> Wasn't having to choose from multiple third-party sources for basic functionality once considered an advantage of Linux?
You can still choose from multiple sources for all kinds of programs under Linux. In fact, you can have them all installed at the same time, and they still play nice with each other. Whether that is different window managers running each other's "native" applications; or different browsers not competing to be the default. Some distros might choose some defaults for you, while others offer you a set of pre-selected packages (e.g. Fedora "Spins") while still giving you the options and possibility to customize after the initial install.
As for Windows. Meh. Who cares about those guys anyway.
No need to impress me as a guest; but you don't need to serve me rotten food either. Or in other words, having YouTube videos played from your laptop as the main source of music for your party is worse than no music at all. And don't get me started on Spotify, with its ludicrous ad breaks.
> Just like any given hobby, the first small/medium sized chunk of money into gets you 90% of the ultimate potential quality
All good points, but the main problem so to speak is that keyword: quality. To large parts of the population it's an unknown, and they dwell around on the bottom, perhaps never even experiencing anything above the 50% mark on your scale.
Some examples: MP3s become popular many years before there was any discussion about them sounding utterly crap; at 128 kb/s, with poor encoders, and decoded on computers which hardly could keep up. Then we got YouTube, taking that right down to 64 kb/s for many years. And in many European countries we now have Spotify, with fucking audio ads in the middle of the tracks. People still listen, and don't care.
That's all on the serving side. On the receiving end, things get even worse: YouTube or Spotify will typically be played back on shitty portable speakers, built-in laptop speakers, or even mobile phones. You're no longer listening to music, but a rather bizarre distorted stream of noise. If you're really lucky, somebody will have the TV on in the background as well.
Now, of course not everybody takes an interest in audio quality, or even music in general for that matter. However, it is still polite to serve your guests something vaguely decent. Rotten food or flat beer is generally not acceptable. Yet, Spotify over the laptop somehow is. It's beyond me.
Geez, you can know a nerd from his over analyzing narrow vision, and conclusions based on air.
All I ask for, is less Microsoft while reading Slashdot. If please is what it takes, I can even afford that: Please, post your Windows questions somewhere else, on your favorite forum, I really don't care where.
> However the actual problem was worse: I am still using Windows. FTFY.
Although, the real problem is that you're posting on Slashdot about it. We're not interested, ok? I'm sure there's a.net forum somewhere you can rant on.
This story brought to you by the Microsoft marketing shills. You can sense their fear and desperation as they cling onto the "Windows also works on small devices" propaganda.
However, the fact that this is posted on/. is the real problem here. If I wanted useless uninteresting news, I would go to digg.
And the news are all unbiased and "fair and balanced" as they say?
That's the way I see the Moore and similar movies: Propaganda, but with a different agenda and bias. Using the exact same smear, exaggeration, misinformation and lies as your daily news source does. In that way, I actually find some of it quite clever.
What I really cannot twist my head around, is that his movies are categorised as documentaries. He even won a price for that. There's more facts in a Spielberg movie. But maybe that's also just part of the marketing and propaganda.
That guy and his wife just got what they paid for, and the only person they have to blame is themselves for being greedy, or trusting enough someone they don't know, and give out personal content. Would you give your personal diary to a random person on the street? Same issue here.
Hosting a blog on your own website doesn't cost much, I'm sure you could find such a shared hosting service for less than 20USD / year.
Exactly, and there is no free lunch. Facebook, Flickr, Fwitter, or Froogle do not give you anything for free, and cannot be trusted with your business. Seems like this was good lesson learnt for the couple.
> As much as I would love the Feds to just run a complete vulnerability scan of the US [...] and then remotely uninstall every instance without telling a damn person.
Gheez, no wonder why privacy is dead in the US.
You seem to be on your knees, finger pointing at your arse, and screaming: "Give it to me!" (Or is that low ID number hiding a bitter old man? Still doesn't help privacy, though).
Either you 1) don't RTFA, and base your comment on the summary (this is the default on Slashdot), or you 2) RTFA and apologize for doing so. In case 2, you are entitled to a slightly more insightful comment, but a one-line summary is usually not part of it.
> After all, the autocomplete algorithm is just another search algorithm, except instead of searching through pages it searches through past inputs.
Yeah, you just go on believing that.
The fact is, the auto complete feature includes all kinds of funky patches. Some of the them work well, while others give rise to the screenshot jokes like "Why are all Americans...". Further patches try to fix the worst "corrections", but at the end of the day, some name in one language is always going to algorithmically resemble profanity in another.
Should Google cover all bases? Maybe, maybe not. Is it only based on past user input? No.
> maybe I should just jump in and make some money off this while it lasts.
There's a common say in the trading circles: "When you're neighbour tells you which stocks to buy, it's time to sell". Now, I'm of course not saying that you're an inexperienced techee. However, the social train has already left the station. When it reaches the dead-end track, you want to be somewhere else.
> I wouldn't be surprised if there are 2 fake Facebook accounts for every real one.
Spot on! Spot on, man! I guess I've created more than twenty myself. All just jokes and fun. Search for any famous person, actor, terrorist or president, and there's at least ten fake accounts for each. It always makes me chuckle when I see the 500M number. "One out of every 13 Earthlings" on FC? Absolute bullshit.
However, what's even funnier, is to see the reaction of the "fanboys" (faceboys?) when you tell them this. Throw in a few "peak facebook", and "social bobble's about to pop", and you really got a good flame war going!:-D
> what other types of realistic attacks are there?
The good old zero, memory / stack overflow attack? Or brute force password attempts. Random open ports. Windows machines.
Or, if you're enemy is really after you in particular: Blackmail, threats to your family, gun to your head. No-knock police raids, or other black-ops. In short, if your attacker is willing to pay anything, you are done for no matter what.
Meanwhile, Verbal walks away from the police station, dropping his feigned cerebral palsy. He gets into a waiting car driven by "Mr. Kobayashi", pulling away just as Kujan comes outside, searching in vain. The movie closes with Verbal reiterating his quote from Charles Baudelaire: "The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist."[2] This is followed by his earlier description of Keyser Söze: "And like that, he's gone."
That was 2002, when Microsoft tried to push their incompatible version of Java through IE. Eventually, they had to withdraw, which at the time, was seen as a win for the good guys. Why Google should get away with bastardizing Java now, is beyond me. Just because they are still the "cool kid on the block"?
Slashdot Mirror
> Wasn't having to choose from multiple third-party sources for basic functionality once considered an advantage of Linux?
You can still choose from multiple sources for all kinds of programs under Linux. In fact, you can have them all installed at the same time, and they still play nice with each other. Whether that is different window managers running each other's "native" applications; or different browsers not competing to be the default. Some distros might choose some defaults for you, while others offer you a set of pre-selected packages (e.g. Fedora "Spins") while still giving you the options and possibility to customize after the initial install.
As for Windows. Meh. Who cares about those guys anyway.
You need postfix, fetchmail, procmail, dovecot and squirrelmail.
Add postgrey to that, and you're good to go.
I don't see why your reply is not scored +5 Insightful, while all the bitching posts are.
No need to impress me as a guest; but you don't need to serve me rotten food either. Or in other words, having YouTube videos played from your laptop as the main source of music for your party is worse than no music at all. And don't get me started on Spotify, with its ludicrous ad breaks.
> Just like any given hobby, the first small/medium sized chunk of money into gets you 90% of the ultimate potential quality
All good points, but the main problem so to speak is that keyword: quality. To large parts of the population it's an unknown, and they dwell around on the bottom, perhaps never even experiencing anything above the 50% mark on your scale.
Some examples: MP3s become popular many years before there was any discussion about them sounding utterly crap; at 128 kb/s, with poor encoders, and decoded on computers which hardly could keep up. Then we got YouTube, taking that right down to 64 kb/s for many years. And in many European countries we now have Spotify, with fucking audio ads in the middle of the tracks. People still listen, and don't care.
That's all on the serving side. On the receiving end, things get even worse: YouTube or Spotify will typically be played back on shitty portable speakers, built-in laptop speakers, or even mobile phones. You're no longer listening to music, but a rather bizarre distorted stream of noise. If you're really lucky, somebody will have the TV on in the background as well.
Now, of course not everybody takes an interest in audio quality, or even music in general for that matter. However, it is still polite to serve your guests something vaguely decent. Rotten food or flat beer is generally not acceptable. Yet, Spotify over the laptop somehow is. It's beyond me.
Geez, you can know a nerd from his over analyzing narrow vision, and conclusions based on air.
All I ask for, is less Microsoft while reading Slashdot. If please is what it takes, I can even afford that:
Please, post your Windows questions somewhere else, on your favorite forum, I really don't care where.
Not interested. In the future, please redirect these stories to Digg.
> However the actual problem was worse: I am still using Windows.
FTFY.
Although, the real problem is that you're posting on Slashdot about it. We're not interested, ok? I'm sure there's a .net forum somewhere you can rant on.
This story brought to you by the Microsoft marketing shills. You can sense their fear and desperation as they cling onto the "Windows also works on small devices" propaganda.
However, the fact that this is posted on /. is the real problem here. If I wanted useless uninteresting news, I would go to digg.
Does Fedora ring a bell?
And the news are all unbiased and "fair and balanced" as they say?
That's the way I see the Moore and similar movies: Propaganda, but with a different agenda and bias. Using the exact same smear, exaggeration, misinformation and lies as your daily news source does. In that way, I actually find some of it quite clever.
What I really cannot twist my head around, is that his movies are categorised as documentaries. He even won a price for that. There's more facts in a Spielberg movie. But maybe that's also just part of the marketing and propaganda.
That guy and his wife just got what they paid for, and the only person they have to blame is themselves for being greedy, or trusting enough someone they don't know, and give out personal content. Would you give your personal diary to a random person on the street? Same issue here.
Hosting a blog on your own website doesn't cost much, I'm sure you could find such a shared hosting service for less than 20USD / year.
Exactly, and there is no free lunch. Facebook, Flickr, Fwitter, or Froogle do not give you anything for free, and cannot be trusted with your business. Seems like this was good lesson learnt for the couple.
Mono is a dependency of several Gnome applications. Java is not.
> As much as I would love the Feds to just run a complete vulnerability scan of the US [...] and then remotely uninstall every instance without telling a damn person.
Gheez, no wonder why privacy is dead in the US.
You seem to be on your knees, finger pointing at your arse, and screaming: "Give it to me!" (Or is that low ID number hiding a bitter old man? Still doesn't help privacy, though).
tl;dr? What is this, Digg, Reddit?
Either you 1) don't RTFA, and base your comment on the summary (this is the default on Slashdot), or you 2) RTFA and apologize for doing so. In case 2, you are entitled to a slightly more insightful comment, but a one-line summary is usually not part of it.
> Firefox 81 seems kind of clunky, doesn't it?
Well, at least they don't give it ridiculous nick names like certain OS distributions do.
Gimmicks and fads will always go out of fashion when the joke gets stale. Sequential numbers is function over form.
> After all, the autocomplete algorithm is just another search algorithm, except instead of searching through pages it searches through past inputs.
Yeah, you just go on believing that.
The fact is, the auto complete feature includes all kinds of funky patches. Some of the them work well, while others give rise to the screenshot jokes like "Why are all Americans...". Further patches try to fix the worst "corrections", but at the end of the day, some name in one language is always going to algorithmically resemble profanity in another.
Should Google cover all bases? Maybe, maybe not. Is it only based on past user input? No.
> maybe I should just jump in and make some money off this while it lasts.
There's a common say in the trading circles: "When you're neighbour tells you which stocks to buy, it's time to sell". Now, I'm of course not saying that you're an inexperienced techee. However, the social train has already left the station. When it reaches the dead-end track, you want to be somewhere else.
> I wouldn't be surprised if there are 2 fake Facebook accounts for every real one.
Spot on! Spot on, man! I guess I've created more than twenty myself. All just jokes and fun. Search for any famous person, actor, terrorist or president, and there's at least ten fake accounts for each. It always makes me chuckle when I see the 500M number. "One out of every 13 Earthlings" on FC? Absolute bullshit.
However, what's even funnier, is to see the reaction of the "fanboys" (faceboys?) when you tell them this. Throw in a few "peak facebook", and "social bobble's about to pop", and you really got a good flame war going! :-D
How did this thread become so crowded with naysayers? Don't you have a Windows machine to re-install or something?
On your way over to Digg, have a look at this.
Another asshat. This thread got a bit crowded with all you astroturfers.
Here's something for you to read. Now piss off.
Geesh! Where did all the fuckers come from? Is it world astroturfing or trolling day or something?
Here's something for you to read. Now go over and play at Digg or Youtube.
Good Bye.
> what other types of realistic attacks are there?
The good old zero, memory / stack overflow attack? Or brute force password attempts. Random open ports. Windows machines.
Or, if you're enemy is really after you in particular: Blackmail, threats to your family, gun to your head. No-knock police raids, or other black-ops. In short, if your attacker is willing to pay anything, you are done for no matter what.
> The difference is that Google is not calling their system Java.
Really? Android docs and source beg to differ:
http://source.android.com/source/code-style.html
http://android.git.kernel.org/?p=platform/packages/apps/Calendar.git;a=tree;f=src/com/android/calendar;hb=HEAD
> The greatest trick the devil pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist -- Verbal Kint
> Karma: Chameleon
Great quote. Wrong attribution.
http://google.com/search?q=Charles+Baudelaire+%22The+greatest+trick+the+devil+ever+pulled+was+convincing+the+world+he+didn't+exist.%22
Bonus reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Usual_Suspects
Meanwhile, Verbal walks away from the police station, dropping his feigned cerebral palsy. He gets into a waiting car driven by "Mr. Kobayashi", pulling away just as Kujan comes outside, searching in vain. The movie closes with Verbal reiterating his quote from Charles Baudelaire: "The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist."[2] This is followed by his earlier description of Keyser Söze: "And like that, he's gone."
> and I have never heard of anyone being sued for "Java IP anything".
Memory lagging a bit after a boozing weekend? I'll help you out:
sun sues microsoft over java
That was 2002, when Microsoft tried to push their incompatible version of Java through IE. Eventually, they had to withdraw, which at the time, was seen as a win for the good guys. Why Google should get away with bastardizing Java now, is beyond me. Just because they are still the "cool kid on the block"?