If she had been arrested only for the files on her HDD that would be absurd, but she was connected with a terrorist group which they had foiled; the files on her HDD are practically incidental.
This is a case of MI5 doing a damn good job, not a big brother issue; infiltrate the terrorist organization, collect information, bring everyone involved in before the plot takes shape.
The mind boggles at the idea that terrorists, who plan to blow up/irradiate/poison civilians and don't plan to get away with it, shouldn't have any action taken against them until they've committed their crime.
You do realize that Joe User can't even get past step 1 above, right?
We're talking about *installing a driver* here. Does Joe User even understand what a driver is? Does Joe User know his graphics card isn't functioning to its full potential? Does Joe User know what graphics card he has? Could Joe User find nvidia.com and navigate through it to find the correct driver? Download the exe, specify the right settings on installation, ignore any scarey unsigned driver warnings, reboot the computer, configure the driver with the nvidia menu, then go and find and download DirectX and test that the driver is working?
Saying "Joe User couldn't install that driver on Linux" is a strange point to make, because I doubt they'd be able to install it on Windows either. That was my point; the perception that Linux is harder comes, I believe, from users who know Windows but not Linux, and so installing a driver on Windows seems so intuitive surely anyone could do it, and Linux seems unintuitive by contrast.
I'd be interested to find someone who learnt desktop computing on Linux, and doesn't use Windows, and see which they find easier to use.
My point about support also holds here: If Joe User is struggling to install an nvidia driver on Windows, I'm not sure where they would go. They couldn't go to MS for support without paying hefty fees (and damn, it's a maze trying to find the support. When EFS screwed up I couldn't find the support page anywhere.). At least on Linux there are communities with people always online ready to guide you through the process for free.
Next time you're in Ubuntu go to X-Chat, it'll open up freenode.net #ubuntu automatically, and ask for help installing the nvidia drivers. You'll get pointed in the direction of some thorough documentation if you're unlucky, and baby walked through the process if you're lucky.
I'm no Linux fanboy, I'm using XP right now and I use FreeBSD on my servers, but I still don't think that a newcomer to desktop computing would find Windows harder to use than Linux in general.
I'm doing a dual Computer Science and Physics degree, and I'm not concerned about the salary the Physics degree will bring, but the relatively exclusive areas where computer science and physics combine:
A course I took in computer science got me interested in logic gates and the inner workings of processors, and if I decide to pursue that avenue of computer science physics will be invaluable.
But the most obvious link between CS and Physics is quantum computing. If/when it becomes practical, expertise in physics and computer science will be required.
I know this is Slashdot, and the same discussions are re-hashed in every article about Linux, but this kind of broad sweeping statement needs to DIE.
Linux is not simpler than Windows. You don't simply push a button and suddenly everything works. I just installed Ubuntu on my laptop and had to fight a small war to get accelerated graphics working. I had to change the wireless network stuff so it used ndiswrapper instead of whatever it was the installer wanted to use to prevent it from constantly dropping connections.
I'm tired of giving examples just to have them shot down by people who think everybody is a hardware expert, has the contents of/etc/ memorized, and oh who cares because nobody needs accelerated graphics on Linux because there's no games to play anyway. If the average user (and my install was very average) needs to manually edit config files, then Linux is still failing at being simple to install and use. To your average user these are not small configuration issues, they are glaring *problems* with the software.
I google "ubuntu nvidia graphics", and this comes up: Unofficial Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft) Starter Guide.
It comes down to:
1) Add universal repositories in Synaptic package manager.
2) Type this in in the terminal: sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx nvidia-kernel-common
sudo nvidia-glx-config enable
3) Type Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to restart your display, or reboot if you prefer.
There are guides to the first and second steps too.
If you know Debian derived distros this is, of course, as second nature as a Windows user using the control panel.
you just reboot and pray
Funny, but I find myself doing this very thing with Linux (what's broken? Is it GDM, Gnome, Nautilus? Did one of the services break? Which one? Ah, screw it, just reboot.)
If GDM or a service crashes it will restart. If nautilus crashes you can restart it by clicking the Home folder button in the dropdown menu. At least when Nautilus crashes the taskbar doesn't go, along with IE, like it does with explorer.exe which leaves you staring at your wallpaper and hoping it'll start back up.
I don't like Linux fanboys, and I think the recent shifts away from 100% rabid anti-Windows posts are very positive. But I do think Linux is as easy to use for a newcomer as Windows, and it has communities built up around the specific distro you use which offer support for all the common problems.
It's silly to say Linux is hard to use and Windows is easy when you don't use Linux but are experienced with Windows. As far as someone who is completely inexperienced with computers goes I think would find a modern Linux distro just as easy to use as they would Windows.
Personally I find Linux and Windows just as easy to use for browsing the web etc, but when it comes to troubleshooting I find Linux much easier. This doesn't mean Windows is necessarily harder to use, I just know Linux better than Windows.
"Linux is very user friendly, it's just picky about its friends."
Yes, because you still have the unlimited right to yell, "FIRE!" in a crowded theater not on fire. Or incite a riot.
Face it, there is NO such thing as unlimited freedoms, and for good reason.
The difference is that you're forcing your views onto others. In this respect you can split speech into three areas;
The black area contains things like shouting into someone's ear, and violent protest.
The gray area contains things like peaceful street protests, which are disruptive to some degree but non-violent, or explicit guides to committing crimes.
The white area contains things like writing your beliefs on your website, or talking to people who want to listen.
We can argue about what degree of disruption is acceptable in the gray area, but the rest is black and white. This case of shutting down a website which no-one was forced to read is clearly in the white area (no matter what speech the site contained (child pornography is a whole other matter of course)); the websites shouldn't have been shut down.
This means PHP will run on.NET as an ASP.NET language. As a PHP4 guy with a lot of open source code invested in PHP I'm pretty excited about this too, but I would be surprised to not see at least major API changes, and at most some language changes too.
On OS X and BSD bash isn't installed by default, but the regular/bin/sh supports the standard extensions my script uses./usr/bin/env bash would break OS X and BSD.
In Eft bash is in/bin/bash, on OS X and FreeBSD bash isn't there, on some linux distros it's in/usr/local/bin/bash, etc, etc./bin/sh is the script people go to for portability, and before dash I had never known/bin/sh to not support extensions which are in every other bourne sh derivative.
On FreeBSD, OS X, pre-6.10 Ubuntu, every other Linux you can think of,/bin/sh supports more than POSIX (and on BSD and OS X/bin/sh isn't bash, it's BSD's own lightweight shell). The GNU toolkit as a whole already has loads of non-POSIX extras which any non-trivial script will use.
I assumed/bin/sh is a bourne shell which has the extensions which can be found in every other bourne shell there is. A sh and toolkit which is strictly POSIX only is very crippled indeed.
As a way to get some scripts to execute faster they changed from using bash as the default shell, to dash. dash breaks compatibility all over the place, none of the extensions found in practically every other bourne shell derivative are there. I first found out about this when someone using one of my scripts reported that 'read -s' (for reading passwords without echoing them) and 'trap function SIGINT' both give errors.
So if the scripts you write are going to be used on Eft, you have to either drop a lot of functionality, or tell users to replace #!/bin/sh with #!/bin/bash (which, of course, only works on Eft; it's/usr/bin/bash elsewhere,/usr/local/bin/bash in other places, bash doesn't come on OS X and BSD but/bin/sh works, etc).
A bit of a reckless move for a bit of extra speed. It would have been more respectable if the Ubuntu team had worked on optimizing bash instead of going for a crippled, but faster, shell.
The ability to close and continue sessions later removes a major reason why many people kept their browsers open for long periods of time. Before when you close your browser you had to open your tabs again and get it in the same configuration, now it goes to being the same as before immidiately.
So even if some leaks remain, the problems they cause are reduced.
The problem is more of a catch 22: The documentaries which try to make money are the ones the general public enjoys seeing, the ones which don't try to make money are usually of poor quality, and so don't get seen despite being free.
Loose change managed to hit the sweet spot where the documentary is of good enough quality to be watchable (but because of the grainy pictures it felt more like a slideshow, and don't get me started on the content). I think the software used to create the documentary, and the archive of free media which can be included in the documentary, is more important for free documentaries than the distribution method.
As Loose Change showed; if a free documentary is good enough it spreads via word of mouth.
Microsoft developed software called PatchGuard to keep 3rd party stuff out of the kernel, this is what McAffee and Symantec are complaining about.
It doesn't seem like the sort of software that would break things when taken away, it seems like the sort of software which you could toggle (though that would defeat the object of course).
The problem is solar panels are still environmentally messy. The energy they produce is clean, but making them requires very toxic, environmentally damaging chemicals, and Google will be needing a lot of it.
I'm not even going to address whether the EULA FUD is true, others have done that elsewhere.
1). If you can only back up your compressed music FROM YORU OWN CDs two times, what will you do after that? You'll probably rip it again. And again and so on as long as you need. Which means you're wasting and paying for electricity that you shouldn't need several times over. Perhaps in the end it only costs each user $5 of electricity to re-rip their entire CD collection. But considering all the MS users, that's a lot of wasted electricity, and a lot of extra pollution.
CD players need to read the CD every time, where's the environmental outcry about that?
2). Two Hardware upgrades: Most people will say "fuck that" and go buy a new computer. What will they do with the old one? Toss it away into their dumpster. The computer will end up in some dump seeping nasty chemicals into the ground. They'll buy a new computer (more environementally harmful chemicals used to make the plastic, RAM, and especially CPU) and be happy for another two upgrades, after which they'll go buy another computer etc etc.
If this were true maybe it would discourage people from buying upgrades, and less harmful chemicals would need to be used.
3). If businesses pay more, that'll be less money they can pay their workers, which means there's less income distribution. More and more $$$ goes to MS [needlessly] and sits in the hands a few elite managers.
If a company actually fires workers so they can buy Windows you have to wonder how useful those workers were.
If this wasn't modded Insightful I'd swear it was a joke..
That's like saying "Isn't it lucky we live on a planet which has water to drink!"; it's not "lucky", we could only have evolved on a planet which had water to drink.
'digital camera -sale -site:.com'; just keep excluding results until you're left with what you want.
The only way to get accurate, personalized results from a flexible search engine is to learn at least some basic query syntax. I don't want digitalcameras.google.com, laptops.google.com, anythingyoucanthinkof.google.com to walk me through making common searches, because it's more effective, flexible and easier to just add on a few extra clauses yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
And I thought stamp collectors were weird.
If she had been arrested only for the files on her HDD that would be absurd, but she was connected with a terrorist group which they had foiled; the files on her HDD are practically incidental.
This is a case of MI5 doing a damn good job, not a big brother issue; infiltrate the terrorist organization, collect information, bring everyone involved in before the plot takes shape.
The mind boggles at the idea that terrorists, who plan to blow up/irradiate/poison civilians and don't plan to get away with it, shouldn't have any action taken against them until they've committed their crime.
You do realize that Joe User can't even get past step 1 above, right?
We're talking about *installing a driver* here. Does Joe User even understand what a driver is? Does Joe User know his graphics card isn't functioning to its full potential? Does Joe User know what graphics card he has? Could Joe User find nvidia.com and navigate through it to find the correct driver? Download the exe, specify the right settings on installation, ignore any scarey unsigned driver warnings, reboot the computer, configure the driver with the nvidia menu, then go and find and download DirectX and test that the driver is working?
Saying "Joe User couldn't install that driver on Linux" is a strange point to make, because I doubt they'd be able to install it on Windows either. That was my point; the perception that Linux is harder comes, I believe, from users who know Windows but not Linux, and so installing a driver on Windows seems so intuitive surely anyone could do it, and Linux seems unintuitive by contrast.
I'd be interested to find someone who learnt desktop computing on Linux, and doesn't use Windows, and see which they find easier to use.
My point about support also holds here: If Joe User is struggling to install an nvidia driver on Windows, I'm not sure where they would go. They couldn't go to MS for support without paying hefty fees (and damn, it's a maze trying to find the support. When EFS screwed up I couldn't find the support page anywhere.). At least on Linux there are communities with people always online ready to guide you through the process for free.
Next time you're in Ubuntu go to X-Chat, it'll open up freenode.net #ubuntu automatically, and ask for help installing the nvidia drivers. You'll get pointed in the direction of some thorough documentation if you're unlucky, and baby walked through the process if you're lucky.
I'm no Linux fanboy, I'm using XP right now and I use FreeBSD on my servers, but I still don't think that a newcomer to desktop computing would find Windows harder to use than Linux in general.
I'm doing a dual Computer Science and Physics degree, and I'm not concerned about the salary the Physics degree will bring, but the relatively exclusive areas where computer science and physics combine:
A course I took in computer science got me interested in logic gates and the inner workings of processors, and if I decide to pursue that avenue of computer science physics will be invaluable.
But the most obvious link between CS and Physics is quantum computing. If/when it becomes practical, expertise in physics and computer science will be required.
I google "ubuntu nvidia graphics", and this comes up: Unofficial Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft) Starter Guide.
It comes down to:
1) Add universal repositories in Synaptic package manager.
2) Type this in in the terminal:
sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx nvidia-kernel-common
sudo nvidia-glx-config enable
3) Type Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to restart your display, or reboot if you prefer.
There are guides to the first and second steps too.
If you know Debian derived distros this is, of course, as second nature as a Windows user using the control panel.
If GDM or a service crashes it will restart. If nautilus crashes you can restart it by clicking the Home folder button in the dropdown menu. At least when Nautilus crashes the taskbar doesn't go, along with IE, like it does with explorer.exe which leaves you staring at your wallpaper and hoping it'll start back up.
I don't like Linux fanboys, and I think the recent shifts away from 100% rabid anti-Windows posts are very positive. But I do think Linux is as easy to use for a newcomer as Windows, and it has communities built up around the specific distro you use which offer support for all the common problems.
It's silly to say Linux is hard to use and Windows is easy when you don't use Linux but are experienced with Windows. As far as someone who is completely inexperienced with computers goes I think would find a modern Linux distro just as easy to use as they would Windows.
Personally I find Linux and Windows just as easy to use for browsing the web etc, but when it comes to troubleshooting I find Linux much easier. This doesn't mean Windows is necessarily harder to use, I just know Linux better than Windows.
"Linux is very user friendly, it's just picky about its friends."
I hear it's patent pending.
The difference is that you're forcing your views onto others. In this respect you can split speech into three areas;
We can argue about what degree of disruption is acceptable in the gray area, but the rest is black and white. This case of shutting down a website which no-one was forced to read is clearly in the white area (no matter what speech the site contained (child pornography is a whole other matter of course)); the websites shouldn't have been shut down.
This means PHP will run on .NET as an ASP.NET language. As a PHP4 guy with a lot of open source code invested in PHP I'm pretty excited about this too, but I would be surprised to not see at least major API changes, and at most some language changes too.
PHP.NET is long overdue though, kudos MS!
On OS X and BSD bash isn't installed by default, but the regular /bin/sh supports the standard extensions my script uses. /usr/bin/env bash would break OS X and BSD.
In Eft bash is in /bin/bash, on OS X and FreeBSD bash isn't there, on some linux distros it's in /usr/local/bin/bash, etc, etc. /bin/sh is the script people go to for portability, and before dash I had never known /bin/sh to not support extensions which are in every other bourne sh derivative.
On FreeBSD, OS X, pre-6.10 Ubuntu, every other Linux you can think of, /bin/sh supports more than POSIX (and on BSD and OS X /bin/sh isn't bash, it's BSD's own lightweight shell). The GNU toolkit as a whole already has loads of non-POSIX extras which any non-trivial script will use.
/bin/sh is a bourne shell which has the extensions which can be found in every other bourne shell there is. A sh and toolkit which is strictly POSIX only is very crippled indeed.
I assumed
I used BSD's standard sh to write the script, and it works on all bourne shell derivatives I've tried; dash is the first it's ever failed to work on.
As a way to get some scripts to execute faster they changed from using bash as the default shell, to dash. dash breaks compatibility all over the place, none of the extensions found in practically every other bourne shell derivative are there. I first found out about this when someone using one of my scripts reported that 'read -s' (for reading passwords without echoing them) and 'trap function SIGINT' both give errors.
/usr/bin/bash elsewhere, /usr/local/bin/bash in other places, bash doesn't come on OS X and BSD but /bin/sh works, etc).
So if the scripts you write are going to be used on Eft, you have to either drop a lot of functionality, or tell users to replace #!/bin/sh with #!/bin/bash (which, of course, only works on Eft; it's
A bit of a reckless move for a bit of extra speed. It would have been more respectable if the Ubuntu team had worked on optimizing bash instead of going for a crippled, but faster, shell.
The ability to close and continue sessions later removes a major reason why many people kept their browsers open for long periods of time. Before when you close your browser you had to open your tabs again and get it in the same configuration, now it goes to being the same as before immidiately.
So even if some leaks remain, the problems they cause are reduced.
Having moved from England I love it here in Australia, and I've found the people here to generally be much better informed than those in England.
The problem is more of a catch 22: The documentaries which try to make money are the ones the general public enjoys seeing, the ones which don't try to make money are usually of poor quality, and so don't get seen despite being free.
Loose change managed to hit the sweet spot where the documentary is of good enough quality to be watchable (but because of the grainy pictures it felt more like a slideshow, and don't get me started on the content). I think the software used to create the documentary, and the archive of free media which can be included in the documentary, is more important for free documentaries than the distribution method.
As Loose Change showed; if a free documentary is good enough it spreads via word of mouth.
I'm not saying that this isn't a step in the right direction, I'm just pointing out that it's not entirely guilt-free energy..
Microsoft developed software called PatchGuard to keep 3rd party stuff out of the kernel, this is what McAffee and Symantec are complaining about.
It doesn't seem like the sort of software that would break things when taken away, it seems like the sort of software which you could toggle (though that would defeat the object of course).
The problem is solar panels are still environmentally messy. The energy they produce is clean, but making them requires very toxic, environmentally damaging chemicals, and Google will be needing a lot of it.
CD players need to read the CD every time, where's the environmental outcry about that?
If this were true maybe it would discourage people from buying upgrades, and less harmful chemicals would need to be used.
If a company actually fires workers so they can buy Windows you have to wonder how useful those workers were.
If this wasn't modded Insightful I'd swear it was a joke..
"Until" doesn't imply that it'll eventually happen. "I'll use the phrase "innocent until proven guilty" until Hell freezes over", for example.
That's like saying "Isn't it lucky we live on a planet which has water to drink!"; it's not "lucky", we could only have evolved on a planet which had water to drink.
'digital camera -sale -site:.com'; just keep excluding results until you're left with what you want.
The only way to get accurate, personalized results from a flexible search engine is to learn at least some basic query syntax. I don't want digitalcameras.google.com, laptops.google.com, anythingyoucanthinkof.google.com to walk me through making common searches, because it's more effective, flexible and easier to just add on a few extra clauses yourself.
That would require a great deal of knowledge about the bacteria; mostly their metabolism and food sources.
Exactly. What would be especially amazing is if he could quickly tell you the nth decimal of pi, with n being a random number from 1 to 100,000.