Google is a tool for communication. It's no different than the inventions of writing, the printing press, the telephone, photography, recorded sound, movies, radio, and TV. It enhanses our ability to think and communicate, just as a shovel enhanses our ability to dig.
WiFi is easy, the GGP was talking about network problems. The docs say that I need a W7Pro machine on the network, although I have little trouble connecting to the Linux machine.
I just rebuilt an old Dell that still had its XP install CDs, and since it only has 500 megs of memory I just reinstalled Windows. After I slap a NIC on it I'm going to want to connect it to the other two computers.
Actually I want it to be headless and control it with the notebook and HP tower with Linux. I should have no trouble with the Linux box, but from the W7 documentation, runninig the XP box from the W7 notebook is going to be a bit problematic.
If someone gives you a file of mine when you've never heard of me (and therefore would never have bought it) I have not only lost nothing, I may in fact gain. You might like the file and buy more.
You do realize that studies show that music pirates spend more money on music than non-pirates, don't you? In fact, all the studies back me up.
Its easy to see how you fall for the fallacy, since it seems logical and reasonable, but it is a fallacy. A couple of years ago, a book publisher believed the same fallacy, so he commissioned a study to see how much in sales was lost when the book hit the internet. Unlike music and movies, it tales a couple of weeks for books to hit the net, so they looked at sales figures to see how much of a drop in sales there was. The publisher and researchers were astounded to find that there was a sales spike, rather than a dip, and attribute it to the added buzz.
As Doctorow notes in one of his books (free at BoingBoing and for sale at Amazon), nobody ever lost money from piracy, but many artists have gone hungry from obscurity.
Nobody's going to buy your stuff if they've never heard of you. The war on piracy is really a war on independant artists.
In the context of TFA, there is an effective theft in that there was a contractual agreement
I'm not part of the contract. The contract is between artist and publisher.
Depriving someone of funds which they theoretically should have received.
I could theoretically win the lottery by finding a winning ticket on the ground. I'm deprived of my theoretical winnings. The fact is, if I wouldn't have paid for the work, you've lost nothing.
But in the case of a corporation--especially one whose sole existence is based on profits from collecting payment for use of copyrighted material--not paying for their own use of copyrighted material, I'm quite happy to vilify that act with the oversimplified term, "theft".
If you're referring to using an unlicensed song in a commercial endeavor, I agree. In that case the money is real, not theoretical, and they have been deprived of it. It's actual money that was stolen, not IP.
many may be offended as being referred to as "cops".
Why? That's what they are. That's like someone from China being offended at being called a Chinaman, even though a Frenchman or an Englishman or an Irishman or a Scotsman has no such offense.
Personally, I do show up at the polls, but I vote "none of the above" by voting Green or Libertarian. Things have changed drastically since 1776; hell, they've changed drastically in the last fifteen years. Used to be, you couldn't buy an election. Now that's the only way to win.
Don't get your definitions from a law enforcement agency. I mean, the none of the FBI's Law Enforcement Officers are in LEO. In fact, don't let government define anything; PATRIOT act, anyone?
Here's the difference between stealing music and infringing copyright.
Sealing music: you walk into WalMart and shoplift a CD. WalMart is out the value of the CD. If you're caught, it's a misdemeanor and a small fine.
Copyright Infringement: You BUY that CD form WalMart and put it on the Pirate Bay. Nobody has lost anything, and the label may actually gain sales from your "piracy". If caught, it will cost you thousands of dollars and maybe jail time.
Not the same at all. I wouldn't steal a car, but I'd accept a copy of a car someone GAVE me.
Pedantic nitpick here: Linux isn't written in BASIC. In assembly it's JMP (jump). Of course, that depends on the chip's instruction set, my assembly experience was all on the Z80.
Spoken by a truly clueless imbecile....so by your wrecking Microsoft should give up on the mobile device market since that keep up with the release cycle....
An illiterate calling someone an imbicile... thanks for the chuckle.
FYI, I believe the word you malaproped should have been "reckoning." And sorry for verbing that noun...
Like leave it turned on for months or years, or shutting down for hardware repair, rebooting, and having the desktop come up exactly as it was when you shut it down, all documents and apps open like they were when you shut it off. That's a major drawback to me, considering you have to reboot every Patch Tuesday; Linux only needs a reboot for a kernel patch. No reboots needed for maintenance patches, just a single click and you're done. No reboots for software installs.
or have been buried
It took months for me to find where to shut off that stupid "tap to click" bullshit on my notebook. It wasn't in the control panel with the mouse controls, as would be logical and expected, but in a little applet buried in the middle of a bunch of other little applets.
Five minutes in kubuntu; it's in the mouse controls in Linux' equivalent of the Cpntrol Panel, where one would logically expect it.
As to the network, I've found it easier to do by hand than follow MS's lame wizards. And why can't I connect my notebook to a network unless there's a Win 7 Pro box on the network, or Linux (yay, Samba)?
it's making me take a hard look at whether it's worth dealing with the technical issues of linux.
Actually, with the right distro there are few to no technical issues. The driver problems are mostly history. Installing it (including apps) is brain-dead simple, not even a fraction of the pain in the ass a Windows install is.
I have a Win 7 notebook and a kubuntu 12.0 tower, the tower almost never needs maintenance and had no technical issues at all. I pretty much built it from junk and spare parts.
If you NEED Photoshop or you're a gamer, Linux isn't for you. For almost everyone else, Linux is better in almost all ways (perhaps not on an office desktop, but in your home for sure). Moving from one version of Linux to the next is a single click, and doesn't change the entire interface like Windows does.
I couldn't figure out why you were modded funny until I laughed at the last paragraph. You pretty much hit the nail square on the head with it. Although I'd have added Sony: "it used to have that feature but we removed it from your computer after you already paid for it. Then we installed a rootkit. Oh, BTW, your CC#s got out."
Don't blame the submitter too much. He might not be a native speaker (I'm sure I sound like an idiot when speaking Thai or Spanish). All your base are belong to us.
Blame the editor. Editors are supposed to be good at grammar, and I've had/. submissions completely rewritten on acceptance.
Ah, youngsters... I guess they don't teach rounding these days. Back when slide rules ruled, you HAD to know how to round... and you obviously don't. Of course, with computers you have insane decimal point accuracy which leads to its own silliness sometimes. And even with binary and ten digit accuracy you get rounding errors.
Anything less than half is rounded down, anything over half is rounded up. 2.2+2.2=4, since the accurate answer is 4.4. 2.3+2.3=5, since the accurate answer is 4.6 which rounds up to 5.
If it's exactly half, then you have an argument. But 2.5+2.4=4.9, still 5. 2.5+2.5 needs no rounding, as it's exactly 5.
2.6 is not a large value of two. 2.6 is rounded up, not down.
I think you'll find that few don't. Now, if you're talking about a cop here, don't say LEO because to us nerds, that's Low Earth Orbit. As someone else pointed out, the "botnet" part gives it away. Would we have to spell out IBM, RAM, or DoS? This is a specialized site. We're nerds. We don't need to spell out C&C for a botnet any more than a law enforcement publication would feel the need to explain what an LEO is, even though it would confuse me; I'm not part of their target audience.
So, for what it's worth, as far as I'm concerned: FAILURE!
Well, you didn't fail completely, you did look it up and educate yourself.
Don't blame Timothy, blame the retards who voted for it in the firehose.
If girlfriends keep you out of jail, why do all the dope dealers and thieves have girlfriends? It seems the cart is before the horse here -- getting a girlfriend doesn't stop them from hacking, stopping hacking gets them girlfriends. I mean, you're not going to meet women while in your basement in front of the computer.
A perfect example of correlation not equaling causation, and in fact one may often confuse cause and effect.
It didn't need to mention them, thats the wonder of having a discussion - you aren't restricted to just the content of the parent post.
You just might want to read/.'s moderation FAQ. Your original post was indeed a troll as modded, and the post I'm replying to is indeed offtopic.
why just rant about the Microsoft ones?
Because it was a Microsoft fan/shill he was responding to. I would guess if it had been a Linux or mac fanboy comment, that's what he would have responded to and not said a word about Microsoft.
Hope I've helped (I'll rightfuly be modded offtopic myself here, but that's OK as my karma stays pretty much at karma cap).
I haven't seen anything not "just work" in Linux for a very long time, and in most cases does the "just works" far better than Windows.
For an example, a bluetooth dongle from WalMart. With Windows you insert the install CD, find the install.exe file, run it, reboot, and cross your fingers.
With kubuntu, plug the dongle in and start DLing pics from your phone.
It's been a LONG time since I had to do any real maintenance on the Linux box. Even OS upgrades are a single click.
When the digital clocks came, our children slowly lost the ability to read analog clocks.
My kids didn't. I still have an analog clock on the wall (they're grown now).
Then ubiquitous calculators eroded arithmetic skills.
If that's true, is a black mark on teachers, not the calculators. I was never any good at rote memorization, and we didn't have calculators back then. So I bought a slide rule to keep from having to learn multiplication tables. Why would one need to memorize tables when you can look it up?
PDAs and smartphones eroded our memory by taking over address lists and phone numbers.
Again, that's a GOOD thing. Rote memorization has nothing to do with intelligence, and usually gets in the way of understanding. I have better uses for my brain than storing phone numbers.
As to GPS taking away ability to read maps, I'm doubtful. It hasn't been around long enough yet to see, and making a blanket generalization that "we lost the ability to read maps" is a bit premature. I know few pwople who even own one.
This is how it starts. The first blows in the war between Augmented Humans and the Naturals
Puny human, BWAHAHAHAHA! You will be assimilated. You will not resist, you will beg to become a cyborg like us. Just wait until you need a pacemaker or a cochlear implant or an artificial hip or other body part.
We had one in our office in 1990 IIRC. It was a Compaq about the size of a lunchbox, with a detachable wired keyboard and an orange plasma display. No mouse, those were the DOS days.
Ten years before that (thirty years ago) my mon (now long-retired) brought home an IBM clamshell. It was the size of a medium suitcase, weight a LOT, had a five inch green CRT and a 5 MB hard drive and two floppy drives.
Now? The most powerful computer I have ever owned is my notebook, which weighs less than a DOS manual did.
They must have looked at gamers and thought it would apply to everyone. I didn't get that far; six pages of three paragraphs per page is an abomination I refuse to look at. But I did get this far: The new look and feel
That's my #1 complaint about Microsoft's software -- every damned upgrade requires retraining. No other software I've seen does this. I'd hate it if they changed where the brake and gas pedal on my car are, but they do this constantly and for no good reason I can see. This is one reason MS products lack in useability compared to other software>
But one has to remember that you are not their customer, the OEM and the IT staff are. That's quite a difference between Linux and Mac, whose desktop (at least) wares are geared to YOU, not the PHB or OEM.
If you are actually a nerd, it should bother you when someone calls the computer case holding a working computer the "CPU" or refers to the monitor as the computer.
I'm amused, not bothered. One guy I know calls the case holding most of the computer's parts the "hard drive" (I call it a computer because it's fully functional and accesible from the network without a keyboard, mouse, or monitor). But cops I've known have been proud to be cops, and you should note that there's a very popular TV show spinning law enforcement as always the good guys called "Cops".
Slashdot Mirror
Google is a tool for communication. It's no different than the inventions of writing, the printing press, the telephone, photography, recorded sound, movies, radio, and TV. It enhanses our ability to think and communicate, just as a shovel enhanses our ability to dig.
WiFi is easy, the GGP was talking about network problems. The docs say that I need a W7Pro machine on the network, although I have little trouble connecting to the Linux machine.
I just rebuilt an old Dell that still had its XP install CDs, and since it only has 500 megs of memory I just reinstalled Windows. After I slap a NIC on it I'm going to want to connect it to the other two computers.
Actually I want it to be headless and control it with the notebook and HP tower with Linux. I should have no trouble with the Linux box, but from the W7 documentation, runninig the XP box from the W7 notebook is going to be a bit problematic.
If someone gives you a file of mine when you've never heard of me (and therefore would never have bought it) I have not only lost nothing, I may in fact gain. You might like the file and buy more.
You do realize that studies show that music pirates spend more money on music than non-pirates, don't you? In fact, all the studies back me up.
Its easy to see how you fall for the fallacy, since it seems logical and reasonable, but it is a fallacy. A couple of years ago, a book publisher believed the same fallacy, so he commissioned a study to see how much in sales was lost when the book hit the internet. Unlike music and movies, it tales a couple of weeks for books to hit the net, so they looked at sales figures to see how much of a drop in sales there was. The publisher and researchers were astounded to find that there was a sales spike, rather than a dip, and attribute it to the added buzz.
As Doctorow notes in one of his books (free at BoingBoing and for sale at Amazon), nobody ever lost money from piracy, but many artists have gone hungry from obscurity.
Nobody's going to buy your stuff if they've never heard of you. The war on piracy is really a war on independant artists.
In the context of TFA, there is an effective theft in that there was a contractual agreement
I'm not part of the contract. The contract is between artist and publisher.
Depriving someone of funds which they theoretically should have received.
I could theoretically win the lottery by finding a winning ticket on the ground. I'm deprived of my theoretical winnings. The fact is, if I wouldn't have paid for the work, you've lost nothing.
But in the case of a corporation--especially one whose sole existence is based on profits from collecting payment for use of copyrighted material--not paying for their own use of copyrighted material, I'm quite happy to vilify that act with the oversimplified term, "theft".
If you're referring to using an unlicensed song in a commercial endeavor, I agree. In that case the money is real, not theoretical, and they have been deprived of it. It's actual money that was stolen, not IP.
many may be offended as being referred to as "cops".
Why? That's what they are. That's like someone from China being offended at being called a Chinaman, even though a Frenchman or an Englishman or an Irishman or a Scotsman has no such offense.
Maybe they[re ashamed of their own profession?
Personally, I do show up at the polls, but I vote "none of the above" by voting Green or Libertarian. Things have changed drastically since 1776; hell, they've changed drastically in the last fifteen years. Used to be, you couldn't buy an election. Now that's the only way to win.
Don't get your definitions from a law enforcement agency. I mean, the none of the FBI's Law Enforcement Officers are in LEO. In fact, don't let government define anything; PATRIOT act, anyone?
Here's the difference between stealing music and infringing copyright.
Sealing music: you walk into WalMart and shoplift a CD. WalMart is out the value of the CD. If you're caught, it's a misdemeanor and a small fine.
Copyright Infringement: You BUY that CD form WalMart and put it on the Pirate Bay. Nobody has lost anything, and the label may actually gain sales from your "piracy". If caught, it will cost you thousands of dollars and maybe jail time.
Not the same at all. I wouldn't steal a car, but I'd accept a copy of a car someone GAVE me.
Pedantic nitpick here: Linux isn't written in BASIC. In assembly it's JMP (jump). Of course, that depends on the chip's instruction set, my assembly experience was all on the Z80.
Spoken by a truly clueless imbecile....so by your wrecking Microsoft should give up on the mobile device market since that keep up with the release cycle....
An illiterate calling someone an imbicile... thanks for the chuckle.
FYI, I believe the word you malaproped should have been "reckoning." And sorry for verbing that noun...
too many things you can't do in Win7
Like leave it turned on for months or years, or shutting down for hardware repair, rebooting, and having the desktop come up exactly as it was when you shut it down, all documents and apps open like they were when you shut it off. That's a major drawback to me, considering you have to reboot every Patch Tuesday; Linux only needs a reboot for a kernel patch. No reboots needed for maintenance patches, just a single click and you're done. No reboots for software installs.
or have been buried
It took months for me to find where to shut off that stupid "tap to click" bullshit on my notebook. It wasn't in the control panel with the mouse controls, as would be logical and expected, but in a little applet buried in the middle of a bunch of other little applets.
Five minutes in kubuntu; it's in the mouse controls in Linux' equivalent of the Cpntrol Panel, where one would logically expect it.
As to the network, I've found it easier to do by hand than follow MS's lame wizards. And why can't I connect my notebook to a network unless there's a Win 7 Pro box on the network, or Linux (yay, Samba)?
it's making me take a hard look at whether it's worth dealing with the technical issues of linux.
Actually, with the right distro there are few to no technical issues. The driver problems are mostly history. Installing it (including apps) is brain-dead simple, not even a fraction of the pain in the ass a Windows install is.
I have a Win 7 notebook and a kubuntu 12.0 tower, the tower almost never needs maintenance and had no technical issues at all. I pretty much built it from junk and spare parts.
If you NEED Photoshop or you're a gamer, Linux isn't for you. For almost everyone else, Linux is better in almost all ways (perhaps not on an office desktop, but in your home for sure). Moving from one version of Linux to the next is a single click, and doesn't change the entire interface like Windows does.
I couldn't figure out why you were modded funny until I laughed at the last paragraph. You pretty much hit the nail square on the head with it. Although I'd have added Sony: "it used to have that feature but we removed it from your computer after you already paid for it. Then we installed a rootkit. Oh, BTW, your CC#s got out."
I can has chezeburger?
Don't blame the submitter too much. He might not be a native speaker (I'm sure I sound like an idiot when speaking Thai or Spanish). All your base are belong to us.
Blame the editor. Editors are supposed to be good at grammar, and I've had /. submissions completely rewritten on acceptance.
Ah, youngsters... I guess they don't teach rounding these days. Back when slide rules ruled, you HAD to know how to round... and you obviously don't. Of course, with computers you have insane decimal point accuracy which leads to its own silliness sometimes. And even with binary and ten digit accuracy you get rounding errors.
Anything less than half is rounded down, anything over half is rounded up. 2.2+2.2=4, since the accurate answer is 4.4. 2.3+2.3=5, since the accurate answer is 4.6 which rounds up to 5.
If it's exactly half, then you have an argument. But 2.5+2.4=4.9, still 5. 2.5+2.5 needs no rounding, as it's exactly 5.
2.6 is not a large value of two. 2.6 is rounded up, not down.
I had to look up "C&C"
You must be new here.
for those who don't know
I think you'll find that few don't. Now, if you're talking about a cop here, don't say LEO because to us nerds, that's Low Earth Orbit. As someone else pointed out, the "botnet" part gives it away. Would we have to spell out IBM, RAM, or DoS? This is a specialized site. We're nerds. We don't need to spell out C&C for a botnet any more than a law enforcement publication would feel the need to explain what an LEO is, even though it would confuse me; I'm not part of their target audience.
So, for what it's worth, as far as I'm concerned: FAILURE!
Well, you didn't fail completely, you did look it up and educate yourself.
Don't blame Timothy, blame the retards who voted for it in the firehose.
If girlfriends keep you out of jail, why do all the dope dealers and thieves have girlfriends? It seems the cart is before the horse here -- getting a girlfriend doesn't stop them from hacking, stopping hacking gets them girlfriends. I mean, you're not going to meet women while in your basement in front of the computer.
A perfect example of correlation not equaling causation, and in fact one may often confuse cause and effect.
You're American aren't you - only an American could be so racist
Oh, the irony, it burns when you touch it!
It didn't need to mention them, thats the wonder of having a discussion - you aren't restricted to just the content of the parent post.
You just might want to read /.'s moderation FAQ. Your original post was indeed a troll as modded, and the post I'm replying to is indeed offtopic.
why just rant about the Microsoft ones?
Because it was a Microsoft fan/shill he was responding to. I would guess if it had been a Linux or mac fanboy comment, that's what he would have responded to and not said a word about Microsoft.
Hope I've helped (I'll rightfuly be modded offtopic myself here, but that's OK as my karma stays pretty much at karma cap).
I haven't seen anything not "just work" in Linux for a very long time, and in most cases does the "just works" far better than Windows.
For an example, a bluetooth dongle from WalMart. With Windows you insert the install CD, find the install.exe file, run it, reboot, and cross your fingers.
With kubuntu, plug the dongle in and start DLing pics from your phone.
It's been a LONG time since I had to do any real maintenance on the Linux box. Even OS upgrades are a single click.
It was all good, for me.
When the digital clocks came, our children slowly lost the ability to read analog clocks.
My kids didn't. I still have an analog clock on the wall (they're grown now).
Then ubiquitous calculators eroded arithmetic skills.
If that's true, is a black mark on teachers, not the calculators. I was never any good at rote memorization, and we didn't have calculators back then. So I bought a slide rule to keep from having to learn multiplication tables. Why would one need to memorize tables when you can look it up?
PDAs and smartphones eroded our memory by taking over address lists and phone numbers.
Again, that's a GOOD thing. Rote memorization has nothing to do with intelligence, and usually gets in the way of understanding. I have better uses for my brain than storing phone numbers.
As to GPS taking away ability to read maps, I'm doubtful. It hasn't been around long enough yet to see, and making a blanket generalization that "we lost the ability to read maps" is a bit premature. I know few pwople who even own one.
This is how it starts. The first blows in the war between Augmented Humans and the Naturals
Puny human, BWAHAHAHAHA! You will be assimilated. You will not resist, you will beg to become a cyborg like us. Just wait until you need a pacemaker or a cochlear implant or an artificial hip or other body part.
We had one in our office in 1990 IIRC. It was a Compaq about the size of a lunchbox, with a detachable wired keyboard and an orange plasma display. No mouse, those were the DOS days.
Ten years before that (thirty years ago) my mon (now long-retired) brought home an IBM clamshell. It was the size of a medium suitcase, weight a LOT, had a five inch green CRT and a 5 MB hard drive and two floppy drives.
Now? The most powerful computer I have ever owned is my notebook, which weighs less than a DOS manual did.
They must have looked at gamers and thought it would apply to everyone. I didn't get that far; six pages of three paragraphs per page is an abomination I refuse to look at. But I did get this far: The new look and feel
That's my #1 complaint about Microsoft's software -- every damned upgrade requires retraining. No other software I've seen does this. I'd hate it if they changed where the brake and gas pedal on my car are, but they do this constantly and for no good reason I can see. This is one reason MS products lack in useability compared to other software>
But one has to remember that you are not their customer, the OEM and the IT staff are. That's quite a difference between Linux and Mac, whose desktop (at least) wares are geared to YOU, not the PHB or OEM.
If you are actually a nerd, it should bother you when someone calls the computer case holding a working computer the "CPU" or refers to the monitor as the computer.
I'm amused, not bothered. One guy I know calls the case holding most of the computer's parts the "hard drive" (I call it a computer because it's fully functional and accesible from the network without a keyboard, mouse, or monitor). But cops I've known have been proud to be cops, and you should note that there's a very popular TV show spinning law enforcement as always the good guys called "Cops".
"Cop" is not a derogatory term.
A computer (and google) are like a shovel. A shovel is an extension to your hand, Google is an extension of your mind.
It's a tool. We've had tools for thousands of years.
Teh hell yuo say!