It will be interesting to see what weapon the BSD crowd will retaliate with.
My guesses are they will respond something like this:
FreeBSD: FreeBSD users will continue their campaign of random acts of elitist snobbery against Linux users. OpenBSD: Theo will threaten to stop work on OpenSSH unless Linus gives him $10,000 for every nasty email he sends a *BSD developer. NetBSD: Will stop developing the NetBSD port for Linus' microwave.
There is a 100 mpg carburetor patent that an oil company is sitting on.
This story has been floating around since the 1950s, far longer than any patent term. Either EvilOilCo has a hundred-year patent to go with their hundren-mile-per-gallon car, or there never was such a device...
Either the survey's methods are bad, or the American consumer's idea of what makes a company trustworthy is hopelessly muddled. Either way, they results of any "brand trust" survey that gives high marks to Bose (Wal-Mart quality at audiophile prices) HP (refilling our $50 ink cartridges that only last a month is illegal) and Sony (Played our music lately? You've got malware!) is worthless.
Why can't students in at THAT grade level, type without looking at the keyboard? There's something wrong here.....
I'm gonna go way out on a limb here and guess that it's because they're studying to become lawyers, not secretaries/typists. If you're not transcribing from paper there's really no advantage to typing without looking at the keys...
Bottom line: OSS is a wonderful idea... like communism. You will find pockets where it works. But overall it falls on its face.
What sort of reality-distortion field are you in that it looks like Linux, GNU, FreeBSD, Mozilla, and OpenOffice are mere "pockets" of success and OpenBSD's perennial financial trouble is the "overall" situation?
If I'm a car dealership, I shouldn't be spending my advertising budget on a quarter-page ad every day and a full-page on Sunday, listing brief details about one-third of my available inventory in glorious 4-tone dithered color. Not when I could use the money to build a website where potential customers can find my FULL inventory, with FULL descriptions of each car, and a half dozen photos of each car in FULL 24-bit color.
If you're a car dealer, the question you have to ask is: Would I like every literate adult in this city to glance at my print ad every day, or 1/10 of 1% of them to search out my web site once every 5 years?
"This is almost like someone wants to destroy the smug "unhackable" world that Mac users live in."
Exactly. Antivirus and firewall vendors want Apple users to pay for their "solutions" to problems that don't yet exist, Windows and Linux fanboys want Mac zealots to feel the pain of spyware infestations, insecure default configurations and constant brute-force attacks on open ports, and the tech press likes negative reporting. We're seeing the collision of many interests creating a huge storm of hype around some minor flaws in OSX security.
"Have any other outdoors-ey types had good experiences with micro-drives?"
My ipod doesn't hold up too well outdoors. If I take it above 11,000 feet, shake it, or let it get too cold, it starts making funny noises. Also, if I have a hard fall skiing or off a bike and it'll hang until I reformat and resync it (I suspect this means the microdrive's heads bounced off the platter and trashed part of the disc). The ipod's good for hiking or cycling on pavement, but if your choice of outdoors-ey activity involves high altitude, cold, vibration, or falling you might want to keep your flash-based player.
Then again, I see a lot of white earphones on the ski slopes so they must work for some people...
Re: Am I going to run OS X 10.4.4 on my Dell ? No.
on
MacBook Pro Reviewed
·
· Score: 1
So... who is the comparison good for?
People who are considering buying a new laptop, but haven't made up their mind about Wintel vs Mactel yet. People who don't have enough experience with modern Macs to gain any insight from benchmarks against other Apple machines. (so it's 2.23751 times faster than a 1.33GHz G4 Powerbook. Is that enough? Is it better than the 2.5GHz Mobile P3 machine I already have?) People who have been burned by Apple's bogus benchmarks and specious "World's Fastest X" claims before and want to know how fast the MacBook is really going to be once it's brought outside the Cupertino reality-distortion field.
1: DVD players and discs have gotten cheap. Sony isn't making as much profit on them as they used to, so it's time to introduce a new format that costs 3 times as much.
2: Sony gets to license the patents related to blu-ray to all other electronics makers, so they get a cut of the action from everyone who sells a blu-ray player or blu-ray discs.
3: Blu-ray DRM is much stronger than DVD CSS. It'll be harder for people to make backup copies or share Sony Pictures movies on P2P networks. Even if they don't sell any more discs, they'll get a warm fuzzy feeling about "solving" the piracy problem.
4: Lack of HD content (especially movies) is holding back sales of HD monitors. If everyone buys into the HDTV craze, Sony stands to make lots of money selling new TVs.
5: Once everybody buys a blu-ray player and HDTV, they'll re-buy a lot of movies in blu-ray format, and Sony stands to make a lot more money there.
Or did you mean what's better for the customer? Well, there is the "more pixels" thing, but that's about it.
I'm sure that they'd sell many more than a few hundred copies to the Linux market. Maybe even a thousand.
$800 x 1000 copies = $800,000
A dinos^H^H^H^H^H company the size of Adobe would blow 800 grand just on meetings to discuss ways to get every employee a new 3-ring binder with amended versions of the corporate software licensing policy and equipment procurement standards with the necessary changes to allow developers to requisition Linux machines for preliminary development of a Photoshop port...
If nobody but the possibly corrupt vote-counting machine can turn the database of individual votes into a human readable list, how can anyone verify that the reported totals have any relation to the votes cast?
2 + 2 = 5,000 for sufficiently hard to audit values of 2...
Re:Another senile scientist weighs in with drivel
on
Forecasting Doomsday
·
· Score: 1
By the way, the Gaia Hypothesis was so much mystical horseshit anyway.
Which differs from transhumanism in that the latter is *techno*-mystical horseshit...
So where are the sub $200 magnetic media (a price to put it on par with CD and DVD burners) that has a comparable life span and read speed as my optical media?
Just get a 200GB hard drive and USB drive enclosure. It's cheap, rewritable, lasts decades, and it's way faster than burning optical discs.
Adding nofollow to all user homepage links is not "editing the user". It's recognizing slashdot is a news site, not an SEO tool and doing something to correct the problem of people (ab)using slashdot's high pagerank for their personal benefit.
Also, you should recognize that the submitter and his reputation *is* part of the story, and discussion about it is relevant. Slashdot stories are not just single links to other sources, the submitter gets to add her own commentary, and can use the summary and choice of links to influence the "spin" on an article. Knowing who published a story and what they might have to gain from it is an important part of being able to evaluate the worth of the story. Using site admin powers to moderate those discussions into the abyss helps nobody except the spammers, scammers, and political cranks who try to manipulate slashdot for their own ends.
Google is heavily based on Linux. One would expect they to support it.
I'm sure they love being able to deploy zillions of servers without paying OS license fees, but they seem actively hostile to desktop Linux users. After they hired the lead Gaim developer to work on their closed-source not-for-Linux chat client, Google Talk voice support seems to have been dropped from the development plan for Gaim 2.0. They haven't exactly been tripping over themselves rushing to port cool apps like Earth, Desktop Search, etc. to Linux either.
Should we toss out any machines that get so bogged down by spyware/viruses/spam relays/DDoS bots/warez FTP servers/whatever that they become unusable, and buy new ones? That will get very VERY expensive in a world where unpatched Windows machines get compromised within 20 minutes of being connected to the internet.
Last time I checked, they had $40 billion (yes, billion with a "B") in liquid assets just sitting in the bank. When you scale Microsoft's amazingly massive wealth down to that of the average American working stiff, that $2.4 million is equivalent to about $2/day in fines. The EU is fining Microsoft less than the price of a small cup of plain coffee from Starbuck's every day. Don't hold your breath waiting for them to change their business practices over this...
For your needs, computing reached perfection 30+ years ago! Go buy an ancient mini on ebay, load up VMS, and enjoy computing Nirvana. It never crashes, and the security is better than most modern systems. The interface may be painfully primitive, but it's *very* well documented (you'll need a spare bookcase or two for all the manuals) so you should have no trouble adjusting. You might have to read slashdot in 80-column text mode, but at least you'll have an OS that suits your needs (and holier-than-thou attitude)...
There's no market for it. Most audiophiles are too busy basking in the warm glow of their $40,000 tube amps and turning up their noses at anything digital to notice that it sounds better, and everyone else thinks 128 kbps mp3 over cheap headphones sounds good enough.
With this change, there won't be any mainstream OSes that still have windowing code in kernel space. That means Windows will have the same context switching performance hit when resizing windows that anti-X11 trolls rant about on *nix now. They'll have to find something new to complain about, or at least some new specious benchmarks to support their nebulous claims about X being "slow by design".
Please, Microsoft, think of the trolls! Moving windowing code ouf of the kernel may be a sound design decision, but by doing this you'll set anti-Linux trolling and Windows fanboyism back by 3-5 years!
Only a small percentage of published music ever reaches the level of "hit album" that qualifies it for sale in big-box retail stores. Stores have only a limited amount of space they can store CDs in, so they choose to carry the ones that sell the most copies. They are more willing to buy 400 copies of Green Day's "American Idiot" because they know they can sell them all in a month than they are to buy one copy each of 400 unknown experimental jazz albums that might not sell at all (and keep taking up shelf/warehouse space indefinitely). Because the store's cost is higher for the unknows, they have to charge more for them than for the popular stuff to recover their costs. An online distributor (like iTunes) only has to store one copy of each song, so it's storage costs are the same whether a song sells one copy or 100,000. That means they're free to sell both the popular music and the less-known stuff for whatever people are willing to pay for them. If that means they can gouge Green Day fans for an extra two bucks and have to dump Dexter Squeekenwhistle And His All-Clarinet Orchestra for 35 cents, that's what will happen.
Re:So why is Tamiflu withdrawn from customers?
on
A Flu Pandemic?
·
· Score: 1
Most people I know say, that it is just a panic by the drug mob to boost sales, but the stocking of flu meds by governments send me a different message....
The message you should be getting is that the drug mob has friends in government. If panicky consumers aren't buying enough of your product to drive prices into the stratosphere, lobby some federal agency to buy up the remainder...
Slashdot Mirror
It will be interesting to see what weapon the BSD crowd will retaliate with.
My guesses are they will respond something like this:
FreeBSD: FreeBSD users will continue their campaign of random acts of elitist snobbery against Linux users.
OpenBSD: Theo will threaten to stop work on OpenSSH unless Linus gives him $10,000 for every nasty email he sends a *BSD developer.
NetBSD: Will stop developing the NetBSD port for Linus' microwave.
There is a 100 mpg carburetor patent that an oil company is sitting on.
This story has been floating around since the 1950s, far longer than any patent term. Either EvilOilCo has a hundred-year patent to go with their hundren-mile-per-gallon car, or there never was such a device...
Either the survey's methods are bad, or the American consumer's idea of what makes a company trustworthy is hopelessly muddled. Either way, they results of any "brand trust" survey that gives high marks to Bose (Wal-Mart quality at audiophile prices) HP (refilling our $50 ink cartridges that only last a month is illegal) and Sony (Played our music lately? You've got malware!) is worthless.
Why can't students in at THAT grade level, type without looking at the keyboard? There's something wrong here.....
I'm gonna go way out on a limb here and guess that it's because they're studying to become lawyers, not secretaries/typists. If you're not transcribing from paper there's really no advantage to typing without looking at the keys...
Bottom line: OSS is a wonderful idea... like communism. You will find pockets where it works. But overall it falls on its face.
What sort of reality-distortion field are you in that it looks like Linux, GNU, FreeBSD, Mozilla, and OpenOffice are mere "pockets" of success and OpenBSD's perennial financial trouble is the "overall" situation?
If I'm a car dealership, I shouldn't be spending my advertising budget on a quarter-page ad every day and a full-page on Sunday, listing brief details about one-third of my available inventory in glorious 4-tone dithered color. Not when I could use the money to build a website where potential customers can find my FULL inventory, with FULL descriptions of each car, and a half dozen photos of each car in FULL 24-bit color.
If you're a car dealer, the question you have to ask is: Would I like every literate adult in this city to glance at my print ad every day, or 1/10 of 1% of them to search out my web site once every 5 years?
Paper still wins for most retail businesses...
"This is almost like someone wants to destroy the smug "unhackable" world that Mac users live in."
Exactly. Antivirus and firewall vendors want Apple users to pay for their "solutions" to problems that don't yet exist, Windows and Linux fanboys want Mac zealots to feel the pain of spyware infestations, insecure default configurations and constant brute-force attacks on open ports, and the tech press likes negative reporting. We're seeing the collision of many interests creating a huge storm of hype around some minor flaws in OSX security.
"Have any other outdoors-ey types had good experiences with micro-drives?"
My ipod doesn't hold up too well outdoors. If I take it above 11,000 feet, shake it, or let it get too cold, it starts making funny noises. Also, if I have a hard fall skiing or off a bike and it'll hang until I reformat and resync it (I suspect this means the microdrive's heads bounced off the platter and trashed part of the disc). The ipod's good for hiking or cycling on pavement, but if your choice of outdoors-ey activity involves high altitude, cold, vibration, or falling you might want to keep your flash-based player.
Then again, I see a lot of white earphones on the ski slopes so they must work for some people...
So... who is the comparison good for?
People who are considering buying a new laptop, but haven't made up their mind about Wintel vs Mactel yet. People who don't have enough experience with modern Macs to gain any insight from benchmarks against other Apple machines. (so it's 2.23751 times faster than a 1.33GHz G4 Powerbook. Is that enough? Is it better than the 2.5GHz Mobile P3 machine I already have?) People who have been burned by Apple's bogus benchmarks and specious "World's Fastest X" claims before and want to know how fast the MacBook is really going to be once it's brought outside the Cupertino reality-distortion field.
1: DVD players and discs have gotten cheap. Sony isn't making as much profit on them as they used to, so it's time to introduce a new format that costs 3 times as much.
2: Sony gets to license the patents related to blu-ray to all other electronics makers, so they get a cut of the action from everyone who sells a blu-ray player or blu-ray discs.
3: Blu-ray DRM is much stronger than DVD CSS. It'll be harder for people to make backup copies or share Sony Pictures movies on P2P networks. Even if they don't sell any more discs, they'll get a warm fuzzy feeling about "solving" the piracy problem.
4: Lack of HD content (especially movies) is holding back sales of HD monitors. If everyone buys into the HDTV craze, Sony stands to make lots of money selling new TVs.
5: Once everybody buys a blu-ray player and HDTV, they'll re-buy a lot of movies in blu-ray format, and Sony stands to make a lot more money there.
Or did you mean what's better for the customer? Well, there is the "more pixels" thing, but that's about it.
I'm sure that they'd sell many more than a few hundred copies to the Linux market. Maybe even a thousand.
$800 x 1000 copies = $800,000
A dinos^H^H^H^H^H company the size of Adobe would blow 800 grand just on meetings to discuss ways to get every employee a new 3-ring binder with amended versions of the corporate software licensing policy and equipment procurement standards with the necessary changes to allow developers to requisition Linux machines for preliminary development of a Photoshop port...
If nobody but the possibly corrupt vote-counting machine can turn the database of individual votes into a human readable list, how can anyone verify that the reported totals have any relation to the votes cast?
2 + 2 = 5,000 for sufficiently hard to audit values of 2...
By the way, the Gaia Hypothesis was so much mystical horseshit anyway.
Which differs from transhumanism in that the latter is *techno*-mystical horseshit...
So where are the sub $200 magnetic media (a price to put it on par with CD and DVD burners) that has a comparable life span and read speed as my optical media?
Just get a 200GB hard drive and USB drive enclosure. It's cheap, rewritable, lasts decades, and it's way faster than burning optical discs.
Adding nofollow to all user homepage links is not "editing the user". It's recognizing slashdot is a news site, not an SEO tool and doing something to correct the problem of people (ab)using slashdot's high pagerank for their personal benefit.
Also, you should recognize that the submitter and his reputation *is* part of the story, and discussion about it is relevant. Slashdot stories are not just single links to other sources, the submitter gets to add her own commentary, and can use the summary and choice of links to influence the "spin" on an article. Knowing who published a story and what they might have to gain from it is an important part of being able to evaluate the worth of the story. Using site admin powers to moderate those discussions into the abyss helps nobody except the spammers, scammers, and political cranks who try to manipulate slashdot for their own ends.
Google is heavily based on Linux. One would expect they to support it.
I'm sure they love being able to deploy zillions of servers without paying OS license fees, but they seem actively hostile to desktop Linux users. After they hired the lead Gaim developer to work on their closed-source not-for-Linux chat client, Google Talk voice support seems to have been dropped from the development plan for Gaim 2.0. They haven't exactly been tripping over themselves rushing to port cool apps like Earth, Desktop Search, etc. to Linux either.
Yup, he did and it was. http://slashdot.org/articles/99/06/21/126233_F.sht ml
Google for the win.
What's the alternative to security?
Should we toss out any machines that get so bogged down by spyware/viruses/spam relays/DDoS bots/warez FTP servers/whatever that they become unusable, and buy new ones? That will get very VERY expensive in a world where unpatched Windows machines get compromised within 20 minutes of being connected to the internet.
Last time I checked, they had $40 billion (yes, billion with a "B") in liquid assets just sitting in the bank. When you scale Microsoft's amazingly massive wealth down to that of the average American working stiff, that $2.4 million is equivalent to about $2/day in fines. The EU is fining Microsoft less than the price of a small cup of plain coffee from Starbuck's every day. Don't hold your breath waiting for them to change their business practices over this...
For your needs, computing reached perfection 30+ years ago! Go buy an ancient mini on ebay, load up VMS, and enjoy computing Nirvana. It never crashes, and the security is better than most modern systems. The interface may be painfully primitive, but it's *very* well documented (you'll need a spare bookcase or two for all the manuals) so you should have no trouble adjusting. You might have to read slashdot in 80-column text mode, but at least you'll have an OS that suits your needs (and holier-than-thou attitude)...
There's no market for it. Most audiophiles are too busy basking in the warm glow of their $40,000 tube amps and turning up their noses at anything digital to notice that it sounds better, and everyone else thinks 128 kbps mp3 over cheap headphones sounds good enough.
With this change, there won't be any mainstream OSes that still have windowing code in kernel space. That means Windows will have the same context switching performance hit when resizing windows that anti-X11 trolls rant about on *nix now. They'll have to find something new to complain about, or at least some new specious benchmarks to support their nebulous claims about X being "slow by design".
Please, Microsoft, think of the trolls! Moving windowing code ouf of the kernel may be a sound design decision, but by doing this you'll set anti-Linux trolling and Windows fanboyism back by 3-5 years!
Nobody knows, that's the problem. When someone can answer that question, we'll be 99.9% of the way to building a real AI.
Retail space is expensive. Server space is cheap.
Only a small percentage of published music ever reaches the level of "hit album" that qualifies it for sale in big-box retail stores. Stores have only a limited amount of space they can store CDs in, so they choose to carry the ones that sell the most copies. They are more willing to buy 400 copies of Green Day's "American Idiot" because they know they can sell them all in a month than they are to buy one copy each of 400 unknown experimental jazz albums that might not sell at all (and keep taking up shelf/warehouse space indefinitely). Because the store's cost is higher for the unknows, they have to charge more for them than for the popular stuff to recover their costs. An online distributor (like iTunes) only has to store one copy of each song, so it's storage costs are the same whether a song sells one copy or 100,000. That means they're free to sell both the popular music and the less-known stuff for whatever people are willing to pay for them. If that means they can gouge Green Day fans for an extra two bucks and have to dump Dexter Squeekenwhistle And His All-Clarinet Orchestra for 35 cents, that's what will happen.
Most people I know say, that it is just a panic by the drug mob to boost sales, but the stocking of flu meds by governments send me a different message....
The message you should be getting is that the drug mob has friends in government. If panicky consumers aren't buying enough of your product to drive prices into the stratosphere, lobby some federal agency to buy up the remainder...