I zapped my cable three years ago. I watched the opening ceremony (and only that) of the London Olympics via a VPN. I don't care enough about Sochi or winter Olympics to be interested in watching any of it.
I don't think it's important if the FCC forces NBC to run a live stream. If NBC thinks the cost of running a stream of the broadcast they're already doing exceeds the revenue they could generate from stream viewers watching the same commercials the network is already doing, that's their problem.
If it isn't profitable, the market can't do it. Not won't, can't.
Fifty-six years after Sputnik, there's profit to be found in building, launching and operating satellites. As a result, the market has built and sustains businesses that do that. Aside from the Russians pay-to-be-a-space-tourist gimmickry (which exists thanks to state-funded infrastructure) no one has built a business putting people into space.
If the market is going to send people out to explore the Solar System, someone will need to tell it how to turn a profit doing that.
Sure, you may run a mail server next to the dryer, but who knows where your mail is, or how it got there.
The internet is not about point-to-point communication. It's a *publishing* technology. The reason I can see this Slashdot page is because it was published on some servers, not sent over some secure wire to me. I click on a URL and somewhere a server sends the data comprising that page out into the net, broken up in itty-bit packets with my IP address embedded in them, and eventually they all get to me, where they are reconstructed and displayed in my browser.
Email is no different. Sure, you can use encryption. But, that's self-limiting unless the entire world knows everyone else's key, and then what good would encryption be?
Just as criminals rely on "social engineering" to get access to data, it's been used for centuries by governments and others to get access to data other people do not want them to see. No matter how anyone uses technology to secure their internet "privacy" (quotes because it's an oxymoron), you are really just depending that the folks who create the technology have not been "socially engineered".
So... if you don't want someone to find out something, don't publish it, on the net or elsewhere.
Our notions of right and wrong tend to adapt to fit our notions of what we want.
Someday, users will use software to create the software they want. When that happens, 95 percent of software developers will be redundant and they will belatedly learn that unions multiply their individual power.
I don't need to read feeds from multiple devices. That means I don't need to synchronize. And, that mean I don't need Google Reader, or Feedly, or the hassle of Tiny Tiny RSS, or whatever.
What I need is a local RSS reader, a client. I already have that, and I had it before Google invented Reader.
People like me, singleton users, don't really care about things that make your professional life a tad more complicated. That's what you're paid for. Sorry.
At heart, you are reflecting the same corporate make-things-easy notions that underpin the adoption of Windows.
The more alternatives in Linux, the better. Fork away, people!
Python-the-language was never registered as a mark in Europe. If the guy backs off, Python geeks out to consider themselves lucky. Be a change from considering themselves exempt from the house rules.
I don't suppose the hate mail and venomous phone calls he got from idiots helped either. Class act, that.
You can run RHEL/CentOS with current Chome, Chromium, Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, the usual multimedia apps, etc., etc., These programs are not in the official RHEL/CentOS repositories but they are available in reliable independent repos. I know because I've done it.
Yes, its stats. That's not the point. The study illustrates the racism that is endemic in society. Not just the U.S., but in every human society.
When a business targets African-Americans by buying names associated with African-Americans, that's textbook racism. Why? Because it's making assumptions about individuals based on their membership in a group.
Ditto the self-serving argument that "Racism is denying the fact that many blacks in the US have been disadvantaged and largely as a result are more likely to commit crimes and get arrested". Applying perceived generalizations about a group to individuals you do not know is textbook racism.
Racism wasn't some passing phase of American history.
At first glance, I thought this was about Bank of America's day-long outage yesterday. On the first of the month, phone, ATM and online access was gone until late in the evening Eastern time.
Ljubuncic's experiences with software are usually the opposite of mine. I installed F18 on multiple drives with multiple partitions with none of the issues of problems he discusses. That's not the first time that's happened.
The new Anaconda has taken a lot of flack. Some is justified. Much of it seems based on people who are, first, mad that it isn't the old Anaconda; second, mad that it doesn't work like the old Anaconda and makes them think about how to use it, and, third, think their experience with the old Anaconda means it was "intuitive". It wasn't. Expecting software to be "intuitive" is just falling victim to sales-pitch hokum.
If your spouse enjoyed gaming, your spouse would already be playing games.
If you convince/cajole/annoy your spouse into playing games, your spouse will, more than likely, do it just to please you and/or to shut you up on the topic.
*You* think games are more interesting than movies. Others may not. (I watch few movies and think games are mind-numbingly boring.)
If your spouse is bored and you are looking to help with that, good for you. But, expand your search.
Framing the question this way misses the point. Civil disobedience is "disobedience" precisely because people choose to violate the law to make a point and are willing to accept the consequences.
It's that readiness to put themselves at legal risk that makes civil disobedience a potent tool for change.
You can't disobey if it isn't illegal. People engaging in civil "obedience" are indistinguishable from everyone else.
>> " just vastly more productive using that interface?"
Some of have never like pointless wiggly windows and ugly, gaudy over-large shiny dock icons that look like they were designed by a 1950's middle school art class.
Compiz irritated me for years. Turning it off was always top of my agenda. I like and use docks, but can't stand Cairo. I don't know what taste is, but Cairo has never had it.
Use what you like. So will I. But neither of us gets to equate what we like with what is better.
>>"... just vastly more productive using that interface?"
It's just what they are used to. They confuse familiarity born of experience with better design and intuitiveness. That leads to entirely bogus rants about how the Gnome devs are supposed to let biased online anecdotal rants plot their course.
The differences between all of the desktop GUI's -- Gnome 2, Gnome 3, KDE, XFCE, OS X, Windows, etc., are minor. In all and each of them, we type on keyboards, move on on-screen cursor, and click on icons. Gnome3 does away with cute little icons in panels and deprecates minimization and people freak out as if those two things were the only way to do anything. People rant about Windows 8 because it is different than what they know. Yet, wait until Microsoft replaces Windows 8 with something entirely different and people who have used nothing else but Win8 will be ranting about how wonderfully easy, productive and intuitive it was.
Some people are so conservative and so rigid that they can't muster up the ability to deal with new software on its own terms, instead bitching because it doesn't work like the old software they know.
I don't get the "at the mercy of" thing. You aren't at the mercy of musicians. They are at your mercy. They make music and hope someone is willing it listen and, ideally, pay for it.
Learning enough about programming to have some very basic idea of how software works is a decent, but not amazing, idea. Like understanding enough about mechanics to have a basic idea of how a car works.
But, that kind of knowledge really won't make you a better driver or a better tech toy user.
Acquiring the skills and knowledge needed to craft a real application for any platform requires serious effort, more effort than most people are willing to put in. People who are curious should follow their curiosity, but that's it.
I asked a dev why the new Anaconda UI wasn't developed separately and then rolled into the next available release whenever it was ready. The answer: Installers have to be developed in conjunction with whatever it is that they're installing. The requirements and dependencies are such that going it alone won't work.
That makes sense. But, I think some fundamental UI design commitments were made early on that are biting them now. Particularly the manual partitioning interface. I find it just plain difficult to figure out what to do with it. It is, for example, possible to put specific partitions on specific drives. But, it ain't easy or obvious. I think it's legitimate to assume that anyone wanting to manually partition drives has at least a basic understanding of the concept. Give them the old Anaconda approach to that, wrapped in the new UI's look.
I still haven't seen an option in the new UI to set partition size at all of a disk or all remaining space on a disk. However, if you specify a size that's more than what's possible, the UI pushes it back to all available space.
I run CentOS as my desktop and it's great. That's what happens when Red Hat takes a good Fedora release and debugs and polishes it for several years.
However, there's no doubt that, at its core, CentOS is aging. At some point, I fully expect to move elsewhere because I will want be able to run what I want to run.
On Fedora 18: I've installed and played with several of the alpha, beta and test candidates. Other than the new Anaconda, this looks like a very nice release. The new Anaconda design, at present, does not present an obvious workflow. I.e., the first few times I used it I wasn't sure what I was supposed to click on or do next. Manual/custom partitioning has been a real quagmire. The new design is the kind of app that really needs little bubbles of explanatory text that pop up when you cursor over them. For starters. (An installer is a complex application, with intimate links to the distribution it installs, yet it needs the capacity to be quickly adapted to new releases. So, I'll cut them a lot of slack.)
Anyway, I've never understood why Fedora commits itself to the 6-month cycle, unless there are internal Red Hat requirements. At the least, have the deadline, but keep it internal only. Why set yourself up for public basing when you don't meet an artificial schedule?
Slashdot Mirror
I zapped my cable three years ago. I watched the opening ceremony (and only that) of the London Olympics via a VPN. I don't care enough about Sochi or winter Olympics to be interested in watching any of it.
I don't think it's important if the FCC forces NBC to run a live stream. If NBC thinks the cost of running a stream of the broadcast they're already doing exceeds the revenue they could generate from stream viewers watching the same commercials the network is already doing, that's their problem.
If it isn't profitable, the market can't do it. Not won't, can't.
Fifty-six years after Sputnik, there's profit to be found in building, launching and operating satellites. As a result, the market has built and sustains businesses that do that. Aside from the Russians pay-to-be-a-space-tourist gimmickry (which exists thanks to state-funded infrastructure) no one has built a business putting people into space.
If the market is going to send people out to explore the Solar System, someone will need to tell it how to turn a profit doing that.
Sure, you may run a mail server next to the dryer, but who knows where your mail is, or how it got there.
The internet is not about point-to-point communication. It's a *publishing* technology. The reason I can see this Slashdot page is because it was published on some servers, not sent over some secure wire to me. I click on a URL and somewhere a server sends the data comprising that page out into the net, broken up in itty-bit packets with my IP address embedded in them, and eventually they all get to me, where they are reconstructed and displayed in my browser.
Email is no different. Sure, you can use encryption. But, that's self-limiting unless the entire world knows everyone else's key, and then what good would encryption be?
Just as criminals rely on "social engineering" to get access to data, it's been used for centuries by governments and others to get access to data other people do not want them to see. No matter how anyone uses technology to secure their internet "privacy" (quotes because it's an oxymoron), you are really just depending that the folks who create the technology have not been "socially engineered".
So... if you don't want someone to find out something, don't publish it, on the net or elsewhere.
Says more about you than them
Besdies, how do you know it's such a great resource if this is the first you've heard of it?
It's all about power.
Our notions of right and wrong tend to adapt to fit our notions of what we want.
Someday, users will use software to create the software they want. When that happens, 95 percent of software developers will be redundant and they will belatedly learn that unions multiply their individual power.
Let's get them to volunteer to be the first to go: "Republicans on Mars!"
The fewer of the miscreants on this planet, the better.
I don't need to read feeds from multiple devices. That means I don't need to synchronize. And, that mean I don't need Google Reader, or Feedly, or the hassle of Tiny Tiny RSS, or whatever.
What I need is a local RSS reader, a client. I already have that, and I had it before Google invented Reader.
The problem is not XP. The problem is speciality software vendors charging ten grand for a software update.
This kind of stuff is why it costs the rest of us $2120.14 to have a hangnail treated at our MD.
People like me, singleton users, don't really care about things that make your professional life a tad more complicated. That's what you're paid for. Sorry.
At heart, you are reflecting the same corporate make-things-easy notions that underpin the adoption of Windows.
The more alternatives in Linux, the better. Fork away, people!
Everyone who knows anything knows Vulcan orbits 40 Eridani A.
We just haven't found it, yet.
Python-the-language was never registered as a mark in Europe. If the guy backs off, Python geeks out to consider themselves lucky. Be a change from considering themselves exempt from the house rules.
I don't suppose the hate mail and venomous phone calls he got from idiots helped either. Class act, that.
You can run RHEL/CentOS with current Chome, Chromium, Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, the usual multimedia apps, etc., etc., These programs are not in the official RHEL/CentOS repositories but they are available in reliable independent repos. I know because I've done it.
What "proprietary components"?
Yes, its stats. That's not the point. The study illustrates the racism that is endemic in society. Not just the U.S., but in every human society.
When a business targets African-Americans by buying names associated with African-Americans, that's textbook racism. Why? Because it's making assumptions about individuals based on their membership in a group.
Ditto the self-serving argument that "Racism is denying the fact that many blacks in the US have been disadvantaged and largely as a result are more likely to commit crimes and get arrested". Applying perceived generalizations about a group to individuals you do not know is textbook racism.
Racism wasn't some passing phase of American history.
Thoroughly current Mountain Lion on a Macbook Pro here. When I enter "file:///" into apps, I get directory listings, not crashes.
At first glance, I thought this was about Bank of America's day-long outage yesterday. On the first of the month, phone, ATM and online access was gone until late in the evening Eastern time.
Ljubuncic's experiences with software are usually the opposite of mine. I installed F18 on multiple drives with multiple partitions with none of the issues of problems he discusses. That's not the first time that's happened.
The new Anaconda has taken a lot of flack. Some is justified. Much of it seems based on people who are, first, mad that it isn't the old Anaconda; second, mad that it doesn't work like the old Anaconda and makes them think about how to use it, and, third, think their experience with the old Anaconda means it was "intuitive". It wasn't. Expecting software to be "intuitive" is just falling victim to sales-pitch hokum.
Consider:
If your spouse enjoyed gaming, your spouse would already be playing games.
If you convince/cajole/annoy your spouse into playing games, your spouse will, more than likely, do it just to please you and/or to shut you up on the topic.
*You* think games are more interesting than movies. Others may not. (I watch few movies and think games are mind-numbingly boring.)
If your spouse is bored and you are looking to help with that, good for you. But, expand your search.
You don't need to change you're comfortable ways: Don't upgrade.
Just don't pretend developers are obligated to keep updating the innards so you can run current software.
Developers who give their stuff away for free usually do pretty much what they damn well please.
Framing the question this way misses the point. Civil disobedience is "disobedience" precisely because people choose to violate the law to make a point and are willing to accept the consequences.
It's that readiness to put themselves at legal risk that makes civil disobedience a potent tool for change.
You can't disobey if it isn't illegal. People engaging in civil "obedience" are indistinguishable from everyone else.
>> " just vastly more productive using that interface?"
Some of have never like pointless wiggly windows and ugly, gaudy over-large shiny dock icons that look like they were designed by a 1950's middle school art class.
Compiz irritated me for years. Turning it off was always top of my agenda. I like and use docks, but can't stand Cairo. I don't know what taste is, but Cairo has never had it.
Use what you like. So will I. But neither of us gets to equate what we like with what is better.
>>"... just vastly more productive using that interface?"
It's just what they are used to. They confuse familiarity born of experience with better design and intuitiveness. That leads to entirely bogus rants about how the Gnome devs are supposed to let biased online anecdotal rants plot their course.
The differences between all of the desktop GUI's -- Gnome 2, Gnome 3, KDE, XFCE, OS X, Windows, etc., are minor. In all and each of them, we type on keyboards, move on on-screen cursor, and click on icons. Gnome3 does away with cute little icons in panels and deprecates minimization and people freak out as if those two things were the only way to do anything. People rant about Windows 8 because it is different than what they know. Yet, wait until Microsoft replaces Windows 8 with something entirely different and people who have used nothing else but Win8 will be ranting about how wonderfully easy, productive and intuitive it was.
Some people are so conservative and so rigid that they can't muster up the ability to deal with new software on its own terms, instead bitching because it doesn't work like the old software they know.
I don't get the "at the mercy of" thing. You aren't at the mercy of musicians. They are at your mercy. They make music and hope someone is willing it listen and, ideally, pay for it.
Learning enough about programming to have some very basic idea of how software works is a decent, but not amazing, idea. Like understanding enough about mechanics to have a basic idea of how a car works.
But, that kind of knowledge really won't make you a better driver or a better tech toy user.
Acquiring the skills and knowledge needed to craft a real application for any platform requires serious effort, more effort than most people are willing to put in. People who are curious should follow their curiosity, but that's it.
I asked a dev why the new Anaconda UI wasn't developed separately and then rolled into the next available release whenever it was ready. The answer: Installers have to be developed in conjunction with whatever it is that they're installing. The requirements and dependencies are such that going it alone won't work.
That makes sense. But, I think some fundamental UI design commitments were made early on that are biting them now. Particularly the manual partitioning interface. I find it just plain difficult to figure out what to do with it. It is, for example, possible to put specific partitions on specific drives. But, it ain't easy or obvious. I think it's legitimate to assume that anyone wanting to manually partition drives has at least a basic understanding of the concept. Give them the old Anaconda approach to that, wrapped in the new UI's look.
I still haven't seen an option in the new UI to set partition size at all of a disk or all remaining space on a disk. However, if you specify a size that's more than what's possible, the UI pushes it back to all available space.
I run CentOS as my desktop and it's great. That's what happens when Red Hat takes a good Fedora release and debugs and polishes it for several years.
However, there's no doubt that, at its core, CentOS is aging. At some point, I fully expect to move elsewhere because I will want be able to run what I want to run.
On Fedora 18: I've installed and played with several of the alpha, beta and test candidates. Other than the new Anaconda, this looks like a very nice release. The new Anaconda design, at present, does not present an obvious workflow. I.e., the first few times I used it I wasn't sure what I was supposed to click on or do next. Manual/custom partitioning has been a real quagmire. The new design is the kind of app that really needs little bubbles of explanatory text that pop up when you cursor over them. For starters. (An installer is a complex application, with intimate links to the distribution it installs, yet it needs the capacity to be quickly adapted to new releases. So, I'll cut them a lot of slack.)
Anyway, I've never understood why Fedora commits itself to the 6-month cycle, unless there are internal Red Hat requirements. At the least, have the deadline, but keep it internal only. Why set yourself up for public basing when you don't meet an artificial schedule?