Do power-user's heads explode at the decision between photoshop, paint shop pro and corel painter?
Gedit has about 30 user preferences spread across 5 tabs in a preferences window -- Notepad has about three
And Notepad is the worst text editor ever written. Its simply useless for anything you would want to use a text editor for - like editing any reasonable complex text file. I like the fact that Open Source apps have lots of options and buttons and features. I also like the fact that the defaults chosen are usually pretty good so the average user need never confuse themself in a sea of choices if all they want to do is use the system.
Regular people do not know what it means to "mount a drive" and they shouldn't have to
Any modern desktop-oriented distro automounts drives for you
Regular People don't want their OK and Cancel buttons reversed
You'll get used to it in a few days
Regular People shouldn't have to learn what
'Home is that folder that has all my stuff in it'. Gee that's hard isn't it, esp. when KDE and GNOME both have pre-configured shortcuts to it that say 'Home' with a little icon of a house on it. I wonder how many Windows users can explain the function of the 'Documents and Settings' folder, despite the name.
Regular People don't want two clipboards that seem to constantly overwrite each other
What the normal ctrl+c/right-click->Copy clipboard and the mouse clipboard? They don't overwrite each other. Methinks you need to learn to co-ordinate your hands a bit better - remember which is on the keyboard and which is on the mouse.
Linux UI fundamentals need a reworking to match the habits that Windows users have been building over the last decade
Why? Linux is not a clone of Windows and shouldn't try to be.
This article is typical of the poorly written 'here's what I think is holding back Linux from the desktop' articles popping up everywhere. Its full of flawed arguments and half-understood concepts that make it look like it was written by someone who's installed Linux, saw it isn't exactly like Windows then blogged about their misconceptions without taking the time to learn something about the new OS.
So an OS is a desktop OS because it sits under your desk? And Plan9 is a valid desktop OS even though it has none of the essential GUI apps necessary for desktop use such as office software and browsers?
I wasn't trying to put Plan9 down - I think its great that there's research going on into something new, I was just saying there's no sense in suggesting it as a desktop OS in place of a Linux distro or Windows XP.
about the 70s concepts, it's rather known that linux views of network aren't what they could be
What are you suggesting these 'views' could be? Keep in mind that just about all the basic networking protocols/standards (IP, TCP/UDP/ICMP, ethernet etc.) where designed during or before the 70's, therefore any OS which uses them will embody '70's concepts'.
Not very inventive, but what's to expect from a 1970s OS anyway?
s
And I suppose you also deride modern cars with the line "not very inventive but what's to expect from an 1890's design anyway?"
Take a look at Plan9
Plan9 is used for research into new concepts in OS design. Its not a replacement for Windows or Suse because its not designed for desktop use at all.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Lab
"With 10 billion [euros], we could build 10,000MW offshore windfarms, delivering electricity for 7.5 million European households," said Jan Vande Putte of Greenpeace International. [From the BBC story linked with the article]
I think that just shows how ridiculous their position on this is. 10 billion to power just 7.5 million homes. How many people are there in the EU? About 400 million? Even assuming 3 people per household that's still only 22.5 million people out of 400 million.
If I was an EU taxpayer I'd rather see my 10 billion go to something that is actually targeted at the kind of large-scale power generation our society needs. Its only extremists like Greenpeace who think that every or $ available should be desperately plowed into any scheme with the word 'renewable' on it wether its able or not, in practice, to produce the levels of energy that we need.
For god's sake Greenpeace look past your noses and give up your religious and irrational fear of the 'N' word. You're head's are as far into the sand of pure ideaology as the 'if I can't see it its not happening' US Republican party is towards global warming..
I was talking about human actions to decrease population as the GGP was saying that new medical treatments like this should be witheld for over-population reasons.
RTFA this is not an immortality treatment - they reckon it can be used to help save people who have suffered severe blood loss. By your logic that we should just let people die because of population concerns we should strip all our hospitals of life-support machines too.
2 12097.html?from=storyrhs
Anyway the population thing its not quite as bad as people used to fear say back in the 70's and so on. The world population growth rate is actually reducing significantly and the population growth curve is levelling off because of declinig fertility rates.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/12/09/1070732
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn3444
Given that the largest war in history (World War 2) only killed 50-100 million ppl I don't see how holding back medical treatments is going to have any significant affect on population growth or decline. Its been proven time and time again that the only way to control population is through sensible family planning.
You'd probably be quite surprised at the number of legal copies of Windows that are in use
You'd be quite surprised at the number of illegal copies too. Everybody I know who didn't get WinXP with a new PC has simply pirated it, most people just don't talk about it or post about it on message boards. I fear the day when all these machines (including, I'll admit, the non-Linux machines in my house) can't get security updates. There will be vast numbers of spam-bots, virus spreaders and DDoS zombies, even more so than now.
A rootkit is software that an attacker installs *manually* *after* he's already cracked your machine to make his life easier. A virus is a *self-replicating* program that compromises your machine in some way and therefore by definition is automatic and doesn't require your machine to already be compromised.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_virus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rootkit
People in Australia don't pronounce 'get reed of it'.
u s
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=ridiculo
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=rid
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=reed
Both ridiculous and rid have the same pronunciation for their rid part. According to the Pronunciation Key this is how you'd use the 'i' in 'pit'. Reed has a different pronunciation entirely which is given as being like 'bee' in the Key.
It looks to me like its an accent thing.
When I was struggling to get a part-time job in uni I looked at those rent-a-coder sites, which are the same idea as computerrepair.com except for developers. I began to realise it might not be my thing when I saw a job to create a firewall program that was 'like Zone Alarm' listed as '$1000 or less'.
What a joke, if I could create a firewall program of similar quality to Zone Alarm for $1000 (or the equivalent labour time, even at say $10/hour) I'd be in business competing against Zone Alarm in a heartbeat. Most of the rest of the jobs were undervalued, many just as ridiculously, as this one.
I soon began to get the impression that the people who actually completed jobs on this site were mostly Indian techies desperate for any pittance of money, no matter how small.
Wow, well I don't know much about phonetics but I do know that in Australia we're taught, and pronounce it, as 'ridiculous'. Ie. with the 'rid' bit pronounced like you'd say 'rid' in "get rid of it", not "get red of it". Maybe its an American thing, I dunno.
rediculous
<spelling-nazi>
ridiculous
Why is it that no one on slashdot can spell this word?
</spelling-nazi>
There's no easy way of installing software like apt-get install
Except for 'urpmi foo' and the GUI equivalent in the Mandrake Control Centre
Or having segfaults all the time while using Mandrake 10.1
What segfaults? The kernel? kde? some app you downloaded off the net? It works fine for the majority of people.
KDE 3.2 when 3.3 is out just because the guys have screwed something up
Nobody screwed KDE up - 3.3 was released only just before 10.1 was released so there wasn't time to integrate it into the distro (at that time Mandriva was following 6 monthly release cycles). There was no attempt to fork KDE - you pulled that out of your arse.
And is Lycoris Debian-based or does it use RPM?
It sounds like you used it for a grand total of about 5 minutes and then gave up.
In my experiences the 'community' distros were terrible - they were actually beta versions and should have been named as such. Fortunately the equivalent official versions were a major improvement when they came out.
The problem with LSB at the moment is that it doesn't go far enough to specify all that's needed for a desktop Linux system. The reason you can install everything on Windows 2000 or Windows XP is that the whole Windows system is a monolithic entity from kernel right up to desktop. You can rely on a lot stuff being there and not changing for 3 or 4 years.
Having said that I disagree with the GP that installing software on Linux is user-unfriendly. In distros like Mandriva it is extremely easy and simple to install software - the catch being that it has to be packaged in one of the repositories for your distro.
Linux distro's have automatic updates too and the distro maintainer assumes the role of testing the application with the new patch applied.
The GP was only half-right by saying that 'a patch can be released right away and users can compile in the new sources themselves' is a strength of OSS. In reality only small numbers of users do this themselves, most simply get it through their distro's auto update feature after its been tested and qa'd by the distro maintainers.
alternately...
pop a CD in the drive, boot Linux, spend next 2-4 hours with user:
'this is where Word is now'
'oh no it looks different'
'well that's because... and this is where you're documents are'
'why are they in this 'Home Folder' thing, where's My Documents gone'
'Well that's because.. and in Linux we have them here..and..'
etc.etc.
With Mandriva:
1. Install Windows XP
2. Defragment drive
3. Run Mandriva installation and select 'automatic partitioning' during install
4. Reboot PC
5. Profit!.. oh wait
You may laugh, but to me it's absolutely incredible that a foreign Government has been forced to pay a private company for alleged copyright violation and promise to be a good consumer in the future
..and that's exactly why Microsoft has given them a big hug and said "all is forgiven" in this case - so they won't have an incentive to look at FOSS.
Indonesia as a sovereign country can do what it wants - they can say 'we won't have anymore copyright laws and all versions of Windows will be free'. Of course if they do that other countries won't trade with them as much so its a decision they have to make - ie. evaluate the costs/benefits to themselves. Imagine the fines if you were a private business and the BSA software nazis audited you and found that level of piracy.
Free software has these advantages for Indonesia