Give an Internet Freedom Disk

An anonymous reader, perhaps the blogger himself, writes to tell us about a new blog aimed at getting non-techies excited over the idea of running from a Live CD. The blogger doesn't call it that, preferring instead "Internet Freedom Disk"; Linux is never mentioned. The submitter adds: "This is just a great gift to drop on your non-geek friends and potentially wake up a sleeping giant." Cheap, last-minute, and you can make them yourself. The blogger isn't selling anything; he provides links to Ubuntu and Knoppix Live CDs. Or pick your favorite.

Comments

We must all use the internet freedom disk

[LordEd]

If we don't support freedom, the terrorists have already won!

Re:We must all use the internet freedom disk

[MyLongNickName]

Nah. It just sounds like you are about five years behind the "cool curve". Remember "Extreme" being put on the front of every product? If you do that now, you get laughed at. "Freedom" is so 2002.

Re:We must all use the internet freedom disk

[Sj0]

If the jump from using firefox in windows to using firefox in linux is so troublesome, I think you've got problems that won't be fixed by any CD...

Re:We must all use the internet freedom disk

[Anonymous Coward]

Where do I get a live CD that supports winmodems like the one which comes on my laptop? I only have this laptop and I'd like to see why Slashdot has been promulgating this OS for nearly a decade. From what I've been hearing it's much easier for non-IT admins nowadays but still has the same, unfriendly and impersonal support of RTFM.

Re:We must all use the internet freedom disk

[JackieBrown]

Your wrong. RTFM

Re:We must all use the internet freedom disk

[faolan_devyn_aodfin]

Everyone know freedom is so late 18th Century!

Re:We must all use the internet freedom disk

[Anonymous Coward]

>>...but still has the same, unfriendly and impersonal support of RTFM. I swear to God: 7836 (RTFM) is the actual "straight-thru" (always a live answer - never a voicemail) extension to our IT group. I've been told I'm the only one outside of the group that 'gets' the joke (and have been asked to please keep it quiet within the company).

Re:We must all use the internet freedom disk

[fm6]

The terrorists have already won. I can even give you the exact date: December 12, 2000.

Re:We must all use the internet freedom disk

[the_bard17]

I'll bite.

Odds are, if I slapped together a Windows-based "Live CD" (BartPE, most likely), it wouldn't have the drivers for your scanner or your printer, either. There's a lot of printers out there... and quite a few of them have sizeable drivers (*cough* HP *cough*).

Besides, I thought the point of the "Internet Freedom Disk" was so that you could browse the web while being relatively carefree? Exactly where does a scanner fit into that usage? I can understand the need for a scanner, but mostly concerning editing/duplicating photographs or saving important paperwork, etc. Needing a scanner to browse the web? That's stretching it a bit.

Point #4 is a little inflammatory, but I'll address it anyway with a few counter arguments. First, odds are that your "commonly used applications" have a license that precludes them from being distributed on a LiveCD. It might be fine for you to slap it onto a LiveCD for your own personal use (realistically, who's gonna find out if it's not?), but if you post the ISO up on the web, somebody's probably going to start hollering. Especially if your "commonly used application" involves certain Microsoft products. For that matter, it's safe to say that you can't build your Windows LiveCD, then toss the ISO up on the web, due to those same licensing concerns. Second, once again this is a "Internet Freedom Disk." Nobody said anything about a "Productivity Freedom Disk" or a "Media Creation/Editing Freedom Disk."

The only argument I can see in your favor is that not all web content is able to be viewed from this LiveCD, most notably certain streaming video (pretty much any site that requires Windows Media Player). I have to assume this, since I can't view this content on my own Linux desktop (CNN anyone?)

Re:We must all use the internet freedom disk

[Technician]

Besides, I thought the point of the "Internet Freedom Disk" was so that you could browse the web while being relatively carefree?

Using Ubuntu live CD once in a while has made it very clear they left out a few things. By the nature of the open source lisence, they can't include them. Things missing are FLASH and other Media codecs.

You are not going to use a live Linux CD to visit My-Space, Yahoo, Google, and others to view the videos and enjoy the music. Non free codecs are not included in the distribution.

The live CD is OK for slashdot and some of the articles, but not all.

Re:We must all use the internet freedom disk

[Ticklemonster]

It's the New and Improved TURBO Internet Freedom Disk with Nano Tube Techonlogy! Key kids, browse all the grown up sites!!! Hey Grown ups, browse all the kiddie sites!!!! yeah. Great. Nothing like a little American style Freedom to assault safety as usual.

Re:We must all use the internet freedom disk

[kdemetter]

Having a bad day ? don't worry , tommorow will be better

Re:We must all use the internet freedom disk

[Hal_Porter]

Extreme To The Max iFreedom 2.0 would be ok, at least for a couple of months. I'd take off the 2.0 then though, that shit is played out.

Actually, I wonder what would happen if Apple made a OS X LiveCD as a promo. It shouldn't be that hard to get OS X to run from a CD. They could allow some simple filesystem access, but not enought to make it a Mac competitor.

And they probably have NVidia and ATI drivers already, so it should work on most graphics cards.

You could give the CDs away widely, and see if people buy Macs when they get used to Mac OS.

Re:We must all use the internet freedom disk

[ElleyKitten]

You are not going to use a live Linux CD to visit My-Space, Yahoo, Google, and others to view the videos and enjoy the music. Non free codecs are not included in the distribution.

You can always use a Linux Live CD that comes with the non-free codecs, like Linspire/Freespire or Mepis.

Re:We must all use the internet freedom disk

[the_bard17]

Yeah... got the mplayer plugin installed, but mistakenly forgot to create a link to the plugin in my $HOME/.mozilla/plugins directory. That by itself won't do the job, however, since CNN still requests WMP. Installing User Agent Switcher should rectify this.

Only, with UAS set to IE 6 & WinXP, pointing FF to cnn.com results in FF crashing hard, with an error something like "expected version > 5, version 4). I'll hunt around for a fix later when it bothers me enough.

Re:We must all use the internet freedom disk

[jonadab]

> Where do I get a live CD that supports winmodems like the one which comes on my laptop?

It depends on what model of winmodem you have, but Knoppix tries to support as many of them as it can. While it's possible to find out what model and chipset you have and look them up to see if they are supported, it's much easier to just put a Knoppix CD in the drive and try it out to see if it works. Because it's a LiveCD, you don't have to install anything or alter the contents of your hard drive, so when you take the CD out and reboot everything will be back the way you left it. So all you lose by trying it is, at most, the cost of a blank CD-R disc, the bandwidth you consumed downloading the image, and the five minutes you spent trying it.

Re:We must all use the internet freedom disk

[jonadab]

> 7836 (RTFM) is the actual "straight-thru" (always a live answer - never a voicemail) extension
> to our IT group. I've been told I'm the only one outside of the group that 'gets' the joke

Bear in mind that 7836 can be translated to any of a hundred and eight different four-letter sequences. If you count sequences with digits in them, which are commonly used to make rememberable phone numbers, there are three hundred and twenty possibilities. Is it really surprising that nobody in the company happened to notice that RTFM is one of the many possibilities for what 7836 might mean? After all, it could also have been chosen because it spells out the Unix command sudo (which is used by system administrators to execute a command with escalated privileges), among other things.

yea...right...

[JazzyMusicMan]

I think you're better off giving them macaroni and cheese drawings. Ever see that mac commercial "i spent all day trying to get my new digital camera to work..."

Re:yea...right...

[karnal]

I don't think I was ever allowed to put the "cheese" on the wonderful macaroni art I used to make as a kid.

I probably would have just eaten the cheese powder anyways.

You lost me at

[Timesprout]

getting non-techies excited over the idea of running from a Live CD

Normal people dont get excited about operating systems. PC's are either tools or toys to them. Getting another operating systems is about as exciting as changing the wash cycle in their dishwasher for most people.

Re:You lost me at

[Who235]

I like to use the "pots and pans" cycle even when there are no pots or pans in the load. I think it's more secure aginst streaks, spots, and other malcleaning. It also protects against the trojan spaghetti sauce that tends to stick after a "normal" cycle.

I know the detergent makers usually only support "normal" wash, but I've found that to be typical Cascade FUD - most of the time I can use exactly the same detergent, or in a pinch I can make my own.

I've tried and tried to get my aunts and uncles to switch over to "pots and pans" so they'll stop calling me when food remains stuck to their dishes, but they always forget and just set the dial to "normal" as soon as I leave. I never should have let on that I know anything about dishwashers.

Oh well.

Re:You lost me at

[Antony-Kyre]

Doesn't the pots and pans cycle use up more energy/water? Doesn't it end up costing you more money each year?

Re:You lost me at

[BlowChunx]

Tell this to my neighbor who put out a Pentium 2.4 machine on the curb because it gave her a BSOD.

Show her a live CD, and it's all kittens after that.

Re:You lost me at

[couchslug]

"PC's are either tools or toys to them."
Exactly. That's why I demonstrate live CDs and THEN give them away.
A machine at work refused to finish booting, and we are down to an airman who only knows to format and reload. (Users aren't Administrators on their boxes much anymore, which would be good if we hadn't got rid of most of our skilled workgroup managers...)
I unplugged the machine from the network, booted Knoppix, burned the needed files to external DVD, and played some of the music I found while I was at it. User was happy his records were saved.

Re:You lost me at

[jrockway]

Well, it would probably be cheaper to just eat off of dirty dishes, right, so why bother with the dishwasher at all?

(Same thing with heating / cooling your house. It's just going to get hot after your turn off your air conditioning, so why bother using it all?)

Re:You lost me at

[Antony-Kyre]

Efficiency is the key. Not using/paying for more than what is needed. I guess it depends on whether someone minds eating off of 90% clean dishes. As for heating and cooling houses, the same thing holds true concerning efficiency.

Re:You lost me at

[Dunbal]

it would probably be cheaper to just eat off of dirty dishes, right, so why bother with the dishwasher at all?

      Isn't that what the dog is for? Here boy...

Re:You lost me at

[AmberBlackCat]

I just want to know if it's going to be compatible with my cups.

Re:You lost me at

[gEvil (beta)]

You should disconnect the fuel line on her car. Just be sure to be around when she discovers it. : D

Re:You lost me at

[supremebob]

Not only that, but most "normal" people aren't really interested in changing their operating system. I got sick of hearing my Dad complain about how much Windows XP sucked, so I gave him a Red Hat Linux distribution for Christmas along with the other gifts that he asked for a few years ago. Even though I offered to help him with the installation, I doubt that he even cracked open the jewel case on those CD's. Some people are just more comfortable with the devil they know, I guess.

Re:You lost me at

[Donniedarkness]

Sadly enough (and I'm not kidding), I have the same damn problem with my family and their dishwasher.

Re:You lost me at

[xactuary]

OK now you're scaring me because I love learning new operating systems AND my my new automatic dishwasher. Oh, and this: Why be normal?

Re:You lost me at

[c6gunner]

Normal people dont get excited about operating systems. PC's are either tools or toys to them. Getting another operating systems is about as exciting as changing the wash cycle in their dishwasher for most people.

Nonsense. I usually carry around two mini-CD's, one with Slax, and one with BartPE, plus a memory stick with just about every application you could ever need. Every time I put one of those tiny disks into a machine that "doesn't work", and have a fully functional GUI 2 minutes later, people get real excited. That kind of stuff is cool even for the "non-geeks", and they get even more amazed when I start doing things like cracking their SAM database :)

Re:You lost me at

[jawtheshark]

I believe you: found a P-IV 1.9GHz/512Meg RAM in the bin at the recycling centre. Completely spyware infested, but well, nothing that a fresh install couldn't fix.

Re:You lost me at

[murdocj]

Not only that, but most "normal" people aren't really interested in changing their operating system

It's the difference between people who want to use their car to get to where they are going, and the people who are fascinated by cars and want to spend their weekends dinking around in the engine. If you offered me a new set of sparkplugs and expected me to be delighted, you'd have a grave disappointment.

Re:You lost me at

[Hal_Porter]

Oh, and this: Why be normal?

Two words - sex and money.

Re:You lost me at

[shadwstalkr]

I just want to know if it's going to be compatible with my cups.

Geez, can't you search through the website of your cup manufacturer, call their tech support, explain what a wash cycle is, search the forums of your dishwasher manufacturer, find your local PPWG (Pots/Pans Washing Group), read the toprck man page, read the water flow schematic, and/or try it yourself?!? If you're too stupid to RTFM and figure out the cycles on your dishwasher, you shouldn't even be using it!!!

Re:You lost me at

[Antony-Kyre]

I think I'd prefer cats. At least they don't drink out of the toilet, and wouldn't be getting their toilet tongue all over the dishes.

hmm great!

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Retake your Internet! Once again browse any page! Click any item! Surf with impunity!

1 - I've failed to "take my internet" so far, how will I retake it?
2 - I can already browse any page
3 - I can already click any item
4 - Does this mean I can download kiddie porn without fearing the police?

Seriously though, as soon as I read that first line, I stopped perusing this blog. It sounds very silly and useless...

Re:hmm great!

[QuantumG]

Does this mean I can download kiddie porn without fearing the police? So long as you're using an open wireless access point, sure.

It is a live CD.

Re:hmm great!

[TheRaven64]

More computers allow booting from optical disks than from USB. A good solution is to boot from a DVD and have an entry in fstab that union mounts a USB device over the top of your DVD. That gives you a decent sized set of applications (4.7GB is enough for a very useful install) as well as some extra storage space.

If you want to do it even better, then put a Xen guest on the USB keychain and have a boot DVD that contains Xen and a dom0 host for machines which don't have Xen installed. That way you don't even need to shut down and lose state when you remove the USB drive, just suspend the machine.

Re:hmm great!

[Technician]

perhaps a usb keychain could be a better alternative.


Except that most USB keychains have no write protect. The idea of a Live CD is there is no way malware can get written and present at the next boot. A writable USB keychain removes this protection.

Brill

[Rexz]

A blogger linked to Ubuntu? Great story guys. Very worthy of the front page.

Re:Brill

[surgeon]

_Terrible_

Bleh, the end of the blog is a party pooper

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

There are a few different IFD's out there. The geeks call them Live-CD's. They don't look to alive to me, but the geeks have a habit of choosing bad names for things, sad but true. You will have to know what an .iso file is and how to burn it. If that just scared you then just buy a large pizza with extra cheese and a six-pack of beer. Then invite your geek friend over to do it for you. This way is much easier and more fun.

So basically, once non-tech folks are excited about live-CDs and have downloaded the iso, they're freed and... need to con a geek into coming to their home to do the job because n00bs can't figure it out. Great, I'm sure countless people needed that advice.

Re:Bleh, the end of the blog is a party pooper

[nurb432]

But it means free food for almost no work.. Sounds good to me.

Re:Bleh, the end of the blog is a party pooper

[flyingfsck]

You won't believe how many geeks(!) I had to help to burn an ISO file on their Windoze PC. Most Windoze CD burning programs make that simple process very difficult/impossible.

Re:Bleh, the end of the blog is a party pooper

[RobertLTux]

yick im going to waive my mod points to post this little gem ftp://terabyteunlimited.com/burncdcc.zip
1 its freeware
2 all it does is burn isos
3 if you can't figure it out sell your computer
4 if you manage to make a coaster your drive is defective (or your box is "compromised")

Re:Bleh, the end of the blog is a party pooper

[NiteShaed]

1. Download and install the ISO Recorder Power Toy.
2. Right click on the .iso file, select "Copy Image to CD"

Didn't seem all that difficult to me.....

Re:Bleh, the end of the blog is a party pooper

[QuantumG]

I use isoburn. It does that one job, that's all it does.. and it makes a little singing noise at the end.

Re:Bleh, the end of the blog is a party pooper

[uberjoe]

But it means free food for almost no work.. Sounds good to me

Free food, AND beer. Don't forget the beer part. Very important.

Re:Bleh, the end of the blog is a party pooper

[QuantumG]

The ISO Recorder Power Toy only does on Vista. WTF, seriously.

Re:Bleh, the end of the blog is a party pooper

[NiteShaed]

Nope, works just fine on XP. Seriously even.
Now, if you're referring to DVD iso, then you'd be correct, but the post I'm responding to specifically refers to CDs. Quoth flyingfsck a couple of posts up:
You won't believe how many geeks(!) I had to help to burn an ISO file on their Windoze PC. Most Windoze CD burning programs make that simple process very difficult/impossible.

Re:Bleh, the end of the blog is a party pooper

[QuantumG]

The ISO Recorder Power Toy only does < 800mb CD images on XP. It only does DVD images on Vista. WTF, seriously.

better.

Re:Bleh, the end of the blog is a party pooper

[QuantumG]

Yeah, sorry, I reposted without the superious < that made my post incomprehensible. Any idea why that guy can't make it burn DVDs? Or his he just so leet that he's already running Vista so he doesn't care about XP anymore?

Re:Bleh, the end of the blog is a party pooper

[NiteShaed]

Ah, now I got ya....and no worries :)

No, I don't know specifics. AFAIK, The power toy just builds a little on what already exists (XP supports CD writing out of the box), so unless MS decides to update XP to support native DVD writing (ha ha ha), I would think no DVD Power Toy for XP.

Re:Bleh, the end of the blog is a party pooper

[Sparr0]

"You will have to know what an .iso file is and how to burn it."

Only if you are running a poorly organized and feature-lacking OS. Kubuntu has "Burn" on the right click menu for an .iso file out of the box.

Re:Bleh, the end of the blog is a party pooper

[PinkPanther]

Does it have a tooltip or something to tell that person what an "ISO" is and why they would want to burn anything anywhere near their computer?

Re:Bleh, the end of the blog is a party pooper

[tehcyder]

You won't believe how many geeks(!) I had to help to burn an ISO file on their Windoze PC. Most Windoze CD burning programs make that simple process very difficult/impossible.

Rubbish, the most popular Windows CD burning progam Nero (which you often get a free cut down/older version of with a PC anyway) does this with a few mouse clicks.

Re:Bleh, the end of the blog is a party pooper

[Sparr0]

The icon has a CD with some indication of data going onto it. I can't describe it precisely since I don't have it in front of me. It seemed pretty self explanatory to me. Joe Average probably understands the term 'burn' by now, even if only from anti-piracy campaigns.

Security?

[delirium of disorder]

It looks like the purpose of this CD is to protect users from Trojans, spyware, and other malware. The author of this page encourages users to click on anything they want on the web and not worry about the source of the executables that they are running. Encouraging users to continue to be ignorant and reckless sounds like a horrible idea. Sure, right now there doesn't happen to be much malware for Linux, but if more dumb people start running Linux, it will be produced. Even though Linux is more resistant than Windoze to being broken into by traditional exploits, if the user deliberately runs some malicious program, the system cannot protect itself. No system that allows the user to administer their own machine can protect from these kinds of attacks. We need to educate users AND give them Linux. Doing either one without the other will leave the our public Internet in worse shape and our fellow users just as bewildered and dangerous.

Re:Security?

[Jarjarthejedi]

"We need to educate users AND give them Linux"

No, we just need to educate them. A Window's user who's smart enough not to click things they shouldn't be clicking, run a firewall and use an Anti-Virus is very hard to attack. Adding Linux to the mix makes them a tiny bit harder but it's not like an educated person who's NOT using Linux is going to get viruses. No offense but that statement just sounds like fanboyism, the OS is a very small factor in computer Safety, the user is a very large factor.

Re:Security?

[flyingfsck]

I have been running Linux since 1996. I open any email attachments and click any links with wild abandon. Ten years and no problems due to that...

Re:Security?

[MustardMan]

Uh, that's the whole point of it being a LIVE CD... your computer gets fucked up, you're a reboot away from a complete restoration. Of course, you still risk having your saved files and whatnot deleted, but that's not the point of the "freedom disk" idea.

Re:Security?

[Chandon Seldon]

Why should users jump through ridiculous hoops to get a system that still isn't secure when they can run secure and functional free software instead?

Re:Security?

[Nasarius]

Or you're one local root exploit away from having your hard drive wiped.

Re:Security?

[yvanthegreat]

As an IT manager on a secondary school, and having spoken to lots of those in other schools, I must warn you about the fact that you might not find enough 'educated' teachers to educate all those users. And even those who should educate the teachers are not always educated enough...

For example, I got this job when the previous 'IT-man' got a job at the government to think about strategies to work with computers in a school and explain them to teachers. The next year, my school got a network.

Re:Security?

[Torvaun]

I'm a computer tech. I need to know the systems my clients are using. Far and away, that's Windows XP, with a smattering of Windows 2000, and one Mac. At home, I run Windows XP. Geek that I am, I know all about firewalls and AV software, phishing and other scams. I don't have computer troubles. How can that be, you ask? Simple. Users, not OS's, are secure or insecure. The same moron who installs everything under the sun on his computer under Windows is going to be sending checks to Nigerian royalty under Linux. I'm in the rare position where switching to Linux would be detrimental. If I fail to keep up on how to do things on Windows systems, I will lose money. Even if there were as many Linux users out there as Windows ones, they would still not increase my customer base by as much as the Windows users do. Besides that, I do enjoy my PC gaming.

Re:Security?

[Kingrames]

You don't understand how effective that would be at improving the security features of Linux.

Stupid people do stupid things [u]more often than[/u] non-stupid people. This would increase the number of guinea pigs running linux by a significant number. Especially if you tell them that they can call themselves the "Person of the Year" if they use it, and still be completely honest.

With more stupid people running linux, more bugs would be found.
When more bugs are found, more bugs are fixed.

When more bugs are fixed, and people realize that Linux fixes its bugs in minutes, hours, or days, and not in months or years, they'll easily see that picking up a copy of Linux and giving feedback is a very very cool thing.

Re:Security?

[mliikset]

A point in favor of these CDs is that they run only in memory, from read-only media. Ergo, a reboot gets you a clean system with no damage done, and the hard disk OS is intact. Perfect for drunken idiots that need to interact online while using a roommate's computer, and who just can't seem to avoid malware and ridiculous downloads. Educating the masses to use Internet resources responsibly is laudable but difficult. A sandbox to contain careless behavior isn't exactly a bad thing in the meantime.

Re:Security?

[robogun]

We need to educate users

Look, they don't want to be 1337 like us. Personally I revel in being a geek, but for many, turning into a geek would be more scary than being pwned. They just want their myspace and pr0n, they don't have the time or brains or the interest to learn the computer workings. Me, I just want them to stop calling when they get browser jacked. Therefore it would behoove us & the intire Internet to see to it that they surf safely.

Re:Security?

[humphrm]

And, apparently, you like comparing apples to oranges.

Go make your money. Not everyone is in it for the money. Sounds like you picked the right OS to support.

Re:Security?

[mliikset]

think about what you're saying, in the context of a typical PC. This person is going to reboot, not turn it over to several other users. Running a local root exploit is only a problem if it is actively being multiused.

Nobody suggested that mission critical systems run from a Knoppix CD, but it might make sense for some casual web surfers.

Re:Security?

[morboIV]

Yes, but stupid people tend not to file very good bug reports.

Re:Security?

[Torvaun]

I'm not talking about massive, brick house made out of bricks of cash money. I'm talking about the whole food and shelter type of money. If I switched, I'd get to be the only homeless guy with a superior knowledge of Linux. Comparing apples to oranges? Sure. But I'm saying that both fruit rot if you don't take steps to preserve them. The user is the thing that computer security is most dependent on. Not the OS. If you want to take the standpoint of 'Our users are more secure than your users' then that's a true statement, on average. Extending that to the elitist snob position of 'That means that our OS is better than yours could ever be' is the problem I'm seeing.

Re:Security?

[robbak]

Or, you're only one mouse click away from having your hard drive wiped.

Re:Security?

[mackyrae]

You're right. If you get paid to fix Windows computer, getting out of practice on XP is bad. I've been using Ubuntu almost exclusively (you know, aside from playing Thief or the Sims on another kid's computer and using QuickBooks at work) for 6 months and I now know it better than 9 years of Windows. Part of that is that I'm forgetting Windows stuff. I work at a computer store. I remember enough to do some tech stuff, but that's not part of my job at the moment, so I don't get much practice at it. I do fix computers for a couple stores in the mall, though, and that brought some stuff back (actually, I figured out how to rollback a driver today after the graphics driver "update" from MS broke). Still, I had to look through my phone going "need a geek who uses Windows..." yesterday when there were web connection troubles and I couldn't think of any other things to try in the Network Connections. It wasn't a computer problem (bad router), but I should've been able to diagnose that it wasn't the computer's fault. I'd like to not use Windows, but I might have to run it in a VM so that when I get calls from family members I can tell them exactly what to click in the Control Panel because I don't remember what all is in there.

Re:Security?

[ps_inkling]

Or you're one local root exploit away from having your hard drive wiped.

Long ago, having your *nix box cracked meant you hard drive was wiped. Haha, very funny.

Today, the people who crack access to systems are not interested in destroying it -- it's a computing resource, and a potential gateway to acquiring other computing resources. Right now, the low-hanging fruit is the plethora of unprotected or underpatched Windows systems. But I'm sure if someone was to root your *nix box, the last thing they would do is wipe the hard drive.

Re:Bad Outcome.

[cp.tar]

This will just allow pedophiles to conduct their activities with even less traceability.

Yes, we have to think of the children.

Please, do not mention Tor anywhere you think pedophiles might be reading.

Why?

[hikerhat]

Why would my non-technical friend want to transform his computer from a fully function system, with all his documents, programs, music, etc into a semi functional linux system running off a cdrom? Removing the word 'linux' from the name of the cd doesn't make it more appealing. And what does 'internet freedom' mean to my non-technical friend? Will he be able to get to more web sites? No. Maybe less given that linux web browsers can only render a subset of the pages windows browsers can. Can he save new files or music to his live cd? No. All your work goes away when you shut the computer down.

Exactly what freedoms are available to you when you run a linux live system off a cdrom that are unavailable to you on your fully functional windows system?

Re:Why?

[Garrett Fox]

And after having his Freedom Disc installed, he'll still not know what to do with those programs, because Linux doesn't yet seem to have a large, friendly "TUTORIAL" button on its default desktop. Asking him to go to IRC with any problems, or read a textbook to learn about this Linux thing, creates a substantial hurdle before this new user can do anything with the new system. If he's told, "What's so hard? There's your Internet browser; there's your word processor," then he's as badly off as if he'd stuck with Windows -- no knowledge of the underlying file system, permissions, etc..

Re:Why?

[QuantumG]

I can name four.

Re:Why?

[Chandon Seldon]

Are you a time traveller from 1998 who hasn't bothered checking to make sure the world hasn't changed in 8 years or something?

Most computer users use their computer by looking at the screen and clicking on stuff that looks like it will do what they want. The fact that Ubuntu has an "Applications" menu rather than a "Start" menu shouldn't slow that down. The big old Firefox icon, and the "OpenOffice.org Word Processor" item under the "Office" menu shouldn't be that hard either.

The fact of the matter is, as long as a user isn't computer illiterate to the point that they can't operate a mouse, any modern user-oriented desktop operating system will work fine for them - Windows XP, Mac OS X, Ubuntu, SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop.

Even the old "Applications" issue is basically irrelevant. The only reason you'd need Windows on a computer is to play computer games - Windows is appropriate in the same places that a Playstation 3 is, not for getting work done.

Re:Why?

[rinkjustice]

Exactly what freedoms are available to you when you run a linux live system off a cdrom that are unavailable to you on your fully functional windows system?

Freedom from proprietary software and forced, expensive upgrades. Freedom from ignorance. Freedom from the same cookie-cutter applications and nagware with annoying splash screens from hell.

Freedom to know what the heck all this Ubuntu buzz is their reading on Digg and Slashdot all the time (and I could go on).

Re:Why?

[Eternauta3k]

Windows is appropriate in the same places that a Playstation 3 is, not for getting work done.

Mathematics, electronic and other kinds of CAD. Linux isn't as advanced as windows in those areas. Don't mention blender and qcad, because they are not as good as their windows counterparts. There are good, specialized windows programs you can't find in linux.

Re:Why?

[Chandon Seldon]

Sure, there are specialized applications in any number of obscure fields that only work on legacy platforms. If you absolutely, positively, must run some specific piece of obscure proprietary software then I guess you need a Windows workstation. That's not specific to Windows applications either - there are bunches of people in obscure computer graphics fields who need to run Solaris or (less frequently now) Irix, because that's where the apps they want to use are available.

But just because there's some obscure piece of field-specific software that requires Windows or Solaris or an AIX workstation doesn't mean that everyone in the world needs to run those operating systems on their computer. Most people don't run extremely obscure almost-custom software when they use their computer - they run normal desktop apps like a word processor and a video player - and for those things there's no good reason to favor Windows over the other options.

Re:Why?

[NiteShaed]

Freedom from proprietary software and forced, expensive upgrades.

The average home user generally couldn't care less. Most of the home-users I run into want to browse the web, and not a whole lot more. They check their email on yahoo, msn, or (shudder) AOL. They use Internet Explorer because it's there, and that's about it.

Freedom from ignorance.

Yeah, there's a selling point.....
You: "Use this, or else I'll think you're ignorant".
User: "Bugger off nerd".
They don't care. They don't consider this kind of information important, or even interesting, and they probably don't consider themselves ignorant for not knowing about it.

Freedom from the same cookie-cutter applications and nagware with annoying splash screens from hell.

Splash Screens? That's got to be the weirdest reason I've ever seen to switch to Linux.

Freedom to know what the heck all this Ubuntu buzz is their reading on Digg and Slashdot all the time

The average home-user type is not reading Slashdot. "News for Nerds", remember? These people are reading MSNBC, or AOL, or any of thousands of other sites where you are really not likely to encounter the word Ubuntu.

Re:Why?

[Mongoose Disciple]

The fact of the matter is, as long as a user isn't computer illiterate to the point that they can't operate a mouse, any modern user-oriented desktop operating system will work fine for them - Windows XP, Mac OS X, Ubuntu, SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop.

Clearly, you've never done tech support. :)

(Possibly including for ignorant enough family members who would be better off if they couldn't operate a mouse -- so far, everything but OS X beat the stuffing out of my father-in-law.)

Re:Why?

[Spikeles]

The only reason you'd need Windows on a computer is to play computer games - Windows is appropriate in the same places that a Playstation 3 is, not for getting work done.

I have to completely agree with this, even though i don't use Linux as often as i did. The only reason i still have Windows installed is to play games and play DVDs. All other applications either have better or equivalent software under Linux and if they don't i can normally get the Windows version running under Wine. *sigh* Biggest problem is that i've never had success playing DVDs properly under Linux unfortunately, it always crashes, has decoding errors or some stupid problem.

Re:Why?

[Garrett Fox]

The sort of user who will only use Firefox, Thunderbird and OO (good programs) also strikes me as the sort who knows and cares nothing about the issues that cause the original article to speak of "freedom." In what way are they better off with Linux, then? It seems kind of patronizing to tell people "this is better," substitute something they see as identical, and not explain why it's better. If you want people to become more experienced and skillful computer users who appreciate issues like DRM and Net security, then they're going to need to learn about things like the file system. A tutorial starting on a very basic level would help to introduce new Linux users to the OS, letting them satisfy any curiosity they have about what they can do other than check their e-mail, and gradually increasing their skill.

Re:Why?

[Technician]

All your work goes away when you shut the computer down.
Exactly what freedoms are available to you when you run a linux live


Ever wish that was the case when the RIAA lawyer sent you a letter?

Sure, here is an image of my hard drive. See it never had bittorrent installed or any other P-P client. Just don't let them know you have a USB external hard drive for your live CD sessions.

Re:Why?

[Eternauta3k]

First, I'll make it clear we're talking about using the pc for work, for which you said windows was useless.

Most people don't run extremely obscure almost-custom software when they use their computer - they run normal desktop apps like a word processor and a video player - and for those things there's no good reason to favor Windows over the other options.

Yet many areas of work require not obscure, custom made legacy apps but apps which are well known (autocad, spice, microwave office) yet not multi-OS. There are other areas (such as financial, where you don't need as much and as diverse a knowledge as in CAD) where you can find decent or great works in progress for linux.

Re:Why?

[Chandon Seldon]

I actually was a professional technical support rep for almost a year. Just like small children, users cope if you don't baby them.

Re:Why?

[Chandon Seldon]

True. That's why I used the term "almost-custom". If the software you list were any more obscure, it would have to be custom.

An interesting note is that the makers of Autocad would probably be pretty receptive to a Linux port if any of their significant customers requested it. Another product of theirs - Maya - not only has Linux binaries, but is actively supported on two different Linux distros.

Re:Why?

[Eternauta3k]

An interesting note is that the makers of Autocad would probably be pretty receptive to a Linux port if any of their significant customers requested it. Another product of theirs - Maya - not only has Linux binaries, but is actively supported on two different Linux distros.

I guess many companies don't port to linux not because they have too much windows-specific code, but because they don't want their developers spending any time on that linux thing they've never heard of before.
I think the only thing stopping the adoption of linux at home by the computer-literate is games. I read an article about the piracy rate here in Argentina and it was around 80%. It would be great for companies to program for linux too, so businesses could switch. But I don't see it hapenning any time soon.

Re:Why?

[Chandon Seldon]

The only general difference I can see between a business user and a home user is that a business user generally won't be playing games. Given that, Linux should be perfect for a corporate environment right now. If there are one or two people who rely on specific legacy Windows apps like Autocad... keep a Windows workstation around for them. If it's just Microsoft Office, the license fees are a waste of money.

Getting non-techies excited

[Simon Garlick]

Repeat after me.

Non-techies don't care about this shit.
Non-techies don't care about this shit.
Non-techies don't care about this shit.

Re:Getting non-techies excited

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

Neither do techies, so it seems.

Re:Getting non-techies excited

[anotherlogan]

Last year a co-worker gave me Puppy Linux for a secret santa gift. Needless to say I was secretly pissed.

Re:Getting non-techies excited

[faolan_devyn_aodfin]

At least he didn't give you Fedora. That's like getting mono for you birthday :P I kid. Were you expecting Ubuntu?

Good intentions, not for everybody (surprise!)

[Virtual_Raider]

I think this is a much better attempt than the horrible BadVista site from yesterday. While the tone of this one may not appeal to everybody, there is absolutely no single approach to anything what will work for everyone under the sun =)

Perhaps sites like this would be most effective after somebody has been experiencing problems with their PC. Try to talk somebody with a perfectly working computer about it and the whole "if it ain't broke don't fix it" mentality takes over.

So free, in fact...

[KmN]

that it doesn't come with Flash or Java. So much for browsing any page.

Re:So free, in fact...

[presentt]

KmN:

that it doesn't come with Flash or Java. So much for browsing any page. Didn't Adobe release Flash as open-source? I think that there is a Mozilla project called Tamarin to integrate Flash as a open-source Firefox plug-in, too. And I think Java is becoming open-source now, as well. So maybe it won't be so long until distributions like Debian (on which Ubuntu is based), which limit packages to those that are strictly free, start including Flash and Java.

Re:So free, in fact...

[FunWithKnives]

You're right. Besides Tamarin, there's also GNU Gnash. Here's the homepage for anyone that's interested. For those of us running K/X/Ubuntu or other Debian-based distros, "sudo apt-get install gnash".

Re:So free, in fact...

[LiquidFire_HK]

Didn't Adobe release Flash as open-source?

Uhm, no, as it says on both of the links you provided, only the ActionScript engine is open. While I suppose it is indeed an important part of Flash, it is nowhere near the whole thing. I guess this would provide some help for the Gnash project, though.

Re:So free, in fact...

[presentt]

Oh, I see. I stand corrected.

So then, how often is ActionScript used on its own, separately from Flash? I don't develop for the web, but wouldn't someone who does be more likely to use Javascript or even ASP.net?

And the best is...

[bogaboga]

I have tested a number of "Internet Freedom Disks" (Live CDs), if I may call them that and have found that the best "Internet Freedom Disk" is Freespire version 1.0.13.This disk comes with everything needed to be productive on the internet nowadays.

It is the only disk that enables me watch CNN video, Yahoo! video, and videos on http://www.youtube.com/ and http://www.video.google.com/ and http://http//www.grouper.com with no tweaking whatsoever.

This disk also enabled me play Yahoo! games which means Java was [properly] installed. Sound and video worked great and the fonts for the first time, looked better, though more work was still needed on this front.

One thing I did not like was the CnR warehouse for it complained about my email address being invalid and complained again that the same email address had already been used!

The other complaint I have with Freespire is the fact that I could not customize my KDE to my liking. But overall, this Freespire distro is the best I have seen for the desktop in the Linux world.

Re:And the best is...

[rollingcalf]

So would you mind posting a link to where someone can download the ISO for a Live CD of Freespire? The Freespire.org site doesn't have anything about Live CDs, only installable CDs (unless it's there somewhere and I couldn't find it).

Re:And the best is...

[bogaboga]

http://tracker.linspire.com/torrents/freespire_1.0 .13.iso.torrent

Burn that torrent and use the resulting disk as a Live CD by selecting the appropriate menu option.

This has success written all over it

[MrNonchalant]

"Woohoo! Yay! Uncle Bobby got me an Internet Freedom Disk!"

I can just the happy children smiling now.

Not this again...

[UbuntuDupe]

Please, cut it with the fads. Just call it by its normal name -- an Internet French Disk.

"Linux Is Never Mentioned"

[emjoi_gently]

Sorry, but this reminds of of Scientologists offering "A Free Personality Test".
Omitting to mention, oh by the way, we're a Weird Religious Cult.

Re:"Linux Is Never Mentioned"

[scoot80]

Lol. I saw one of those fliers a few days ago..

Re:Those long, long, long, boot times.

[eldepeche]

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

Scam!

[DukeFH]

This is like when christians drop fake $100 bills with the gospel on the back.

Re:Scam!

[p0ss]

FTA

You will have to know what an .iso file is and how to burn it. If that just scared you then just buy a large pizza with extra cheese and a six-pack of beer. Then invite your geek friend over to do it for you. This way is much easier and more fun.

TRANSLATION

"hey guys, i can get you free porn if you'll be my friends!"

Re:Scam!

[MLease]

This is like when christians drop fake $100 bills with the gospel on the back.

That would have to be one humongous $100 bill!

-Mike

AOL

[Joebert]

"This is just a great gift to drop on your non-geek friends and potentially wake up a sleeping giant."

Yeah, that's what AOL thought.
I can see the looks on my friends and families faces now when I try to give them this disk.

Nothing personal

[Infonaut]

Non-techies don't care about this shit. (x3)

Agreed. But the next time I see the phrase "repeat after me" on Slashdot, I'm going to go down to Fry's and sling giant vats of flaming bat guano all over the aisles until the police drag me away, kicking and screaming, babbling on about trite, overused expressions on Slashdot.

Re:Nothing personal

[p3w-451]

Repeat after me.

Re:Nothing personal

[FishWithAHammer]

Repeat after me.

after me.

"Freedom"???

[thib_gc]

It's called an Internet *French* Disk, you insensitive clod... oh wait... never mind, it is an Internet Freedom Disk.

Re:"Freedom"???

[nowhere.elysium]

An 'Internet Liberté Disc', perchance?

Re:Bad Outcome.

[QuantumG]

Don't worry, it's not like anyone can get Tor to work anyway.

Bad habits die hard

[symbolic]

Despite the health crisis facing the US where the number of obese people is steadily rising, nothing changes. Why? Bad habits. An over-reliance on Windows is no less a bad habit than ordering a super-sized meal for the fifth time in one week.

But it doesn't matter- the super-sized meal, even though, over the long term, is degrading my health, it works for me NOW...this second. The failure here is the inability or lack of motivation when it comes to looking past the immediately obvious. Moving beyond this will require a cultural shift, and those don't come easy.

That having been said, I think linux will continue to gain ground, albeit slowly. The "freedom disk" may find takers in a small number of cases, but I don't think it will have the degree of impact that some are hoping for.

In reply to the story...

[Antony-Kyre]

Geeks need not beer. Give them a high energy drink instead.

Re:In reply to the story...

[Airconditioning]

Heresy!

Re:In reply to the story...

[Dunbal]

Geeks need not beer. Give them a high energy drink instead.

      What, are you 12 or something? :P

Re:In reply to the story...

[Antony-Kyre]

I'm in my 20s, but then again, I don't drink alcohol. I never tried it neither, so maybe I'm missing something.

This would make an interesting slashdot poll. "What kind of drinks do geeks out there consume when doing their stuff?"

Re:In reply to the story...

[Dunbal]

I never tried it neither, so maybe I'm missing something.

      Somebody get this guy a Duff beer! (Waits for typical "Barney" style transformation)

Re:In reply to the story...

[Aranwe Haldaloke]

I'll give them a high-energy drink, accelerated to 0.8c, courtesy of LHC.

Re:In reply to the story...

[slothman32]

I don't know why people seem to be obsessed with beer.
I tried it and don't like it.
No really, everyone I've tried, only a few sips of, was so bitter I couldn't swallow.
And no it's not, "American sucks; try Erupoean[sic]."
It's beer, and all ethanol beverages as well.
The total amount I've tried is less than my stomach isn't, a six-pack that is.

In any case I friended you because someone also isn't into it, to the extreme.

P.S. I am in my late 20's so it's not an age thing either. Nor my religion, et al.

Re:In reply to the story...

[Antony-Kyre]

I haven't tried alcoholic beverages. As to whether any food I consumed ever had alcohol used in it, I have no idea.

I figure it's best for me to not try it. The disadventages outweight any potential benefits (isn't a glass of red wine a day suppose to be healthy or something?). I don't have to worry about the high cost of it. The same goes for smoking tobacco, which I haven't tried. Namely, my health is more important in this respect and I wouldn't want to drain any of my money into these kinds of things.

The only recreational drug I use is caffeine, and that would be when I drink cans of Coca~Cola Classic. Still, it's not addicting because it's an easy switch over to anything else, except everything else is expensive compared to pop, except bottled water.

Re:In reply to the story...

[Antony-Kyre]

I should clarify that at one point my beverage of choice was Gatorade if I'm not mistaken, but at $4-5 per gallon (128 ounces) versus $3-5 per half case (144 ounces of pop).

Really?

[Sycraft-fu]

You have something to back that up or are you basing this off of one invalid case? Nero and Roxio, the two most popular burners, both support ISO naively and easily. You just tell it to make a CD from an image, show it the image, it does the rest. In the event the computer doesn't have one of those two you can grab DVD Decrypter which isn't really made for burning, but ISO burning is one of it's features (and it works well).

So I'm going to call BS here, especially given your use of "Windoze". My guess is that you know very little about Windows and in one case found a system that you couldn't figure out how to make burn, more likely your problem than Windows' problem. You've now decided that burning in Windows is hard, which is totally false.

FYI: Things like this don't help convert people to Linux. They convince people that Linux users are uninformed zealots and shouldn't be listened to. When you tell someone "This is hard to do in Windows," and it's not they figure (correctly) that you don't know what the hell you are talking about. Also using things like "Windoze" just makes you sound like you are 13. Nobody is sold by name calling. Act professional and stick to real issues, maybe someone will listen to you.

jargonizing is fun

[SaidinUnleashed]

Live CD is to "Internet Freedom Disk" as shovel is to "hand-held low-pollution manual excavation utility"

Re:Bad Outcome.

[mek2600]

You could save a lot of time by removing that other appendage instead.

Won't work. Here's why.

[Aphrika]

Friends I have that don't use Linux can't seem to comprehend the idea of a free OS. If I dropped copy of Ubuntu on their lap at Christmas, they'd immediately be suspicious of it. On booting, they'd complain that it wasn't Windows and that'd be that.

Reminds me of giving out mince pies in front of church on Saturday - most people couldn't understand why we would possibly give away mince pies. It was just a nice idea for shoppers walking past. Same with OSes - people expect to be charged, if they're not, they instantly assume that it's of low quality and crap, or there's some kind of benefit in it for you. Linux has more chance of being taken up if it was a $500 OS. Then it'd be a status symbol and everyone under the Sun would want it, or aspire to own it.

Re:Won't work. Here's why.

[Joey7F]

They are right to think that. Churches that are giving pies away are trying to get their attendance up. Restaurants that give away free samples are hoping you come spend some money there. Linux advocates are usually hoping people will use it and thus increase the OS' influence.

--Joey

Re:Won't work. Here's why.

[rohan972]

Friends I have that don't use Linux can't seem to comprehend the idea of a free OS.

Just yesterday I had some success explaining this (regarding openoffice, not an OS, but no real difference) to some non-tech business associates:
They understand commodities, I explained that most software is a commodity with near zero distribution costs. I explained the role of vendor lock-in in increasing prices and eliminating competition. I told them that Sun sell hardware and produce software to add value to the hardware (close enough) and release it free to reduce Microsoft's vendor lock in and that this reduces Microsoft's influence on Sun's market and business.

Not a comprehensive explanation but it was enough for them to see a business reason for people to release free software and to not be looking for the catch.

Hi, it's me

[Infonaut]

Can you bail me out of jail?

Re:Hi, it's me

[spun]

Can you pay me in vats of flaming bat guano?

Re:Bad Outcome.

[Nasarius]

I'm all for sarcastic humor and everything, but what the heck? Tor now even provides a pretty Windows installer complete with tray icon and no unsightly DOS window. It's just a matter of setting your favorite SOCKS-compatible P2P app (eg, eMule) to use the proxy. It's damn slow, but it works just fine.

Re:Bad Outcome.

[QuantumG]

SOCKS-compatible There ya go.

Example story

[Bananenrepublik]

I have tried and failed to burn an .iso image with the reduced version of Roxio that is distributed with Dell PCs in Germany. Only looking it up in google made me achieve this goal. Before that, my sister's boyfriend had tried to burn an .iso on the same computer and finally ended up setting up a network, pulling the .iso over to his PC, and burning it there. We are both computer-savvy. It just so happened that the program's documentation was unusable, and the .iso burning function was buried in the most unlogical place.

Yes, there are programs where burning .isos is easy, but unlike all Linux distributions, they don't come for free with your Windows PC.

Give Bibles

[EmbeddedJanitor]

.. and get them excited about religion.

You'd probably get pissed if someone tried to force their ideology down your throat so why should you force yours on others?

Re:Give Bibles

[QuantumG]

Meh. I have relatives that have done this to me. Specifically, they show me the part of the bible that they think is relevant to some recent woe in my life that I shared with them. When it is relevant I thank them for sharing their wisdom with me. When it isn't, I have a nice conversation with them about how they thought it was relevant and how it wasn't. Of course, what I never mention to them is that I'd love to read the bible more often, but it is just such poor writing that my brain won't tolerate it. It would be great if Neal Stephenson or Peter F. Hamilton or some equally great modern writer could rewrite the bible so it isn't so boring, tedious, cryptic, and, well, preachy. Then I could read about the coolest jew who ever lived without having to remember the difference between "shall" and "shant".

Re:Give Bibles

[mr_mischief]

I'm not saying the writing is any different, or that you'll like it any more, but there are Bibles in plainer English than the King James translation. Many of them are better translations, too. If you really want to read the Bible in plain English -- whether for your own beliefs, for literary purposes, in order to refute it, or any reason at all, you can go to your local religious bookstore and ask about the New International Version, a student edition Bible, or the Good News Bible.

Re:Give Bibles

[QuantumG]

Plain english is a start but, as I understand it, these are all translations right? They're not rewrites by people with actual literary skill, are they?

Re:Give Bibles

[Anonymous Coward]

actually, KJV was the closest to a translation written by actual literary types. Even shakespeare may have helped out.

Re:Give Bibles

[nacturation]

Plain english is a start but, as I understand it, these are all translations right? They're not rewrites by people with actual literary skill, are they? I suppose in a way it's like making Shakespeare more accessible by having it rewritten in modern language.

"I think this chick bitches too much."

      --Macbeth, Act III, Scene II

Re:Give Bibles

[Pantero Blanco]

Offering someone a Bible isn't forcing anything down their throat, and neither is giving them a LiveCD. Do you seriously feel oppressed when a Jehovah's Witness/Mormon/PETA member tries to hand you a pamphlet?

Re:Give Bibles

[Thng]

The New International Version and Good News are translations. There are a few that are somewhere among a translation, rewrite, and a paraphrase.

The New Living Translation (NLT) is written so that it is similar to conversational modern english, with a conversational flow.

God's Word is like the NLT, and is free to download in PDF.

The Message is less of a translation and more of a paraphrase in again, conversational modern english. Think of taking each book and giving it novel-like formatting. Chapters and verses still present, but they're basically footnotes. It's not a Neal Stephenson novel, but it's a long way from the language and format of the KJV. Judging the author's literary skill is left as an exercise to the reader.

Re:Give Bibles

[Petrushka]

The KJV of the Bible was translated from Latin. The Bible was written in Greek and Hebrew.

Sorry, your first sentence is wrong: one of the key things that makes the KJV special is that it was, in fact, an extremely scholarly translation from Greek and Hebrew, not from Latin. I can't read Hebrew, but can attest that its rendition of Greek is generally pretty precise.

Re:Give Bibles

[Stormwatch]

Then I could read about the coolest jew who ever lived

At whose point of view: Peikoff's or the Brandens'?

Re:Give Bibles

[dosius]

You are both right.

While much of the KJV was translated from Greek and Hebrew there is definitely evidence of having translated from a Latin source (Mt 6.34, 1Cor 13, Is 14.12).

A truer example of a Bible translated from the original tongues is the Geneva Bible, for which I have the New Testament available for purposes of comparison.

-uso.

Re:Give Bibles

[Cylix]

I was wondering what to give out for Christmas this year.

Now, if I can just find a reason for work to put me up in enough hotels to collect all those "gifts" for giving.

Thanks SID: 597831! You're the best!

Re:Give Bibles

[Beyond_GoodandEvil]

Do you seriously feel oppressed when a Jehovah's Witness/Mormon/PETA member tries to hand you a pamphlet?
Nope, I think that they want me to throw it away for them.

Re:Give Bibles

[Wicked Zen]

Eh... that's not really what she was saying. More like, "Oh, please, this chick so full of sh*t."

Re:Give Bibles

[artifex2004]

Offering someone a Bible isn't forcing anything down their throat, and neither is giving them a LiveCD. Do you seriously feel oppressed when a Jehovah's Witness/Mormon/PETA member tries to hand you a pamphlet?

I do when they won't stop trying to hand it to me, expecting me to actually take it.
If I respect their right to proselytize, they need to respect my right to ignore them.

Also, if I have a "no soliciting" sign on my door, (I don't) in this area they can be fined for walking up and ringing the doorbell and trying to engage me, or even for leaving their materials rubber banded to my front doorknob.

Re:Give Bibles

[osssmkatz]

That's Hamlet.

Re:Give Bibles

[rohan972]

Of course, what I never mention to them is that I'd love to read the bible more often, but it is just such poor writing that my brain won't tolerate it. It would be great if Neal Stephenson or Peter F. Hamilton or some equally great modern writer could rewrite the bible so it isn't so boring, tedious, cryptic, and, well, preachy.

Perhaps try reading proverbs. You can read a sentence or two at a time because it's largely written that way. If you want to be entertained by reading though, you might enjoy a novel more or some preaching CD's or videos of someone like Jesse Duplantis, who is very funny.

Re:Give Bibles

[impleri]

The Authorised Version (i.e. what some refer to as the KJV) was translated primarily from the Textus Receptus, one of the manuscripts found earlier on in time. The Hebrew Bible (i.e. OT) was translated primarily from the Septuagint (Greek translation of the Hebrew/Aramaic texts). Beside that, however, the AV translators did follow the Latin Vulgate for clarification. Modern scholarship, however, tends to use one of two major critical editions of the Greek NT (which are edited and modified every decade or so by the leading Greek and NT scholars such as Scott McKnight) and sometimes even varies between the two, as well as noting major variations in the text (which is why one can see things like the Amplified Bible which just exaggerates this aspect to an extreme). The Hebrew Bible is generally translated from the Masoretic texts (but most translators pay attention to variant texs, as well as the various talmuds and early Jewish commentaries). And, to get to the GP's question, there are some paraphrase "translations" which take an already translated Bible (such as the NIV) and make some changes to it (and come up with the TNIV, NIrV, etc). Personally, i'd recommend going with a translation that is more conservative/traditional while based on the critical texts (i.e. other texts found more recently that seem to be more authentic--however they determine that--that the TR of the AV). One that fits that criteria is the NRSV, although it is sometimes pretty formal in its language. There's a particular version of it (The New Interpreter's Study Bible) which does a good job with clarification/translation notes (and it has some non-canonical texts [from the standard American Protestant perspective). If you're interested in reading in plain English (with some decent prose) and don't care too much if the translator takes liberty with nuances in words (such as the Greek Middle Voice), then Eugene Peterson's The Message does a pretty good job of "contemporary English." I wouldn't recommend it 500 years from now (as the language changes), but it seems to be the most solid translation (as opposed to paraphrase) in plain English.

Re:Give Bibles

[Bega]

Do you seriously feel oppressed when a Jehovah's Witness/Mormon/PETA member tries to hand you a pamphlet?

I feel oppressed the moment I say no and the other person doesn't stop.

Re:Give Bibles

[physicsnick]

Depends on what the pamphlet says. Just yesterday I was at the mall, and some lady handed me a religious pamphlet. Inside it told me I was living a life of despair and disease and would eventually try to kill myself due to "immoral activities", one of which was listed as "dancing". Yes, I was pretty insulted. I don't think handing someone a LiveCD compares in any way.

Re:Give Bibles

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

Unfortunately, the most well-quoted parts of the Bible are the densest, and more often than not are quoted from the King James Version. It's not obvious to the modern reader that "Greater love hath no man than this" is in object-verb-subject order, and such concerns get in the way of really understanding the text.

Some of the Old Testament stories are pretty decent to read, though...try 1 Samuel 20 from the Contemporary English Version. (I don't necessarily endorse this version -- I just got a physical copy two days ago -- but it reads well.)

The entire book of Esther also is pretty good, as are parts of Acts, such as Acts 27 in a translation called The Message.

Of course, these aren't necessarilly the parts that relate to recent woes (when was the last time the king wanted to kill you or you were caught in a shipwreck off Malta?), but they're as theologically important as "My cup runneth over; surely goodness and mercy shall follow me" and similar parts.

(The New International Version and other more well-known versions are all good (you probably have heard quotes or readings from the NIV, even if you haven't heard the name), but it puts a large emphasis on faithfulness to the original text, which doesn't always use the same idioms as modern English.)

Re:Give Bibles

[nacturation]

It'll be the most interesting mythological mashup of all time, not to mention that it would be SO sacrelicious! And, to be buzzword compliant, call it a Religion 2.0 Mashup.

Re:Give Bibles

[sanguinemoon]

Yes, I do. They're very annoying and should take it to somebody that cares. They than want me to surrendor my way of thinking to their's and that's not gonna happen

Re:Give Bibles

[rk]

Not very interested, really. I generally keep Javascript turned off in my soul.

Re:Give Bibles

[Duds]

My Linux CD includes the bible in PDF!

Re:Give Bibles

[ajs318]

My standard method of dealing with christian propaganda {when crossing the street and scowling from a distance have failed to do the business} is to tear it up slowly in front of their face and give it back to them. I have tried to deconvert them; but if somebody's brain is already damaged enough for them to believe in imaginary friends, it's usually fruitless. And of course the problem you always face when you have an argument with a mental defective is that onlookers might not know which is which.

Re:Give Bibles

[Petrushka]

That's certainly worth knowing -- thanks for the references. (I'll even look them up someday when I have time!)

Re:Give Bibles

[ConceptJunkie]

And of course the problem you always face when you have an argument with a mental defective is that onlookers might not know which is which.

All I can say is that either you're not doing it right, or you are mentally defective yourself. Or do you think an "argument" means yelling and profanity?

Re:Give Bibles

[fritsd]

Peter F. Hamilton??
Peter F. "Deus - ex - Machina - in the extreme" Hamilton??
No thank you.

Re:Give Bibles

[spikedvodka]

Look for something called the "Jerusalem version", and before you ask about translaters with "actual literary skill", remember that one of the final editors was none other than our very favorite J.R.R Tolkien

it's also a pretty darn readable version if you ask me

Re:Give Bibles

[jthayden]

True, but then you lose the observation that guilty people often deny things much more than a non guilty person would.

Re:Give Bibles

[Da_Weasel]

shant? isn't that the past participle of shat?

Re:Give Bibles

[fritzk3]

You may find that you like The Message, which is a modern PARAPHRASE of the Bible. I'm pretty sure it's free of "shants."

There's also the New Living Translation, but that's closer to the language of the Bible that you're probably referring to.

Just my two cents.

Re:Give Bibles

[kjart]

Peter F. "Deus - ex - Machina - in the extreme" Hamilton??

Those books started off so well, too :(

Re:Give Bibles

[Hal_Porter]

The Good Gnus Bible is actually free as in speech not just beer. If you read stuff you don't like, like Jesus Stallman sparing the Proprietary Software Vendors, you just go in to the wiki and change it.

Re:Give Bibles

[whimmel]

Both Shakespeare and stories from the Bible have been translated into modern language countless times by crappy TV sitcoms trying to get an award for dramatic acting.

Re:Give Bibles

[Eunuchswear]

Uh, you think that overuse of Deus ex-Machina disqualifies him from writing the Bible?

Re:Give Bibles

[a.d.trick]

Plain english is a start but, as I understand it, these are all translations right? They're not rewrites by people with actual literary skill, are they?

No, they have absolutly no skill whatsovever, just about 8 to 12 years of post secondary education, a Ph. D., and a life-time of work on the translations. You might not agree with the content written in these translations (or in the original for that matter), but these probably are some of the most difficult and finnest pieces of translation to date.

And the line between a translation and a rewrite is incredibly fine. There is no perfect translation for anything. John 6:35 is an awesome example: "Then Jesus declared, 'I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty. . .'" (NIV translation). In Jesus' Palistine, bread was a staple food, yet in many Asian countries, bread is something that only the richer people eat (and it's often sweet, and used for deserts). If you just do a straight translation you'll lose a lot of the meaning, so many people have opted to use rice instead of bread, but that isn't perfect either.

Disclaimmer: Both of my parents are Bible Translators and I'm going for a minor in linuguistics.

Re:Give Bibles

[a.d.trick]

I have this jewish friend, Nogga. She's pretty fluent in hebrew, and a damned good writer in english. Also, she's a F to M in progress. I'll bet if I got her to paraphrase the catholic bible in modern english, as a novel, it would be controversial enough to make her millions of dollars. Or at least get billions of hate-emails. Should be fun either way.

You're probably right, but only because millions of people are idiots and don't check their facts. Like you for example. Here are some facts that might help you.

1. She may be fluent with modern Hebrew, but I'm pretty sure she'd be almost useless with translating the Hebrew Scriptures which are written with an acient version of Hebrew that is rarely used outside of academia these days. It would be like getting a guy who speaks modern Greek to translate the works of Homer. It wouldn't work.
2. Language doesn't exist in a vacuum. The Hebrew scriptures include all sorts of literary themes and motifs that have been dead for thousands of years. If you don't understand these, you'll miss out on much of what is going on (which is one reason why you should be very careful when you hear people saying they preach from the True Bible(tm), thy are often very sincere, but also very sincerly wrong).
3. The Hebrew scriptures that we use and the ones that the Jewish people use are actually very similar (the exception is the Apocryphal book, but they were never really taken seriously anyways). I don't know how devout she is, but she might take issue with translating her scriptures into something sacreligious. Another Jew I know who took a radical view on the Hebrew Scriptures wasn't terribly popular and didn't last too long.

4. I'm not saying that the current translations are all that good, but you should learn a thing or to be fore you start being critical next time.

Re:Give Bibles

[bohemian72]

For the first time in a while, I wished I had mod points. What the parent says is spot on. I have experience with The New Interpreters's Study Bible, having been a former United Methodist seminarian, at a time when all my classmates and profs were fairly giddy with the release of each new installment. I generally use a NRSV study bible for my own personal use and I hear The Message every week in the church I work at (as music director).

An interesting note about translations. If you compare the language of the NRSV and the NIV, you'll see they are very nearly identical. Where they differ is in the footnotes and annotations in the study versions of these translations. The NRSV study bibles are generally very scholastic, while the NIV study bibles have a clear evangelical bent.

Re:Give Bibles

[Fordiman]

Hm. Apparently you can't smell the sarcasm. Oh well.

Re:Bleh, the end of the post is a party pooper

[imthesponge]

That's for creating an image and burning it, not for burning a pre-made image.

"Isn't selling anything"?

[My name is Bucket]

Maybe not in the most immediate sense...

How long to boot up?

[Salvance]

Anyone know how long this thing takes to boot up? I'd imagine it would take a lot longer than what most people are accustomed to, but that's just my guess...

Re:How long to boot up?

[Mr. Hankey]

That depends on how much junk loads after they get into XP, assuming that's what they're running. I've seen recent XP systems take more than 5 minutes to load completely, counting all the little apps that load into the taskbar once you've logged in. Knoppix would have been ready to go with time to spare.

Personally, I bring out live CDs like knoppix once someone's system is dead. I use it to help recover their systems or their documents, opening their files with OpenOffice or a text editor when in doubt. More than a few have shown a lot of interest in Linux after seeing their systems or data brought back from the dead, and I'm happy to help if they're interested in an install.

Re:Bleh, the end of the post is a party pooper

[Dunbal]

That's for creating an image and burning it, not for burning a pre-made image.

      Personally I just load the image into the Daemon-Tools virtual CD and then use Nero to copy from the virtual to the real CD.

Uh...

[rindeee]

wait, what? Is it just me, or is this really stupid? I get the idea and all, but I can just picture this guy and his 'friends' sitting in mom's basement donned in their Che Guevara t-shirts and giggling with glee as they talk about how this is going to bring down the capitalists that have taken over 'their' Internet. Of course, none of them know who the hell Che Guevara is nor do they understand the fundamental precepts of capitalism, but 'man this is gonna be cool'! Thank goodness Slashdot's helping get the word out. Viva la revolution! Who ate my Spaghetti-O's!

Re:Uh...

[ChameleonDave]

I don't get some of the vitriol poured out here. If someone wants to encourage the use of Linux, that seems fine to me. If they were sitting on their arse playing Civ IV, you wouldn't bother criticising them and yet it would be a bigger waste of time.

As well as using a PCLinuxOS/Windows dual-boot, I sometimes run Puppy Linux from a thumb drive on this computer. Here are the advantages:

• It is much safer than Windows, and even a bit safer than running Linux from the harddrive.
• After booting (which is about as long as PCLinuxOS or XP), everything is incredibly fast.
• What I do is not limited to this computer.

The third point links in with the major advantage of my portable, 90MB Puppy. This Xmas I'm going to be staying with the in-laws. Instead of messing around with their crappy Windows machine, I'm going to be able to plug in my thumb drive and instantly access all my e-mails, Firefox favourites, and most important documents.

It will be particular cool because Puppy will allow me to leave the computer on, checking for e-mails. You see, my mother-in-law only allows her Windows machine to be online for a few minutes at a time because she is so paranoid about malware. All I will have to do is convince her that Puppy is immune to viruses and I won't have to keep turning the computer back on every twenty minutes.

I wouldn't recommend replacing any installed OS with Puppy, but it is a valuable tool. Setting it up would be beyond most people, but i believe that if I gave someone this thumb drive as a Xmas gift, saying "this thing is like a floppy, but it can hold a gig of your favourite stuff so you can use it when you're round your mate's house; plus if you put it in before turning the computer on, it boots up this Linux thing that lets you surf with zero chance of viruses," I'm sure they'd find it to be a cool little gadget.

(My first /. post)

Re:Uh...

[rindeee]

"I don't get some of the vitriol poured out here." Um...'vitriol'? It's called tongue in cheek. Get over yourself. "If they were sitting on their arse playing Civ IV, you wouldn't bother criticising them and yet it would be a bigger waste of time." I wouldn't? You seem to know me better than I do. When the hell did this become a 'Puppy Linux' thread? For Pete's sake, let me clear this up for you so you can sleep: I am a Linux user. I have been a Linux user/admin since the mid 90's. I also use OS X, Windows, and a smattering of other OS's, if that helps you relax. My post had nothing to do with Linux. I was poking fun at the 'activist' mentality that so often creeps into /., especially in terms of recruiting new Linux users. Now, go. Sleep. The world shall not end without your watchful eye keeping tabs on the vitriol factor of /. postings.

Guess who's retarded?

[morboIV]

I think this is the most pathetic thing I've ever seen on Slashdot.

Why would anyone want to routinely run from a LiveCD. Ubuntu from a LiveCD runs like shit, and what about downloading stuff? The moron suggests you just put it flash drive. Yeah, and then I'm going to take out the LiveCD and run the file I just downloaded on my normal OS. So I'm still going to need virus protection, and I'm still going to need to be sane about where I get files from on the internet, but I'll just add ages of fucking around with a LiveCD. And how about bookmarks? You going to explain to people how that's going to work? Or how about in the time it takes to download a LiveCD, tweak it to your liking, and burn it, you just install a free anti-virus program, a free firewall and firefox?

A LiveCD will be about as useful as a coaster as it will be as an 'IFD'. If some moron gave me one of these things I would have absolutely no choice but to beat some sense into them.

Re:Guess who's retarded?

[morboIV]

And another thing. How many people who you give this to are going to fully understand the concept of a LiveCD versus an OS on the harddrive? Even if anyone actually tries this, how many people are going to fully grasp that it runs poorly because the entire OS is on the CD, and how many people do you think are just going to look at it and say 'What is this? Wow, it runs like shit. Glad I've got Windows'? I very much doubt the net result will help Linux adoption.

Re:Guess who's retarded?

[moeinvt]

I understand your perspective, but I think you underestimate the frustration and desperation of many windows users. Also, do you think there's any "harm" in it? If out one of every thousand discs got someone interested in Linux, it would be well worth the marginal distributed cost.

I was running an XP box last week and decided to by-pass the firewall for 5 minutes to check the connection speed. Within that span I got attacked twice. Once by something wanting me to visit a web site to do a critical "fix" for the computer, and by a pop-up telling me to run "regedit". Connecting an unarmored windows box to the Internet these days is like going for a swim with the sharks, and it's only getting worse. That dusty live CD from last Christmas might be tempting after a few months of downloading "critical" fixes and paying for firewall and anti-virus software and a spam filtering service.

Re:Guess who's retarded?

[bjb]

As much as I love the idea of booting a live CD for restoration or trying out a distro before installing, the parent is absolutely right on everything else.

• Boot times? Ha!
• Bookmarks? Forget it.
• Downloads? Any viruses are only going to follow your thumb drive back to your regular Windows installation (that IS who the article is targetting, no?)

At the same time, if the computer doesn't have enough memory, the CD drive tends to thrash like crazy - and this is most likely the SLOWEST device on a PC today.

The only time I've ever suggested a live CD to someone is when their hard drive was toast and they wanted to try and recover whatever they could. Suggesting that for regular use? Gets tiresome quickly, and I'd be interested to know how long a CD drive can work at high speeds with that much seeking.

vmware player

[pikine]

One advantage of running off a live CD is that it doesn't, under normal circumstances, touch your hard drive. This is why the author claims that you don't have to worry about trojan, viruses, spyware, etc. It's not that you don't get infected, but these malware programs are erased from main memory everytime you turn off the computer. However, the author assumes that a malware doesn't scan your computer and mount existing physical hard drives to infect. This could conceivably happen.

There is a better way. Get VMware player and an Ubuntu virtual machine appliance, and run Firefox off it. That also protects your host computer, and you can always revert your disk image to a pristine stage if you were infected. At least with great likelihood, malware from a guest OS does not penetrate virtual machine.

Re:Bad Outcome.

[RobertLTux]

actually a high percentage of pedos don't like to use "the other organ" with their targets (gets in the way of the "play") (hint some pedos CAN'T / DON'T HAVE TOO)

One word :

[DrYak]

so why should you force yours on others?

RETALIATION.

I tried it.

[bcrowell]

I tried giving away The Open CD (or something similar) to my students. This was a class of biology majors at a community college, so the geek quotient was higher than the general population, but a lot lower than slashdot. I got zero response. Zero interest. Not a single student ever even tried it. I think OpenOffice is a particularly lackluster thing to try to get ordinary people excited about, because they already have word. If they have a good income, they have a legal copy of Word; if they're starving students, they have a pirated copy. They already have tons of Word files on their computer, and no motivation to mess around seeing if OpenOffice will mangle the formatting or not. This is one of the realities we have to deal with: OSS is not an option for most people, for most tasks, because they're locked into proprietary formats.

OSS games also don't seem to impress people, for several possible reasons: (1) they're crude compared to commercial games, (2) in many cases, they don't work well with the video card, so you get poor performance, and (3) people are used to being able to play flash games for free. I hate to say it, but clubpenguin.com is a lot slicker than most Linux games. Similarly, people are used to getting all those Google AJAX apps for free, and they don't lie up at night worrying about whether Gmail is open-source.

Here is a similar project I've been working on to do a promotional CD of free textbooks. I haven't had much time to work on it since the semester started, however. (Yes, I know the link to theassayer.org is down -- DNS troubles, which should be fixed soon.)

Re:I tried it.

[Burz]

People hate being offered items that are "free". To most, that word usually translates as "promotional item" or "stuffed full of ads and marketing surveys".

I think offering them a "Safety Disc" or "Security Disc" will sound a lot more practical / no-nonsense. Use it as a failsafe when system trouble strikes, or to scan for rootkits and other malware, or keep yourself protected from Internet criminals.

Re:I tried it.

[bcrowell]

People hate being offered items that are "free". To most, that word usually translates as "promotional item" or "stuffed full of ads and marketing surveys".
Interesting point. I'd go a little further: giving the average person free software as a gift is like giving, say, your grandparents a PS3 as a present. Learning how to use it is going to take them some time, and it's most likely to gather dust if they aren't motivated to spend that time.

Re:I tried it.

[NineNine]

People hate being offered items that are "free". To most, that word usually translates as "promotional item" or "stuffed full of ads and marketing surveys".

Or "Dear god, this crazy religious nut is trying to recruit me into his cult. How awkward!"

Re:I tried it.

[Hatta]

I tried giving away The Open CD (or something similar) to my students. This was a class of biology majors at a community college

Well they're bio students, not CS students. No surprise they're not interested. You could have given them something like DNA Linux, and shown them a little of what free software can do in real scientific applications. That would have been more relevant and more likely to get them interested.

is this the same as...

[Anonymous Coward]

freedom fries?

freedom toast?

freedom tickler?

stupid fucking Americans.

Re:Bleh, the end of the post is a party pooper

[FLEB]

That'll work for a lot of things, but not for a bootable disc.

Re:Those long, long, long, boot times.

[wakejagr]

Yeah, Damn Small Linux is good, but I prefer Puppy Linux because I've found it to be more easily customizable. Using Puppy Unleashed, I've made a custom version that includes the software I consider essential (vim, screen, sshfs, mplayer, mp3blaster, ratpoison, etc). Each of those is not available on the standard live-cd, but I added them to my custom version - and got them working the way I like - with a few hours of work. Most of that time was spent burning test CD-RW's to make sure that everything interacted correctly (elinks needs to know how to play nice with screen, ~/.bashrc needs to included vim specific variables, among other details).

Boot process (for my somewhat large ~85MB version) is under 1 min on the machine I most recently tested (a 1.4ghz athalon box with 512MB RAM). That is faster than the WinXP boot process for that machine. Several versions of Puppy fit on a 50MB buisiness card sized CD and load even faster.

Keep some Puppy Linux mini CDs in your wallet

[EmbeddedJanitor]

and when the relatives tell you about their spam woes, you can pull out the CD .....

It's sweet to turn the tables!

Re:Keep some Puppy Linux mini CDs in your wallet

[emjoi_gently]

... meet a girl late at night at a bar...
Back at her house she asks, "Have you got some, umm, Protection?"
"Yeah, in my wallet".

The night then proceeds in a manner that is disappointing to all concerned.

Re:Keep some Puppy Linux mini CDs in your wallet

[WhyDoYouWantToKnow]

Oh come on. When was the last time guys on /. met girls in bars AND actually got to go home with them?

Yeah

[goldcd]

What a great idea. Give your parents a CD to shove in their working computer.
I can feel the love already coming from my Mum: Why does it take an age to start? Why does it say it can't install my wifi driver? Now I've managed to install a Linux Wifi driver, what's my Hex key? Where's IE? Where've all my bookmarks gone? What exactly have I gained by this gift?

Re:Yeah

[nleaf]

What exactly have I gained by this gift?

Ah, good, you managed to sneak a little Christmas Spirit in there at the end.

"Freedom Disk"? Come off it...

[GFree]

Giving someone an "Internet Freedom Disk" sounds rather childish, like you're a hippie or something. The intentions might be worthy, but people don't particularly respond well with such labels; it's hard to take it seriously. It's the same reason why people haven't flocked to Linux despite the marketing of it having greater freedoms than Windows - people just don't give a shit. At least, not yet.

Wrong angle of approach here unfortunately.

Translation Agendas, Literary Skill vary a lot

[billstewart]

Different groups who've translated the Bible into English have had different priorities and skill sets, written for different subsets of the English language, and done so at different times and therefore their dialects have different levels of readability today. (Sorry to pick on English here; I know a little about the Latin Vulgate, Luther's German translation and the Frency Douay translation, but basically nothing about post-1610 translations except into English :-)

Most modern translations are trying to strike some balance between readability, preservation of the nuances in the original languages, continuity with familiar readings from earlier well-known translations, introduction of better copies of original texts that weren't available to previous translators, better availability of other original-language material that helps us understand the way the language was used at the time the original documents were written, and of course there's the problem of dealing with poetry.

The King James translation was fairly conservative for its time (finished 1611), trying to retain much of the familiarity of the popular Geneva translation (which was politically awkward, because that had a lot of Puritan notes and commentary printed with it, and the King wanted stuff that was politically Anglican), and the Geneva translation retained a lot of continuity with Tyndale's and other translations, so even though the English language had been changing radically during the 1500s, and almost all of the "thee" and "thou" and "ye" and "hast" had gone out of popular usage by 1600, a lot of late-1400s grammar was in the translation. On the other hand, the KJV is still very accessible today, partly because it gradually became influential, partly because Shakespeare remains influential, and partly because the translators, while they were trying for broad readability, were a bunch of Southerners (that's London, Oxford, Cambridge, not Alabama :-), so you don't have the diversity of UK dialects such as Scots or Geordie or Cornwall English or Welsh-Border, so the last 400 years of linguistic evolution haven't hit it as hard as if he'd hired a bunch of his fellow Scots to translate it.

Re:A pile of shit by any other name...

[b0s0z0ku]

Stop trying to trick people into wanting Linux. Either they'll accept it (and it's pretty hard to see why they'd do that) or they won't.

I don't know, Ubuntu Eft running on my laptop's HDD is pretty fast, works well, and took about 20 minutes to install, including OpenOffice, GIMP, and a whole bunch of other software I found useful. But, agreed, running from a CD is annoying and slow as all hell. A "live USB key" would be far better, though I don't really see the point of that either except as a recovery tool.

-b.

george casatanza?

[minus_273]

George castanza,, is that you? gave up on the human fund already?

Re:Won't work. Here's why-Not sneaky enough.

[Slithe]

Uh, huh. And of course no advocates would benefit from THAT! That's what the grandparent was saying!

Re:and my current XP installation

[Spikeles]

Well instead of whining on Slashdot about it, why don't you contact your favourite distro and get them to put those things into Linux?

is it an INTERNET freedom disk...

[solitas]

...or, more properly, a MICROSOFT freedom disk? (freedom from microsoft)

This will not change the status quo...

[Anonymous Coward]

Although there are always the minority of "non techy" users who will appreciate f/oss like linux, the majority simply do not have the interest or ability.

Give the disk to married guys

[alohatiger]

Here's the sales pitch: "When you boot this CD, after you turn your computer off there's NO EVIDENCE on the computer that shows what you browsed to. And the browser history will be intact when your wife logs in normally, so she'll have no idea what you did with the Magic Porn CD."

Re:Example story-with subtitles.

[secolactico]

http://www.burnatonce.com/ (based on cdrdao, as far as I know. My favorite for the time being)
http://www.cdburnerxp.se/ (works for dvds as well)

Both free (as in beer), for Windows, and easily found using Google.

I'm not trying to knock off Linux (which I also use), but there's plenty of freeware out there for Windows.

Re: Bible in modern language

[TaoPhoenix]

Petra the music band has done some really interesting things with the material. Their songwriter was so talented the group is in my top 100 even though I am quite firmly not Christian.

At least you were careful to say "modern AND literary skill" ... the bible written in MMORPG would be terrifying to behold.

You're marketing it the wrong way.

[chaosite]

The main advantage of liveCDs is that they don't track you.

As in pr0n. Pop in that liveCD and your wife/girlfriend/mother (last one most likely, as this is slashdot) will never need find out about how you spend your time.

The perfect pr0n surfing enabling utility. And, even if they come up with Firefox/Linux exploits, they're just going to go away when you reboot!

Next time someone shows you a computer full of dialers, discreetly hand them an Ubuntu liveCD. Everyones better off, and, they'll start associating Linux with orgasms.

Bullet Proof Linux

[TaoPhoenix]

Okay, here we go. Time to get rained upon. My karma must be around Plus50 by this point, and I'm gonna need every bit of it to survive this one. Time to say hello the Penguinator. I'm moderately bright, but I have no luck. (I racked up $25,000 in surgery playing badminton.)

Is there such a thing as a CD that boots itself with minimal adjustments to windows, so I could host an office "Experimental Freedom Friday (EFF)" so that we can all oooh and aaah, then avoid breaking anything?

Part of the demo would be the fewest keystrokes possible, and all It would have to do is run Firefox, Open Office and Mp3s. Part of the presentation pitch would be "look, it only takes 4-6 commands I can write down on an index card".

We could coin a distro name. BulletProof Linux.

Anyone want to take up the challenge? I am humbly offering myself as the TestBird, like the Canaries in mines. I'm your dream audience. Clueless, nervous, and adventurous. Get me going, and I can pitch this to hordes your Non-Caring Average Users.

I am also changing my Slashdot settings, so I can some of you some email questions to avoid flooding the forum.

I definitely fear the penguins, despite the tagline at the top. Here's a pic of Tux glaring at me.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/robot-fotomat/3216143 51/

Who's Gonna Suppport Them?

[DavidD_CA]

I learned recently (it took me a while to really learn this lesson) to stop recommending computer systems to friends and family.

I used to go as far as helping them pick out peripherals, specs, and even order it with them on the web. Now I say "Go to dell.com and get at least a gig of RAM." The conversation stops there.

Why? Because the more I help influence their decision, the more they expect me to support that decision afterward. They're not being mean, they're just naturally extending the help I initally offered them.

Why would I want to give a non-geek a Linux disk? They're going to come back to me with all sorts of questions about software compatibility, drivers, printing, etc. No one else they know will support them, even paid companies like their OEM or their ISP. And if they're running a business off this computer, then now I'm liable for what may happen to it.

When will the geek world realize that Linux is not the answer to everything?

Re:Who's Gonna Suppport Them?

[TheBAFH]

> When will the geek world realize that Linux is not the answer to everything?

We already know that. The answer to everything is 42 and Linux != 42.

Re:Example story-with subtitles.

[SQLGuru]

I like the Virtual CD Control Panel (search Google, I got mine from my MSDN Subscription) and the ISO recorder (http://isorecorder.alexfeinman.com/isorecorder.ht m) both free as in Beer.

Virtual CD Control Panel lets you mount the ISO images and use them directly. ISO Recorder gives you the Right-Click/Burn to Disk option from Explorer. I almost never use Roxio or Nero.

Layne

Not a great present.

[Animats]

Still, the worst corporate Xmas present ever has to be the year when Bank of America sent customers a cute little metal box containing -- an AOL disk.

They actually did that. I have one.

Re:Not a great present.

[mqduck]

You lie. Prove it.

Re:Example story-with subtitles.

[anagama]

Linux is trivial if your time is worth nothing.

I don't know how it could get more trivial to burn an ISO. I'm currently using a Gnome desktop and all I do is insert CD, right click on the ISO I want to burn, and choose burn to disk from the context menu. Anyway, I consider my time valuable. That's why I use Linux.

Must...frame...issue...toward...business!

[jbn-o]

Of course not, and even if someone does feel that way that doesn't mean they are being oppressed.

But many who post to websites like this (Digg, /., and others) have been fed a steady diet of business-first thinking -- the notion that we should view every issue chiefly in terms of business interests. The posters are usually young, they haven't read much, but they aren't stupid, merely ignorant of the long struggle many people make to ensure freedoms for themselves and others. They've also been taught to not give any mind to the condition of others, so speaking and thinking in narrow economic ways is de rigeur. For them, business-first thinking is never seen as pushing something down someone's throat, that ideology has the privilege of being viewed as the norm. So when someone talks in terms of freedom (or, perhaps, ethics and social solidarity), that talk must immediately be reframed as inappropriate. One easy way to do this is to mock them for being "religious" which gives others readers a cue that such talk isn't tolerated. After all, businesses greatest achievement is convincing people to divorce their work from ethical examination; we musn't have people asking questions like what kind of society they want to live in.

just remind them of linux all the time

[LittleImp]

That works much better. Every time you have to clean up someones PC you just tell them: That wouldn't have happened with Linux/*BSD. Eventually, after a few years (or when you just stop fixing their computer), they will switch. And as soon as they see how you can surf pron without any hassle, they are hooked.

Thoughts From an MS Fangirl

[PixieDust]

I enjoy Windows. Sure it gets boring for me, but overall I enjoy Windows quite a bit. Now here's the thing. I don't use Linux very often, it's just too much of a pain to get going, and I often find the dumbest reasons to ditch it. The last time, the ONLY reason I ditched it, was because I couldn't get a frikken flash player to work. I'm addicted to flash cartoons. Damn you Adobe/Macromedia!

That said, I think this is a wonderful idea. Someone mentioned that people don't get excited over Operating Systems. Well, not when you put it like that. Just show off some of the things about it, and people WILL get excited about it. Wobbly windows are awesome. The first time I saw that, I wanted to install Linux JUST for that, to play with them. I think that is kind of the point here. It's just getting people to USE the thing, hoping the features will sell themselves.

Personally, I think it's genius. It also has the potential to help the USER to switch to Linux. Granted there is a pretty big difference in just running a LiveCD, and actually installing the thing, but many installers these days are becoming simpler for those new to the show. There's a part of me that wishes this would get more publicity, just because it has the potential to create some really good happenings for the Users.

In short, people would see how Linux stacks up against Windows (the good, bad and the ugly), and some will undoubtedly make the switch. As Linux captures more of the OS market share, along with MacOS-X, Microsoft will scramble to keep pace. This could create very REAL, and VIABLE competition for Microsoft, which I think would be beneficial to EVERYONE. The ONLY reason that MS is still on top, is because people find it too hard, or too inconvenient to make the switch to Linux (for various reasons). This has the potential to go a long ways towards overcoming that hurdle.

All in all, (and this coming from an MS Fangirl), well done. Very well done. The real question is, will this make it to enough people, and will it actually accomplish what I'm thinking it could.

Being PRODUCTIVE on the Internet???

[TeXMaster]

This disk comes with everything needed to be productive on the internet nowadays.

I didn't know you could be productive on the internet ...

Would you recommend Vista?

[AYeomans]

What's your answer to "what do you think of Vista?". Seriously, not meant as a troll. There are exactly the same questions on software compatibility, drivers, printing, etc. At least for the next few months until teething incompatibilities are fixed.

I like it that I can honestly tell people I have no personal experience of running Vista, but the screenshots look pretty. So they will have to look elsewhere for support.

Re:Would you recommend Vista?

[stubear]

Windows Vista is not readily available to the public so any issues with hardware drivers aren't issues until its actual release. If manufacturers can't get their shit together by January 30th and release Vista compatible drivers then it's their fault, not Microsoft's. They've had ample time to develop and deploy drivers to their customers.

Re:Would you recommend Vista?

[DavidD_CA]

I've only been using the Customer Preview #1, so I can't speak for the final version that is to ship. That being said, everything has worked perfectly with a few minor exceptions:

  - ATI hadn't finished their Vista driver quite yet. It worked, but it wasn't as snappy as they promise it to be
  - An occasional unexpected crash here and there, of which half reported "this bug has been fixed" when I submitted it

It was actually quite stable for a pre-release that came out six months ago. Yes, the interface is pretty, and yes I will probably never use the Gadgets (Widgets?). The frequent prompting for admin rights was a little annoying at first but I got used to it, and certainly see the value in it for non-geeks.

And I think a lot of us are missing all of the enhancements that Vista will bring to the corporate world with additional Group Policy settings, the bit locker, etc.

Re:Would you recommend Vista?

[AYeomans]

Looks like I need to clarify - I'm pro-Vista and pro-Linux, but that's not the point. The question is what would you recommend, given that you really don't want to be cast as the software support channel?

I cannot recommend Linux as I don't want to install it for them and find what hardware doesn't work, get the internet connection working, and not lose any data. Even with current live-CDs.
I cannot recommend Vista for exactly the same reasons.
I cannot recommend Windows XP as it's obsolescent.

Stated like that, I guess I've implied the answer. Recommend a Macintosh.

live CDs for other platforms?

[v1]

I wonder what microsoft or apple would think of entertaining the idea of giving out a free live CD? That would be an easy way for them to get their system into the hands of potential customers, to give it a taste.

Re:live CDs for other platforms?

[ChameleonDave]

Is that a joke? Windows is ubiquitous. Handing out Windows liveCDs to give people a taste for it would be like water manufacturers handing out water in order to convert all those people who have only ever drunk beer.

Unconnected Freedom Disk

[Glasswire]

Given that many full installable distros like Ubuntu require a long and complicated edits to configure connection to a WPA PSK AP, it seems a little optimisitc to assume these live CDs can be handed out with strong confidence that newbies, esp with wireless laptops will be able to boot and connect. I've used about 8 of them (from DSL to Knoppix) and while they're pretty good at detecting wired connections (although some recent wired LAN chipsets still don't get supported right away), I've rarely found wireles, esp with encryption to work without a lot of manual configuration - which is really self-defeating if a RO live CD makes you do it everytime. Much as I wish it were'nt true, Windows (Vista -for example) does an excellent job of finding wireless hdw, spotting an access point and correctly guessing the kind of encryption key the AP is looking for - which is ironic, since there's no such thing as a Windows live CD (except for PE which is really an installer boot environment). I don't believe Microsoft can see a licening model for live CD that works as long as CD/DVDs can be copied. (Maybe live CDs that HAVE to be connected to clock a charge-per-minute of run time :-))

So, when DSL can accurately detect and quickly configure wireless (and still run totally out of 128MB or more of RAM) I'll give out tons of these to newbies.

same here ..

[rs232]

"I learned recently .. to stop recommending computer systems to friends and family .. they're just naturally extending the help I initally offered them"

A mature lady of my acquaintance, ordered a Dell/BT Internet laptop with talk/talk and wireless broadband. She even paid the extra £84.00 for a 'technician' to come round and install it. The box was delivered but he left after a while as he couldn't figure out how to connected it.

Problem #1 the talking CD didn't install correctly. I phoned 'Dave' in India who told me the NIC was faulty. I knew this to be incorrect as when I configured the client PC with a static IP it worked - except the network was slow as the client required the wireless key code that is printed on the underside of the router. Incidentally the wireless key code or SSID is referred to under a different acronym in XP, just to be more confusing.

BT Talk Talk required logging into a seperate web page and entering configuration information. None of this is documented. Oh I forgot the install won't work unless the firewall is disabled. Again no reference to this. Weeks later, Talk Talk stops working, Yahoo messenger won't play recorded msgs except under administrator. The anti-spam feature in the AV software causes Outlook to take ages to open an email. I know what 'Dave' in India is going to tell me - reinstall from the CD. No fucking way. This year is the last time I ever fix one of Bills computers for free.

was Re:Who's Gonna Suppport Them?

Re:same here ..

[DavidD_CA]

Every problem you mentioned has to do with a third-party application or peripheral. How is that Bill's fault?

And you're telling me that Linux apps are any better?

By the way, Windows calls the SSID a "Network Name". And it quite correctly calls the WEP key exactly what it is, a WEP key. Just because your manufacturer calls it something else does not make Windows incorrect.

Re:same here ..

[rs232]

"Every problem you mentioned has to do with a third-party application or peripheral. How is that Bill's fault?"

Nonsence, you have no way of knowing that for sure. It's the stuff on the supplied CD, months later it stops working - for no apparent reason. If Dell/BT/Microsoft supply a combined product I at least expect it to run as described for longer than ninety days. I mention Bill since nine tenths of the problem IS Windows. Now how can I get the sound card working under standard user. How can I restore Talk/Talk. How can I stop the spam filter from freezing Outlook. I did use an online form to contact the help desk, I'm still awaiting a reply.

"And you're telling me that Linux apps are any better?"

I ran a SuSE Linux desktop for the best part of a year and it still functioned and that was with installing 'third party' applications like Mplayer and Mpeg4IP and various third party RPMs. I can't recall one time when it broke from all the tinkering. I recently overwrote it with openSuSE 10.1 and now can't write to the cdburner, but that's another story.

"By the way, Windows calls the SSID a "Network Name". And it quite correctly calls the WEP key exactly what it is, a WEP key. Just because your manufacturer calls it something else does not make Windows incorrect"

I understand Bill and Windows are perfect and without flaw, but couldn't the fella who made the talking CD have used the same names for things. As refering to the same thing as wireless key code or SSID or WEP key tends to confuse people.

Would you like...

[Chelloveck]

Would you like some Freedom Fries with that?

zero interest ..

[rs232]

"I tried giving away The Open CD (or something similar) .. I got zero response. Zero interest"

You do seem unfortunate as you can't even get physics student or your wife to use Open Office and now young inquizitive kids won't even put a CD in a computer. What version did you choose. Did you burn your own or buy them in. What did the students do with the CDs when you handed them out in the computer room, play frizbee or use them as beer mats. What is the policy of students using their own software at your college.

Re:I tried it.

Re:Example story-with subtitles.

[ckaminski]

Windows is just as trivial if your time is worth nothing.

I lack for nothing in my OpenSuSE installs, except games, and I really don't have a lot of time for those.

Windows .ISO burning options:
    * Burn At Once
    * Daemon Tools <- Allows mounting of ISO images as drive volumes.

Outdated software?

[ohtani]

FTFA:
"What can't the Internet Freedom Disk do? Protect you from phishing scams."

But it uses Firefox. Is it perhaps using Pre-2.0 version without phishing checking, or maybe has it turned off?

had to find a negative spin ..

[rs232]

"Encouraging users to continue to be ignorant and reckless sounds like a horrible idea"

How you can spin a bootable CD into 'reckless' has me bewildered. Since when was it ignorant and reckless to be able to browse the Web or open an attachment without your bank account being emptied by the Russian Mafia. Encouraging the users to be 'responsible' is an exercise in futility. Create a customised configuration that restores itself from an image each time it's booted would be the more realistic solution. The image is stored on a hidden partition on the hard drive so restoring wouldn't be that slow, at least on Linux. It would also relieve you of the burdon of wasting four hours out of your life in yet another Windows Install marathon.

In this day and age, if you're doing any sort of online banking a bootable CD is a must. Put a lowspec machine in the corner of the office for just such a purpose. Blaiming the users is just a copout on the responsibilities of the Banks and the software producers.

Key words: ignorant, reckless, dumb, bewildered and dangerous ..

was Re:Security?

My sister loved it...

[gillbates]

Kind of odd - my sister is a graduate student in Biology. A few years ago, I set up Open Office on her computer.

A few months ago, I got a call. She had a little extra money, and decided to buy MS Office from the school bookstore - thinking that she'd finally moved out of the "I'm poor so I need free software" stage. She installed it - and now she calls me, asking me why it doesn't do automatic word completion. I told her, that's just something Microsoft doesn't do. Now she thinks MS is stupid. Of course, she uses Power Point because OO.org never did achieve full compatibility, but she's a little bit wiser about the state of software than she used to be.

She doesn't care what she runs, as long as it works. Same for my other sister - she used a RedHat based laptop for several semesters because she didn't have the money for Windows. I never received any support calls from her until the laptop finally died (hardware failure).

Do you know why geeks install pirated copies of Windows? It's the only way they can get the Hot Chick(TM) to call them back...

Re:My sister loved it...

[bcrowell]

Interesting story, but I'm curious to hear the final outcome with sister #1. Does she (a) use OOo, or (b) think MS is stupid, but still use Word? Does the story support the hypothesis that whatever software people get started with, they stay with it forever?

The word completion anecdote tickled me -- I hate that feature of OOo, and just recently wasted some time trying to figure out how to turn it off :-)

Re:My sister loved it...

[gillbates]

I hated that feature, too, but my sister loved it. She ended up keeping both and only using Word when it was specifically required.

Blogging the Bible

[mspohr]

Try this for a different take on the bible: http://www.slate.com/id/2141050/

I can see the commercial now

[spun]

"Hey, man, is that Freedom Disk?"
"Yeah, man!"
"Well then boooooot it up, man!"

Geek and ISO in same sentence

[tacokill]

I can safely say that if your "geek" friends can't figure out how to burn an ISO (assuming they have access to Google or any other search engine), then they aren't geeks. Instead, they are "power users" or "advanced" users. But not geeks.

Part of being a geek is figuring it out. Be it with your current software or a different application that does the same thing. And by the very definition of the word, geeks have already figured out a LOT of stuff. Otherwise, people wouldn't say they are geeks, would they?

Sorry to rant but I have trouble with self-described geeks that can't figure out the most basic of IT questions. I see this more and more in the world. There seems to be an abundance of people calling themselves geeks but a severe lack of knowledge and understanding from those same people. I wonder how/why that is?


(And just to make sure nobody thinks I am trying to be arrogant here, I too, have asked my fair share of questions. But I started with Google and went from there. Usually, I found my answer in a couple of mouse clicks. And especially with something like burning ISO's. There are, literally, hundreds of sites that tell you, exactly, how to burn an ISO. So how does a true geek miss that? Answer: they're either 100% totally lazy, or 100% not a geek. I think the latter.)

Book of God by Walter Wangrin

[pbhj]

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Book-God-Bible-Novel/dp/07 4593983X/sr=1-1/qid=1166533688/ref=sr_1_1/026-5404 366-8449265?ie=UTF8&s=books

Or just google for it.

The "Book of God" is a novel based on the Bible filling in well researched but still imagined details about life in Biblical times. It stays close to the original text and gives a reverend rendition of happenings starting with Abraham and moving on through to the Acts of the Apostles. It is not an exhaustive account. YMMV

Try it ... there's an excerpt here http://walterwangerinjr.org/new_web/publish_detail s.php?id=27&t=excerpt from the start of the novel.

Quote:
          Abraham felt the hairs on his neck begin to tingle. Suddenly this was not
mere dinner conversation. It felt intimate and dangerous.
          He was about to respond, when the stranger turned toward the tent and
called out, "Sarah! Sarah, why did you laugh?"
          A tiny voice in the dark interior said, "I didn't laugh."
          The stranger said, "Yes, you did. When I said you would bear a son you
laughed in your heart and mumbled. Shall old age have pleasure anymore?
Woman," said the stranger, "is anything too hard for the Lord?"
          Abraham gaped. His heart had begun to race wildly. His mind could scarcely keep
pace with events. The Lord! This fellow had said. Is anything too hard for the Lord?
          Once more, louder now but hidden still behind the reed screen of the tent,
Sarah said, "I did not laugh!"
          The three men were rising up, preparing to travel on. "You did, you know,"
the more glorious one said. "You laughed."
          And then they left. They set out on the long road that descended to the city of
Sodom.