Users? Who cares about users? DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS! . . . . . Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted! Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like JOKING!
You forget that unlike earlier times, some here not only aren't nerds, but a few are decidedly rather, um, "slow". Some of these folks get mod points, they see the word "interesting" in your post and mod it as such.
I know your karma's good, but it's too bad someone (someone who probably works at MS) modded you down; your comment was a hell of a lot better than the astroturfer that you replied to (who was modded at +5, I found that very strange).
It seems everyone has forgotten WHY gates started his foundation -- he was shamed into it by his father, a lawyer. Gates is no hero.
What I will say is that the proponents for free and open source software seem to be more interested in the free nature than the actual software itself.
I can't speak for other open source advocates, but that is true for me. As to quality, if I needed a spreadsheet I'd probably buy a copy of Excel, if I were a professional digital artist I'd surely buy a copy of photoshop. But since I don't need that sort of software in a professional setting, Oo and Gimp do fine.
However, With the few exceptions like there, I've found that the open alternatives are usually equal or even superior, especially when you're talking about Windows. It lacks features I consider essential to an OS, and offers nothing that Linux lacks, at least that I know about. Yes, Windows is prettier than KDE, but pretty just doesn't matter to me. Also, friends bring old computers with W98 or XP and corrupted registries and newer OSes simply won't run on them. I had to break the password on an old ThinkPad, I was going to install Linux on it (the lazy way, I know) but even Mandriva 2005 wouldn't load. I'm not about to tell someone with a five year old computer that they need to spend $150 on an OS when the hardware itself isn't worth that much.
I want free/open-source software to be BETTER than the proprietary alternatives
Thank you! That tool was incredibly useful. It was the bartender's compute and I drank free today, so I owe you a few beers! (im' drunk, thank you again), ,
I just hope Raymond and Stallman also plant their own crops, cook their own food and never eat out.
But food is just like open source. The ingredients are listed on every package in the grocery store, you can grow and cook your own or pay someone else to grow and cook it.
The few "foods" that are like proprietary software is soda with its secret formulas, "fast food" -- and like software, closed source food is usually bad for you.
Why should anyone pay for anyone else's life choices?
I don't know of any studies, but it's been my experience that your health is affected more by genetics than your lifestyle. Is it your fault that you're prone to cancer? Is it your fault that all your grandparents had heart attacks when they were fifty? If they did, you probably will too, no matter how healthy your lifestyle. You may run up even more medical bills on tests, just because you're aware that you're at risk. Should I pay for your bad genes? I say I should.
If you get drunk and run a red light and fishbone me, why should I pay for your bad choices? Again, I have no numbers, but I've seen as many or more people hospitalized from accidents of various sorts than illnesses brought about by bad habits.
It sounds like your Harper is little different than our Dubya was. Well, maybe not as bad, nobody has attacked Canada and Harper hasn't invaded a foreign country because of bad intel.
I fear that Romney may win the Presidency and take us back to the Bush years. MBAs apparently make awful Presidents, especially "trickle down" politicians like Bush and Romney.
I urge my neighbors in the Great White North to fight the madness the MAFIAA is trying to inflict on you.
If you choose to be fat, if you choose to smoke, if you choose to live an unhealthy lifestyle, you should be the one to pay for your healthcare expenses.
Being fat and smoking don't make you sick, they make you DEAD. And no matter how healthy your lifestyle, you're going to die, and you're likely going to rack up some huge medical expenses while doing so. Take a healthy seventy year old who will ultimately live to be a hundred. He's likely to visit the doctor every week for thirty years. Compare that to the fat sedentary slob who has a heart attack at age 45, he may not even make it to the hospital. That dead fatass isn't making your costs go up, it's my 84 year old mom that's making costs go up. Broke her arm last year, had pnumonia this year. Costly. People who die young are cheap, people who die old are expensive.
It's people who live healthy lifestyles that run up huge medical bills, because they live longer. But we all die.
And as to the "fattening stuff will kill you," what about those of us who are genetically thin? I got pretty fat when I was on Paxil (I would guess it slows your metabolism down, but I don't really know). When I got off the Paxil the weight came off by itself. If anything, I have a hard time keeping weight on. If I were in California, why should I, a skinny man, have to pay the fatso tax?
Man, slashdot is really rubbing it in today! The bartender at Felbers said she bought an old laptop running XP but didn't have the password. I told her if it was a BIOS password forget it, with a Dell you have to disassembe the thing and short two pins on a chip. But it was the Windows password, I told her no problem, if I couldn't get past the password I'd install Linux on it.
But the thing's way too old, it's an IBM thinkpad with 128k of memory. I couldn't even get it to install mandriva 2005. Kubuntu 10.04 almost ran from the CD. Almost.
If I could get to the damned file system all I'd have to do would be to delete a single file. I feel like an idiot, can't even break into a Windows computer I have in my hands!
Maybe tonight I'll see if I can find a copy of DR-DOS or Tiny Linux or something.
It removes the password completely. There are some protections in place though for accounts without a password (e.g. by default, you can't remote desktop into a Windows machine if the target user account lacks a password - if necessary this can be changed via a group policy setting on the target machine).
Well, that won't work for me then... maybe after I install Linux on the Windows box dual boot; I need to move files back and forth between the two machines. If it was dual-boot I could network into the Linux side to get get files back and forth from the Windows partition. With kde there's a password, but you can configure it so the computer itself inserts the password, if you log out without rebooting or access the files from another machine you need to enter the password.
In two years time I expect to become a father and so won't have much time for gaming anyway
I loved playing network games with my kids when they got to be about 10 or 12. Before that it was stuff like whiffleball and legos. The best times of my life were when playing with the kids! They're both in their twenties now, I wish one of them would make me a grandpa.
plus I kinda want to create and build things as opposed to just playing games as a hobby.
Well, I was programming and making web sites for fun as well. One of my sites became pretty popular. One day my youngest, about 12 at the time, came home from school one day with wide eyes and said "dad, did you know you were famous?" It turns out most of her friends were fans of my site and didn't believe her when she told them the site was her dad's! Of course, back then nobody was on the net except us nerds. In sixty years, nothing has been as rewarding and fulfilling as being a parent. Your best days are ahead of you!
Regardless of one's feelings on Microsoft, that company has consistently and continually tried to make their user interfaces as attractive and easy to use as is possible.
Attractive? Yes. Windows is the prettiest desktop out there. Useable? Hardly. Changing where the damned menu items are in every release is NOT useable. Having mouse setting other than in the control panel is not useable. Windows only seems useable to those who haven't used anything else.
They've gone through the effort to develop fonts, to determine how to add pseudo-3d effects, how to space things and how to define icons and sizes.
None of those things add to useability. Pretty? Yes. Useable? Hell no.
That's not something you need to take a class for. All that information is easily available.
Indeed, when did the fucking jocks start posting at slashdot? Sometimes I think it was better when we nerds were pariahs and left alone. Physical "education" isn't he least bit educational. Education is learning, archery and basketball are not.
The average user (and you are surely not one of them) has serious problems navigating a WIndows or a Mac desktop. Linux is about two orders of magnitude harder. "Linux on the desktop" is not "Linux on the desktop for a tiny minority of expert users and some vertical appliances", it is "Linux on the desktop for the masses". The latter is never going to happen. Not as long as the GUI teams for Linux are utterly out of touch with what the typical PC user needs.
That's odd, whenever a normal brings me a Windows box that's so full of malware it won't boot, I always install Linux+KDE, not one of them has complained about it. I haven't seen the problems you attribute to Linux and I've been using it since 2002.
Of course, I do it for free, if you're making good money servicing Windows I can see why you'd love it. A normal user can't keep Windows going for a year. If I was making money servicing Windows machines I'd sing Windows' praises, too.
The reason Linux hasn't taken off is because nobody but us have ever heard of it. I can't count the times I've had a notebook somewhere in public and someone sees it and asks "which version of Windows is that?" Every normal I've know who I installed Linux for has loved it.
Yeah, they even sell frozen broccoli with the cheese already in it. Throw the bag in the microwave, nuke it, pour it into a bowl and you're done. Cauliflower's good with cheese, too.
Screw that, just slop it in a bowl and throw it in the microwave for a couple of minutes. Then put melted velveeta on it. Not all of us have a weight problem, and I imagine that few of us who actually LIKE brocooli and Brussels Sprouts have a weight problem. I mean, when was the last time you ordered brocolli at Burger King?
"Let's see, I'll have two Whoppers, a large... no, make that HUGE fries, half a gallon of Coke... oh, and a plate of brocolli!
SSRIs only actually work on people with severe major depression.
I would caution ANYONE to NOT take those drugs unless you've already had thoughts of suicide. I was prescribed Paxil after my divorce, and the only time in my life I ever considered suicide was when the (incompetent) MD took me off of them while I was moving out of the big house the bank had foreclosed on and into a tiny apertment. The only thing that kept me alive was knowing what it would do to my parents and children.
There's really no effective treatment for depression, because depression isn't really an illness. It's a rational response to an abusive world.
That's not depression, that's the blues. The only cure for the bluse is John Lee Hooker, BB King, Eric Clapton, Howlin' wolf... depression is a chemical imbalance in the brain. The blues, everybody gets, and it seldom lasts long.
I gots sunshiiiiiiine, on a cloudy day When the web is dow-own, I got the month of May I hear you say, what can make me feel this way? Local! Local! Local! Talking 'bout STORAGE! LOCAL!
Sorry sir, but your application has been denied. If we followed your suggestions we would not need to horas, torture, or bother anyone. Then everyone would forget what DHS stands [for], we would loose funding and become an irrelevant agency like BATF.
Again thank you for your time, please see BOB on the way our for your complementary cavity search.
I'd send YOU to Bob but at least you didn't mangle any apostrophes. I hope English isn't your primary language! Guys, this is what the folks were talking about in this thread; why a well-rounded education is important. Some of you guys make me completely sure you've never attended a single college class, or ever read a single book or you'd know the difference between loose and lose, their there and they're, and that "pass the potato's" is fuctarded. Sorry, Anon-Admin, but you look like you could use a little remedial education. Check that second link, you can get "edumakatid" for free.
Star Trek script writers did a whole bunch of handwaving and even made up a bunch of BS to try and explain how that worked.
That was one thing that always annoyed me about Star Trek. It's bad enough that anyone would think that an alien species would look anything like us (which was the point of a short SF story I wrote) but to think species from completely different solar sytems could mate is beyond ludicrous.
Because why would an employer want employees that are more likely to keep fit and keep their health insurance costs down?
I've seldom excersized for the sake of excersize, although I do enjoy walking. I'm 60 and the worst physical ailment I've had was a detached retina. Meanwhile Rocky, a young fellow I used to drink with who worked construction (you're talking REAL excersize there!) died from a sudden heart attack three years ago at age 42.
Then there's my uncle, who had a lung removed in the '60s because of TB and smoked four packs of camels a day through it while working as supervisor (sitting on his ass all day like us nerds do) at a garbage incinerator, died of COPD when he was about as old as I am now. His sedentariness and smoking saved his employer from having to pay him a pension.
Staying fit doesn't reduce your medical costs, good genes do. Dying young actually helps an employer's bottom line because you won't collect that pension.
PE has no place in any school, especially college. School is for learning. PE is for dumb jocks who couldn't think their way out of a paper bag.
Leniency is given to non-habitual offenders- ie. based on prior behavior, not potential. Please reconsider voicing an opinion on legal issues until you're a whole lot less ignorant.
From your own link: In prescriptive grammar fewer is the prescribed comparative to be used in relation to grammatically plural, discretely quantifiable nouns, i.e., count nouns. The comparative less, it is argued, should be used when speaking of a grammatically singular noun (including mass nouns). Descriptive grammarians, however, are only concerned with the extent that this distinction applies in actual human usage.
"Fewer" is for counts; e.g. "fewer and fewer people know the difference between lose and loose". "Less" is for amounts, e.g. "I have less gasoline in my car than I did yesterday."
If you have fewer cornflakes in the box, you have less cereal.
BTW, the wiki article is incredibly badly written. Actually, I should have said "poorly written" but who the fuck cares as long as the meaning is clear?
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Users? Who cares about users? DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS!
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Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like JOKING!
You forget that unlike earlier times, some here not only aren't nerds, but a few are decidedly rather, um, "slow". Some of these folks get mod points, they see the word "interesting" in your post and mod it as such.
I know your karma's good, but it's too bad someone (someone who probably works at MS) modded you down; your comment was a hell of a lot better than the astroturfer that you replied to (who was modded at +5, I found that very strange).
It seems everyone has forgotten WHY gates started his foundation -- he was shamed into it by his father, a lawyer. Gates is no hero.
What I will say is that the proponents for free and open source software seem to be more interested in the free nature than the actual software itself.
I can't speak for other open source advocates, but that is true for me. As to quality, if I needed a spreadsheet I'd probably buy a copy of Excel, if I were a professional digital artist I'd surely buy a copy of photoshop. But since I don't need that sort of software in a professional setting, Oo and Gimp do fine.
However, With the few exceptions like there, I've found that the open alternatives are usually equal or even superior, especially when you're talking about Windows. It lacks features I consider essential to an OS, and offers nothing that Linux lacks, at least that I know about. Yes, Windows is prettier than KDE, but pretty just doesn't matter to me. Also, friends bring old computers with W98 or XP and corrupted registries and newer OSes simply won't run on them. I had to break the password on an old ThinkPad, I was going to install Linux on it (the lazy way, I know) but even Mandriva 2005 wouldn't load. I'm not about to tell someone with a five year old computer that they need to spend $150 on an OS when the hardware itself isn't worth that much.
I want free/open-source software to be BETTER than the proprietary alternatives
I certainly can't disagree with that.
Thank you! That tool was incredibly useful. It was the bartender's compute and I drank free today, so I owe you a few beers! (im' drunk, thank you again), ,
I just hope Raymond and Stallman also plant their own crops, cook their own food and never eat out.
But food is just like open source. The ingredients are listed on every package in the grocery store, you can grow and cook your own or pay someone else to grow and cook it.
The few "foods" that are like proprietary software is soda with its secret formulas, "fast food" -- and like software, closed source food is usually bad for you.
Hear that wooshing sound? That's the sound of a bass playing a bass.
All your bass are belong to us.
Why should anyone pay for anyone else's life choices?
I don't know of any studies, but it's been my experience that your health is affected more by genetics than your lifestyle. Is it your fault that you're prone to cancer? Is it your fault that all your grandparents had heart attacks when they were fifty? If they did, you probably will too, no matter how healthy your lifestyle. You may run up even more medical bills on tests, just because you're aware that you're at risk. Should I pay for your bad genes? I say I should.
If you get drunk and run a red light and fishbone me, why should I pay for your bad choices? Again, I have no numbers, but I've seen as many or more people hospitalized from accidents of various sorts than illnesses brought about by bad habits.
It sounds like your Harper is little different than our Dubya was. Well, maybe not as bad, nobody has attacked Canada and Harper hasn't invaded a foreign country because of bad intel.
I fear that Romney may win the Presidency and take us back to the Bush years. MBAs apparently make awful Presidents, especially "trickle down" politicians like Bush and Romney.
I urge my neighbors in the Great White North to fight the madness the MAFIAA is trying to inflict on you.
If you choose to be fat, if you choose to smoke, if you choose to live an unhealthy lifestyle, you should be the one to pay for your healthcare expenses.
Being fat and smoking don't make you sick, they make you DEAD. And no matter how healthy your lifestyle, you're going to die, and you're likely going to rack up some huge medical expenses while doing so. Take a healthy seventy year old who will ultimately live to be a hundred. He's likely to visit the doctor every week for thirty years. Compare that to the fat sedentary slob who has a heart attack at age 45, he may not even make it to the hospital. That dead fatass isn't making your costs go up, it's my 84 year old mom that's making costs go up. Broke her arm last year, had pnumonia this year. Costly. People who die young are cheap, people who die old are expensive.
It's people who live healthy lifestyles that run up huge medical bills, because they live longer. But we all die.
And as to the "fattening stuff will kill you," what about those of us who are genetically thin? I got pretty fat when I was on Paxil (I would guess it slows your metabolism down, but I don't really know). When I got off the Paxil the weight came off by itself. If anything, I have a hard time keeping weight on. If I were in California, why should I, a skinny man, have to pay the fatso tax?
Tax the internet? Th-th-th-th-that's all, folks!
Man, slashdot is really rubbing it in today! The bartender at Felbers said she bought an old laptop running XP but didn't have the password. I told her if it was a BIOS password forget it, with a Dell you have to disassembe the thing and short two pins on a chip. But it was the Windows password, I told her no problem, if I couldn't get past the password I'd install Linux on it.
But the thing's way too old, it's an IBM thinkpad with 128k of memory. I couldn't even get it to install mandriva 2005. Kubuntu 10.04 almost ran from the CD. Almost.
If I could get to the damned file system all I'd have to do would be to delete a single file. I feel like an idiot, can't even break into a Windows computer I have in my hands!
Maybe tonight I'll see if I can find a copy of DR-DOS or Tiny Linux or something.
It removes the password completely. There are some protections in place though for accounts without a password (e.g. by default, you can't remote desktop into a Windows machine if the target user account lacks a password - if necessary this can be changed via a group policy setting on the target machine).
Well, that won't work for me then... maybe after I install Linux on the Windows box dual boot; I need to move files back and forth between the two machines. If it was dual-boot I could network into the Linux side to get get files back and forth from the Windows partition. With kde there's a password, but you can configure it so the computer itself inserts the password, if you log out without rebooting or access the files from another machine you need to enter the password.
In two years time I expect to become a father and so won't have much time for gaming anyway
I loved playing network games with my kids when they got to be about 10 or 12. Before that it was stuff like whiffleball and legos. The best times of my life were when playing with the kids! They're both in their twenties now, I wish one of them would make me a grandpa.
plus I kinda want to create and build things as opposed to just playing games as a hobby.
Well, I was programming and making web sites for fun as well. One of my sites became pretty popular. One day my youngest, about 12 at the time, came home from school one day with wide eyes and said "dad, did you know you were famous?" It turns out most of her friends were fans of my site and didn't believe her when she told them the site was her dad's! Of course, back then nobody was on the net except us nerds. In sixty years, nothing has been as rewarding and fulfilling as being a parent. Your best days are ahead of you!
Regardless of one's feelings on Microsoft, that company has consistently and continually tried to make their user interfaces as attractive and easy to use as is possible.
Attractive? Yes. Windows is the prettiest desktop out there. Useable? Hardly. Changing where the damned menu items are in every release is NOT useable. Having mouse setting other than in the control panel is not useable. Windows only seems useable to those who haven't used anything else.
They've gone through the effort to develop fonts, to determine how to add pseudo-3d effects, how to space things and how to define icons and sizes.
None of those things add to useability. Pretty? Yes. Useable? Hell no.
That's not something you need to take a class for. All that information is easily available.
Indeed, when did the fucking jocks start posting at slashdot? Sometimes I think it was better when we nerds were pariahs and left alone. Physical "education" isn't he least bit educational. Education is learning, archery and basketball are not.
The average user (and you are surely not one of them) has serious problems navigating a WIndows or a Mac desktop. Linux is about two orders of magnitude harder. "Linux on the desktop" is not "Linux on the desktop for a tiny minority of expert users and some vertical appliances", it is "Linux on the desktop for the masses". The latter is never going to happen. Not as long as the GUI teams for Linux are utterly out of touch with what the typical PC user needs.
That's odd, whenever a normal brings me a Windows box that's so full of malware it won't boot, I always install Linux+KDE, not one of them has complained about it. I haven't seen the problems you attribute to Linux and I've been using it since 2002.
Of course, I do it for free, if you're making good money servicing Windows I can see why you'd love it. A normal user can't keep Windows going for a year. If I was making money servicing Windows machines I'd sing Windows' praises, too.
The reason Linux hasn't taken off is because nobody but us have ever heard of it. I can't count the times I've had a notebook somewhere in public and someone sees it and asks "which version of Windows is that?" Every normal I've know who I installed Linux for has loved it.
It sounds like programming. Measure with a micrometer, mark with chalk, cut with a chain saw.
Yeah, they even sell frozen broccoli with the cheese already in it. Throw the bag in the microwave, nuke it, pour it into a bowl and you're done. Cauliflower's good with cheese, too.
Screw that, just slop it in a bowl and throw it in the microwave for a couple of minutes. Then put melted velveeta on it. Not all of us have a weight problem, and I imagine that few of us who actually LIKE brocooli and Brussels Sprouts have a weight problem. I mean, when was the last time you ordered brocolli at Burger King?
"Let's see, I'll have two Whoppers, a large... no, make that HUGE fries, half a gallon of Coke... oh, and a plate of brocolli!
SSRIs only actually work on people with severe major depression.
I would caution ANYONE to NOT take those drugs unless you've already had thoughts of suicide. I was prescribed Paxil after my divorce, and the only time in my life I ever considered suicide was when the (incompetent) MD took me off of them while I was moving out of the big house the bank had foreclosed on and into a tiny apertment. The only thing that kept me alive was knowing what it would do to my parents and children.
There's really no effective treatment for depression, because depression isn't really an illness. It's a rational response to an abusive world.
That's not depression, that's the blues. The only cure for the bluse is John Lee Hooker, BB King, Eric Clapton, Howlin' wolf... depression is a chemical imbalance in the brain. The blues, everybody gets, and it seldom lasts long.
I gots sunshiiiiiiine, on a cloudy day
When the web is dow-own, I got the month of May
I hear you say, what can make me feel this way?
Local! Local! Local! Talking 'bout STORAGE!
LOCAL!
(apologies to The Temptations)
Sorry sir, but your application has been denied. If we followed your suggestions we would not need to horas, torture, or bother anyone. Then everyone would forget what DHS stands [for], we would loose funding and become an irrelevant agency like BATF.
Again thank you for your time, please see BOB on the way our for your complementary cavity search.
I'd send YOU to Bob but at least you didn't mangle any apostrophes. I hope English isn't your primary language! Guys, this is what the folks were talking about in this thread; why a well-rounded education is important. Some of you guys make me completely sure you've never attended a single college class, or ever read a single book or you'd know the difference between loose and lose, their there and they're, and that "pass the potato's" is fuctarded. Sorry, Anon-Admin, but you look like you could use a little remedial education. Check that second link, you can get "edumakatid" for free.
Star Trek script writers did a whole bunch of handwaving and even made up a bunch of BS to try and explain how that worked.
That was one thing that always annoyed me about Star Trek. It's bad enough that anyone would think that an alien species would look anything like us (which was the point of a short SF story I wrote) but to think species from completely different solar sytems could mate is beyond ludicrous.
Because why would an employer want employees that are more likely to keep fit and keep their health insurance costs down?
I've seldom excersized for the sake of excersize, although I do enjoy walking. I'm 60 and the worst physical ailment I've had was a detached retina. Meanwhile Rocky, a young fellow I used to drink with who worked construction (you're talking REAL excersize there!) died from a sudden heart attack three years ago at age 42.
Then there's my uncle, who had a lung removed in the '60s because of TB and smoked four packs of camels a day through it while working as supervisor (sitting on his ass all day like us nerds do) at a garbage incinerator, died of COPD when he was about as old as I am now. His sedentariness and smoking saved his employer from having to pay him a pension.
Staying fit doesn't reduce your medical costs, good genes do. Dying young actually helps an employer's bottom line because you won't collect that pension.
PE has no place in any school, especially college. School is for learning. PE is for dumb jocks who couldn't think their way out of a paper bag.
Leniency is given to non-habitual offenders- ie. based on prior behavior, not potential. Please reconsider voicing an opinion on legal issues until you're a whole lot less ignorant.
I suggest you do the same. Without a Card to Play, Texas Grandma Sentenced to Life Without Parole for First-Time Drug Offense
From your own link: In prescriptive grammar fewer is the prescribed comparative to be used in relation to grammatically plural, discretely quantifiable nouns, i.e., count nouns. The comparative less, it is argued, should be used when speaking of a grammatically singular noun (including mass nouns). Descriptive grammarians, however, are only concerned with the extent that this distinction applies in actual human usage.
"Fewer" is for counts; e.g. "fewer and fewer people know the difference between lose and loose". "Less" is for amounts, e.g. "I have less gasoline in my car than I did yesterday."
If you have fewer cornflakes in the box, you have less cereal.
BTW, the wiki article is incredibly badly written. Actually, I should have said "poorly written" but who the fuck cares as long as the meaning is clear?
I hope I've educated a few people.