I found out because AT&T texted me to let me know that my iphone could now get free WiFi... But they aren't supposed to know i even have one... i don't have an iPhone plan, i bought my original iPhone from apple, then took it home and unlocked/activated it without ever agreeing to a new contract. Looks like they're recognizing my IMEI... I really wish i could change that, but none of the programs seem to work with the new firmwares!:-/ The worst part is, since they know i have an iPhone, they block MMS even with a hacked phone running an MMS program, but even though they know i have an iPhone, i don't get visual voicemail! -Taylor
If you think back further, apple orchards started silicon valley.
When we get right down to it, it was an expedition funded by the King of Spain which made Silicon Valley possible. And since the King of Spain ruled by the divine right of kings, backed by the catholic church, the Pope should get half the credit.
So, it was an absolute monarch and a leader of a state religion who began Silicon Valley - and in fact, all of American corporations. Chew on that, libertarians:).
I don't understand that whole "and when you are trying to get the internet working on Linux" business you are speaking of.
Honestly, I have been using Ubuntu since 5.04 and on a variety of laptops. I have never (not once!) had to work in some special way to "get the Internet working". It always just worked, right out of the box.
Didn't have to use the command line to go online. Not once.
So, just out of curiosity: When was the last time you tried "to get the Internet working on Linux"? Which distro? Really would like to know...
I think 6.10, 7.04, and 7.10 Then i stopped trying. Part of the problem was that my wireless card wasn't officially supported, but a bunch of people claimed to get it to work, and it was trying to do that that was such a pain, because they all tell you to type a bunch of seemingly random stuff into the terminal and if one thing about your situation is different, you can't look over a menu and try different similar things. The weird thing is that in one of the versions (7.04 i think) recognized it, but then would freeze every time upon trying to discover wireless networks. I finally bought a nice linksys card that i knew was supported, but i was so turned off from linux by then that i stopped caring.
I also tried installing ubuntu in a virtual machine (vmware) and that was an huge unsuccessful waste of time. I am pretty weary of using linux for much now. I may try 8.10, i dunno. I'll have to see what NTFS support is like, because everything i have is NTFS, and i don't have much use for FAT32 because i have lots of files over 4gigs.
Don't get me wrong, i absolutely love the idea of linux, i just think the people coding it don't realize that the average user never, ever wants to have to remember the full path to anything, and never wants to remember a bunch of codes for stuff. In fact i think the worst part isn't the special codes but having to type full paths for things, that blows. -Taylor
I thought, we call it "Silicon Valley" — and it didn't need government sponsorship to come into being...
Hmm, I think you're forgetting that if you trace back further Silicon Valley has connections with the Space and Military programs - here and here. I think I'd conclude that there's a complex set of influences favoring the creation of Silicon Valley.
But, hey, don't let me get in the way of a good "private industry is inherently more efficient" fantasy...
If you think back further, apple orchards started silicon valley. -Taylor
Those aren't even equivalent. "vi/etc/network/interfaces;;ifdown eth0;ifup eth0;" would make it permanent like the other one.
Wow, that's terrible, i would way rather go through those menu options than remember all those paths and that syntax, thats insane.
I can see how typing all that might be useful once you know it, but there is just no way a "normal" person would ever, ever want to have to learn all that stuff, and thats why linux adoption is terrible. And honestly it's the people who don't realize how terrible that kind of thing is for the normal user that keeps linux difficult to use.
I know that things like ubuntu add lots of nice menus now for things, and that its a lot better than it has been, and i also know that you can't make a menu for EVERY possible task, but you could certainly make menus for *nearly* every task. That may sound difficult, but windows manages to do it. Sure there are times where you need to pull up the command line in windows, but its extremely rare. As another person said, it's just a different way of thinking, but i think for the casual users, menus are a lot better, and that's what's stopping linux adoption. You just need to have both. -Taylor
My grandmother could use spotlight. She won't be able to use find, locate and grep.
And that is the target audience of Shuttleworth's point: the Computer Illiterates.
I agree, everyone on here acts like linux is way better because it's had this stuff for ages but i STILL can't use most of it because it requires spending hours online searching for answers (and when you're trying to get the internet working in linux on a dual boot machine, it's hell... you have to reboot to something else, search for answers, reboot to linux, try it, forget what you had to do, reboot...)
I don't really need to try hard to make the argument because you guys either already know what i mean or you pretend like it's easy ("duh just type ~rf - m" or something something, because yeah, a menu to do that would kill someone).
Anyway, yeah, spotlight is probably nice. Google desktop is also awesome. I especially like being able to just double tap control to bring up the search, type what i want, it's right there.
Anyway, now that i've pissed off everyone... *hides* -Taylor
And special landing rights at Moffet? Can't go a few extra miles out of SJA? Oh, right, it needs to be near their little Boeing something.
Umm... They already have rights to use Moffet field, which is a good business deal since it never gets used otherwise and it's a perfectly good airport, its MUCH closer to them, and traffic on 101 to the airport (which is SJC, not SJA) totally sucks pretty much all the time.
If they need to get on a plane, having their own airport nearby probably saves them an hour or two every time they have to go somewhere, and probably an hour or so again when they come back.
When a company is that big, 3 hours of CEO's time is actually worth what it costs them to set that up, so it's actually a good business decision.
If you don't think they should have a fighter jet i can't blame you, but don't knock the one sensible part of this - having a good airport as close as possible. -Taylor
I was thinking the same thing, as im sure many people are. With the economy in the toilet, the political landscape ablaze, unemployment jumping, terrible gas prices and millions wondering if their 401K plans haven't been an enormous waste of time and money, Larry and Sergey have shown unquestionably that they are utterly out of touch.
I don't mind saying that it's offensive enough to me to pull out of the Google cloud completely. They could be doing incredibly helpful things with their billions, and instead they just buy toys.
You should be ashamed of yourselves, google execs.
Yeah, i mean SERIOUSLY. They should give ME the money so that i can buy a jet instead. -Taylor
Someone has to break it out into a DRM-free format to start with, free media doesn't just magically appear on the internet...
Granted, a lot of stuff is leaked in the pre-DRM stage by someone in the industry, but failing that, someone will need to take protected stuff and set it free for the rest of us.
Umm... rip a CD? I have a feeling things are going to be avaliable on CD for a while. Hell, you can still buy Vinyls. -Taylor
I hate to break it to ya, but you never "purchased" the song to begin with. You bought a "license" to play it.
They still OWN the song.
Well, more specifically, i bought a license to listen to the song. Why can't i listen to it using whatever device i want?
Sure i don't own the rights to redistribute the song, but that's not what i want. I want to be able to buy a piece of media, and then play it on my ipod, or my xbox, or my car stereo that has USB input, or some device 50 years from now in god-knows what format.
Don't you have friends with old Beetles records from 40 or so years ago? Can you imagine what it would have been like if they had DRM? Something would have gone wrong and they would have had to re-purchase the *rights* to listen to those songs probably once every 5 to ten years. Do you want to pay for the same song 20 times over your lifetime? I don't fucking want to. -Taylor
Why do I get a "Virus Detected" from Avast when I try to go to that site?:)
Really? Maybe avast is crazy, i don't get any errors and the company is indeed legitimate. Maybe their server got hacked but they are just a little surplus store, they wouldn't do any harm on purpose. I don't really like AVAST anyway... -Taylor
also, i think they just went out of business but i'm not sure: http://www.trianglemachinery.com/ i'm not sure where you're located though, you kinda need to be there to know what to get. surplus places are good when you're making custom art-like stuff. -Taylor
Buying a computer system you cannot afford to properly use is crazy. Yes, some people are crazy, and those crazy people are going to lose data, but there's no sense in defending it.
Well, i guess i'm crazy, i have 3TB of space on my home PC, and no way to back it all up offsite. I do have some important folders from one drive automatically copy to another drive periodically, so if one drive dies the other will be okay, but if i lose them both or the place burns down or i get a nasty virus, it's all going to hell. Most of my space is taken up by pirated... err... backed up... HD movies. And porn, lots of porn. Either way, i'm not too worried if i lose that, it's just the things i back up i really care about. The thing is, i was going to RAID 3 of the drives into a secure 1TB array, but now i hear all these issues with RAID and i worry that it may be WORSE than just copying over the files periodically. I want a DROBO but those are expensive as hell.
This article has inspired me to look into Tape Backup but i worry that it's not cost effective (i haven't looked yet).
I should fill up some tapes with a few hundred gigs of porn, write "confidential" on them, and stash them in a bag, under some bush, across the street from HP near my apartment. I'm sure some curious person would come looking, only to discover their contents and wonder why the hell someone went to all that trouble....
...Right now the worst somebody could do is take out my computer. I could deal with that, given enough time and resources. However, dealing with the loss of my computer requires "light" and "coffee". You take that away from me and I am really screwed. Without my computer I am bereft of all the wonderful porn on the internet. Of course, I have a backup plan that involves a rather large library of tapes and magazines. Once again, I still need light!...
I have a backup plan that involves an attractive woman. And some rope. And maybe a shovel and some lyme for when i'm done. -Taylor
It doesn't get fewer searches. It gets less *traffic*.
Well, duh. Yahoo is serving out (carefully HTML-formatted) lists of URLs. YouTube is serving out videos. Which one do you suppose is generating more bytes of traffic?
I suppose that depends on how they define traffic? I didn't RTFA but i'd be curious... -Taylor
How the hell do you pronounce the durn thing? I've always been calling it the "Triple-E", but saying "an Triple-E" isn't proper English. So what is it? E e e? A drawn-out e? Something else?
Actually, i never really noticed how many E's were in it, i just call it the E-E-PC. Kind of wrong, but if you look at it like E-ee-PC, it works, and it sounds good. -Taylor
The story isn't bogus... If a general purpose search site that searches the whole web, and used to be number one, now gets fewer searches than a single-purpose video search site, it really underscores how low yahoo has fallen! -Taylor
My windows vista reports its version number as version 6 in the command prompts when you ask it. Looks like windows 7 is version 7 to me.
Where do you guys (slashdot, not the parent) get your facts? The current builds are probably based off of vista or something, so they may still be 6.1, but i imagine Win 7 will be version 7, as planned. -Taylor
Slashdot Mirror
Visual voicemail is an AT&T service, so why would you expect get it with a different provider?
I'm mortified about the cake incident. Simply mortified!
No, i have AT&T, just not an iPhone plan. I already had a contract with a data package and i didn't feel like agreeing to a new contract.
-Taylor
I found out because AT&T texted me to let me know that my iphone could now get free WiFi... But they aren't supposed to know i even have one... i don't have an iPhone plan, i bought my original iPhone from apple, then took it home and unlocked/activated it without ever agreeing to a new contract. Looks like they're recognizing my IMEI... I really wish i could change that, but none of the programs seem to work with the new firmwares! :-/
The worst part is, since they know i have an iPhone, they block MMS even with a hacked phone running an MMS program, but even though they know i have an iPhone, i don't get visual voicemail!
-Taylor
Can it drive my car like james bond's phone?
Or better yet, Dr. Horrible's?
Well, all the information to develop such a thing is freely avaliable, so, in a way, yes, it can.
-Taylor
When we get right down to it, it was an expedition funded by the King of Spain which made Silicon Valley possible. And since the King of Spain ruled by the divine right of kings, backed by the catholic church, the Pope should get half the credit.
So, it was an absolute monarch and a leader of a state religion who began Silicon Valley - and in fact, all of American corporations. Chew on that, libertarians :).
Haha, excellent.
-Taylor
I don't understand that whole "and when you are trying to get the internet working on Linux" business you are speaking of.
Honestly, I have been using Ubuntu since 5.04 and on a variety of laptops. I have never (not once!) had to work in some special way to "get the Internet working". It always just worked, right out of the box.
Didn't have to use the command line to go online. Not once.
So, just out of curiosity: When was the last time you tried "to get the Internet working on Linux"? Which distro? Really would like to know...
I think 6.10, 7.04, and 7.10
Then i stopped trying.
Part of the problem was that my wireless card wasn't officially supported, but a bunch of people claimed to get it to work, and it was trying to do that that was such a pain, because they all tell you to type a bunch of seemingly random stuff into the terminal and if one thing about your situation is different, you can't look over a menu and try different similar things. The weird thing is that in one of the versions (7.04 i think) recognized it, but then would freeze every time upon trying to discover wireless networks. I finally bought a nice linksys card that i knew was supported, but i was so turned off from linux by then that i stopped caring.
I also tried installing ubuntu in a virtual machine (vmware) and that was an huge unsuccessful waste of time. I am pretty weary of using linux for much now. I may try 8.10, i dunno. I'll have to see what NTFS support is like, because everything i have is NTFS, and i don't have much use for FAT32 because i have lots of files over 4gigs.
Don't get me wrong, i absolutely love the idea of linux, i just think the people coding it don't realize that the average user never, ever wants to have to remember the full path to anything, and never wants to remember a bunch of codes for stuff.
In fact i think the worst part isn't the special codes but having to type full paths for things, that blows.
-Taylor
I thought, we call it "Silicon Valley" — and it didn't need government sponsorship to come into being...
Hmm, I think you're forgetting that if you trace back further Silicon Valley has connections with the Space and Military programs - here and here. I think I'd conclude that there's a complex set of influences favoring the creation of Silicon Valley.
But, hey, don't let me get in the way of a good "private industry is inherently more efficient" fantasy...
If you think back further, apple orchards started silicon valley.
-Taylor
Those aren't even equivalent. /etc/network/interfaces;;ifdown eth0;ifup eth0;" would make it permanent like the other one.
"vi
Wow, that's terrible, i would way rather go through those menu options than remember all those paths and that syntax, thats insane.
I can see how typing all that might be useful once you know it, but there is just no way a "normal" person would ever, ever want to have to learn all that stuff, and thats why linux adoption is terrible. And honestly it's the people who don't realize how terrible that kind of thing is for the normal user that keeps linux difficult to use.
I know that things like ubuntu add lots of nice menus now for things, and that its a lot better than it has been, and i also know that you can't make a menu for EVERY possible task, but you could certainly make menus for *nearly* every task. That may sound difficult, but windows manages to do it. Sure there are times where you need to pull up the command line in windows, but its extremely rare. As another person said, it's just a different way of thinking, but i think for the casual users, menus are a lot better, and that's what's stopping linux adoption. You just need to have both.
-Taylor
You don't get it.
My grandmother could use spotlight. She won't be able to use find, locate and grep.
And that is the target audience of Shuttleworth's point: the Computer Illiterates.
I agree, everyone on here acts like linux is way better because it's had this stuff for ages but i STILL can't use most of it because it requires spending hours online searching for answers (and when you're trying to get the internet working in linux on a dual boot machine, it's hell... you have to reboot to something else, search for answers, reboot to linux, try it, forget what you had to do, reboot...)
I don't really need to try hard to make the argument because you guys either already know what i mean or you pretend like it's easy ("duh just type ~rf - m" or something something, because yeah, a menu to do that would kill someone).
Anyway, yeah, spotlight is probably nice. Google desktop is also awesome. I especially like being able to just double tap control to bring up the search, type what i want, it's right there.
Anyway, now that i've pissed off everyone...
*hides*
-Taylor
And special landing rights at Moffet? Can't go a few extra miles out of SJA? Oh, right, it needs to be near their little Boeing something.
Umm... They already have rights to use Moffet field, which is a good business deal since it never gets used otherwise and it's a perfectly good airport, its MUCH closer to them, and traffic on 101 to the airport (which is SJC, not SJA) totally sucks pretty much all the time.
If they need to get on a plane, having their own airport nearby probably saves them an hour or two every time they have to go somewhere, and probably an hour or so again when they come back.
When a company is that big, 3 hours of CEO's time is actually worth what it costs them to set that up, so it's actually a good business decision.
If you don't think they should have a fighter jet i can't blame you, but don't knock the one sensible part of this - having a good airport as close as possible.
-Taylor
I was thinking the same thing, as im sure many people are. With the economy in the toilet, the political landscape ablaze, unemployment jumping, terrible gas prices and millions wondering if their 401K plans haven't been an enormous waste of time and money, Larry and Sergey have shown unquestionably that they are utterly out of touch.
I don't mind saying that it's offensive enough to me to pull out of the Google cloud completely. They could be doing incredibly helpful things with their billions, and instead they just buy toys.
You should be ashamed of yourselves, google execs.
Yeah, i mean SERIOUSLY. They should give ME the money so that i can buy a jet instead.
-Taylor
Someone has to break it out into a DRM-free format to start with, free media doesn't just magically appear on the internet...
Granted, a lot of stuff is leaked in the pre-DRM stage by someone in the industry, but failing that, someone will need to take protected stuff and set it free for the rest of us.
Umm... rip a CD?
I have a feeling things are going to be avaliable on CD for a while. Hell, you can still buy Vinyls.
-Taylor
I hate to break it to ya, but you never "purchased" the song to begin with. You bought a "license" to play it.
They still OWN the song.
Well, more specifically, i bought a license to listen to the song. Why can't i listen to it using whatever device i want?
Sure i don't own the rights to redistribute the song, but that's not what i want. I want to be able to buy a piece of media, and then play it on my ipod, or my xbox, or my car stereo that has USB input, or some device 50 years from now in god-knows what format.
Don't you have friends with old Beetles records from 40 or so years ago? Can you imagine what it would have been like if they had DRM? Something would have gone wrong and they would have had to re-purchase the *rights* to listen to those songs probably once every 5 to ten years. Do you want to pay for the same song 20 times over your lifetime? I don't fucking want to.
-Taylor
Line-out, line-in, patch cord. What's so difficult?
Well, that's a pain in the ass!
I've got an easier one: Pirate! Then you don't have hoops to jump through!
-Taylor
Why do I get a "Virus Detected" from Avast when I try to go to that site? :)
Really? Maybe avast is crazy, i don't get any errors and the company is indeed legitimate. Maybe their server got hacked but they are just a little surplus store, they wouldn't do any harm on purpose.
I don't really like AVAST anyway...
-Taylor
thirded.
also, i think they just went out of business but i'm not sure:
http://www.trianglemachinery.com/
i'm not sure where you're located though, you kinda need to be there to know what to get.
surplus places are good when you're making custom art-like stuff.
-Taylor
Buying a computer system you cannot afford to properly use is crazy. Yes, some people are crazy, and those crazy people are going to lose data, but there's no sense in defending it.
Well, i guess i'm crazy, i have 3TB of space on my home PC, and no way to back it all up offsite. I do have some important folders from one drive automatically copy to another drive periodically, so if one drive dies the other will be okay, but if i lose them both or the place burns down or i get a nasty virus, it's all going to hell.
Most of my space is taken up by pirated... err... backed up... HD movies. And porn, lots of porn.
Either way, i'm not too worried if i lose that, it's just the things i back up i really care about.
The thing is, i was going to RAID 3 of the drives into a secure 1TB array, but now i hear all these issues with RAID and i worry that it may be WORSE than just copying over the files periodically. I want a DROBO but those are expensive as hell.
This article has inspired me to look into Tape Backup but i worry that it's not cost effective (i haven't looked yet).
I should fill up some tapes with a few hundred gigs of porn, write "confidential" on them, and stash them in a bag, under some bush, across the street from HP near my apartment. I'm sure some curious person would come looking, only to discover their contents and wonder why the hell someone went to all that trouble....
God i'm strange.
-Taylor
...Right now the worst somebody could do is take out my computer. I could deal with that, given enough time and resources. However, dealing with the loss of my computer requires "light" and "coffee". You take that away from me and I am really screwed. Without my computer I am bereft of all the wonderful porn on the internet. Of course, I have a backup plan that involves a rather large library of tapes and magazines. Once again, I still need light!...
I have a backup plan that involves an attractive woman. And some rope. And maybe a shovel and some lyme for when i'm done.
-Taylor
It doesn't get fewer searches. It gets less *traffic*.
Well, duh. Yahoo is serving out (carefully HTML-formatted) lists of URLs. YouTube is serving out videos. Which one do you suppose is generating more bytes of traffic?
I suppose that depends on how they define traffic? I didn't RTFA but i'd be curious...
-Taylor
How the hell do you pronounce the durn thing? I've always been calling it the "Triple-E", but saying "an Triple-E" isn't proper English. So what is it? E e e? A drawn-out e? Something else?
Actually, i never really noticed how many E's were in it, i just call it the E-E-PC. Kind of wrong, but if you look at it like E-ee-PC, it works, and it sounds good.
-Taylor
Yeah, WTF slashdot?
-Taylor
The story isn't bogus... If a general purpose search site that searches the whole web, and used to be number one, now gets fewer searches than a single-purpose video search site, it really underscores how low yahoo has fallen!
-Taylor
My windows vista reports its version number as version 6 in the command prompts when you ask it.
Looks like windows 7 is version 7 to me.
Where do you guys (slashdot, not the parent) get your facts? The current builds are probably based off of vista or something, so they may still be 6.1, but i imagine Win 7 will be version 7, as planned.
-Taylor
..aaaaaand i just realized that is from a book, and it was pretty helpful, so i bought the book!
-Taylor
I'm probably going to get creamed for this, but what is that image linked to?
I'm young, get over it.
-Taylor
Hey this is pretty sweet, thanks! I just started learning C# and a bit of knowledge about threading would be great. :)
-Taylor