I seem to recall that from about 2006 to 2008 all I heard about was the health benefits of tea, especially green tea. (Remember 'superfoods' and how 'antioxidants' were/are the solution to all health woes?) A quick google search for 'health benefits green tea' yields just shy of 6 million results. Is it just that none of these articles appeared on slashdot that's causing your conspira-spidey sense to tingle?
I have to agree that this post sounds as though posted from someone that has never used Mandriva. I run Ubuntu on one machine and Mandriva 2006 on the other and far too often I find myself preferring Mandriva. I'm no n00b, and spend the bulk of my time in bash, but the administrative tools (and installation process) really are quite a bit ahead of Ubuntu's. Using urpmi, you have most the power of apt-get available as well. In terms of free distros, Ubuntu is ahead in that it will inform you when new updates are ready...you don't find yourself having to change package mirrors as often as you do with Mandriva's free servers. Additionally, apt-get is much faster than urpmi. But to say Mandriva is dead and Ubuntu is the best is ludicrous and uninformed. Don't forget, as well as Mark Shuttleworth has guided Ubuntu thus far, it's still a pretty new distro, and has plenty of time to improve.
I'm pretty excited to read about parallel init in the new Mandriva. Maybe I'll take this distro for a test drive soon. But like everything else in life, "don't knock it till you try it."
(Side note: As a company, I'm not too fond of Mandriva. The way they ousted the original head of the company is reprehensible, and obviously I like what Ubuntu does for the community much better than I like the actions of Mandriva.)
This was my initial thought when reading the headline. If the "problem" with FireFox is that it doesn't incorporate enough social, "web 2.0" tools, then by the author's reasoning Flock should have a sizeable chunk of the browser market by now. (I actually don't know how Flock reports its User-Agent in HTTP headers, does it display the same FireFox?). Regardless, I agree with jalefkowit that this is probably not the solution. In fact, most firefox users like the slim-downed browser that gets better with whatever extensions they want. The power isn't that it comes with all these tools, its that you can put them in if you want. More likely (if there is really large market out there for such a product), Mozilla (or any third-party really) could provide a firefox bundle that includes many social extensions pre-installed and generally-configured.
Actually, as an Oregonian myself, I think we are absolutely California's Canada. When everyone gets fed up with California, they move to Oregon...completely ignoring the giant "Welcome to Oregon now Go Home" sign.
At Oregon State we used robots (tekbots) in many EE and CS classes. In my experience, it was terrible as a freshman, as those of us without prior knowledge in electronics were completely clueless as to how to debug them. The first version we built was very complex, yet was required for the course. The longer your robot didn't work properly, the more your grade would inevitably suffer. The TAs were thrilled with having to debug everyone's robots all the time, too (of course, some 90% of this was bad soldering).
Later classes in college, when we started diving into Assembly, we got an updated robot kit. This updated kit included addons to the original robot. If you didn't have an original robot, or it didn't work, welcome back to square one where you had to rebuild it. Oh, and robots are cheap in neither price nor labor. At least at this point in college, we were using the robots to execute assembly; there was an immediately practical use for them.
I think robots can be useful as an aid, but really not much moreso than a simulator. They have the coolness factor, but that's about it...at least for basic undergrad education.
My understanding of MySQL licensing is that unless you're non-commercial (or non-profit?), MySQL is in fact _not_ free. You can "beat the price" with, say, PostgreSQL. I'm currently working in an organization that's beginning to use MySQL for new web sites and applications and some of the other posts on this issue are correct: MySQL is still not fully-featured, high-availability features have a long way to go, etc. Also, I would love to be able to say "that'll get 'er done" and finish up my work. Unfortunately, if you can't sell management on the fact that it'll get the job done _and_ get it done to the desired specifications, the "get 'er done" part isn't all that's important.
Well, I wanted to do a new post, but in a shining moment of ingenuity couldn't find the 'post new comment' link.
Regardless, one of the issues here (aside from the egregious abuse of civil liberties and privacy) is the fact that taxpayer money is being used to mine this extraordinary amount of data, store it, maintain it, and keep it up to date. That is, we're spending money to the government to spy on us using a program we didn't even know about.
One of the "hilarious" arguments the goverment is giving is that they're not collecting names or addresses, just phone numbers. If only there were someway to lookup name and address phone a phone number. Besides, how do we know they're not recording more than this? All we have is their word.
Here's the part that really gets me. Citizens are apparently OK with this because what's a little lack of privacy for the sake of national security. Have we heard yet at all how this database is going to help combat terrorism? Spying on everyone might help I suppose, but what's the plan? I wish I worked for an organization where I could get paid do the work first and only justify it later if the boss takes some heat.
I didn't realize impossibility could be expressed as a percent. How do the scales of impossibility and possibility measure up? If something is 40% impossible, is it then 60% possible?:-) Just being a smart-ass...
I view the notion of e-books analogous to the upcoming (and present) movie format wars. Right now, I may own a movie on a format as old as VHS. Some I have on DVD. Maybe I want PSP or iTunes versions. If I want the ability to watch ONE movie on all of the aforementioned hardware players, I have to buy N copies of it, once per format.
Books strike me as similar. Through most publishers, you can _either_ buy the e-book format or the physical copy; and you only have rights to one format. Especially in the case of books, you should be purchasing a specific collection of organized information, not the medium that contains it. I would gladly buy an e-book version if the physical book were shipped to me later.
Aside from this, the notion of buying "used" e-books is almost nonsensical. However, for students, used textbooks have a huge market, and involve the savings of quite a bit of money. If I purchase a book in electronic format for almost (if not the same) price, I cannot recover any of that cost at a later date.
Lastly, most of us/.-ers sit around the computer all day at "work." Sometimes, I just want to divorce myself from a desk and a computer for a while. Even if it is a technical book or manual, it's nice to be able to just thumb through it on the couch.
Slashdot Mirror
I seem to recall that from about 2006 to 2008 all I heard about was the health benefits of tea, especially green tea. (Remember 'superfoods' and how 'antioxidants' were/are the solution to all health woes?) A quick google search for 'health benefits green tea' yields just shy of 6 million results. Is it just that none of these articles appeared on slashdot that's causing your conspira-spidey sense to tingle?
I have to agree that this post sounds as though posted from someone that has never used Mandriva. I run Ubuntu on one machine and Mandriva 2006 on the other and far too often I find myself preferring Mandriva. I'm no n00b, and spend the bulk of my time in bash, but the administrative tools (and installation process) really are quite a bit ahead of Ubuntu's. Using urpmi, you have most the power of apt-get available as well. In terms of free distros, Ubuntu is ahead in that it will inform you when new updates are ready...you don't find yourself having to change package mirrors as often as you do with Mandriva's free servers. Additionally, apt-get is much faster than urpmi. But to say Mandriva is dead and Ubuntu is the best is ludicrous and uninformed. Don't forget, as well as Mark Shuttleworth has guided Ubuntu thus far, it's still a pretty new distro, and has plenty of time to improve.
I'm pretty excited to read about parallel init in the new Mandriva. Maybe I'll take this distro for a test drive soon. But like everything else in life, "don't knock it till you try it."
(Side note: As a company, I'm not too fond of Mandriva. The way they ousted the original head of the company is reprehensible, and obviously I like what Ubuntu does for the community much better than I like the actions of Mandriva.)
This was my initial thought when reading the headline. If the "problem" with FireFox is that it doesn't incorporate enough social, "web 2.0" tools, then by the author's reasoning Flock should have a sizeable chunk of the browser market by now. (I actually don't know how Flock reports its User-Agent in HTTP headers, does it display the same FireFox?). Regardless, I agree with jalefkowit that this is probably not the solution. In fact, most firefox users like the slim-downed browser that gets better with whatever extensions they want. The power isn't that it comes with all these tools, its that you can put them in if you want.
More likely (if there is really large market out there for such a product), Mozilla (or any third-party really) could provide a firefox bundle that includes many social extensions pre-installed and generally-configured.
Actually, as an Oregonian myself, I think we are absolutely California's Canada. When everyone gets fed up with California, they move to Oregon...completely ignoring the giant "Welcome to Oregon now Go Home" sign.
At Oregon State we used robots (tekbots) in many EE and CS classes. In my experience, it was terrible as a freshman, as those of us without prior knowledge in electronics were completely clueless as to how to debug them. The first version we built was very complex, yet was required for the course. The longer your robot didn't work properly, the more your grade would inevitably suffer. The TAs were thrilled with having to debug everyone's robots all the time, too (of course, some 90% of this was bad soldering). Later classes in college, when we started diving into Assembly, we got an updated robot kit. This updated kit included addons to the original robot. If you didn't have an original robot, or it didn't work, welcome back to square one where you had to rebuild it. Oh, and robots are cheap in neither price nor labor. At least at this point in college, we were using the robots to execute assembly; there was an immediately practical use for them. I think robots can be useful as an aid, but really not much moreso than a simulator. They have the coolness factor, but that's about it...at least for basic undergrad education.
My understanding of MySQL licensing is that unless you're non-commercial (or non-profit?), MySQL is in fact _not_ free. You can "beat the price" with, say, PostgreSQL. I'm currently working in an organization that's beginning to use MySQL for new web sites and applications and some of the other posts on this issue are correct: MySQL is still not fully-featured, high-availability features have a long way to go, etc.
Also, I would love to be able to say "that'll get 'er done" and finish up my work. Unfortunately, if you can't sell management on the fact that it'll get the job done _and_ get it done to the desired specifications, the "get 'er done" part isn't all that's important.
Well, I wanted to do a new post, but in a shining moment of ingenuity couldn't find the 'post new comment' link.
Regardless, one of the issues here (aside from the egregious abuse of civil liberties and privacy) is the fact that taxpayer money is being used to mine this extraordinary amount of data, store it, maintain it, and keep it up to date. That is, we're spending money to the government to spy on us using a program we didn't even know about.
One of the "hilarious" arguments the goverment is giving is that they're not collecting names or addresses, just phone numbers. If only there were some way to lookup name and address phone a phone number. Besides, how do we know they're not recording more than this? All we have is their word.
Here's the part that really gets me. Citizens are apparently OK with this because what's a little lack of privacy for the sake of national security. Have we heard yet at all how this database is going to help combat terrorism? Spying on everyone might help I suppose, but what's the plan? I wish I worked for an organization where I could get paid do the work first and only justify it later if the boss takes some heat.
I didn't realize impossibility could be expressed as a percent. How do the scales of impossibility and possibility measure up? If something is 40% impossible, is it then 60% possible? :-) Just being a smart-ass...
I view the notion of e-books analogous to the upcoming (and present) movie format wars. Right now, I may own a movie on a format as old as VHS. Some I have on DVD. Maybe I want PSP or iTunes versions. If I want the ability to watch ONE movie on all of the aforementioned hardware players, I have to buy N copies of it, once per format.
/.-ers sit around the computer all day at "work." Sometimes, I just want to divorce myself from a desk and a computer for a while. Even if it is a technical book or manual, it's nice to be able to just thumb through it on the couch.
Books strike me as similar. Through most publishers, you can _either_ buy the e-book format or the physical copy; and you only have rights to one format. Especially in the case of books, you should be purchasing a specific collection of organized information, not the medium that contains it. I would gladly buy an e-book version if the physical book were shipped to me later.
Aside from this, the notion of buying "used" e-books is almost nonsensical. However, for students, used textbooks have a huge market, and involve the savings of quite a bit of money. If I purchase a book in electronic format for almost (if not the same) price, I cannot recover any of that cost at a later date.
Lastly, most of us