Yes, dual monitor support has been better with the inclusion of RandR. More than two monitors, however, at least if they are spread across multiple cards, and you're pretty much out of luck.
I've been using a triple-display setup for a few years now, and several times I've tried to get an equivalent experience in Windows and Linux. Windows wins hands down every time. The xorg developers don't know when RandR will support multiple cards, either. It was supposed to be the latest release, xserver 1.6 I think, but that's no longer the case.
apparently you missed the memo about our country being a representative republic, not a democracy.
Apparently you missed the memo about the word democracy not meaning "mob rule" in English anymore.
Let me quote definition one of "democracy" from the Oxford English Dictionary:
1. Government by the people; that form of government in which the sovereign power resides in the people as a whole, and is exercised either directly by them (as in the small republics of antiquity) or by officers elected by them. In mod. use often more vaguely denoting a social state in which all have equal rights, without hereditary or arbitrary differences of rank or privilege.
The U.S. is a democracy. The U.S. is a republic. The two are not mutually exclusive. Offhand you can find a usage of "democracy" referring to elected representatives in the OED as early at 1842.
I don't know where all this nonsense about democracy only referring to mob rule or tyranny of the majority. I'd be tempted to say Aristotle's classification of political systems, but anyone who's stupid enough to think that the U.S. isn't a "democracy" but is a "republic" probably hasn't read much Aristotle, either.
The problem is that we don't live in a democracy, but stupid people keep claiming we do. We have a republic to help protect the rights of the minority, even when the majority is against it.
No, stupid people go around crying "The U.S. isn't a democracy, it's a republic" and relying on a classical definition of democracy that is essentially non-standard English.
Smart people, on the other hand, use words properly. Let me quote definition one of "democracy" from the Oxford English Dictionary:
1. Government by the people; that form of government in which the sovereign power resides in the people as a whole, and is exercised either directly by them (as in the small republics of antiquity) or by officers elected by them. In mod. use often more vaguely denoting a social state in which all have equal rights, without hereditary or arbitrary differences of rank or privilege.
The U.S. is a democracy. The U.S. is a republic. The two are not mutually exclusive. And if you're going to be a pedant, at least be correct.
On the other hand, saying that the FSF is "dedicated to eliminating restrictions on copying, redistribution, and modifying computer programs" is extremely accurate. In fact, though I didn't see it on the home page, it's the quote that comes up in the Google blurb when you search.
Also, just because the GPL requires copyright to function doesn't mean that the FSF isn't against copyright. I think most of us concede that the GPL is a case where the FSF is using copyright law in a novel, unintended way to accomplish their goals.
If the FSF could rewrite copyright law, it'd be completely different. I'd say they have an open dislike (maybe not "bias") against the current typical use of copyright, especially for computer programs.
Learn your copyright law. All that's needed for copyright to apply is fixation in a tangible medium of expression. Publication determines length of copyright in some cases, but what constitutes "publication" these days is pretty blurry in any case...
In the case law, the factor of "economic impact" is almost never limited to direct competition. In fact, quite the opposite. Think of the case involving the 2 Live Crew parody of "Pretty Woman." In that decision, the court noted that the rap parody wouldn't really be competing for the market that the original was going for. However, they also noted that it might compete in the market for authorized rap versions of "Pretty Woman."
That fair use was OK, but the broad economic impact rationale is found all over the place. There's practically no use that won't have an economic impact when you consider the fact that pretty much any use could be licensed. "Fair use" always has an economic impact if you consider that that specific use could have involved license payments.
In this case, you could argue that viewing TurnItIn's practice as fair use deprives the students of the ability to license their works to plagiarism detection services. That's not really that far-fetched. I haven't read this opinion, and I don't have the time to right now, but I suspect that what is being perceived as a victory for "fair use" in this case is simply a prioritization of corporate interests over individual interests. That, and TurnItIn probably had better laywers.
Who wants to bet that Microsoft applications don't count towards the limit?
Seriously, though, someone below mentioned Windows Explorer. Since "explorer.exe" is always running anyway (except when it crashes and you lose the start menu), I don't see how that can count. And iexplore is quite similar, and used internally.
They can't possibly equate "applications" with processes, since average Windows systems will have 40 to 60 processes at a given time.
"Transgender" doesn't necessarily mean people who "cut off their genitalia." From what I understand, it can refer to people who do not psychologically identify exactly with the bipolar genders of male/female.
It can also refer to intersexual people, i.e., people with sexual characteristics of both genders. This is more common than most people realize, but often newborns undergo "corrective" surgery to assign them to one gender category or another.
Heh, your nick is funny given the content of your post.
The problem, though, is that this isn't just a typical shared resource. If we were talking about food, or oil, or water, of course a flat-rate, all-you-can-eat model wouldn't work. All of those are commodities that can be used up.
Internet access is different. You can't "use up" your connection, in the sense of permanently depleting it, requiring that more be made or acquired. All you can do is saturate it. Obviously if too many people seek to saturate a finite connection at one time, there won't be enough to go around, but there's no permanent depletion. That's not exactly the same as the traditional tragedy of the commons.
To make an analogy, think of a buffet that serves chicken wings. Let's assume they can serve 1000 wings per hour, and that the wings have a marginal cost of $0.
So, if we only serve 100 customers at a time and assume that they will eat 10 wings / hr., we should be alright. Now, maybe we decide to oversell our capacity, and serve 200 people at a time, banking that the average customer only eats 5 wings / hr. Sure, they may be a few who gorge themselves and eat 25 wings an hour, but they'll be balanced out.
Now, we notice that the average person is eating 20 wings an hour. So, we have several options. We could only admit 50 people at a given time. We could serve 2000 wings an hour, and still take 100 people. We could limit everyone to 10 wings an hour. Or, we could ditch the buffet idea, and start changing everyone $1 / wing.
Notice which one of those doesn't actually solve the capacity problem: charging per wing. Sure, maybe it discourages people from gorging themselves on 100 wings, but if the average consumption is rising, charging by wing doesn't fix the capacity problem.
No, but being a Slashdot poster entitles you to decree that people must accept that the end result of any investment, whether it be ten minutes and a dollar, or years and millions, must be given up for free at the expense of the investor.
I know you weren't replying directly to me, but for the sake of conversation, I'm not saying that.
Think about your comment, though. Current copyright law grants the same protection both the person who invests tens minutes and a dollar, and the one who invests ten years and a hundred thousand dollars. Doesn't make much sense, if you ask me.
For that matter, the same unitary patent system governs the newest wonder drug as well as an improved cheese slicer.
What I witness is a profound lack of imagination on the part of so many people who refuse to believe that incentive structures can be any different than they currently are. There are substantive, alternative proposals out there, especially in the areas where it matters most (e.g., drugs for diseases that afflict primarily developing nations).
Frankly, I don't give a fuck what the artists think. The RIAA and their ilk are small potatoes, ants, compared to the worldwide effects of intellectual property.
The real money in IP is not in copyright, but in patents. Drugs, pharmaceuticals, etc. Sadly, part of the spillover effect of all these artists clamoring for their "rights" and "property" is that IP as a whole is viewed less as a utilitarian means to an end, and more as a natural, God-given right. Then trade policy, etc., start to be affected by that attitude, and all of the sudden you get lawsuits over compulsory licensing of antiretrovirals, and seizures of legitimately produced generic drugs.
Fuck the artists. IP is bigger than music and movies. It's about people's lives, and our tendency to put the profit motive before all else.
Yeah, Amtrak in the Northeast is nice. I take it fairly often between New Haven and Baltimore/Washington. Beats driving on I-95 for sure, and when gas was $4 / gal., add in tolls, and depending on when you went it was cheaper.
The Acela is certainly more comfortable, but way overpriced. I only take it when it's comp'ed.
My iPod Touch plays my MP3 collection. Did you have a question?
Well, to be fair, the Kindle can read your.mobi or TXT collections. I just wanted to point out that the iPod Touch isn't exactly a DRM-free device. I'm not just trying to be an ass, either, I have an iPod and put up with the DRM as well.
Sending WOL packets across the Internet is a bad idea, they probably won't reach intact (at least according to what I read about it a few years ago). OTOH, my old Linksys router running Tomato firmware allows me to log in from anywhere, and to send a WOL packet on the local network.
If I can do it on my Linksys WRT54G with free software, there's no reason why an enterprise/business network can't implement the same thing. This is a problem that's been solved for years.
I'm coming up on two years of daily use, and have just switched from Tiger to Leopard a few weeks ago, FWIW.
The one thing going for it is that it's pretty. Other than that, it's unnecessarily slow, has a shitty filesystem, is no more stable than XP and certainly not Vista, always had issues sleeping and waking, ilife was buggy (specifically iPhoto), is only secure through obscurity (as we've seen with the recent pwn2own contest).
Never had a problem with it being slow. At tasks like video encoding, it's faster than my desktop, which is a 2.6 GHz dual-core Opteron. In terms of user experience, the slowest thing I've experienced is waiting for Word or OpenOffice to launch, neither of which are known for being fast applications.
Not sure what "shitty filesystem" means. In terms of actual everyday usage, it's fine for me. Spotlight is amazing, so I rarely use the Finder, which admittedly does kind of suck (why does pressing "Enter" on a file take me to rename it?). At least as good, if not better, than Google desktop search, and Windows Desktop Search is horrid by comparison.
Stability? Yeah, I'd say same as XP - in my experience both are very stable, and single app crashes don't bring down the whole system. I've had maybe three or four hard lockups in nearly two years. Vista? I tried it a year ago and gave up.
Never, ever had a problem with sleeping or waking. Maybe you have a hardware issue.
I don't use iLife/iPhoto/iMovie/iTunes. Front Row is pretty, but this is primarily a work/school machine, and I don't care for Apple's "user-friendly" applications, which to me feel far too confining.
So yeah, YMMV. I'll tell you what did suck, though - using Ubuntu on this MacBook. PITA to install and configure, and when I was finally done, had hard lockups every time I used it. Maybe it's just 8.10.
The people who actually use the computer, use a word Processor, spreadsheet, email, web-browser and various other apps, the operating system is largely irrelevant to them
That's exactly the point I'm trying to make. If the OS is irrelevant, then what will they gain from training on Linux with OpenOffice? Nothing. In fact, they will be better off training on Windows with Microsoft Office, because that's what the vast majority of offices use.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, dual monitor support has been better with the inclusion of RandR. More than two monitors, however, at least if they are spread across multiple cards, and you're pretty much out of luck.
I've been using a triple-display setup for a few years now, and several times I've tried to get an equivalent experience in Windows and Linux. Windows wins hands down every time. The xorg developers don't know when RandR will support multiple cards, either. It was supposed to be the latest release, xserver 1.6 I think, but that's no longer the case.
apparently you missed the memo about our country being a representative republic, not a democracy.
Apparently you missed the memo about the word democracy not meaning "mob rule" in English anymore.
Let me quote definition one of "democracy" from the Oxford English Dictionary:
1. Government by the people; that form of government in which the sovereign power resides in the people as a whole, and is exercised either directly by them (as in the small republics of antiquity) or by officers elected by them. In mod. use often more vaguely denoting a social state in which all have equal rights, without hereditary or arbitrary differences of rank or privilege.
The U.S. is a democracy. The U.S. is a republic. The two are not mutually exclusive. Offhand you can find a usage of "democracy" referring to elected representatives in the OED as early at 1842.
I don't know where all this nonsense about democracy only referring to mob rule or tyranny of the majority. I'd be tempted to say Aristotle's classification of political systems, but anyone who's stupid enough to think that the U.S. isn't a "democracy" but is a "republic" probably hasn't read much Aristotle, either.
The problem is that we don't live in a democracy, but stupid people keep claiming we do. We have a republic to help protect the rights of the minority, even when the majority is against it.
No, stupid people go around crying "The U.S. isn't a democracy, it's a republic" and relying on a classical definition of democracy that is essentially non-standard English.
Smart people, on the other hand, use words properly. Let me quote definition one of "democracy" from the Oxford English Dictionary:
1. Government by the people; that form of government in which the sovereign power resides in the people as a whole, and is exercised either directly by them (as in the small republics of antiquity) or by officers elected by them. In mod. use often more vaguely denoting a social state in which all have equal rights, without hereditary or arbitrary differences of rank or privilege.
The U.S. is a democracy. The U.S. is a republic. The two are not mutually exclusive. And if you're going to be a pedant, at least be correct.
This is largely mythical, but its a myth the shipping companies use to prevent law suits from their crewmen after being taken hostage.
Care to substantiate or clarify that claim?
On the other hand, saying that the FSF is "dedicated to eliminating restrictions on copying, redistribution, and modifying computer programs" is extremely accurate. In fact, though I didn't see it on the home page, it's the quote that comes up in the Google blurb when you search.
Also, just because the GPL requires copyright to function doesn't mean that the FSF isn't against copyright. I think most of us concede that the GPL is a case where the FSF is using copyright law in a novel, unintended way to accomplish their goals.
If the FSF could rewrite copyright law, it'd be completely different. I'd say they have an open dislike (maybe not "bias") against the current typical use of copyright, especially for computer programs.
Learn your copyright law. All that's needed for copyright to apply is fixation in a tangible medium of expression. Publication determines length of copyright in some cases, but what constitutes "publication" these days is pretty blurry in any case...
In the case law, the factor of "economic impact" is almost never limited to direct competition. In fact, quite the opposite. Think of the case involving the 2 Live Crew parody of "Pretty Woman." In that decision, the court noted that the rap parody wouldn't really be competing for the market that the original was going for. However, they also noted that it might compete in the market for authorized rap versions of "Pretty Woman."
That fair use was OK, but the broad economic impact rationale is found all over the place. There's practically no use that won't have an economic impact when you consider the fact that pretty much any use could be licensed. "Fair use" always has an economic impact if you consider that that specific use could have involved license payments.
In this case, you could argue that viewing TurnItIn's practice as fair use deprives the students of the ability to license their works to plagiarism detection services. That's not really that far-fetched. I haven't read this opinion, and I don't have the time to right now, but I suspect that what is being perceived as a victory for "fair use" in this case is simply a prioritization of corporate interests over individual interests. That, and TurnItIn probably had better laywers.
The problems with Windows Mobile may stem from the retarded behavior of not actually closing applications when you click the "X" button.
I don't know if they've fixed this since WM2003SE. I remember having an add-on that made the "close" button actually close things.
Bad geek! It's called Pirate radio, and it's been around longer than the Pirate bay!
Yeah, I use that trick to get the start menu back after it crashes :-)
Who wants to bet that Microsoft applications don't count towards the limit?
Seriously, though, someone below mentioned Windows Explorer. Since "explorer.exe" is always running anyway (except when it crashes and you lose the start menu), I don't see how that can count. And iexplore is quite similar, and used internally.
They can't possibly equate "applications" with processes, since average Windows systems will have 40 to 60 processes at a given time.
"Transgender" doesn't necessarily mean people who "cut off their genitalia." From what I understand, it can refer to people who do not psychologically identify exactly with the bipolar genders of male/female.
It can also refer to intersexual people, i.e., people with sexual characteristics of both genders. This is more common than most people realize, but often newborns undergo "corrective" surgery to assign them to one gender category or another.
Heh, your nick is funny given the content of your post.
The problem, though, is that this isn't just a typical shared resource. If we were talking about food, or oil, or water, of course a flat-rate, all-you-can-eat model wouldn't work. All of those are commodities that can be used up.
Internet access is different. You can't "use up" your connection, in the sense of permanently depleting it, requiring that more be made or acquired. All you can do is saturate it. Obviously if too many people seek to saturate a finite connection at one time, there won't be enough to go around, but there's no permanent depletion. That's not exactly the same as the traditional tragedy of the commons.
To make an analogy, think of a buffet that serves chicken wings. Let's assume they can serve 1000 wings per hour, and that the wings have a marginal cost of $0.
So, if we only serve 100 customers at a time and assume that they will eat 10 wings / hr., we should be alright. Now, maybe we decide to oversell our capacity, and serve 200 people at a time, banking that the average customer only eats 5 wings / hr. Sure, they may be a few who gorge themselves and eat 25 wings an hour, but they'll be balanced out.
Now, we notice that the average person is eating 20 wings an hour. So, we have several options. We could only admit 50 people at a given time. We could serve 2000 wings an hour, and still take 100 people. We could limit everyone to 10 wings an hour. Or, we could ditch the buffet idea, and start changing everyone $1 / wing.
Notice which one of those doesn't actually solve the capacity problem: charging per wing. Sure, maybe it discourages people from gorging themselves on 100 wings, but if the average consumption is rising, charging by wing doesn't fix the capacity problem.
No, but being a Slashdot poster entitles you to decree that people must accept that the end result of any investment, whether it be ten minutes and a dollar, or years and millions, must be given up for free at the expense of the investor.
I know you weren't replying directly to me, but for the sake of conversation, I'm not saying that.
Think about your comment, though. Current copyright law grants the same protection both the person who invests tens minutes and a dollar, and the one who invests ten years and a hundred thousand dollars. Doesn't make much sense, if you ask me.
For that matter, the same unitary patent system governs the newest wonder drug as well as an improved cheese slicer.
What I witness is a profound lack of imagination on the part of so many people who refuse to believe that incentive structures can be any different than they currently are. There are substantive, alternative proposals out there, especially in the areas where it matters most (e.g., drugs for diseases that afflict primarily developing nations).
If you are a tenured academic (his example) or a journalist and you plagiarize, you could be out of a job.
Tenured! Not even tenured. Imagine you're a junior professor, and it's found you've plagiarized. Good luck ever getting tenure anywhere.
Copyright and plagiarism have nothing to do with each other.
Wow. Self-righteous much?
Frankly, I don't give a fuck what the artists think. The RIAA and their ilk are small potatoes, ants, compared to the worldwide effects of intellectual property.
The real money in IP is not in copyright, but in patents. Drugs, pharmaceuticals, etc. Sadly, part of the spillover effect of all these artists clamoring for their "rights" and "property" is that IP as a whole is viewed less as a utilitarian means to an end, and more as a natural, God-given right. Then trade policy, etc., start to be affected by that attitude, and all of the sudden you get lawsuits over compulsory licensing of antiretrovirals, and seizures of legitimately produced generic drugs.
Fuck the artists. IP is bigger than music and movies. It's about people's lives, and our tendency to put the profit motive before all else.
It is a word: educative.
I'd quote the OED as well, but I'm too lazy to start up my VPN and interrupt the torrents.
Besides, pedagogical would have more to do with the method of teaching. "Educational" would probably have been the best choice.
Yeah, Amtrak in the Northeast is nice. I take it fairly often between New Haven and Baltimore/Washington. Beats driving on I-95 for sure, and when gas was $4 / gal., add in tolls, and depending on when you went it was cheaper.
The Acela is certainly more comfortable, but way overpriced. I only take it when it's comp'ed.
Sorry to break it to any Obama fans here, but you clowns elected an empty suit.
On the other hand, even an empty suit is better than what we've had for the past eight years.
In U.S. law, it's called contributory copyright infringement.
My iPod Touch plays my MP3 collection. Did you have a question?
Well, to be fair, the Kindle can read your .mobi or TXT collections. I just wanted to point out that the iPod Touch isn't exactly a DRM-free device. I'm not just trying to be an ass, either, I have an iPod and put up with the DRM as well.
There's no way in hell I'm willing to accept ridiculous levels of DRM for the benefit of being able to read a book on an electronic device.
Yeah, I'm right with you there. Just say not to DRM!
(They got me an iPod Touch instead.)
Wait, what?
Sending WOL packets across the Internet is a bad idea, they probably won't reach intact (at least according to what I read about it a few years ago). OTOH, my old Linksys router running Tomato firmware allows me to log in from anywhere, and to send a WOL packet on the local network.
If I can do it on my Linksys WRT54G with free software, there's no reason why an enterprise/business network can't implement the same thing. This is a problem that's been solved for years.
I used OS X as my primary desktop for two years.
I'm coming up on two years of daily use, and have just switched from Tiger to Leopard a few weeks ago, FWIW.
The one thing going for it is that it's pretty. Other than that, it's unnecessarily slow, has a shitty filesystem, is no more stable than XP and certainly not Vista, always had issues sleeping and waking, ilife was buggy (specifically iPhoto), is only secure through obscurity (as we've seen with the recent pwn2own contest).
Never had a problem with it being slow. At tasks like video encoding, it's faster than my desktop, which is a 2.6 GHz dual-core Opteron. In terms of user experience, the slowest thing I've experienced is waiting for Word or OpenOffice to launch, neither of which are known for being fast applications.
Not sure what "shitty filesystem" means. In terms of actual everyday usage, it's fine for me. Spotlight is amazing, so I rarely use the Finder, which admittedly does kind of suck (why does pressing "Enter" on a file take me to rename it?). At least as good, if not better, than Google desktop search, and Windows Desktop Search is horrid by comparison.
Stability? Yeah, I'd say same as XP - in my experience both are very stable, and single app crashes don't bring down the whole system. I've had maybe three or four hard lockups in nearly two years. Vista? I tried it a year ago and gave up.
Never, ever had a problem with sleeping or waking. Maybe you have a hardware issue.
I don't use iLife/iPhoto/iMovie/iTunes. Front Row is pretty, but this is primarily a work/school machine, and I don't care for Apple's "user-friendly" applications, which to me feel far too confining.
So yeah, YMMV. I'll tell you what did suck, though - using Ubuntu on this MacBook. PITA to install and configure, and when I was finally done, had hard lockups every time I used it. Maybe it's just 8.10.
The people who actually use the computer, use a word Processor, spreadsheet, email, web-browser and various other apps, the operating system is largely irrelevant to them
That's exactly the point I'm trying to make. If the OS is irrelevant, then what will they gain from training on Linux with OpenOffice? Nothing. In fact, they will be better off training on Windows with Microsoft Office, because that's what the vast majority of offices use.