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Comment Wow, there's a lot of women haters here (Score 0, Troll) 1145

Folks, I've been looking at the postings and it's clear to me that as a group your biased. Here are the facts of the matter:
  • 2 men made inappropriate sexist comments at PyCon.
  • Those comments offended a woman.
  • PyCon has RULES OF CONDUCT.
  • Those "guys" BROKE THE RULES OF CONDUCT.

Which fact are you people not clear on? Those guys are NOT victims. They ARE the perpetrators. They're being fired is a direct consequence of their BEHAVIOR.

Here's a simple diagnostic that you can take to help you decide if you have a difficult time or are simply unable to understand when a comment is inappropriate:

Here's Atriusofbricia sig line: "I was raised on the command line, bitch."

Do you see the problem with it? If the answer is yes, then you're capable of understanding when a statement is demeaning to women.

If the answer is no, then you may have a problem empathizing with women. I strongly encourage you to give some thought as to why you're having trouble relating to women.

Comment Either you're doing it wrong or I've slipped into (Score 2) 965

a parallel universe. I don't know what Linux distro you're using that you're having so much problems with your hardware, but I do know that I'm a happy Debian user for 8+ years. My family has 3 laptops and 2 desktops (built by me from parts bought at newegg.com) all running Debian Linux testing and one person has a mac laptop.

I've got 30,000+ software packages available to me from Debian's repositories, all of them tested before I install them. I don't have to deal with downloading funky software packages from questionable websites. I just do a sudo apt-get install and I'm good to go. Debian was so stable that I decided to upgrade the software on my workstation every day with a sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade for 3 1/2 years without problems.

I use KDE on my workstation an LXDE on my 7 year old laptop. Everything "just works" for me. Either I'm missing something or you folks must be using some really sucky Linux distro.

Maybe it's the hardware. I always check to make sure the hardware works with vanilla Linux. Are you folks using hardware made straight from Redmond? Are you using those funky windows drivers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NDISwrapper)? I wouldn't trust that steaming pile for anything. Don't ever use a windows driver on your Linux machine. That's just insane.

If you've never heard of Debian Linux, do yourself a favor and check it out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_Linux

Ubuntu Linux is based off Debian, except Ubuntu is about the bling, Debian is about the stability.

Comment Re:Wrong conclusions from the data (Score 1) 104

I would think the hardware response time would dwarf the software response time by at least an order of magnitude, i.e. it takes a solenoid to be activated longer than for the operating system to make the request that the solenoid be activated. At the speeds at which vehicles move I don't see how a software response time in the millisecond range could possibly be considered bad. Maybe I just need to see some examples to understand the issues better.

Comment Do a public service and let us know (Score 5, Informative) 467

It's been almost 4 years since I built my last box. I'm planning on building another desktop this summer and would like to know who to avoid as I'm intending to purchase a motherboot that's supported by coreboot so I don't have to deal with UEFI. If there's a motherboard vendor doing evil stuff and they're listed I would like to avoid them if I can. Here's the link for supported motherboards: http://www.coreboot.org/Supported_Motherboards

Comment Re:Obligatory (Score 2) 245

libman, I just don't see the problem with the GPL license. The BSD license permits people to take free source code and lock it way and not share back, the big example here is Apple, and Microsoft's TCP/IP stack from 90's. The way I see it, GPL is an immunization for the user community against the jerks who want to take source code and not share back their changes.

I understand that some people don't see why it's important to immunize the community against for want of a better analogy I call antisocials. Certainly I understand why corporations like Apple and Microsoft don't want the community to be protected from people who take without giving back, but you haven't given me a good explanation yet for why you believe GPL is restrictive.

Yes, in terms of antisocial exploitation of software I suppose you could say it's restrictive. In terms of being able to make use of the software and modify it at will, I think it's awesomely free. The issue I personally have with the BSD license is not the terms of the license, but that it makes no provision to stop exploitation by corporations like Apple and Microsoft who do not have a history of share and share alike, but instead, a history of aggressively attempting to exterminate any competition.

Personally, I'm looking for a software license that makes the world a better place, not some Darwinian winner-exterminates-all-other-competitors where the only survivors are the companies with lots of $$$ whose priority #1 is to make more $$$ by any means necessary such as suing competitors with BS patents.

Comment This is not a technical issue. (Score 4, Insightful) 480

It's a policy issue. Here's the solution to the Gordian knot: The city sets the policy that all government documents received externally or written internally must be written using the ISO/IEC 26300:2006 standard format (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument) or pdf format. That way the Microsoft people can use their Microsoft office, and everybody else who doesn't want to be forced to use Microsoft products can use OpenOffice/Libre Office/Google docs/whatever. After all, that's the point of open standards -- everybody can use their own software to implement the standard. See? One big happy family and no bitterness. Now after having solved their painful and expensive problem, when do I get my consultant fee of 50000 euros for solving their problem so quickly?

Comment Seriously, who cares? (Score 1, Insightful) 187

It's like the guy selling the best buggy whips in the era of the car. Or the crazy homeless guy spewing crap about Soviet communism will triumph over capitalism any day now. It's only been 20+ years since the Berlin wall fell. Why does IE anything even matter? It's not going to be on your Android phone, or iphone. Who cares?

Comment Re:It's simple to explain the correlation (Score 1) 388

It doesn't matter whether or not they "controlled for caloric intake". The biochemical process by which fructose is processed by the liver converts the fructose directly into fat. A person who consumes 2000 calories daily of protein/fiber/low carbohydrates (with no sugars) is not going to have the same problems as a person who consumes 2000 calories daily of primarily sugar/fructose as the latter goes straight to fat and depresses the metabolism of the individual while the former does not. Please take some time to watch Dr. Lustig's presentation or the 10 minutes abbreviated version to understand what the metabolic issues are with fructose. Not all calories are the same.

Comment Re:Defective thinking (Score 3, Interesting) 1010

For me thinking becomes defective in several ways. The first way thinking can be defective is when thinking about evaluating a boolean statement and incorrectly applying the rules of logic to evaluate the statement. Here's an example:
  1. pancreatic cancer if left untreated leads to death.
  2. Sooner or later everyone dies.
  3. ?!?!
  4. Therefore if someone dies it must have been from pancreatic cancer.

The first 2 statements are true statements about the human condition. The third is a fallacious deduction made by incorrect application of logic. The most you could say logically without additional data is that "if someone dies it may have been from pancreatic cancer."

Another way that thinking can become defective is situations involving the reality of the universe in which an individual rejects valid observational data that contradicts their assumptions about the universe. To give you an example of defective thinking consider individuals whose religious beliefs require them to believe that the universe is no older than a few thousand years old, that the world was created in 7 days, that every word in the bible is both divinely inspired, literal, and infallible. When such individuals are presented with fossils of species that no longer exist, that can be dated by various techniques involving radioactive decay rates to be thousands, or even millions older than the supposed creation of the earth, or when the individuals are presented with an explanation of the General theory of relativity, the gravitational red shift and its implications for how far away some objects truly are in both time and space such as billions of years light years away and billions of years ago, such individuals reject the observational data as obviously incorrect or misunderstood, because the data contradicts their religious beliefs. That ability to hold onto assumptions about the universe in spite of the fact that valid data that contradicts those assumption is what constitutes defective thinking.

Comment Re:crash faster (Score 1) 563

I respectfully disagree that Windows is the best. It's always been my experience that Windows is nothing more than a trap to lock people into Microsoft products, products designed as much as possible to not be compatible with open standards. I don't know what your experience with Linux has been, but my experience has been that configuring and installing "Office" products is trivially easy with any Debian based distro, or even RedHat. If you've seen people attempting to replicate Microsoft products using "home brew 'free' solutions that are undocumented, unreliable and impossible for another employee to figure out what is going on" then I would have to guess those people are new to linux and don't realize that almost every Linux distro comes with a package manager, a package manager that can install free and open standard office automation software that's been available for years. I would encourage you to tell your friends to read up on Ubuntu or Linux Mint and give either either one a shot and especially practice using their package managers to see how easy it is to install software. It's really amazing how much software comes prepackaged in Debian based Linux distros.

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