Who mentioned Hurd? I didn't. That's not even a good strawman.
Why is the comparison point a netinstall? And why, on a system that can be upgraded from version to version, does anyone care very much about configuring it the first time? You only have to install once, not repeatedly. How hard is a netinstall anyway? The LXDE disc includes openbox, it's not like anyone needs a third party to provide a window manager.
If "helper bash scripts" are important why aren't they even mentioned on the project page? Or are they the kind of scripts you only need in order to work around issues arising from changing for the sake of change something that was already working and well tested?
If there is something substantial or useful about crunchbang (and similar) then why is it so hard to quantify? Phrases such as "many applications chosen specifically for their hackability attributes" (taken from their "about" page) are just layering more cringe making bs on top of the more usual bs higher up that page.
If the difference between distro X and its parent is a theme and some helper bash scripts then no it isn't a proper distro.
Anything you can do with can be done equally well, usually better, with the unadulterated parent distro.
I checked the Crunchbang "about" page. Here's what it offers: a collection of unquantifiable claims, the same kernel and userland already available in Debian, and a dark theme.
Apparently it's "Infinitely hackable" and "Super nimble" blah blah blah. I'm surprised they didn't also claim "elegant" and "intuitive".
The summary assumes that "upgrading" is intrinsically and self-evidently beneficial. Why? People in business usually are not teens who get excited by a point release of ubuntu or by the latest irony free announcement of "the most secure ever" version of Windows. While they might be using IE6 they are mostly not relying on Norton Pirate Bay Special Edition for security, or on their annoying college age offspring for opinions on IT infrastructure or purchasing. Why would anyone spend large amounts of money and time to replace hardware and software that works as desired, to retrain emplyees to do stuff they are already doing, and maybe even hire extra employees, when there is no need?
The question only becomes relevant when failure to act has a reasonable potential to lead to financial penalty or some other kind of liability.
A person liking to watch a tv show of which you disapprove now has equivalency, in your superior hipster mind, to putting one's own eye out with a fork.
Somehow I still rate the "idiots" higher. They are not nearly so stupid as their critics.
The idea of identifying people as idiots and treating them with contempt merely on the basis of their personal taste isn't a new one but its practical application went into steep decline when the Berlin Wall came down and Honecker and CeauÅYescu and co. got helped off the stage. It takes truly daring hipster genius to defy reason, history, decency and sanity, and subscribe to the same inane elitist nonsense. God bless the hipsters for they make we idiots look like decent, kind, thoughtful people simply by us sitting on our fat asses watching tv and not telling everyone else how we're better than them.
I've never seen it, but if I was a fan then so what?
If you believe you can identify people as idiots because they don't share your taste in tv entertainment shows you're not saying anything meaningful about their intelliegence, but about yours. Those people you're sneering at are consuming mass media; you're doing *exactly* the same thing and being sold to and persuaded in *exactly* the same way but being small minded and mean spirited with it. I still like the "idiots" better.
Everyone knows they are being bombarded by attempts to manage their behaviour and attitudes. The idiots are the ones who mistakenly think that others don't know this and who believe themselves too intelligent and insightful to be influenced. Just because you can combine this conceit with some snobbery about mass media production values doesn't make you either specially intelligent or any less probe to manipulation. It means you are influenced a little differently by those nasty cheap shows with garish ads, but that you are influenced in exactly the same way as the "idiots" and by identical means by the same people for the same reasons, but in marginally different settings. Congratulations.
What most people don't have is the opportunity to select from a range of choices that goes from very good through excellent and up to perfect. That range only exists in the imagination of people who have lost touch with reality. So people try to make the best choice they can.
Meanwhile because they didn't all choose the non-existent imaginary fantasy option then some self regarding conceited dicks call them stupid and talk about them with contempt, the same contemptuous attitude they claim to observe in the despised politicians and judiciary etc.
And if anyone disagrees with them it provokes a brainless ad-hominem response "you're afraid that you're one of the idiots" and rejecting a mere assertion leads to an claim that you "deny such an obvious fact".
If that is a demonstration of being "able to truly understand abstract logic" then I prefer the contemptible idiots every time.
No, most people now are not idiots. But curiously some/. commentators can make such a crass generalisation without understanding who is left looking stupid as the words come tumbling out.
No need to do anything. When disaster strikes just wait three days and it simply restores itself. Shortly afterwards the data ascends into The Cloud and becomes available forever and ever. Halleluiah!
Since when it become necessary to express "remove" by saying "nuke from orbit"?
This kind of attention seeking exaggeration is much too common and the noise tends to mask less exciting but more rational opinions and observations, like mine for instance (he he he)
Anyway who installs a full Unity Ubuntu with the intention of immediately removing Unity? There are all those *buntu "dude I made this kewl theme" versions masquerading as distributions, anyone can use one of those instead. Do people really install something they already know they hate just to have an excuse to flap their jaws whining about it?
I'm neither a Gnome user nor an Ubuntu desktop user (prefer Debian Xfce on desktop and Ubuntu LTS on server) but I have tried Gnome 3. I'd say it is a very useable environment which presents a coherent alternative to the traditional models. I had read many terrible reviews and lots of same sounding opinions but when I tried it for myself for a few days I thought it was visually appealing and also let the user work very efficiently both with keyboard or mouse or both. The drawback for me is that the compositing is a performance hit (some obvious GUI latency and apps sometimes painfully slow to launch) on my Intel GPU netbook, so I'm still much better off with Xfce's more modest compositing.
The big desktops like Gnome, Unity and KDE always seem to be developed by and for people who have impressive hardware such as large dual monitors and powerful desktops with multi-core CPU and powerful graphics. There is little regard for those of us who run plain old dual cores or integrated GPU laptops, or (heaven forbid) single cores with integrated GPU. If the newer version is more useable for those of us oddballs who don't buy a new graphics card or laptop every year then I'll be interested to revisit it.
If you've actually done some blind testing such as abx then you'll have had to swallow your pride and admit that in general you can't distinguish lossless audio from lossy until the lossy bitrates plummet.
But there are specific "killer samples" that expose the deficiencies in lossy encoders. For example there is a sample called eig_essence on which mp3 encoders completely fail and which ogg vorbis requires very high bitrates to encode without smearing. Modern codecs do a lot better: iTunes AAC encoder or Fraunhofer's AAC encoder will encode of the same sample at moderate bitrates with the sound indistinguishable from original.
eig is an extreme example because most people won't have anything in their music collection that sounds similar (amphetamine addicted techno freaks excepted), but there are other well known problem samples (search somewhere like hydrogenaudio for trumpet and castanets) which are the kinds of music you might own and hear often.
When people say that they can distinguish lossy from lossless they shouldn't be dismissed out of hand but the claim should be able to survive simple scrutiny i.e. a blind test. And if I can't hear any difference between a lossy encode and lossless it doesn't mean that someone else can't, only that I can't. There are irrational people who assert they can identify lossy from lossless 100% of the time, or 44100 Hz from 96000/192000 Hz, and conversely there are irrational people who believe their subjective experience with their $20 ear buds and cellphone music player extrapolates to "everything sounds the same".
Yes it's real. If you can get past the partisan political bloggers and established media who don't usually notice anything in IT related tech beyond Apple, Google, MS and Samsung press releases then you can discover that the Conservative party (the larger partner in the coalition administration) has some well informed and rational policies in these areas. We've had several decades of IT school level education being no more than training people to use proprietary software for clerical tasks, while the government paid vast sums to middlemen for huge projects which failed to deliver while costs rose. Vast sums of money have been siphoned off to giant corporations like Microsoft, Serco and Fujitsu, for minimal benefit. Governments of all complexions have been guilty of terrible negligence and possibly corruption, but finally a few people who understand the severity of these problems and wish to fix them find themselves in government, and good luck to them. I'm not (so far) a Conservative voter, nor a member of any political party.
Only capital punishment fits in a case like this because there are two factors so serious that no lesser punishment is appropriate.
The first is that the offender gave greater weight to his conscience than to the power of his state. He disobeyed orders and statute. Any student of 20th century history will tell you that blind obedience is the glue that binds successful societies and engenders success, safety and justice.
The second is that the offender communicated with people so depraved that they openly engage in journalism, a pursuit that has the potential to inform taxpayers and voters such that they eventually become able to make rational choices and decisions, regardless of the wishes of their superiors.
This has to stop now, and any repetition or emulation be discouraged by the least ambiguous means available.
I find the same. Using Maemo on a Nokia N810 and playing with Meego on my Eee PC showed the good sense of a UI that is intelligently designed to work well with wide screens, especially with GPU accelerated compositing. Unity has a few rough edges but conceptually it works, and the execution is catching up with the concept with each release. But it is dog slow, to the point of being much too annoying to use, with lags, latencies and lock ups. I've only tried it with modest hardware such as Intel Atom with integrated GMA 3150 and a desktop with integrated Nvidia 8200 (with nvidia binary driver). On my Eee PC it pretty much kills the GPU accelerated video playback. The same modest hardware can run Gnome Shell composited desktop rather better (but still a bit annoying). Meanwhile, using Xfce's software composited UI on Debian lets applications launch like a sprinter out of the blocks..."on the 'B' of Bang!" as Linford Christie used to describe his starts. The hardware is modest, but surely dual cores and GPU acceleration offer more than enough to open a notepad type app or a menu or a terminal emulator without any perceptible lag?
I find intriguing the idea of a single portable device fulfilling the roles of phone, tablet, desktop and TV tuner/home media hub, with applications automatically presenting a suitable UI for each role. But I suspect that running Unity will require so many CPUs and GPUs that the portability aspect will entail the owner retaining staff to carry the sacred device, and to waft it with yak-tail whisks to keep it cool in use (in the style of the courts of ancient despots of the Orient). At least there will be something to look at while waiting for gedit to open.
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Who mentioned Hurd? I didn't. That's not even a good strawman.
Why is the comparison point a netinstall? And why, on a system that can be upgraded from version to version, does anyone care very much about configuring it the first time? You only have to install once, not repeatedly. How hard is a netinstall anyway? The LXDE disc includes openbox, it's not like anyone needs a third party to provide a window manager.
If "helper bash scripts" are important why aren't they even mentioned on the project page? Or are they the kind of scripts you only need in order to work around issues arising from changing for the sake of change something that was already working and well tested?
If there is something substantial or useful about crunchbang (and similar) then why is it so hard to quantify? Phrases such as "many applications chosen specifically for their hackability attributes" (taken from their "about" page) are just layering more cringe making bs on top of the more usual bs higher up that page.
If the difference between distro X and its parent is a theme and some helper bash scripts then no it isn't a proper distro.
Anything you can do with can be done equally well, usually better, with the unadulterated parent distro.
I checked the Crunchbang "about" page. Here's what it offers: a collection of unquantifiable claims, the same kernel and userland already available in Debian, and a dark theme.
Apparently it's "Infinitely hackable" and "Super nimble" blah blah blah. I'm surprised they didn't also claim "elegant" and "intuitive".
Better description: pointless.
I feel duty bound to point out your inappropriate use of capitalisation.
I'm not sure I believe you but the proof is in the pudding.
Surely that should be pluralizate?
In nerd land what is the plural of sheep?
venii, vidii, vicii, virii.
Don't be one of the doofi. Go back to your boxen.
There is no such word as virii either in English or Latin. The plural of virus is viruses.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plural_of_virus#Treating_v.C4.ABrus_as_2nd_declension_masculine
The summary assumes that "upgrading" is intrinsically and self-evidently beneficial. Why? People in business usually are not teens who get excited by a point release of ubuntu or by the latest irony free announcement of "the most secure ever" version of Windows. While they might be using IE6 they are mostly not relying on Norton Pirate Bay Special Edition for security, or on their annoying college age offspring for opinions on IT infrastructure or purchasing. Why would anyone spend large amounts of money and time to replace hardware and software that works as desired, to retrain emplyees to do stuff they are already doing, and maybe even hire extra employees, when there is no need?
The question only becomes relevant when failure to act has a reasonable potential to lead to financial penalty or some other kind of liability.
It's funny because it happened to someone else. Ha ha!
People aren't buying a kernel, they're buying a product.
A person liking to watch a tv show of which you disapprove now has equivalency, in your superior hipster mind, to putting one's own eye out with a fork.
Somehow I still rate the "idiots" higher. They are not nearly so stupid as their critics.
The idea of identifying people as idiots and treating them with contempt merely on the basis of their personal taste isn't a new one but its practical application went into steep decline when the Berlin Wall came down and Honecker and CeauÅYescu and co. got helped off the stage. It takes truly daring hipster genius to defy reason, history, decency and sanity, and subscribe to the same inane elitist nonsense. God bless the hipsters for they make we idiots look like decent, kind, thoughtful people simply by us sitting on our fat asses watching tv and not telling everyone else how we're better than them.
I've never seen it, but if I was a fan then so what?
If you believe you can identify people as idiots because they don't share your taste in tv entertainment shows you're not saying anything meaningful about their intelliegence, but about yours. Those people you're sneering at are consuming mass media; you're doing *exactly* the same thing and being sold to and persuaded in *exactly* the same way but being small minded and mean spirited with it. I still like the "idiots" better.
"If I get burned in a fire, i should probably keep sticking my hand in it, cause that's what intelligent creatures do right?"
You just did. Twice.
Everyone knows they are being bombarded by attempts to manage their behaviour and attitudes. The idiots are the ones who mistakenly think that others don't know this and who believe themselves too intelligent and insightful to be influenced. Just because you can combine this conceit with some snobbery about mass media production values doesn't make you either specially intelligent or any less probe to manipulation. It means you are influenced a little differently by those nasty cheap shows with garish ads, but that you are influenced in exactly the same way as the "idiots" and by identical means by the same people for the same reasons, but in marginally different settings. Congratulations.
What gave Ebert his ability to confront people like Schneider was the glass of Badger Milk he drank every morning.
What most people don't have is the opportunity to select from a range of choices that goes from very good through excellent and up to perfect. That range only exists in the imagination of people who have lost touch with reality. So people try to make the best choice they can.
Meanwhile because they didn't all choose the non-existent imaginary fantasy option then some self regarding conceited dicks call them stupid and talk about them with contempt, the same contemptuous attitude they claim to observe in the despised politicians and judiciary etc.
And if anyone disagrees with them it provokes a brainless ad-hominem response "you're afraid that you're one of the idiots" and rejecting a mere assertion leads to an claim that you "deny such an obvious fact".
If that is a demonstration of being "able to truly understand abstract logic" then I prefer the contemptible idiots every time.
No, most people now are not idiots. But curiously some /. commentators can make such a crass generalisation without understanding who is left looking stupid as the words come tumbling out.
No need to do anything. When disaster strikes just wait three days and it simply restores itself. Shortly afterwards the data ascends into The Cloud and becomes available forever and ever. Halleluiah!
Hyperbole or what?
Since when it become necessary to express "remove" by saying "nuke from orbit"?
This kind of attention seeking exaggeration is much too common and the noise tends to mask less exciting but more rational opinions and observations, like mine for instance (he he he)
Anyway who installs a full Unity Ubuntu with the intention of immediately removing Unity? There are all those *buntu "dude I made this kewl theme" versions masquerading as distributions, anyone can use one of those instead. Do people really install something they already know they hate just to have an excuse to flap their jaws whining about it?
I'm neither a Gnome user nor an Ubuntu desktop user (prefer Debian Xfce on desktop and Ubuntu LTS on server) but I have tried Gnome 3. I'd say it is a very useable environment which presents a coherent alternative to the traditional models. I had read many terrible reviews and lots of same sounding opinions but when I tried it for myself for a few days I thought it was visually appealing and also let the user work very efficiently both with keyboard or mouse or both. The drawback for me is that the compositing is a performance hit (some obvious GUI latency and apps sometimes painfully slow to launch) on my Intel GPU netbook, so I'm still much better off with Xfce's more modest compositing.
The big desktops like Gnome, Unity and KDE always seem to be developed by and for people who have impressive hardware such as large dual monitors and powerful desktops with multi-core CPU and powerful graphics. There is little regard for those of us who run plain old dual cores or integrated GPU laptops, or (heaven forbid) single cores with integrated GPU. If the newer version is more useable for those of us oddballs who don't buy a new graphics card or laptop every year then I'll be interested to revisit it.
If you've actually done some blind testing such as abx then you'll have had to swallow your pride and admit that in general you can't distinguish lossless audio from lossy until the lossy bitrates plummet.
But there are specific "killer samples" that expose the deficiencies in lossy encoders. For example there is a sample called eig_essence on which mp3 encoders completely fail and which ogg vorbis requires very high bitrates to encode without smearing. Modern codecs do a lot better: iTunes AAC encoder or Fraunhofer's AAC encoder will encode of the same sample at moderate bitrates with the sound indistinguishable from original.
eig is an extreme example because most people won't have anything in their music collection that sounds similar (amphetamine addicted techno freaks excepted), but there are other well known problem samples (search somewhere like hydrogenaudio for trumpet and castanets) which are the kinds of music you might own and hear often.
When people say that they can distinguish lossy from lossless they shouldn't be dismissed out of hand but the claim should be able to survive simple scrutiny i.e. a blind test. And if I can't hear any difference between a lossy encode and lossless it doesn't mean that someone else can't, only that I can't. There are irrational people who assert they can identify lossy from lossless 100% of the time, or 44100 Hz from 96000/192000 Hz, and conversely there are irrational people who believe their subjective experience with their $20 ear buds and cellphone music player extrapolates to "everything sounds the same".
Yes it's real. If you can get past the partisan political bloggers and established media who don't usually notice anything in IT related tech beyond Apple, Google, MS and Samsung press releases then you can discover that the Conservative party (the larger partner in the coalition administration) has some well informed and rational policies in these areas. We've had several decades of IT school level education being no more than training people to use proprietary software for clerical tasks, while the government paid vast sums to middlemen for huge projects which failed to deliver while costs rose. Vast sums of money have been siphoned off to giant corporations like Microsoft, Serco and Fujitsu, for minimal benefit. Governments of all complexions have been guilty of terrible negligence and possibly corruption, but finally a few people who understand the severity of these problems and wish to fix them find themselves in government, and good luck to them. I'm not (so far) a Conservative voter, nor a member of any political party.
If you wish to boost the credibility of the post by expressing your support then it helps to begin your eulogy with a word other than "Dang".
Arabic? Iranians aren't Arabs. Their language is Farsi which, unlike Arabic, is one of the Indo-European languages.
Your a,b,c conjectures are equally unrelated to anything factual or likely.
Only capital punishment fits in a case like this because there are two factors so serious that no lesser punishment is appropriate.
The first is that the offender gave greater weight to his conscience than to the power of his state. He disobeyed orders and statute. Any student of 20th century history will tell you that blind obedience is the glue that binds successful societies and engenders success, safety and justice.
The second is that the offender communicated with people so depraved that they openly engage in journalism, a pursuit that has the potential to inform taxpayers and voters such that they eventually become able to make rational choices and decisions, regardless of the wishes of their superiors.
This has to stop now, and any repetition or emulation be discouraged by the least ambiguous means available.
I find the same. Using Maemo on a Nokia N810 and playing with Meego on my Eee PC showed the good sense of a UI that is intelligently designed to work well with wide screens, especially with GPU accelerated compositing. Unity has a few rough edges but conceptually it works, and the execution is catching up with the concept with each release. But it is dog slow, to the point of being much too annoying to use, with lags, latencies and lock ups. I've only tried it with modest hardware such as Intel Atom with integrated GMA 3150 and a desktop with integrated Nvidia 8200 (with nvidia binary driver). On my Eee PC it pretty much kills the GPU accelerated video playback. The same modest hardware can run Gnome Shell composited desktop rather better (but still a bit annoying). Meanwhile, using Xfce's software composited UI on Debian lets applications launch like a sprinter out of the blocks..."on the 'B' of Bang!" as Linford Christie used to describe his starts. The hardware is modest, but surely dual cores and GPU acceleration offer more than enough to open a notepad type app or a menu or a terminal emulator without any perceptible lag?
I find intriguing the idea of a single portable device fulfilling the roles of phone, tablet, desktop and TV tuner/home media hub, with applications automatically presenting a suitable UI for each role. But I suspect that running Unity will require so many CPUs and GPUs that the portability aspect will entail the owner retaining staff to carry the sacred device, and to waft it with yak-tail whisks to keep it cool in use (in the style of the courts of ancient despots of the Orient). At least there will be something to look at while waiting for gedit to open.