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Comment Re:Lies and statistics (Score 1) 265

Sure and you spend even more money raising children, buying food, paying income tax, driving to work. So what? $370k over a lperson's ifetime for a school that benefits the society as a whole isn't a horrible thing. Schools are essential, and they have to be paid for. It's part of the society that we live in. Part of the social contract. The whole point of taxes is that they are amortized over time and the entire population, for the benefit of the collective society.

Some people spend more than that on cigarettes over their lifetime. And if you add up all the useless things we buy (junk food, toys we throw away, clothes we throw away), I'm sure that's a huge number also. So I'm not really sure what your point is. Public spending is always bad? Taxes are always bad? Having a civil society with a social contract is bad?

Comment Re:gnome (Score 1) 267

Mate works very well for me on several different distros. So you can have your Gnome 2 back, and even better it is being updated and improved while being true to the original paradigm which works great for me.

When I first got into Linux I was a Windows 95 refugee, and I wasn't too familiar with how Linux actually worked. I messed around a bit with FVWM95 but that never worked for me. Then KDE 1.0 was released and that made Linux work for me. That was the last time I ever used Windows. The single-click thing drove me nuts though. It took until KDE 2.0 to get that to be an option. Somewhere along the line I started using Gnome 1.0 which sucked horribly (unstable) but I stuck with it for whatever reason. I've tried to use KDE along the way v2, v3, v4, but I always came back to Gnome. Not sure why. I think it's because KDE never looked right to me. Which is odd because I use a lot of Qt apps that look great with GTK themes! I jumped from Gnome 2 to Mate though. Tried Gnome 3 but it doesn't work the way I do and I don't want to learn to work the way it does. Why should I? A computer is just a tool, not an experience.

Comment Re:Linux and systemd (Score 1) 69

That's a bit odd to say as systemd was first proposed to solve a number of pressing server problems including issues with rapid spin up and spin down of virtualized containers, increasingly complex and dynamic storage subsystems such as fiber-channel fabrics and attached storage arrays, dynamic networking and routing configuration as is common in virtualization and containers, service supervision, and increased logging and auditing. The fact that it is also ideally suited to desktops and laptops is nice.

If you face none of the more vexing configuration management issues on your servers, then count yourself lucky.
 

Comment Re:Faster UI changes (Score 1) 208

Man what a day to not have mod points! Hopefully mods will see your post and mod it to +5. Seems like most of these mistakes are made on purpose these days for some value of "because it's so cool." I see this happening all the time these days, particularly on web-based applications, even here on slashdot. Discoverability of UI functionality is at an all-time low and the removal of obvious functionality is happening all the time (the read more link, dice? Come on guys). We're just expected to already know what everything does even if its changing all the time. Read the fine manual... oh wait there is no documentation. I've seen plenty of horrid user interfaces made by engineers and people like me who think obscure command-line flags are intuitive, but now it seems like even the UI experts (no wait they aren't UI experts, they are user "experience" experts) are doing it. I wonder what will happen when all the current generation of UX experts hit their cognitive decline years later in life. I suspect that if the present trend continues, computers will be all but unusable for many people who can no longer keep up. Progress you know.

Comment Re:What does the 'X' in 'UX' mean? (Score 1) 288

Where are my mod points when I need them! This is exactly right. I've thought the same thing ever since the hipster term, "UX" was introduced in the last couple of years. It's not even a matter of introducing new functionality. It's change for the sake of change. It's like developers get together at the local coffee shop and brainstorm new strange ways of doing common tasks and then they foist them on the world without any usability research, or watching how people actually use their computers. Because everyone should be as cool as they are. I can think of no other explanation for changes that firefox made, for example. I don't think the present class of "user experience" thinking is going to stand the test of time. Had UX people been in charge of cars or airplanes, we'd still be messing with with function goes on what pedal, or what controls should be linked together on the yoke. Would be a nightmare. Rudder isn't that important so lets put it on a blue knob behind the pilot's head. We don't use it, so we doubt anyone does either.

Maybe the UX teams at places like Mozilla don't know that real people use Firefox as a tool to get their work done, and constantly messing with it interferes with our ability to do what we need to do. It's not that change can never be done, but that change has to be done in the context of understanding what the end users' purposes are. MS certainly understood that for years with Windows, only to forget it when introducing Windows 8.

Comment Start a hot dog fire with booster cables (Score 1) 210

My brother and his friend found themselves without any matches recently, but needing to start a fire to roast hot dogs and marsh mellows over. Using a paperclip and jumper cables they got the fire going quite quickly so they didn't have to eat raw hot dogs. They did have to carefully lay the fire though with lots of tinder as the paperclip only lasted a few seconds. But it was enough.

Comment Re:Converted wifi hub into network bridge (Score 2) 210

A pair of ubiquiti NanoStationMs work well enough you may never have needed to implement the cable, though the NanoStationM is limited to 100 Mbit/s. I use it to get a solid network connection between two houses 400 feet apart and it works great. I actually get the full 100 Mbit/s out of it which is pretty impressive. The low-end units can work up to a kilometer away. I had been planning to trench in fiber optic, but this works so well for me that I've abandoned the idea of running the fiber for now. At least until I really need Gigabit across the link (or more).

Comment Re:Oh...my...gawd! (Score 4, Informative) 50

Sure but SpaceX's goal to land the first stage has little to do with its cargo launch capabilities and its recent launch failure, or its march to man-rated rockets and the heavy lift booster. So I argue SpaceX is still doing very well in this lap. They can lift about one metric tonne more than the Progress freighter, and they are the only ones with return cargo capabilities. Return capabilities we haven't had since the Space Shuttle. I'm glad to see the Japanese cargo vehicle getting good use, and I'm happy to see all the different companies enter this space (literally). SpaceX happens to be the American company the closest to providing independence for western astronauts.

Comment Re:Pao Wants "Safe Spaces" for Shills and Ideologu (Score 5, Informative) 385

Slashcode hasn't been open source in some time. Soylent built their site based on an older version of slashcode that was available and has modified it and improved it from there. Slashdot is built on the closed, and now completely proprietary, slashcode base.

Please Dice, drop the silly share button and return the read more link, and the read comments link. And provide a way to turn off the video stories that get stuck inline. This is an appropriate story to remind you of this. Your money is made because of content provided for free by us.

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