so how about if i go out and buy myself a shiny new race car. I have NEVER had to handle a car with that much power, so i end up ramming it into a farmers market.
The car is not defective in any way, so long as you have the skills to operate it.
I should be held responsible for being a jackass and buying a race car.
Granted, windows == race car is not a very good comparison, but I still think that it works for the analogy.
In your car analogy, the owner reasonably believed that when the car wasn't running, it wouldn't go anywhere and a THIRD PARTY pushed the car such that it rolled down the hill. True. I suppose that the analogy could be changed to say: "if i leave my doors unlocked, and my house gets robbed, is it the contractor that installed the locks fault?"
better?
The mechanisms to prevent your computer from getting rooted are in place. People just don't use them.
I have said it before here, and i will say it again. People really need to be held accountable for what damage is caused by their ignorance. If my car comes flying through your bedroom window at 30 miles an hour because I parked it at the top of a hill in neutral, should General Motors be responsible? No.
Likewise, if i leave a completely unprotected winbox up on the internet and it gets rooted, should Microsoft be held responsible (which seems to be what some of you think)?
In both cases harm has been caused by my negligence, and i should be held accountable for both.
So it is okay that they embed your user info into the track because they have been doing it for a while? People have been downloading music from P2P networks for a while now too....does that mean it is okay?
Can anybody even imagine how amazing it would be if cell phone networks became like wifi? You pay a monthly fee for access and you're on. Devices like this motherboard would really really open up the possibility for a homebrew-cellphone market. What would be very interesting to see is cell phone carriers become more like ISPs. You get some bandwidth from them, and you get to use it for pretty much whatever you want.
I still remember exactly what convinced me to never buy a different phone than the blackberry. My dads bike had a dead battery, so naturally he was like "Son, PUSH ME DOWN THE FREAKING STREET"....so there i go, sprinting behind his bike down the pavement, blackberry on my hip. When we reached the peak of our speed (probably a blistering 3-4 miles an hour...it is a big HUGE cruising harley), my BB flew off of my belt and started tumbling down the street. After we got the bike started, i walked back up and found it. When i did there wasn't a SCRATCH ON IT. The thing was still turned on, and still receiving calls/emails. I've tumbled over the handlebars and down the trail on my mountain bike with the thing in my pack, i've dropped it down onto the concrete, had a fly apart etc etc etc. The thing has got ONE scratch on the back of the battery cover.
Somehow i doubt this thing could stand up to that...
I know this would be nasty and whatnot, but why don't they just D-DOS the trackers for torrent networks, kill of a few of the big NNTP servers, knock our some IRC servers etc.....We're talking about people with nearly unlimited funds here (the mafRIAA). I mean, just lobby congress to allow it, and make it happen. Stop biatching that all P2P is t3h evil, and knock out what really is the thorn in the side of a big chunk of the internets.
Lets face it people, this would really be better for all of us. The way that big governments have been able to stick their noses into OUR freaking networks has been because we are all supposedly these evil murdering pirates. Illegal file trading quiets down for a little bit, and maybe the government might start leaning a little bit back towards our side of things. The big mucky mucks in washington don't know much, if anything, about the way that packet switched networks operate... but there IS somebody willing to educate them on the subject. Do we really want MAFRIAA henchmen doing the training?
Unfortunately, the iPhone will NEVER become that great skypable device in the sky that we have all been waiting for for so long now. Apple is a business and a publicly traded one at that. If their phones became that cell-killer device, their contract with cingular would go bye-bye in a big huge hurry. Not to mention that no cell provider would want to come near the phone if that ever happens.
I am really shocked and, frankly, kindof disappointed in you here slashdot. The majority of you seem to have played right back in to the fanboism that you all claim to hate so much. You are excited that apple is allowing third party development of software on their device. It is the same as when apple allowed people to dual-boot windows on their macs.
Somebody please please explain to me why microsoft is hated more than apple....i really really don't understand this one.
actually I think that you totally missed the point of the article. The point was to see what somebody who had absolutely NO exposure to a mac would think after 30 days of using it. If he didn't use spotlight, thats probably because he couldn't find it, or had no freaking clue what the hell "spotlight" meant. Same thing with dashboard. What does that app's functionality have to do with a dashboard? (at least in the sense that the vast majority of people think of it). Sure, you might know what these things are, or that you can find openoffice for mac by searching for "neo-office", but how is this guy supposed to know that "textpad" is just like wordpad on steroids. The point is that a user should not have to search all over the place to find these things. They should be able to just sit down in front of the keyboard, and get their work done.
And don't even start about fink, or macports, or whatever else is out there. The casual user should NOT have to install some goofy third party port-of-a-port of a BSD application.
It would be nice to know just how much data you are trying to store. If this is going to be a whole bunch of mp3s, then you might look into a Raid 1 array of that new 1TB drive from hitachi. At 1TB, it is still gonna be pretty hard to fill this with DIVX encoded movies. I guess though, if you need more space, do a 0+1. Meaning a redundant array of a data-striped set.
If you are talking about some sort of seriously whacked out array of like some Blu-Rays or HDDVDs or some crazy thing like that....then i would....uhhh....probably just start praying.
Honestly, the best set up (once again depending upon your intentions) is probably going to be a linux box running: mt-daapd (for streaming to itunes) mpd (the media player daemon, for hooking the box into a stereo) slimserver (to stream through a web interface to any machine that can reach it on the network). Samba (for sharing the music to windows clients) vsftpd (for sharing the music to everybody else)
slap a couple of those 1TB drives in there with some Raid 1 for redundnacy....and i think you should be in VERY good shape.
OH OH OH...put it into one of those ultra-sexy HTPC boxes for added win factor.
Just the other day, one of my very close friends (who works in a high performance computing lab at a major university), called to ask me "how to get data onto a disk after you format it".....basically she was asking how you actually get files from one place to another after a format. A VERY VERY basic basic operation, one that would seem very obvious to most every linux user. However, she runs Ubuntu on her desktop, and has therefore NEVER EVER had to touch anything related to the operating system (and no this isn't flame bait, i ran Ubuntu on my laptop for over a year). She also wanted to know what exactly a file system was. Something that is explained at length in the Gentoo guide. There has been numerous other questions very similar to this one, ALL of which could have been almost immediately answered by just reading through the Gentoo install guide.
IMHO, installing from CLI should be a right of passage for any linux nub.
I've installed redhad, suse, mandrake, ubuntu, fedora, and i'm sure quite a few other distros along the way. Gentoo has been BY FAR the most educational of them all. While Suse asked me how i wanted to partition my disks, it didn't really explain why.
While staring at a bunch of GCC output is pointless, staring at the./configure output, and the make install output is actually quite useful. It will show you exactly where the binaries are being put, and if there are in errors it will tell you exactly what they are (giving you the oppurtunity to fix them).
I guess that it is the difference between owning a ford taurus (a very very easy to use, reliable, doesn't break and if it does its easy to fix, if there is a problem it just turns a light on on the dash that says "Problem" car) and owning an old muscle car. With the old muscle car, you're going to spend a LOT of time in the garage, covered in oil and grease, with a wrench in your hand either trying to get the thing to run again, or trying to squeeze just a LITTLE bit more torque out of it. While spending time in the garage playing with an old mustang doesn't make any sense to my dad the automotive investor, its freaking FUN!
I guess in conclusion, if you want something that is totally 100% rock solid, never breaks, you just turn it on and leave it in the rack forever without touching it, or really doing anything past the initial configuration....one of the other distros is probably for you (actually one of the BSDs is probably for you). But if you want something that you really have to get your hands dirty with, that has all kinds of weird quirks and things that only YOU probably understand.....well then you should probably go with gentoo.
Because you don't just hurl the freaking song across the office. You say, "okay, yeah, press that button, and that button, okay hold on i'm sending it......did you get it!? okay check it out, i sent a couple of other songs too, tell me if you like them"....
this also gives you the opportunity to walk over a couple of days later and ask if she (or whoever you sent the music to) like the music. It is VERY Social.
I disagree with your test. A better one would be to hand it to her for a week, then try to take it away and see what happens. I have a blackberry, for the first few days or so, the interface was VERY strange to me, and it took a lot of pecking around before I figured out the philosophy of how everything was layed out. Now, I don't think i will ever own a different phone. Navigating through other peoples phones now is a pain, nothing is organized with any sort of logic, and the menus look like those of a fisher price toy.
I really do feel bad for the Devs working on the zune. It must be tough to have the skills, the money, and the facilities to create something really really truly cool....but be held back by the fact that you "cool new toy" won't be allowed by upper management for fear of lawsuit. I mean, imagine if the zune didn't have the DRM built into the wireless song swap feature....that is just really really damn cool! I mean, imagine sitting in your cube, and talking to that cute girl across the row about some song that she should just oh so totally have, and then being able to just go "HERE!" and give it to her!! I would imagine that if the zune caught on, some cool linux dev would probably make a "zune server" or something like that, similar to the mt-daapd projectf (to make iTunes think that your linux box is sharing a song library with it), but for the wireless functionality of the zune.
THAT would be freaking cool.
FYI..i don't work for microsoft...i know that sounded like an ad for the zune or something...I own an iPod in fact. I'm just saying, keep in mind that the engineers I'm sure are working on this device aren't evil RIAA lawyers, they're geeks. It must just really really really suck to not be able to put all the cool features i'm sure you would want into a project that you're working on...
Keep in mind that people use email for quite a bit more than just exchanging messages with each other. For instance: I work with a company that has an inbox set up that grabs any properly formatted Excel sheets that come in, pushes them through a database, then replies a result (I work in an auto auction, the customer will put all of his purchases into the excel spreadsheet, send it off, and the bot replies to him where to send all of the cars). Some people might argue that this is something better suited for FTP, or maybe some CGI on a webserver...but email works PERFECTLY for this application. EVERYONE has email, and it works almost 100% of the time. In fact, just about every non computer-literate person i know uses their email like an FTP. If they want to share a file with somebody, they email it. If they want to have something available to them where ever they go (as long as they have a net connection) they email it to themselves. Google even has the ability to play MP3s directly from your inbox. This makes sense though, what is easier? FInding an FTP server for your windows box, creating a rule on your firewall, and then remembering your IP address, or setting up some DNS action (even more fun when you have a dynamic address, don't know what a NAT/FIREWALL is, have no idea what an IP address is, and have never heard of FTP), or just sending a simple email?
So...maybe to the old school UNIX admin who uses MUTT as their mail client.....email might be dead, but in the big time business world, it is very very much alive.
The unfortunate thing is that right now, you aren't the target market for the people making these devices. Their target is the type of people who call up a home theater architect and tell them that they don't care how much it costs, just to get it done. People like that don't really CARE about the DRM, because if they want another copy for the car/RV/cabin/kids bedroom, they just go out and buy it. Or when a new standard comes out, they assume that it must be somehow better, and thats why they go out and buy it again.
I think that this is using the term 'robot' a bit loosely. This isn't really any more of a robot than the wireless thermometer that I have outside my kitchen. If you could drop the thing on top of a cable, and it would just wander all over(under?) the city looking for bad cables until you called it home; if it had the ability to make a (psuedo-)decision on what to do next based on its surroundings....THAT would be a robot.
I guess that IMHO a robot should be a machine that could do something that would seem "random" to a casual observer.
Slashdot Mirror
so how about if i go out and buy myself a shiny new race car. I have NEVER had to handle a car with that much power, so i end up ramming it into a farmers market.
The car is not defective in any way, so long as you have the skills to operate it.
I should be held responsible for being a jackass and buying a race car.
Granted, windows == race car is not a very good comparison, but I still think that it works for the analogy.
better?
The mechanisms to prevent your computer from getting rooted are in place. People just don't use them.
there is a tool i have heard of called "lunix" or something like that that is supposed to do that job.
But i've heard that you have to download it from those shady Pirate 2 Pirate networks, so its probably a virus!
I have said it before here, and i will say it again. People really need to be held accountable for what damage is caused by their ignorance. If my car comes flying through your bedroom window at 30 miles an hour because I parked it at the top of a hill in neutral, should General Motors be responsible? No.
Likewise, if i leave a completely unprotected winbox up on the internet and it gets rooted, should Microsoft be held responsible (which seems to be what some of you think)?
In both cases harm has been caused by my negligence, and i should be held accountable for both.
So it is okay that they embed your user info into the track because they have been doing it for a while? People have been downloading music from P2P networks for a while now too....does that mean it is okay?
The robot doesn't have the ability to go "Shut the f*ck UP! I'M not going to drop you!!! HOLD STILL!!!"
Can anybody even imagine how amazing it would be if cell phone networks became like wifi? You pay a monthly fee for access and you're on. Devices like this motherboard would really really open up the possibility for a homebrew-cellphone market. What would be very interesting to see is cell phone carriers become more like ISPs. You get some bandwidth from them, and you get to use it for pretty much whatever you want.
I still remember exactly what convinced me to never buy a different phone than the blackberry. My dads bike had a dead battery, so naturally he was like "Son, PUSH ME DOWN THE FREAKING STREET"....so there i go, sprinting behind his bike down the pavement, blackberry on my hip. When we reached the peak of our speed (probably a blistering 3-4 miles an hour...it is a big HUGE cruising harley), my BB flew off of my belt and started tumbling down the street. After we got the bike started, i walked back up and found it. When i did there wasn't a SCRATCH ON IT. The thing was still turned on, and still receiving calls/emails. I've tumbled over the handlebars and down the trail on my mountain bike with the thing in my pack, i've dropped it down onto the concrete, had a fly apart etc etc etc. The thing has got ONE scratch on the back of the battery cover.
Somehow i doubt this thing could stand up to that...
I know this would be nasty and whatnot, but why don't they just D-DOS the trackers for torrent networks, kill of a few of the big NNTP servers, knock our some IRC servers etc.....We're talking about people with nearly unlimited funds here (the mafRIAA). I mean, just lobby congress to allow it, and make it happen. Stop biatching that all P2P is t3h evil, and knock out what really is the thorn in the side of a big chunk of the internets.
Lets face it people, this would really be better for all of us. The way that big governments have been able to stick their noses into OUR freaking networks has been because we are all supposedly these evil murdering pirates. Illegal file trading quiets down for a little bit, and maybe the government might start leaning a little bit back towards our side of things. The big mucky mucks in washington don't know much, if anything, about the way that packet switched networks operate... but there IS somebody willing to educate them on the subject. Do we really want MAFRIAA henchmen doing the training?
So you're mad because they started following apple's lead?
Unfortunately, the iPhone will NEVER become that great skypable device in the sky that we have all been waiting for for so long now. Apple is a business and a publicly traded one at that. If their phones became that cell-killer device, their contract with cingular would go bye-bye in a big huge hurry. Not to mention that no cell provider would want to come near the phone if that ever happens.
I am really shocked and, frankly, kindof disappointed in you here slashdot. The majority of you seem to have played right back in to the fanboism that you all claim to hate so much. You are excited that apple is allowing third party development of software on their device. It is the same as when apple allowed people to dual-boot windows on their macs.
Somebody please please explain to me why microsoft is hated more than apple....i really really don't understand this one.
actually I think that you totally missed the point of the article. The point was to see what somebody who had absolutely NO exposure to a mac would think after 30 days of using it. If he didn't use spotlight, thats probably because he couldn't find it, or had no freaking clue what the hell "spotlight" meant. Same thing with dashboard. What does that app's functionality have to do with a dashboard? (at least in the sense that the vast majority of people think of it). Sure, you might know what these things are, or that you can find openoffice for mac by searching for "neo-office", but how is this guy supposed to know that "textpad" is just like wordpad on steroids. The point is that a user should not have to search all over the place to find these things. They should be able to just sit down in front of the keyboard, and get their work done.
And don't even start about fink, or macports, or whatever else is out there. The casual user should NOT have to install some goofy third party port-of-a-port of a BSD application.
It would be nice to know just how much data you are trying to store. If this is going to be a whole bunch of mp3s, then you might look into a Raid 1 array of that new 1TB drive from hitachi.
At 1TB, it is still gonna be pretty hard to fill this with DIVX encoded movies. I guess though, if you need more space, do a 0+1. Meaning a redundant array of a data-striped set.
If you are talking about some sort of seriously whacked out array of like some Blu-Rays or HDDVDs or some crazy thing like that....then i would....uhhh....probably just start praying.
Honestly, the best set up (once again depending upon your intentions) is probably going to be a linux box running:
mt-daapd (for streaming to itunes)
mpd (the media player daemon, for hooking the box into a stereo)
slimserver (to stream through a web interface to any machine that can reach it on the network).
Samba (for sharing the music to windows clients)
vsftpd (for sharing the music to everybody else)
slap a couple of those 1TB drives in there with some Raid 1 for redundnacy....and i think you should be in VERY good shape.
OH OH OH...put it into one of those ultra-sexy HTPC boxes for added win factor.
EXACTLY!
Just the other day, one of my very close friends (who works in a high performance computing lab at a major university), called to ask me "how to get data onto a disk after you format it".....basically she was asking how you actually get files from one place to another after a format. A VERY VERY basic basic operation, one that would seem very obvious to most every linux user. However, she runs Ubuntu on her desktop, and has therefore NEVER EVER had to touch anything related to the operating system (and no this isn't flame bait, i ran Ubuntu on my laptop for over a year). She also wanted to know what exactly a file system was. Something that is explained at length in the Gentoo guide. There has been numerous other questions very similar to this one, ALL of which could have been almost immediately answered by just reading through the Gentoo install guide.
IMHO, installing from CLI should be a right of passage for any linux nub.
I've installed redhad, suse, mandrake, ubuntu, fedora, and i'm sure quite a few other distros along the way. Gentoo has been BY FAR the most educational of them all. While Suse asked me how i wanted to partition my disks, it didn't really explain why.
./configure output, and the make install output is actually quite useful. It will show you exactly where the binaries are being put, and if there are in errors it will tell you exactly what they are (giving you the oppurtunity to fix them).
While staring at a bunch of GCC output is pointless, staring at the
I guess that it is the difference between owning a ford taurus (a very very easy to use, reliable, doesn't break and if it does its easy to fix, if there is a problem it just turns a light on on the dash that says "Problem" car) and owning an old muscle car. With the old muscle car, you're going to spend a LOT of time in the garage, covered in oil and grease, with a wrench in your hand either trying to get the thing to run again, or trying to squeeze just a LITTLE bit more torque out of it. While spending time in the garage playing with an old mustang doesn't make any sense to my dad the automotive investor, its freaking FUN!
I guess in conclusion, if you want something that is totally 100% rock solid, never breaks, you just turn it on and leave it in the rack forever without touching it, or really doing anything past the initial configuration....one of the other distros is probably for you (actually one of the BSDs is probably for you).
But if you want something that you really have to get your hands dirty with, that has all kinds of weird quirks and things that only YOU probably understand.....well then you should probably go with gentoo.
Because you don't just hurl the freaking song across the office. You say, "okay, yeah, press that button, and that button, okay hold on i'm sending it......did you get it!? okay check it out, i sent a couple of other songs too, tell me if you like them"....
this also gives you the opportunity to walk over a couple of days later and ask if she (or whoever you sent the music to) like the music. It is VERY Social.
you insensative clod
I disagree with your test. A better one would be to hand it to her for a week, then try to take it away and see what happens. I have a blackberry, for the first few days or so, the interface was VERY strange to me, and it took a lot of pecking around before I figured out the philosophy of how everything was layed out. Now, I don't think i will ever own a different phone. Navigating through other peoples phones now is a pain, nothing is organized with any sort of logic, and the menus look like those of a fisher price toy.
I really do feel bad for the Devs working on the zune. It must be tough to have the skills, the money, and the facilities to create something really really truly cool....but be held back by the fact that you "cool new toy" won't be allowed by upper management for fear of lawsuit. I mean, imagine if the zune didn't have the DRM built into the wireless song swap feature....that is just really really damn cool! I mean, imagine sitting in your cube, and talking to that cute girl across the row about some song that she should just oh so totally have, and then being able to just go "HERE!" and give it to her!! I would imagine that if the zune caught on, some cool linux dev would probably make a "zune server" or something like that, similar to the mt-daapd projectf (to make iTunes think that your linux box is sharing a song library with it), but for the wireless functionality of the zune.
THAT would be freaking cool.
FYI..i don't work for microsoft...i know that sounded like an ad for the zune or something...I own an iPod in fact. I'm just saying, keep in mind that the engineers I'm sure are working on this device aren't evil RIAA lawyers, they're geeks. It must just really really really suck to not be able to put all the cool features i'm sure you would want into a project that you're working on...
Keep in mind that people use email for quite a bit more than just exchanging messages with each other. For instance: I work with a company that has an inbox set up that grabs any properly formatted Excel sheets that come in, pushes them through a database, then replies a result (I work in an auto auction, the customer will put all of his purchases into the excel spreadsheet, send it off, and the bot replies to him where to send all of the cars). Some people might argue that this is something better suited for FTP, or maybe some CGI on a webserver...but email works PERFECTLY for this application. EVERYONE has email, and it works almost 100% of the time. In fact, just about every non computer-literate person i know uses their email like an FTP. If they want to share a file with somebody, they email it. If they want to have something available to them where ever they go (as long as they have a net connection) they email it to themselves. Google even has the ability to play MP3s directly from your inbox. This makes sense though, what is easier? FInding an FTP server for your windows box, creating a rule on your firewall, and then remembering your IP address, or setting up some DNS action (even more fun when you have a dynamic address, don't know what a NAT/FIREWALL is, have no idea what an IP address is, and have never heard of FTP), or just sending a simple email?
So...maybe to the old school UNIX admin who uses MUTT as their mail client.....email might be dead, but in the big time business world, it is very very much alive.
Meanwhile, allofmp3's servers are painfully slow due to the huge influx of traffic from all of the publicity this is giving them.
The unfortunate thing is that right now, you aren't the target market for the people making these devices. Their target is the type of people who call up a home theater architect and tell them that they don't care how much it costs, just to get it done. People like that don't really CARE about the DRM, because if they want another copy for the car/RV/cabin/kids bedroom, they just go out and buy it. Or when a new standard comes out, they assume that it must be somehow better, and thats why they go out and buy it again.
I think that this is using the term 'robot' a bit loosely. This isn't really any more of a robot than the wireless thermometer that I have outside my kitchen. If you could drop the thing on top of a cable, and it would just wander all over(under?) the city looking for bad cables until you called it home; if it had the ability to make a (psuedo-)decision on what to do next based on its surroundings....THAT would be a robot.
I guess that IMHO a robot should be a machine that could do something that would seem "random" to a casual observer.
We could just simplify the process and start calculating drive space in libraries of congress * elephants of pressure per square postage stamp.
if prenup = false:
select * from MEN where yearly_income > 500,000 and value_of_car > 80,000
else:
cocktease()
SOLVED!
The article missed the two biggest causes of global warming:
1. George Bush hating black people
2. Bears