They constantly threaten to attack a country which did nothing to them. They are at the same time working to acheive Nuclear technology and say that nobody can stop them.
One could misread this as referring to the US threatening the Iran...
While embedded systems are surely more interesting than Linux and related topics, I'd still miss the feeling of crossing borders, doing something novel etc. (which is what we had in the 80's with our home computers until everyone had them and in the 90's with Linux).
I tend to take Linux, the 'net and all its applications for granted these days and am more interested in things that improve on everyday life - for example, robotics are worth exploring. And why does my PC have health monitoring and I don't?;-) Just because we use our computers and the web for many hours every day, it doesn't mean that the other facets of our lives don't offer interesting problems for people who like engineering, tinkering...
But Linux is that freedom all over again, and improved. It's the connection with other users, figuring out how to interface with new gadgets like digital picture frames and sensor networks. And it's easier than ever to get in touch with someone just like you, thousands of miles away, grouping in clusters to have the same kinda fun.
I'm an old timer too, but I cannot agree with you. Linux was like that in the late 90's, but today it's just too much politics and screwing around with the hundreds of shiny half-finished apps. There is no challenge in tinkering with it, most issues (and there are plenty due to the general sloppiness of everyone involved) are fixed by googling. I'm sorry, but there is no more "pioneering" left to do with Linux and it's the same with the Web.
Music will never be free as long as greedy artists, even those without any talent or success, continue to support the RIAA and all the loyalty collecting institutions (GEMA in Germany etc.) in the vain hope that they, some day, will be chosen by the music industry to become rich.
Talk to any amateur artist, see how completely out of their mind they are in this regard.
Why don't more Linux-using shops reach out to the Linux-using community?"
Simple: because there are not enough users. In the 80's and 90's, all less popular computing platforms shared the same fate, they were largely neglected by hardware and software vendors. In order to gain support from vendors who cannot afford to duplicate their support efforts for a small minority, Linux needs a market share of 10-15% or more on the desktop.
It's simply amazing how fast they managed to grow both the site and the company since 2004, congratulations on getting such a valuation within 3 years(!).
That said, I feel a bit old when I look at Facebook, since I do not understand at all why it appeals to so many people. Perhaps they managed to pull in all those who never made their own homepage/myspace profile/yahoo account etc....
There are always limits, one should not have the freedom to steal. The freedom to harm. The freedom to enslave. ...
If you are a software developer that doesn't like the GPL because it forces you to make your additions public, then, sorry, screw you, write your own software from scratch. You have no right to benefit on an altered social contract of those who made their work available.
What a nice way to illustrate how the GPL enslaves developers to a particular mindset. Only the BSD license grants real freedom, since it doesn't limit anyone's rights. It's not hard to understand, but some people are just such fanatics.
I have to chuckle at the thought of some people having "online relationships", then perhaps mating in Second Life and having kids (some young Second Life players who want new parents?:-P)... If that doesn't show how Darwinism works, I don't know what does.
The question that arises is: do people who seek online relationships simply turn their backs on life? What else is it, if not social suicide?
Um... sorry, you're wrong.
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/grammar/g_a post.html
To save anyone having to follow the link, I will reveal the principle and relevant use of the word:
1) to form possessives of nouns
Microsoft is the noun, the campaign belongs to it, hence "it's Anti-Linux Campaign" is the correct spelling.
No offense, but that's bullshit. "it" is not a noun, therefore the quoted use of the apostrophe is not valid. "it's" is short for "it is", "its" is the correct possessive form.
It's written its Anti-Linux campaign (not "it's").
By not proofreading even the abstracts of your stories, you are adversely affecting the spelling abilities of your readers, leading to more badly written submissions...
about how something that is socially considered moderately anti-social [...] can actually do something like bring two people together and enhance a relationship.
If that enhanced their relationship, they should consider sitting in front of their computers less...
Documents look different if you use different fonts. If you install either the MS true type fonts, or the Redhat freedom fonts, then the formatting issues go away. Excel macros can be a problem for some people, in which case Gnumeric is a better option. These points are well known to anybody who cares.
Fonts aren't an issue since I was talking about compatibility between OO and Office on Windows systems. Neither are Excel macros an issue since we don't even use them much.
I don't believe you're a frequent user of Excel/Word/PowerPoint. Neither am I and I was recently convinced by other people that OpenOffice still has many problems with compatibility (I use OpenOffice only but only do simple stuff). Word documents render differently and Excel diagrams look completely different (sort order is different, the labels look broken, OO just doesn't have sane defaults for some settings and doesn't save some settings in Excel files, the same goes for Impress vs. PowerPoint...). As long as even non-techie Users can prove to you that OpenOffice can't replace MS Office for them, it's not a serious alternative.
The difference between a state with such a surveillance network and the traditional kind of police state is still the legislation, i.e. which actions are punished and which aren't. Germany is much closer to a police state IMHO since they are always videotaping public (peaceful) demonstrations, so people feel threatened and/or punished for participating. The catch here is that with the individual powerless to display its opposition to the government's actions in relative safety and privacy, he will also become powerless to prevent the introduction of totalitarian laws, so a true police state is just a matter of time (if desired by politicians, anyway).
Those CCTV networks are extremely efficient, esp. when they can also look through your windows and in the next step in 10-20 years they have cameras in your house as well.
With so much crime-preventing technology everywhere, the criminals will have but one choice: to infiltrate the police...
it's goddamn fugly (esp. the fonts) and the UIs of apps are a mess
corporate desktops need a *working* replacement for MS Office including the calendar stuff and seamless PDA support (and not more broken, more expensive and with worse support than MS Office - like all those pseudo-professional Outlook placebos for $399 per seat)
major game titles (no real progress here since IDs early attempts 10 years ago - despite all the hacked compatibility libraries)
most good open source projects are half-arsed attempts, never finished due to lack of motivation. Half-arsed UI toolkits, half-arsed libraries of all sorts, half-arsed apps. Will this ever change?
Fix these and you've got a winner. Neglect them and it'll stay a nice product for no-lifers who are used to feeling inferior and for sysadmins whose idea of a workstation is a box with an xterm window.
(says someone who hasn't bothered with Linux on the desktop since 1997 - and no, this is not a flamebait, it's just a honest opinion - correct me if you think I'm wrong)
Spammers with a brain display the captchas from the site they want to spam on another (fake or not) site and let real users solve them to gain access to pr0n or whatever. Then they can access the original site with the captcha solution. So, it's completely pointless to pay someone for it, I take it the author of this article was just guessing (and without much imagination).
I sugest aiming for group offices - closed spaces with 5 or 6 people. Big enough for a team, small enough to significantly reduce noise and visual distractions. Best of all, it helps build team spirit.
The downside is that it limits your options for growing or splitting teams. If you have a closely-knit, efficient team of 6 people and their office is full, what do you do if you want to hire 1-2 more people for the same team?
The only viable solution for office space is to have moveable walls (but with good noise reduction) so you can always adapt to your current needs, but sadly, most offices don't allow for this.
The author seems to be a bit frustrated with his WoW addiction. It is a fact that WoW is popular and successful because it is *addictive* and not because people chose it after they made a rational decision based on the intriguing storyline and continuously added new content. It may lack a storyline, but obviously that doesn't prevent it from being fun and addictive, so it is rather arrogant to call it "lame" because it doesn't have one. The comparison with Oblivion is particularly ignorant, since Oblivion is already pretty indifferent about your choices in the game, the faction system of that game is no more complex than the simple reputation system in WoW (e.g. you can get rep with Bloodsail pirates too). Oblivion has 0 replayability value, is 100% linear (contrary to all the PR claims) and was a great let-down for many old Morrowind fans like me, because it has boring, similar-looking content all over.
I can't say I liked the constant grinding in WoW very much, but since there is enough variation in it (you can grind rep, PVP ranks, gold or hunt particular items), it serves well enough to keep you busy and moderately entertained (which is the whole point). What drove me off in the end was the requirement to have a well-composed guild with 40 disciplined players ready for raiding in order to see the interesting content (I left when we were at Vael) and that Blizzard had weird ideas about seasonal content, which made me feel like the whole game was aimed at 10 year olds.
This is why Capitalism will fail in a society which is able to replicate any commodity at no cost and no effort.
It has nothing to do with capitalism. It's a great misunderstanding to think that an object, concept, design or even data can be "protected" in any way from duplication when it is exposed to other people. It's the same misconception the music industry is suffering from when they pay for the creation of a piece of music and think that they paid for the exclusive rights too, when they give up these rights as soon as they expose the music to the public. All that matters (in the capitalistic sense too) is how much the creation and the duplication cost and these factors determine how fast something will be spread. The concept of imposing fees or fines for duplicating something (in addition to the actual cost of physically duplicating it) is not capitalistic, it's anti-capitalistic command economy that protects lobbyist minority interests and hinders competition.
I will ignore your silly flames, perhaps you can come up with some sensible points too.
The fact is that the HTML code (and anyone with any experience and competence in this field will tell you the same, including any Google employee) is so bad that Google can't tell the difference between 2380 pages,
This seems to be simply a matter of using the same title / meta tags. It has nothing to do with validation or poor HTML (in the technical sense).
Let's view this from another point: Explain to me how the markup can be of excellent and for some reason, utube.com still doesn't manage to get within the first 100 (or even 500) first search results on Google. Is it conspiracy? If not, what?
I would attribute this to a PEBKAC problem on your side. For me, a search for "utube" returns utube.com as the first hit, when I search for "u tube" and "used tubes" it comes up on the first page. Honestly, I have no idea what your issue is, but you seem to have no grounds for arguing there, much less to flame me in such an immature way.
Slashdot Mirror
One could misread this as referring to the US threatening the Iran ...
It's bad enough that someone like Bush is in power, but it's even worse that he was actually elected by human beings.
I tend to take Linux, the 'net and all its applications for granted these days and am more interested in things that improve on everyday life - for example, robotics are worth exploring. And why does my PC have health monitoring and I don't? ;-) Just because we use our computers and the web for many hours every day, it doesn't mean that the other facets of our lives don't offer interesting problems for people who like engineering, tinkering...
I'm an old timer too, but I cannot agree with you. Linux was like that in the late 90's, but today it's just too much politics and screwing around with the hundreds of shiny half-finished apps. There is no challenge in tinkering with it, most issues (and there are plenty due to the general sloppiness of everyone involved) are fixed by googling. I'm sorry, but there is no more "pioneering" left to do with Linux and it's the same with the Web.
Music will never be free as long as greedy artists, even those without any talent or success, continue to support the RIAA and all the loyalty collecting institutions (GEMA in Germany etc.) in the vain hope that they, some day, will be chosen by the music industry to become rich.
Talk to any amateur artist, see how completely out of their mind they are in this regard.
Simple: because there are not enough users. In the 80's and 90's, all less popular computing platforms shared the same fate, they were largely neglected by hardware and software vendors. In order to gain support from vendors who cannot afford to duplicate their support efforts for a small minority, Linux needs a market share of 10-15% or more on the desktop.
That said, I feel a bit old when I look at Facebook, since I do not understand at all why it appeals to so many people. Perhaps they managed to pull in all those who never made their own homepage/myspace profile/yahoo account etc. ...
... are they watching us reading this article?
What a nice way to illustrate how the GPL enslaves developers to a particular mindset. Only the BSD license grants real freedom, since it doesn't limit anyone's rights. It's not hard to understand, but some people are just such fanatics.
The question that arises is: do people who seek online relationships simply turn their backs on life? What else is it, if not social suicide?
No offense, but that's bullshit. "it" is not a noun, therefore the quoted use of the apostrophe is not valid. "it's" is short for "it is", "its" is the correct possessive form.
http://www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca/~csk/its.html
If that enhanced their relationship, they should consider sitting in front of their computers less ...
Fonts aren't an issue since I was talking about compatibility between OO and Office on Windows systems. Neither are Excel macros an issue since we don't even use them much.
I don't believe you're a frequent user of Excel/Word/PowerPoint. Neither am I and I was recently convinced by other people that OpenOffice still has many problems with compatibility (I use OpenOffice only but only do simple stuff). Word documents render differently and Excel diagrams look completely different (sort order is different, the labels look broken, OO just doesn't have sane defaults for some settings and doesn't save some settings in Excel files, the same goes for Impress vs. PowerPoint ...). As long as even non-techie Users can prove to you that OpenOffice can't replace MS Office for them, it's not a serious alternative.
The difference between a state with such a surveillance network and the traditional kind of police state is still the legislation, i.e. which actions are punished and which aren't. Germany is much closer to a police state IMHO since they are always videotaping public (peaceful) demonstrations, so people feel threatened and/or punished for participating. The catch here is that with the individual powerless to display its opposition to the government's actions in relative safety and privacy, he will also become powerless to prevent the introduction of totalitarian laws, so a true police state is just a matter of time (if desired by politicians, anyway).
With so much crime-preventing technology everywhere, the criminals will have but one choice: to infiltrate the police...
Fix these and you've got a winner. Neglect them and it'll stay a nice product for no-lifers who are used to feeling inferior and for sysadmins whose idea of a workstation is a box with an xterm window.
(says someone who hasn't bothered with Linux on the desktop since 1997 - and no, this is not a flamebait, it's just a honest opinion - correct me if you think I'm wrong)
The downside is that it limits your options for growing or splitting teams. If you have a closely-knit, efficient team of 6 people and their office is full, what do you do if you want to hire 1-2 more people for the same team?
The only viable solution for office space is to have moveable walls (but with good noise reduction) so you can always adapt to your current needs, but sadly, most offices don't allow for this.
I can't say I liked the constant grinding in WoW very much, but since there is enough variation in it (you can grind rep, PVP ranks, gold or hunt particular items), it serves well enough to keep you busy and moderately entertained (which is the whole point). What drove me off in the end was the requirement to have a well-composed guild with 40 disciplined players ready for raiding in order to see the interesting content (I left when we were at Vael) and that Blizzard had weird ideas about seasonal content, which made me feel like the whole game was aimed at 10 year olds.
It has nothing to do with capitalism. It's a great misunderstanding to think that an object, concept, design or even data can be "protected" in any way from duplication when it is exposed to other people. It's the same misconception the music industry is suffering from when they pay for the creation of a piece of music and think that they paid for the exclusive rights too, when they give up these rights as soon as they expose the music to the public. All that matters (in the capitalistic sense too) is how much the creation and the duplication cost and these factors determine how fast something will be spread. The concept of imposing fees or fines for duplicating something (in addition to the actual cost of physically duplicating it) is not capitalistic, it's anti-capitalistic command economy that protects lobbyist minority interests and hinders competition.
The fact is that the HTML code (and anyone with any experience and competence in this field will tell you the same, including any Google employee) is so bad that Google can't tell the difference between 2380 pages,
This seems to be simply a matter of using the same title / meta tags. It has nothing to do with validation or poor HTML (in the technical sense).
Let's view this from another point: Explain to me how the markup can be of excellent and for some reason, utube.com still doesn't manage to get within the first 100 (or even 500) first search results on Google. Is it conspiracy? If not, what?
I would attribute this to a PEBKAC problem on your side. For me, a search for "utube" returns utube.com as the first hit, when I search for "u tube" and "used tubes" it comes up on the first page. Honestly, I have no idea what your issue is, but you seem to have no grounds for arguing there, much less to flame me in such an immature way.