I've used Wordpress since forever (2006?), and I seem to remember that at least back in the bad old days the admin username had to be "admin." Nothing else. There are probably millions of people who set their blogs up back then and haven't looked at that setting since.
I wonder what they're doing this for? What does blowing up a planet's worth of little blogs get anyone? Does anyone know what this thing actually does?
Yup, work and games are the two biggies. Two profs (and me) who are linux users from way back (around '95, Suse; '98 Redhat to Ubuntu to Debian; 2005 Ubuntu to Linux Mint) all have to have fairly actively used installs of virtualbox or vmware to work with colleagues.
My friends and relations are using it on their home/personal stuff, and aren't gamers. Linux is actually working way better for them than Windows because they don't lose all their files every few months because they catch something nasty and need re-installs. (Yes, I told them about a million times not to download wallpapers and ringtones from Transdniester:P, or to click on email links promising pictures of cute cats.) They're the opposite of power users of anything, not just the OS.
An insightful commenter once said that Linux works great for people willing to learn it or for people who just want an appliance. It's the medium-level users who have the hardest time switching, and that sounds more like your circle of friends and relations.
I have a bunch of friends and relations for whom I've set up Linux (ubuntu, more recently LinuxMint). Usually what made them willing to try it was total fed-up-ness with endless viruses. I made sure to install with a desktop arranged as much like what they were used to as I could.
Result: not one single complaint, not one single reinstall, not one single virus of course. They range from a 65 year-old tech Luddite, to a fourteen (now 17) year old facebooking teenager. They've installed software they want. ("Oh? I just go to the Software Center? That's all? Cool.") I haven't had to help with any of that. One support issue in three years: setting wireless back up when a provider changed settings.
I think the best thing we could do is a system of (not-Tupperware)Linuxware parties/installfests. Like Arlo Guthrie said long ago, first there'd be one, and they'd think we were weird. Then there'd be two and they'd think we were gay. Then there'd be three, and they'd know it was a movement.
When is the legal system going to catch up? (I know. Stupid question.) Years ago I didn't sign up for Facebook because it was pretty clear there were zero protections for my rights to my data or my privacy. I'll wait till there's some laws so which reduce the chance of being screwed over, I thought. Won't take long, I thought.
Well I'm still waiting. And when it comes up, I see more and more people who've convinced themselves this is just the modern world and there's nothing to be done about it. (Read: nothing they need to do about it.) Like epine's brilliant comment said in the Google Glass thread, it's the pragmatism of the damned.
I'm a biologist, and I'd second Phil Plait. Definitely wait for second, third, and fourth opinions on this before getting excited. The fact that they're seeing ET "dinoflagellates" and "cyanobacteria" in their samples is a fair indication that they're seeing things.
Exactly. Research is not programming. The most restrictive license has been the rule in scholarship for centuries, except it wasn't a "license." It was just the way you were supposed to do things. FOSS-type principles pop up everywhere, because when it comes to knowledge, they work.
Seconded. I have such a bad attitude to the Goog at this point. When they say it will be open or it won't be used for tracking, all I can think is, "Yeah, right. Until you've got market share."
And I agree with all the comments to my comment. Use goog, get oriented, ask question (noting how previous searches didn't find the answer) on the right forum... get told to use search to find answer deeply buried in noise. (To anyone who leaves that kind of comment: You know what? If you're so smart, provide the direct link to that answer.)
Yup. I've heard of IRC. It's like Mary in Mary Had A Little Lamb. When it's good, it's very very good, and when it's bad, it's awful. See signal deeply buried in noise, above.
As for information dying in wikis, too true at this point. I'm arguing that's what we need to fix. Have one place, on Wikipedia for instance, called Linux How-to, that we (i.e. us *nix users) all settle on as "the one how-to to rule them all," that has paid (gasp!) editors to curate it. We all add our nuggets of wisdom to it, but there are editors to keep the currently relevant signal on top. And it should be organized with a nice clear For Beginners tutorial we can point beginners to, and every distro can point to their subsection in their first-use screen. We're a community. We can do this. (Hah.)
That needs to be in large bold caps. I've gotten a few of those "Google it. You can do this" comments, too, without even the courtesy of suggesting appropriate search terms. Obviously I don't know them, if my searches so far haven't done better than land me on that forum. Lack of an easy, fast clear way to find current answers is the biggest thing holding linux back.
Does MSFT still think they're a monopoly? Really? They want users to get used to a phone/tablet interface, where they have a 2% share (? less?), so they put it on their desktop where people keep buying Macs these days every time they pull these boneheaded stunts.
The other huge thing waiting to be noticed is that there are Linux distros out there (e.g. LinuxMint) that take less "getting used to" for a WinXp user than Win8. The only thing saving MSFT is that Linux has no advertising budget. And we'd never agree on which distro to recommend.
Exactly, indeed. Calling someone names is not an argument. (Nor is it all that unchildish.)
It's also flat-out false to say RMS is spreading fear, uncertainty, or doubt. Nowhere does he dangle dark but unnamed consequences for using Ubuntu. And there's no uncertainty or doubt whatsoever in his rejection of spyware and therefore of Ubuntu.
Exactly. Google search was amazing early on, when the comparison was to "no search." Now, with a near-infinite web and squillions of SEOs gaming the ratings, it's just half-baked, like all GOOG's products. Half-baked and gamed still brings in billions of dollars for them. Without effective competition that could take any of those billions away, half-baked is going to be all we get.
No, the author does not have a right to some share of my mind. The author has a right to demand payment before I can see the work. They have no right to bamboozle me into absorbing ads because that's an easier way to get money from people.
Officially, we're not cattle. So when did making a buck off me start to take precedence over everything in the Bill of Rights?
That's not just a figure of speech. As the (great?)grandparent comment says, it's about impressions. There's plenty of evidence (1, 2, 3, for instance) that ads have the most effect on behavior when you're not paying attention. So the only way for me to stop manipulation of my own mind is not to have those ads in the background in the first place.
But advertisers have some sacred "right" to make a buck that's more important than me making my own decisions. Which is even weirder because, I'm told, the free market depends on informed consumers making free choices.
Let's face it. Advertisers are gunning for a world where our eyelids are propped open with matchsticks while we watch whatever we're told to watch.
Yes, that's been covered in multiple studies. (The Cartalk guys, for all that they're funny, have a page full of serious links to that stuff. The whole "hang up and drive" is a crusade of theirs.) One big difference is that the passenger can see when the driver drifts toward the oncoming truck -- or whatever -- and stops talking.
I know. I know. This is/. Nonetheless... the article is talking about social and mechanical reasoning. Not empathy vs. logic. Not Repub vs Dem. Not women vs men.
It's about two types of problem solving: reasoning about causal relationships of inanimate objects and reasoning about the mental states of other persons. Those are the two that are, according to this research, neurologically mutually exclusive.
By racing off into stereotypes, the most obvious implication has been missed. At least one of them has. Using a phone or social media (social cognition) is mutually exclusive to driving (physical cognition).
It'll be fun to time how long it takes that inconvenient point to sink in against motivated cognition.
Being a crazy biologist, I thought it would be fun to see how hermit crabs react to the availability of an unexpected big Rolls Royce shell. They'd been congregating near the showers, so I put it there. At night there was a seething mass of hermits swapping. Shells are at a premium, and I'd noticed earlier that the smallest one was making do with a discarded toothpaste tube cap. It looked very sad.
Well, the next morning there was no sign of the orgy. No hermit crabs to be seen, no discarded shells, no debris. But in one corner of the shower stall, there was the toothpaste tube cap, no longer needed.
and payment is a small percentage of price based on usage metering by something like the Patent Office. Except it wouldn't be the Patent Office. It'd be the Usage Office or something. The money for the payments would come from a surcharge on things invented within the last however-many years. And payments would be made for, say, half that many years. After that, the thing would enter the public domain.
People would still get paid for being brilliant inventors, but they couldn't rest on a useless monopoly.
And the other essential rule is that only the actual inventor(s) could get payment. None of this BS of selling intellectual "property."
1) Actually, around 1997 or 1998, I started trying to switch to Redhat. Setup (esp. couldn't get graphics working on my computers) and package installation were way too time-consuming for somebody who didn't know much and did have other work to do.
2) 2003-2005 got a laptop with Fedora pre-installed and moved to Linux as primary OS
3) early 2005 moved to Ubuntu
4) early 2011, refugee from Unity, moved to Linux Mint Debian
No doubt what's wrong with my connection is that I'm not in Charlotte. I'm in a working class neighborhood in Southern California. No, it's not a conspiracy. It's a monopoly. (A few blocks over, where the condos start, everybody gets Verizon Fios.)
TW is the only ISP in my neighborhood. Officially we get 1MB/s up, 8Mb/s down. And ever since I signed up for the federal SAM speed testing program I heard about here on/., I've actually seen those speeds more than half the time. Before that, and now on weekends, we're generally at 50Kbytes/s (so 400 Kb/s) down, around 5% of the advertised "speed."
People say you get what you pay for, but not with Time Warner.
And those of you pissing about "well, whaddya need it for?" That's not the point. (In my case, it's mainly for downloading GBs of Debian distros....) The point is that we should get what we pay for.
Slashdot Mirror
"You can't ever have rules that explicitly favor one gender over another." Odd that they're currently almost all men then, isn't it?
Gaaa. That subject line should read "username," not password.
I've used Wordpress since forever (2006?), and I seem to remember that at least back in the bad old days the admin username had to be "admin." Nothing else. There are probably millions of people who set their blogs up back then and haven't looked at that setting since.
I wonder what they're doing this for? What does blowing up a planet's worth of little blogs get anyone? Does anyone know what this thing actually does?
Yup, work and games are the two biggies. Two profs (and me) who are linux users from way back (around '95, Suse; '98 Redhat to Ubuntu to Debian; 2005 Ubuntu to Linux Mint) all have to have fairly actively used installs of virtualbox or vmware to work with colleagues.
:P, or to click on email links promising pictures of cute cats.) They're the opposite of power users of anything, not just the OS.
My friends and relations are using it on their home/personal stuff, and aren't gamers. Linux is actually working way better for them than Windows because they don't lose all their files every few months because they catch something nasty and need re-installs. (Yes, I told them about a million times not to download wallpapers and ringtones from Transdniester
An insightful commenter once said that Linux works great for people willing to learn it or for people who just want an appliance. It's the medium-level users who have the hardest time switching, and that sounds more like your circle of friends and relations.
I have a bunch of friends and relations for whom I've set up Linux (ubuntu, more recently LinuxMint). Usually what made them willing to try it was total fed-up-ness with endless viruses. I made sure to install with a desktop arranged as much like what they were used to as I could.
Result: not one single complaint, not one single reinstall, not one single virus of course. They range from a 65 year-old tech Luddite, to a fourteen (now 17) year old facebooking teenager. They've installed software they want. ("Oh? I just go to the Software Center? That's all? Cool.") I haven't had to help with any of that. One support issue in three years: setting wireless back up when a provider changed settings.
I think the best thing we could do is a system of (not-Tupperware)Linuxware parties/installfests. Like Arlo Guthrie said long ago, first there'd be one, and they'd think we were weird. Then there'd be two and they'd think we were gay. Then there'd be three, and they'd know it was a movement.
When is the legal system going to catch up? (I know. Stupid question.) Years ago I didn't sign up for Facebook because it was pretty clear there were zero protections for my rights to my data or my privacy. I'll wait till there's some laws so which reduce the chance of being screwed over, I thought. Won't take long, I thought.
Well I'm still waiting. And when it comes up, I see more and more people who've convinced themselves this is just the modern world and there's nothing to be done about it. (Read: nothing they need to do about it.) Like epine's brilliant comment said in the Google Glass thread, it's the pragmatism of the damned.
I'm a biologist, and I'd second Phil Plait. Definitely wait for second, third, and fourth opinions on this before getting excited. The fact that they're seeing ET "dinoflagellates" and "cyanobacteria" in their samples is a fair indication that they're seeing things.
Exactly. Research is not programming. The most restrictive license has been the rule in scholarship for centuries, except it wasn't a "license." It was just the way you were supposed to do things. FOSS-type principles pop up everywhere, because when it comes to knowledge, they work.
Seconded. I have such a bad attitude to the Goog at this point. When they say it will be open or it won't be used for tracking, all I can think is, "Yeah, right. Until you've got market share."
And I agree with all the comments to my comment. Use goog, get oriented, ask question (noting how previous searches didn't find the answer) on the right forum ... get told to use search to find answer deeply buried in noise. (To anyone who leaves that kind of comment: You know what? If you're so smart, provide the direct link to that answer.)
Yup. I've heard of IRC. It's like Mary in Mary Had A Little Lamb. When it's good, it's very very good, and when it's bad, it's awful. See signal deeply buried in noise, above.
As for information dying in wikis, too true at this point. I'm arguing that's what we need to fix. Have one place, on Wikipedia for instance, called Linux How-to, that we (i.e. us *nix users) all settle on as "the one how-to to rule them all," that has paid (gasp!) editors to curate it. We all add our nuggets of wisdom to it, but there are editors to keep the currently relevant signal on top. And it should be organized with a nice clear For Beginners tutorial we can point beginners to, and every distro can point to their subsection in their first-use screen. We're a community. We can do this. (Hah.)
That needs to be in large bold caps. I've gotten a few of those "Google it. You can do this" comments, too, without even the courtesy of suggesting appropriate search terms. Obviously I don't know them, if my searches so far haven't done better than land me on that forum. Lack of an easy, fast clear way to find current answers is the biggest thing holding linux back.
Does MSFT still think they're a monopoly? Really? They want users to get used to a phone/tablet interface, where they have a 2% share (? less?), so they put it on their desktop where people keep buying Macs these days every time they pull these boneheaded stunts.
The other huge thing waiting to be noticed is that there are Linux distros out there (e.g. LinuxMint) that take less "getting used to" for a WinXp user than Win8. The only thing saving MSFT is that Linux has no advertising budget. And we'd never agree on which distro to recommend.
"anyone who cares about having a usable OS probably dropped Ubuntu as soon as they made Unity the default."
True. It's certainly what I did.
Exactly, indeed. Calling someone names is not an argument. (Nor is it all that unchildish.)
It's also flat-out false to say RMS is spreading fear, uncertainty, or doubt. Nowhere does he dangle dark but unnamed consequences for using Ubuntu. And there's no uncertainty or doubt whatsoever in his rejection of spyware and therefore of Ubuntu.
Exactly. Google search was amazing early on, when the comparison was to "no search." Now, with a near-infinite web and squillions of SEOs gaming the ratings, it's just half-baked, like all GOOG's products. Half-baked and gamed still brings in billions of dollars for them. Without effective competition that could take any of those billions away, half-baked is going to be all we get.
No, the author does not have a right to some share of my mind. The author has a right to demand payment before I can see the work. They have no right to bamboozle me into absorbing ads because that's an easier way to get money from people.
Officially, we're not cattle. So when did making a buck off me start to take precedence over everything in the Bill of Rights?
That's not just a figure of speech. As the (great?)grandparent comment says, it's about impressions. There's plenty of evidence (1, 2, 3, for instance) that ads have the most effect on behavior when you're not paying attention. So the only way for me to stop manipulation of my own mind is not to have those ads in the background in the first place.
But advertisers have some sacred "right" to make a buck that's more important than me making my own decisions. Which is even weirder because, I'm told, the free market depends on informed consumers making free choices.
Let's face it. Advertisers are gunning for a world where our eyelids are propped open with matchsticks while we watch whatever we're told to watch.
Yes, that's been covered in multiple studies. (The Cartalk guys, for all that they're funny, have a page full of serious links to that stuff. The whole "hang up and drive" is a crusade of theirs.) One big difference is that the passenger can see when the driver drifts toward the oncoming truck -- or whatever -- and stops talking.
I know. I know. This is /. Nonetheless... the article is talking about social and mechanical reasoning. Not empathy vs. logic. Not Repub vs Dem. Not women vs men.
It's about two types of problem solving: reasoning about causal relationships of inanimate objects and reasoning about the mental states of other persons. Those are the two that are, according to this research, neurologically mutually exclusive.
By racing off into stereotypes, the most obvious implication has been missed. At least one of them has. Using a phone or social media (social cognition) is mutually exclusive to driving (physical cognition).
It'll be fun to time how long it takes that inconvenient point to sink in against motivated cognition.
Being a crazy biologist, I thought it would be fun to see how hermit crabs react to the availability of an unexpected big Rolls Royce shell. They'd been congregating near the showers, so I put it there. At night there was a seething mass of hermits swapping. Shells are at a premium, and I'd noticed earlier that the smallest one was making do with a discarded toothpaste tube cap. It looked very sad.
Well, the next morning there was no sign of the orgy. No hermit crabs to be seen, no discarded shells, no debris. But in one corner of the shower stall, there was the toothpaste tube cap, no longer needed.
There's no presumably about it. When White Men Can't Do Math, Stereotype threat and the intellectual performance of African Americans (and pdf). Stereotype threat and the academic underperformance of minorities and women.
You can put anyone down, make them feel bad, and make them less than they are. And then we all lose what they could be contributing.
and payment is a small percentage of price based on usage metering by something like the Patent Office. Except it wouldn't be the Patent Office. It'd be the Usage Office or something. The money for the payments would come from a surcharge on things invented within the last however-many years. And payments would be made for, say, half that many years. After that, the thing would enter the public domain.
People would still get paid for being brilliant inventors, but they couldn't rest on a useless monopoly.
And the other essential rule is that only the actual inventor(s) could get payment. None of this BS of selling intellectual "property."
1) Actually, around 1997 or 1998, I started trying to switch to Redhat. Setup (esp. couldn't get graphics working on my computers) and package installation were way too time-consuming for somebody who didn't know much and did have other work to do.
2) 2003-2005 got a laptop with Fedora pre-installed and moved to Linux as primary OS
3) early 2005 moved to Ubuntu
4) early 2011, refugee from Unity, moved to Linux Mint Debian
Now: still there, but playing with Solus....
No doubt what's wrong with my connection is that I'm not in Charlotte. I'm in a working class neighborhood in Southern California. No, it's not a conspiracy. It's a monopoly. (A few blocks over, where the condos start, everybody gets Verizon Fios.)
TW is the only ISP in my neighborhood. Officially we get 1MB/s up, 8Mb/s down. And ever since I signed up for the federal SAM speed testing program I heard about here on /., I've actually seen those speeds more than half the time. Before that, and now on weekends, we're generally at 50Kbytes/s (so 400 Kb/s) down, around 5% of the advertised "speed."
People say you get what you pay for, but not with Time Warner.
And those of you pissing about "well, whaddya need it for?" That's not the point. (In my case, it's mainly for downloading GBs of Debian distros....) The point is that we should get what we pay for.