Simply blaming games (or, more generally, the media) for our society's problems with violence allows us to ignore the real roots of the problem -- which usually boil down to failures of societies as a whole. Which thought seems worse: "Video games are teaching kids to be violent", or "Our society's methods for protecting the safety and security of its members are insufficient and could fail again any time, and I'm probably part of the problem"?
Of course there was an Internet back then, but since it was all just ASCII porn back in those days, your point is still valid.
You are, of course, quite correct in pointing that out! In my defense, though -- I was aware that the internet already existed back then, and I didn't mean to imply that it didn't. What I was thinking of when I wrote my original post was more along the lines of "there was no internet available to Joe Normal User", or "there was no internet available to Joe Normal Porn Viewer". I suppose I should have written it out that way...
...about the porn industry having the power to decide the format war never convinced me in the first place.
Yes, it is said that the porn industry were largely responsible for VHS beating Betamax, even though the latter was technically superior. But that wasn't the only factor. Keep in mind -- Sony was incredibly restrictive of its format, whereas VHS licensing was much more liberal, so most VCR manufacturers opted to produce equipment for VHS. That's a pretty important point too.
Also, keep in mind, although the porn industry may have had a certain influence on the whole process back in the day -- that was (mainly) in the 1980s. Back then, there was no internet. I'm certain that many if not most people who would have been in the market for porn tapes back then would just download it nowadays.
The reason why people still buy books because that is the most convenient format for reading and can't easily be copied. Your alternatives essentially come down to reading everything on a screen or printing everything out on your home printer, neither of which is very comfortable for most people. Plus, illegal copies of books are hard to come by because they aren't easy to make if you don't have access to the original source. It takes a lot of scanning and/or copywriting, e.g. a lot of work.
Hollywood not marketing its screenwriters like book authors has nothing to do with it. And the only way this realisation that books are "perfect DRM" could be applied to, say, music or movies would be by... going back to vinyl records and film reels. Yay.
...that, as technology moved on, there just weren't enough webmasters around who were good at their job. In the early days of the web, just having a website was enough to be taken reasonably seriously as a professional. Back in those days, all you needed to know was a little HTML (and not even HTML 4, depending how early on, never mind CSS, JavaScript, Flash or cross-browser compatibility) and you needed a few writing skills. Nowadays, the bar is a little higher. Nowadays, a "webmaster" would have to be a competent designer, competent developer *and* a fairly skilled writer, not to mention a pretty good moderator, since so many websites nowadays have a community.
People who are good at all of that are far and few between, so instead of having one mythical webmaster who does everything, it makes more sense to have the tasks split up into different jobs: Web designer, web developer and content provider (which may be any sort of professional, for example marketing or journalism, or the website user himself).
The reason child porn is illegal is not because being attracted to minors is a crime, not matter what your age. The reason it is a crime is because you are feeding an industry that is preying on children. Children under 18 are not considered old enough to make the decision to appear in porn. So sure, at 16, it's perfectly reasonable to be attracted to girls his age. But supporting those girls as they start a pornography career (under the influence of others) is what's wrong!
It's a pretty well known fact nowadays that the lion share of people who get caught with child porn on their computers downloaded it off various filesharing networks or traded it with other "collectors". Also, looking at some studies that have been done on child pornography, it seems that most of the material found on filesharing networks was either commercially produced in the 1960s and 1970s or privately produced. You can read up on these facts in the Wikipedia article about child pornography, but it can be easily verified from other sources, too.
My point is: 99% of people with child pornography didn't pay for it, they didn't have influence on its production, and no contact with the makers. Since the rules of supply and demand don't apply when there's no money/other compensation involved, there is no real reason to believe that heightened demand in child porn causes more production of it. In general, people who own child porn are not "feeding an industry". That is pure groupthink. You know. "Think of the children."
Now, naturally, I do not in any way condone child porn. When a child is abused and the abuser distributes recordings of the abuse, that causes the child to suffer even more. And believe me, there is nothing that gets my blood boiling with rage faster than seeing someone cause a child to suffer unnecessarily.
The emotional hurt that stems from the knowledge that recordings of the abuse are circulating somewhere out there stems from the abuser first putting the material *on* P2P or wherever. It seems to me that whether two or two million see the recordings after that can't be measured reliably and doesn't make much difference any more. The damage has already been done by that point, by the abuser, the moment he made the recordings available.
So what I'm basically getting at, is that I'm having trouble seeing how exactly people leeching child porn off P2P are causing damage. They don't cause the creation of new material and thus don't cause more abuse; and the emotional hurt for the victim doesn't stem from them but simply from the fact that the material is available.
Okay, you might argue that child pornography "inspires" abuse and encourages the viewer to abuse. But I've read of several studies that found no significant link between viewing child pornography and abusing. And in my neck of the woods (Switzerland), education material from the police indicates that most viewers of child pornography are neither paedophiles nor child molesters, they just get a kick out of the forbidden and are not usually at risk of becoming molesters themselves.
Again, let me repeat that I think child pornography is Not A Good Thing (tm), that I hate just about nothing more than seeing a child suffer unnecessarily and that I have never commited a sexual offense in my life. So I'm not some predator trying to push his agenda here. But it really seems to me that the general view on the child pornography issue is built largely on facts that have been shown to be mostly untrue. It also seems to me that this view is dangerously easy for the powers that be to use for their own purposes. You know. "Think of the children". Or "'Child pornography' is the root password for the constitution". I think you could even go as far as to say that the damage to society caused from that is way bigger than the damage caused by some idiot having pornographic pictures of 12-year-olds from the 1970s on his computer.
I'm not saying "repeal child pornography laws". That co
What happens when (not if) N. Korea weaponizes these giant rabbits? Possibly by irradiating them and turning them into an even larger and more fearsome animal (sort of like African killer bees, but with big floppy death ray shooting ears). Seriously folks. Won't someone think of the children?
This is modded... insightful? Funny, yeah, okay. But insightful?
1. We already have tons of big and fearsome animals in this world.
2. How exactly does one turn a rabbit, even a big one, into a weapon?
3. North Korea still has more likely things to turn into weapons than rabbits.
4. Across the globe, humanity is facing global warming, nuclear weapons, social injustice. In many regions, humanity is facing starvation, disease and war. C'mon people, we have bigger things to worry about than communist killer rabbits already.
Again, kudos to the poster for a funny post, but I'm not sure what to make of the moderation...
If your music is so bad that Timbaland is producing a copy of it, you should take up mime or tiddlywinks as a means of creative expression.
Consider Nelly Furtado: Intelligent, talented, creative musician who has been turned into a shite-generating whore. All thanks to Timbaland.
The person who made the original song cares. People who support justice care. Whether you like Timbaland or not doesn't enter into it. This is a question of principle.
Maybe we should just rewrite copyright law. "It is illegal to use media without permission from the original author, that is, unless the one doing the plaguarising is someone whom Slashdot user swordgeek doesn't like."
You're assuming they're using their own credit cards... remember, we're talking about people who are already commiting a crime to begin with. How'd you like to have your credit card # harvested and then find out about it by having the Gestapo kick in your door? Yikes.
The Gestapo hasn't been around for over 61 years. I'm not sure if this should count as an invocation of Godwin...
Speaking of that, I had the wildest thought that the KDE devs had a secret team dedicated to making names with K in them. I mean, Kopete? Konversation? Konsole? Sounds all Deutsch to me.
Well, not all. From Wikipedia: "According to the Kopete FAQ, the name Kopete comes from the Chilean word Copete, a word to refer to alcoholic drinks."
It shows some graphical pics of games that have been converted to SVG (nice to say the least). Then in the article, it talks about the various projects that are working on core libs. Once those are fleshed out, then more apps will come into focus. I would say that this is actually a pretty good preview of very unsettled work. As to the desktop, well, there will be more.
The thing is, though, that nothing about this, other than the pictures of the re-vamped games, is new. They're basically just repeating the KDE roadmap. It's probably an OK sum-up for those who haven't been following the KDE project's plans, but a news article this is not.
Instead of seeking to make the Internet safe for children, why not simply ban children from the Internet?
After all, this is primarily an adult world. Childhood is a temporary phase. There are some things that are not, and never will be, suitable for children. That does not mean they are not suitable for adults.
Wow, who on Earth modded *this* up to +4 Insightful? Okay, I'll bite. Here's just a small number of random reasons why. Because:
- It's impossible. Such a ban would be completely unenforceable. Nobody needs even more feel-good laws that don't actually work.
- Big companies which use the internet to advertise to children or foster brand recognition with children would fight such a law with claws and teeth.
- Attempting to enforce such a ban would inevitably compromise the anonymity, free speech, instant accessibility, freedom and openness that make the internet so great. In other words, it would mean attempting to turn the internet into CompuServe.
- Banning kids from the internet would keep them from benefiting from all the good bits. You know, access to the world's largest library, learning resources, Wikipedia, etc. Ways of expanding your horizon and all that. It's a bit late to start when you're 18 (or whatever age you'd suggest).
And, most importantly, you point out that some things are suitable for adults but not for children. Immature children don't suddenly turn into mature, stable, balanced adults all by themselves in one moment. They grow into it. They *learn* to be mature. And how do they learn that? Certainly not by being completely shielded from the real adult world throughout their valuable growing and learning phase.
(Never mind the fact that this whole story doesn't have any real connection to the internet in the first place - spoiled brats misbehaving badly didn't exactly only start to come up in 2005, the year Youtube was invented.)
Looking at the Slashdot frontpage right now, among the stories I see are: "Researchers Work Around Hepatitis Drug Patent", "Wal-Mart Is Pushing Compact Fluorescent Bulbs", "Month of Apple Fixes", "MySQL Falcon Storage Engine Open Sourced", "Creating Prion-Free Cows". Maybe it's just my morning coffee making me optimistic, but it seems to me there's not usually this much positive news on Slashdot! Almost gives you hope for 2007, that does.
You're going about this incorrectly. If a piece of hardware works in one distribution, it will theoretically work in all. Granted, it will probably be easier in Ubuntu or Fedora, but just because you may have to work a little harder in Slackware doesn't mean the hardware isn't compatible. The OS is still GNU/Linux, and there are very few hardware-related tools that are propriety among any one of the big distros.
I think you're missing the point about what exactly tuxpatible.info is meant to be.
Yes, theoretically, something that works in one distro will indeed work in all of them. Practically, however, this is often not the case. Are you seriously claiming that all Linux distros have identical hardware support / recognition? If that was really so, hardware recognition wouldn't be such a major point in Linux distro reviews. Fact is: Not every distro includes every driver, not every distro includes the same version of every driver, not every distro is perfectly bug-free, and so on, and so on.
Tuxpatible isn't just meant to answer the question, "Is there a Linux driver available for $HARDWARE". It's meant to answer more specific questions, like: "What distros will $HARDWARE work well with?" or "Will $HARDWARE work with my distro of choice?", or "What do I have to do to get $HARDWARE working on my distro of choice?", or "How do I fix this common problem with $HARDWARE under my distro of choice?"
But this is exactly the problem! When people ask this question, they get details, and perhaps a link to a list or two. But there is no single up-to-date reliable hardware list that a Linux-user can really rely on. This should be a simple URL of a website that answers all hardware questions: enter a chipset or a product name, and get a list of distros on which it works. Sounds obvious, and necessary, but we still don't have it. Even such a website for a specific distro doesn't exist, to my knowledge - for example the Ubuntu wiki has lists of compatible hardware, but it isn't very convenient or accessible, I've spent a lot of wasted time on it. Also, if a particular model isn't listed, I don't know if that means it wasn't tested, or doesn't work (although some models are marked as not working). And the basic problem is that the Ubuntu wiki could be wrong - I am not aware of anyone doing serious quality control there.
I guess for most people knowledgeable about Linux, this isn't a big issue - they know the answers or know where to get them. Still, a better solution would make things more convenient for them. And newcomers would certainly be much happier.
You know, I'm involved with a reasonably young project that aims to do exactly that - provide a community-powered, up-to-date, comprehensive central Linux hardware compatibility listing. It was launched in autumn, but for various reason, no work was done on it for several months, and we're only just picking up on it again now. So it still needs a whole lot of work, and it could do with more contributors, too. We tried to submit it to Slashdot, but the story was refused.
If you think this project has potential and is worthwhile supporting, spread the link, contribute to the website, or if you have mod points and feel like it, mod this post up so that more people may see this!
Yes, unfortunately, it appears there website has gone offline due to technical problems. It should be back soon. It was still online when I posted the link.
Personally, I'm a great fan of PCLinuxOS. Its hardware recognition beats even Ubuntu in my experience. Programmes and drivers are easily installed using a graphical user interface (Synaptic), the package repositories are great and very complete. The "PCLinuxOS control center" is a user-friendly graphical system administration tool that beats the Windows ones sideways to hell and back. The PCLinuxOS community is extremely friendly and helpful. Should you find a programme missing from the repositories (although that rarely happens), ask on the forum, and often, the maintainers will add it for you. By default, it comes with KDE, but GNOME/Xfce/etc. are available to download.
The only major downside I can think of is that the default theme looks a bit ugly, but that's easily fixed!
Also, PCLinuxOS.94 should be released soon, which should make the distro better than ever!
If people like working on this, great, let them. But even if it was great in its day, is *anyone* seriously fooling themselves AmigaOS is going to make a comeback of any sort ever again?
Slashdot Mirror
Simply blaming games (or, more generally, the media) for our society's problems with violence allows us to ignore the real roots of the problem -- which usually boil down to failures of societies as a whole. Which thought seems worse: "Video games are teaching kids to be violent", or "Our society's methods for protecting the safety and security of its members are insufficient and could fail again any time, and I'm probably part of the problem"?
...about the porn industry having the power to decide the format war never convinced me in the first place.
Yes, it is said that the porn industry were largely responsible for VHS beating Betamax, even though the latter was technically superior. But that wasn't the only factor. Keep in mind -- Sony was incredibly restrictive of its format, whereas VHS licensing was much more liberal, so most VCR manufacturers opted to produce equipment for VHS. That's a pretty important point too.
Also, keep in mind, although the porn industry may have had a certain influence on the whole process back in the day -- that was (mainly) in the 1980s. Back then, there was no internet. I'm certain that many if not most people who would have been in the market for porn tapes back then would just download it nowadays.
The reason why people still buy books because that is the most convenient format for reading and can't easily be copied. Your alternatives essentially come down to reading everything on a screen or printing everything out on your home printer, neither of which is very comfortable for most people. Plus, illegal copies of books are hard to come by because they aren't easy to make if you don't have access to the original source. It takes a lot of scanning and/or copywriting, e.g. a lot of work.
Hollywood not marketing its screenwriters like book authors has nothing to do with it. And the only way this realisation that books are "perfect DRM" could be applied to, say, music or movies would be by... going back to vinyl records and film reels. Yay.
...in Soviet Russia, interceptor missles YOU a success.
...that, as technology moved on, there just weren't enough webmasters around who were good at their job. In the early days of the web, just having a website was enough to be taken reasonably seriously as a professional. Back in those days, all you needed to know was a little HTML (and not even HTML 4, depending how early on, never mind CSS, JavaScript, Flash or cross-browser compatibility) and you needed a few writing skills. Nowadays, the bar is a little higher. Nowadays, a "webmaster" would have to be a competent designer, competent developer *and* a fairly skilled writer, not to mention a pretty good moderator, since so many websites nowadays have a community.
People who are good at all of that are far and few between, so instead of having one mythical webmaster who does everything, it makes more sense to have the tasks split up into different jobs: Web designer, web developer and content provider (which may be any sort of professional, for example marketing or journalism, or the website user himself).
It's a pretty well known fact nowadays that the lion share of people who get caught with child porn on their computers downloaded it off various filesharing networks or traded it with other "collectors". Also, looking at some studies that have been done on child pornography, it seems that most of the material found on filesharing networks was either commercially produced in the 1960s and 1970s or privately produced. You can read up on these facts in the Wikipedia article about child pornography, but it can be easily verified from other sources, too.
My point is: 99% of people with child pornography didn't pay for it, they didn't have influence on its production, and no contact with the makers. Since the rules of supply and demand don't apply when there's no money/other compensation involved, there is no real reason to believe that heightened demand in child porn causes more production of it. In general, people who own child porn are not "feeding an industry". That is pure groupthink. You know. "Think of the children."
Now, naturally, I do not in any way condone child porn. When a child is abused and the abuser distributes recordings of the abuse, that causes the child to suffer even more. And believe me, there is nothing that gets my blood boiling with rage faster than seeing someone cause a child to suffer unnecessarily.
The emotional hurt that stems from the knowledge that recordings of the abuse are circulating somewhere out there stems from the abuser first putting the material *on* P2P or wherever. It seems to me that whether two or two million see the recordings after that can't be measured reliably and doesn't make much difference any more. The damage has already been done by that point, by the abuser, the moment he made the recordings available.
So what I'm basically getting at, is that I'm having trouble seeing how exactly people leeching child porn off P2P are causing damage. They don't cause the creation of new material and thus don't cause more abuse; and the emotional hurt for the victim doesn't stem from them but simply from the fact that the material is available.
Okay, you might argue that child pornography "inspires" abuse and encourages the viewer to abuse. But I've read of several studies that found no significant link between viewing child pornography and abusing. And in my neck of the woods (Switzerland), education material from the police indicates that most viewers of child pornography are neither paedophiles nor child molesters, they just get a kick out of the forbidden and are not usually at risk of becoming molesters themselves.
Again, let me repeat that I think child pornography is Not A Good Thing (tm), that I hate just about nothing more than seeing a child suffer unnecessarily and that I have never commited a sexual offense in my life. So I'm not some predator trying to push his agenda here. But it really seems to me that the general view on the child pornography issue is built largely on facts that have been shown to be mostly untrue. It also seems to me that this view is dangerously easy for the powers that be to use for their own purposes. You know. "Think of the children". Or "'Child pornography' is the root password for the constitution". I think you could even go as far as to say that the damage to society caused from that is way bigger than the damage caused by some idiot having pornographic pictures of 12-year-olds from the 1970s on his computer.
I'm not saying "repeal child pornography laws". That co
1. We already have tons of big and fearsome animals in this world.
2. How exactly does one turn a rabbit, even a big one, into a weapon?
3. North Korea still has more likely things to turn into weapons than rabbits.
4. Across the globe, humanity is facing global warming, nuclear weapons, social injustice. In many regions, humanity is facing starvation, disease and war. C'mon people, we have bigger things to worry about than communist killer rabbits already.
Again, kudos to the poster for a funny post, but I'm not sure what to make of the moderation...
Maybe we should just rewrite copyright law. "It is illegal to use media without permission from the original author, that is, unless the one doing the plaguarising is someone whom Slashdot user swordgeek doesn't like."
Speaking of that, I had the wildest thought that the KDE devs had a secret team dedicated to making names with K in them. I mean, Kopete? Konversation? Konsole? Sounds all Deutsch to me.
Well, not all. From Wikipedia: "According to the Kopete FAQ, the name Kopete comes from the Chilean word Copete, a word to refer to alcoholic drinks."
It shows some graphical pics of games that have been converted to SVG (nice to say the least). Then in the article, it talks about the various projects that are working on core libs. Once those are fleshed out, then more apps will come into focus. I would say that this is actually a pretty good preview of very unsettled work. As to the desktop, well, there will be more.
The thing is, though, that nothing about this, other than the pictures of the re-vamped games, is new. They're basically just repeating the KDE roadmap. It's probably an OK sum-up for those who haven't been following the KDE project's plans, but a news article this is not.
Not to forget:
4. Profit!!!
How about "Russian Rocket Crashes In Wyoming"?
It should also be pointed out that the port to QT is expected to very noticeably improve performance.
Maybe it's a typo, but just to clarify: KDE is already based on QT. It's just that KDE 4 will be using QT 4, whereas the current KDE uses QT 3.
Instead of seeking to make the Internet safe for children, why not simply ban children from the Internet?
After all, this is primarily an adult world. Childhood is a temporary phase. There are some things that are not, and never will be, suitable for children. That does not mean they are not suitable for adults.
Wow, who on Earth modded *this* up to +4 Insightful? Okay, I'll bite. Here's just a small number of random reasons why. Because:
- It's impossible. Such a ban would be completely unenforceable. Nobody needs even more feel-good laws that don't actually work.
- Big companies which use the internet to advertise to children or foster brand recognition with children would fight such a law with claws and teeth.
- Attempting to enforce such a ban would inevitably compromise the anonymity, free speech, instant accessibility, freedom and openness that make the internet so great. In other words, it would mean attempting to turn the internet into CompuServe.
- Banning kids from the internet would keep them from benefiting from all the good bits. You know, access to the world's largest library, learning resources, Wikipedia, etc. Ways of expanding your horizon and all that. It's a bit late to start when you're 18 (or whatever age you'd suggest).
And, most importantly, you point out that some things are suitable for adults but not for children. Immature children don't suddenly turn into mature, stable, balanced adults all by themselves in one moment. They grow into it. They *learn* to be mature. And how do they learn that? Certainly not by being completely shielded from the real adult world throughout their valuable growing and learning phase.
(Never mind the fact that this whole story doesn't have any real connection to the internet in the first place - spoiled brats misbehaving badly didn't exactly only start to come up in 2005, the year Youtube was invented.)
Looking at the Slashdot frontpage right now, among the stories I see are: "Researchers Work Around Hepatitis Drug Patent", "Wal-Mart Is Pushing Compact Fluorescent Bulbs", "Month of Apple Fixes", "MySQL Falcon Storage Engine Open Sourced", "Creating Prion-Free Cows". Maybe it's just my morning coffee making me optimistic, but it seems to me there's not usually this much positive news on Slashdot! Almost gives you hope for 2007, that does.
You're going about this incorrectly. If a piece of hardware works in one distribution, it will theoretically work in all. Granted, it will probably be easier in Ubuntu or Fedora, but just because you may have to work a little harder in Slackware doesn't mean the hardware isn't compatible. The OS is still GNU/Linux, and there are very few hardware-related tools that are propriety among any one of the big distros.
I think you're missing the point about what exactly tuxpatible.info is meant to be.
Yes, theoretically, something that works in one distro will indeed work in all of them. Practically, however, this is often not the case. Are you seriously claiming that all Linux distros have identical hardware support / recognition? If that was really so, hardware recognition wouldn't be such a major point in Linux distro reviews. Fact is: Not every distro includes every driver, not every distro includes the same version of every driver, not every distro is perfectly bug-free, and so on, and so on.
Tuxpatible isn't just meant to answer the question, "Is there a Linux driver available for $HARDWARE". It's meant to answer more specific questions, like: "What distros will $HARDWARE work well with?" or "Will $HARDWARE work with my distro of choice?", or "What do I have to do to get $HARDWARE working on my distro of choice?", or "How do I fix this common problem with $HARDWARE under my distro of choice?"
But this is exactly the problem! When people ask this question, they get details, and perhaps a link to a list or two. But there is no single up-to-date reliable hardware list that a Linux-user can really rely on. This should be a simple URL of a website that answers all hardware questions: enter a chipset or a product name, and get a list of distros on which it works. Sounds obvious, and necessary, but we still don't have it. Even such a website for a specific distro doesn't exist, to my knowledge - for example the Ubuntu wiki has lists of compatible hardware, but it isn't very convenient or accessible, I've spent a lot of wasted time on it. Also, if a particular model isn't listed, I don't know if that means it wasn't tested, or doesn't work (although some models are marked as not working). And the basic problem is that the Ubuntu wiki could be wrong - I am not aware of anyone doing serious quality control there.
I guess for most people knowledgeable about Linux, this isn't a big issue - they know the answers or know where to get them. Still, a better solution would make things more convenient for them. And newcomers would certainly be much happier.
You know, I'm involved with a reasonably young project that aims to do exactly that - provide a community-powered, up-to-date, comprehensive central Linux hardware compatibility listing. It was launched in autumn, but for various reason, no work was done on it for several months, and we're only just picking up on it again now. So it still needs a whole lot of work, and it could do with more contributors, too. We tried to submit it to Slashdot, but the story was refused.
In case anyone is interested in taking a look, the URL is http://www.tuxpatible.info.
If you think this project has potential and is worthwhile supporting, spread the link, contribute to the website, or if you have mod points and feel like it, mod this post up so that more people may see this!
Well I hope their website is going to be released soon as well. All I get from your URL http://www.pclinuxos.com/ is a redirect to http://rubens.hmdnsgroup.com/suspended.page/ where it says that the page is not available.
Yes, unfortunately, it appears there website has gone offline due to technical problems. It should be back soon. It was still online when I posted the link.
Personally, I'm a great fan of PCLinuxOS. Its hardware recognition beats even Ubuntu in my experience. Programmes and drivers are easily installed using a graphical user interface (Synaptic), the package repositories are great and very complete. The "PCLinuxOS control center" is a user-friendly graphical system administration tool that beats the Windows ones sideways to hell and back. The PCLinuxOS community is extremely friendly and helpful. Should you find a programme missing from the repositories (although that rarely happens), ask on the forum, and often, the maintainers will add it for you. By default, it comes with KDE, but GNOME/Xfce/etc. are available to download.
.94 should be released soon, which should make the distro better than ever!
The only major downside I can think of is that the default theme looks a bit ugly, but that's easily fixed!
Also, PCLinuxOS
YMMV, of course, but that's my opinion.
If people like working on this, great, let them. But even if it was great in its day, is *anyone* seriously fooling themselves AmigaOS is going to make a comeback of any sort ever again?