"saying Windows isn't ready for the desktop. And linux is?"
It is for my desktop. Windows free for approximately 4 months now. The closest I get is WINE and rdesktop.
One of the most compelling reasons for switching was malware (there are lots of other reasons, many idealistic, but what pushed me was malware). And basically, an install of Ubuntu is easier than a complete reinstall of Windows. It also stays fixed, which windows won't without a radical rewrite. There is no good reason why a complete reinstall of a system should be necessary every 6 months or so, or the purchase of a new computer in the case where there is no free tech support available.
I see someone has already asked for details about the file server (it was interesting), could you share some info on the other systems? Thanks in advance. Also, what size/brand of monitor do you run? I wouldn't think you'd go to the trouble of building a really efficient computer without doing likewise with the monitor.
How convenient! All you have to do to not have a compromised system is to read slashdot every day to chance upon relevant updates, google around for fixes, and follow instructions to use the user-friendly regedit program. Sure, grandma might have a little trouble with it, but windows has got to be ready for the desktop any year now.
The caps aren't running the monitor, all they are doing is reserving enough energy to start things up again on demand. Which means that the energy draw is fixed wrt the interval in which the monitor switches itself off, and user input switches it on again.
"If these cables and speakers and pre-amps, and turntables are all so ridiculous then why don't all of you who are suddenly "experts" on the subject start manufacturing them?"
"It doesn't cost billions of dollars to change the world. It costs somebody giving a damn and refusing to back down."
It depends on the size of your goals and who your likely allies and opponents are. Sending a local sheriff to jail is small potatoes in the scheme of things. And in your (Disney-esque) fight, you might find allies you never knew you had, but maybe it's just that you are serving as a useful idiot?
"What have you done?"
Sat back and thought a bit about how the world works, after having my chain yanked by the likes of MTV's "Rock the Vote" and running faster on the same old hamster wheel.
Or you could do what actually works and use your own media network to influence people, systematically evaluate which candidates will vote the way you want them to, and fund/advertise the more pliant ones.
You just need a few billion dollars to get the ball rolling. Good luck.
"My CPU is usually almost idle, but having a lot of tasks using the disks at the same time slows everything down. I really look forward to SSDs and near penalty-free random access."
You could always store your mp3s on one disk, another application on another disk, etc etc. It's a kluge though, because it requires more power to do so.
Why wait for the Nigerians? If all that is required to administer a server is an IQ in the ballpark of 67 and little to no English skills, there must be a horde of latent IT admins flooding across the Mexican border every day. As a bonus, these people are positively geniuses when compared to the Nigerians, and are currently wasting their time picking fruit and washing dishes.
"I hate to sound like a member of the tin hat bunch but I have to wonder if this isn't a brilliant plan by the music companies to sell you the same music yet again!"
Brilliant? A summer intern could come up with the same plan, probably did, and then thought it through and dismissed it. A slick consultant would have looked at the same plan and realized that he was dealing with people with lots of money to spend on someone who tells them what they want to hear, and saw a goldmine.
It's a sign of the recording industry's desperation that they are spending money on publicity to get it implemented. They are hoping that the public are going to ditch something way more convenient and just as good for old technology, the only benefit of which is that it takes more work to rip, and once ripped, will be available on the internet for free anyway.
I wonder why Vista sales remain flat, if not
damn small, despite the gutsy efforts of Microsoft's marketing department. Surely a newly minted OS from the same folks that brought us notepad.exe would make consumers as excited as a new puppy.
Having a reputation for not tolerating fools lightly also curbs the stupid and uninformed from wasting his time and the time of his collaborators. I suppose that's still motivated by insecurity, in that he needs OpenBSD to work well in order for it to pay, although it wouldn't be to prove his superiority.
The guy he was replying to could have just asked "Theo, I've scoured the mailing list for your opinion on the security of virtualization, I couldn't find any, I've seen a lot of claims by virtualization vendors for increased security benefits on the basis of x, what's your opinion?"
Maybe he should have read "How To Ask Questions The Smart Way". If he had, he probably wouldn't have spouted a bunch of marketing blurb to Theo and suggest that he implement a feature based on that marketing blurb. http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
Yes, for that particular model, you could. Every single safe of that model was set to the same combination, and if the guy who had ordered it had bothered to rtfm, he could have changed the combination. Even 1,2,3,4,5... would have been better than just leaving it to the default. And I'm sure that that particular manual would have been understandable by a layperson. It would have consisted of diagrams and instructions by someone for whom English was their first language (seeing that this was 50 years ago, when America actually used to manufacture things). But of course, no one bothered to read it.
What's so wrong with having your cake and eating it too, if you can figure out how? I'm just not a fan of doing arbitrary work. I'd rather do a bit more work once, up front, so I won't have to do the same monotonous bit of work day after day for the rest of my life.
It's not as if the possibilities aren't there. Even stuff that is cheap isn't done - insulation on new houses, and basic things like flat disc rims on cars, rear wheel skirts, deflectors, undertrays, most of the grille blocked etc. The payback period is measured in months, not some stupid 10 year period like a new prius. And half of those basic modifications aren't even done on the Prius! This is stuff that was known approximately 100 years ago! It's ancient technology, and the fact that it is not implemented en masse is just ****ing pathetic.
Part of the problem is that the bulk of the bell curve are too stupid to buy something more expensive even when the payback period is a year or two. The other part of the problem is that there is ample money to be made in parting these fools from their money and comparatively little profit in helping them save it. Make flat racing style disc rims mandatory, and watch the entire wheel rim industry dries up. Etc. etc.
It just shits me that we are burning through perfectly good resources, and once it's too late we'll see that we were in fact bundling dollar bills together in bales and throwing them on a bonfire.
What's your point? It's not as if there aren't more efficient options out there, they just have a longer payback time. Increase the variable cost of resource usage, and suddenly buying more efficient appliances and vehicles makes good economic sense.
And really, this is just putting the negative externalities back on the producer. Source control is a lot cheaper than everyone purchasing a million air purifiers.
It also stems from upper management either not being smart enough or not dedicating enough time to do a bit of basic research on security, so then they either ignore security issues entirely, or want security but completely underestimate the intelligence required to do a good job at it.
I'm reminded of reading "Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman!", where Feynman routinely bypassed the cargo cultish efforts at security by his ostensible military overseers. It's the same pattern - primitive people attempting to construct something that is fundamentally incomprehensible to them. On one hand, you have New Guineans building an "airfield" expecting to magically get cargo, not understanding that a landing strip is only one piece in a gigantic logistical chain. On the other hand, you have people whose fundamental intelligence limit is blue collar or middle management type work buying the most expensive safe money can buy and not changing the combination from the factory default!
"She was already using Firefox / OpenOffice / Gaim so for her the differences were pretty nominal."
And that's the key. Switching operating systems is a big deal if it means switching your entire personal software collection at once, and that's what a lot of people try to do and fail. They switch, get culture shock, and retreat back to XP.
If you can figure out which applications you use and then convert yourself to a FOSS program, one by one, then by the time you have finished you can install Ubuntu Gutsy and the rest of your problems will be restricted to driver issues. I don't know why I didn't think of doing it like that earlier, it seems so obvious now.
Seconded, both are brilliant in their own way. Tremulous in particular is both extremely addictive AND has the eye candy that most gaming addicts seem to require. Wesnoth is just extremely addictive, in a HOMM 2 + internet multiplayer kind of way.
"So perhaps I gloss over some of the troubles I had along my migration path to Linux."
It's easy enough to do. I've forgotten how hard it was, but not enough that I won't upgrade without using a new HDD to do the full install on rather than wiping the old one. It took me a solid week to get my Feisty setup to where it felt like "home". Dual monitors by hacking the xorg.conf, getting vpn to work, mail and web settings amongst others.
The difference between now and then is that I'm not having recurring pain like I did with XP. No nagging spyware worries is a big one. Knowing that the whole thing has source that anyone can read is also a relief. Knowing that I can upgrade for free and not have everything arbitrarily change on me, just to milk some more fees is another (although I suppose if Canonical are only charging for support, the easiest thing to do once Ubuntu is on enough PCs would be to arbitrarily change things around (like Vista did) so that you are one step ahead when it comes time to offering support. But someone can still fork the code, so much less worry than MS.)
It's also the difference between the linux of 5+ years ago and Ubuntu today. Rather than spyware hell, it was dependency hell, or driver hell, or something else just not working. Now it works.
He's talking about an intergenerational difference in people, which is why he mentions youth having no training in ethics, while most people can be said to be "basically honest". His main thrust is the following:
"So today you have a lot of young people who have no character, no ethics and they find no problem in defrauding somebody or stealing from somebody or cheating somebody. Until we change that, crime is just going to get easier, faster, more global, harder to detect."
I think he's focusing on the symptoms rather than the underlying causes, especially as it applies to the USA.
Take a cage of social animals (e.g. primates, lions, wolves, deer, bison etc) at the zoo. Within their cage, they will have a subset of behaviors within the realm of possible behaviors. That subset could be said to be an ethic. We remove the boundaries to each cage, competition to the same finite set of resources commences, and then we wonder why the set of observable interspecies behaviors is larger than the subsets formerly displayed within each cage, by a group of animals whose genetic code has been selected over millions of years to increase the frequency of their own genes.
He is right in a sense, that technology enables competition for finite resources. But as to his half-baked idea of a solution? i.e. Papering over the underlying reality of the USA with mandatory ethics classes in schools, and a 4 year course that only an idiot with no concept of earning enough money to provide for a family would take? It's a joke.
I guess it depends on how much of a gaming addict you are. It's a bit of a continuum. If you absolutely MUST play the latest game, you need XP or a console.
There are other people (like me) who can get a fix from a good game and don't tire of playing the same few games over and over again. Before there were computer games, people used to play chess, football, backgammon, cards, etc. A lot of people would play the same thing over and over again, because each time it was different, they enjoyed the competition, and starting a new game every week would mean they would remain forever a n00b.
There is a middle ground between the two, those who like a bit of eye candy or something approximating a modern game in addictiveness and not looking like it came bundled with windows 3.1, but are content to play it over and over and over again (due to multiplayer). Games like Tremulous, Nexuiz, and Wesnoth are there.
If you like the idea of using and becoming part of the userbase of a FOSS operating system, and you can addict yourself to games such as I have just mentioned, then Ubuntu works fine. Installing is as simple as opening synaptic, typing the above, checking a box or two, and clicking "apply".
Absolutely. I'm blown away by how good it is. (Nexuiz is pretty damn good too, way better than openarena.) And with ubuntu, it's as simple an install as typing tremulous into synaptic, check, apply.
There aren't many high quality FOSS games, but they certainly exist. For those people who think FOSS is a noble cause, and don't have ADD (or the urge to pirate) to the point where they must have whatever shiny new game is out there now, Ubuntu certainly checks the boxes.
Now, you'd best be getting out of the way of my tyrant...
Slashdot Mirror
This seems to be the main thread, there are a couple hundred posts now.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=599025
"saying Windows isn't ready for the desktop. And linux is?"
It is for my desktop. Windows free for approximately 4 months now. The closest I get is WINE and rdesktop.
One of the most compelling reasons for switching was malware (there are lots of other reasons, many idealistic, but what pushed me was malware). And basically, an install of Ubuntu is easier than a complete reinstall of Windows. It also stays fixed, which windows won't without a radical rewrite. There is no good reason why a complete reinstall of a system should be necessary every 6 months or so, or the purchase of a new computer in the case where there is no free tech support available.
In an era of malware, Windows is broken.
I see someone has already asked for details about the file server (it was interesting), could you share some info on the other systems? Thanks in advance. Also, what size/brand of monitor do you run? I wouldn't think you'd go to the trouble of building a really efficient computer without doing likewise with the monitor.
How convenient! All you have to do to not have a compromised system is to read slashdot every day to chance upon relevant updates, google around for fixes, and follow instructions to use the user-friendly regedit program. Sure, grandma might have a little trouble with it, but windows has got to be ready for the desktop any year now.
Are you serious or trolling?
The caps aren't running the monitor, all they are doing is reserving enough energy to start things up again on demand. Which means that the energy draw is fixed wrt the interval in which the monitor switches itself off, and user input switches it on again.
"If these cables and speakers and pre-amps, and turntables are all so ridiculous then why don't all of you who are suddenly "experts" on the subject start manufacturing them?"
Maybe they have a conscience?
"It doesn't cost billions of dollars to change the world. It costs somebody giving a damn and refusing to back down."
It depends on the size of your goals and who your likely allies and opponents are. Sending a local sheriff to jail is small potatoes in the scheme of things. And in your (Disney-esque) fight, you might find allies you never knew you had, but maybe it's just that you are serving as a useful idiot?
"What have you done?"
Sat back and thought a bit about how the world works, after having my chain yanked by the likes of MTV's "Rock the Vote" and running faster on the same old hamster wheel.
Or you could do what actually works and use your own media network to influence people, systematically evaluate which candidates will vote the way you want them to, and fund/advertise the more pliant ones.
You just need a few billion dollars to get the ball rolling. Good luck.
"My CPU is usually almost idle, but having a lot of tasks using the disks at the same time slows everything down. I really look forward to SSDs and near penalty-free random access."
You could always store your mp3s on one disk, another application on another disk, etc etc. It's a kluge though, because it requires more power to do so.
Why wait for the Nigerians? If all that is required to administer a server is an IQ in the ballpark of 67 and little to no English skills, there must be a horde of latent IT admins flooding across the Mexican border every day. As a bonus, these people are positively geniuses when compared to the Nigerians, and are currently wasting their time picking fruit and washing dishes.
http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/sft.htm#gdp%20table
"I hate to sound like a member of the tin hat bunch but I have to wonder if this isn't a brilliant plan by the music companies to sell you the same music yet again!"
Brilliant? A summer intern could come up with the same plan, probably did, and then thought it through and dismissed it. A slick consultant would have looked at the same plan and realized that he was dealing with people with lots of money to spend on someone who tells them what they want to hear, and saw a goldmine.
It's a sign of the recording industry's desperation that they are spending money on publicity to get it implemented. They are hoping that the public are going to ditch something way more convenient and just as good for old technology, the only benefit of which is that it takes more work to rip, and once ripped, will be available on the internet for free anyway.
I wonder why Vista sales remain flat, if not damn small, despite the gutsy efforts of Microsoft's marketing department. Surely a newly minted OS from the same folks that brought us notepad.exe would make consumers as excited as a new puppy.
Having a reputation for not tolerating fools lightly also curbs the stupid and uninformed from wasting his time and the time of his collaborators. I suppose that's still motivated by insecurity, in that he needs OpenBSD to work well in order for it to pay, although it wouldn't be to prove his superiority.
It's not as if he has Don Knuth's option of simply doing away with email in order to get his work done, he needs to stay up to date. http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html
The guy he was replying to could have just asked "Theo, I've scoured the mailing list for your opinion on the security of virtualization, I couldn't find any, I've seen a lot of claims by virtualization vendors for increased security benefits on the basis of x, what's your opinion?"
Maybe he should have read "How To Ask Questions The Smart Way". If he had, he probably wouldn't have spouted a bunch of marketing blurb to Theo and suggest that he implement a feature based on that marketing blurb.
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
Yes, for that particular model, you could. Every single safe of that model was set to the same combination, and if the guy who had ordered it had bothered to rtfm, he could have changed the combination. Even 1,2,3,4,5... would have been better than just leaving it to the default. And I'm sure that that particular manual would have been understandable by a layperson. It would have consisted of diagrams and instructions by someone for whom English was their first language (seeing that this was 50 years ago, when America actually used to manufacture things). But of course, no one bothered to read it.
What's so wrong with having your cake and eating it too, if you can figure out how? I'm just not a fan of doing arbitrary work. I'd rather do a bit more work once, up front, so I won't have to do the same monotonous bit of work day after day for the rest of my life.
It's not as if the possibilities aren't there. Even stuff that is cheap isn't done - insulation on new houses, and basic things like flat disc rims on cars, rear wheel skirts, deflectors, undertrays, most of the grille blocked etc. The payback period is measured in months, not some stupid 10 year period like a new prius. And half of those basic modifications aren't even done on the Prius! This is stuff that was known approximately 100 years ago! It's ancient technology, and the fact that it is not implemented en masse is just ****ing pathetic.
Part of the problem is that the bulk of the bell curve are too stupid to buy something more expensive even when the payback period is a year or two. The other part of the problem is that there is ample money to be made in parting these fools from their money and comparatively little profit in helping them save it. Make flat racing style disc rims mandatory, and watch the entire wheel rim industry dries up. Etc. etc.
It just shits me that we are burning through perfectly good resources, and once it's too late we'll see that we were in fact bundling dollar bills together in bales and throwing them on a bonfire.
What's your point? It's not as if there aren't more efficient options out there, they just have a longer payback time. Increase the variable cost of resource usage, and suddenly buying more efficient appliances and vehicles makes good economic sense.
And really, this is just putting the negative externalities back on the producer. Source control is a lot cheaper than everyone purchasing a million air purifiers.
It also stems from upper management either not being smart enough or not dedicating enough time to do a bit of basic research on security, so then they either ignore security issues entirely, or want security but completely underestimate the intelligence required to do a good job at it.
I'm reminded of reading "Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman!", where Feynman routinely bypassed the cargo cultish efforts at security by his ostensible military overseers. It's the same pattern - primitive people attempting to construct something that is fundamentally incomprehensible to them. On one hand, you have New Guineans building an "airfield" expecting to magically get cargo, not understanding that a landing strip is only one piece in a gigantic logistical chain. On the other hand, you have people whose fundamental intelligence limit is blue collar or middle management type work buying the most expensive safe money can buy and not changing the combination from the factory default!
"She was already using Firefox / OpenOffice / Gaim so for her the differences were pretty nominal."
And that's the key. Switching operating systems is a big deal if it means switching your entire personal software collection at once, and that's what a lot of people try to do and fail. They switch, get culture shock, and retreat back to XP.
If you can figure out which applications you use and then convert yourself to a FOSS program, one by one, then by the time you have finished you can install Ubuntu Gutsy and the rest of your problems will be restricted to driver issues. I don't know why I didn't think of doing it like that earlier, it seems so obvious now.
"tremulous, Battle for wesnoth"
Seconded, both are brilliant in their own way. Tremulous in particular is both extremely addictive AND has the eye candy that most gaming addicts seem to require. Wesnoth is just extremely addictive, in a HOMM 2 + internet multiplayer kind of way.
"So perhaps I gloss over some of the troubles I had along my migration path to Linux."
It's easy enough to do. I've forgotten how hard it was, but not enough that I won't upgrade without using a new HDD to do the full install on rather than wiping the old one. It took me a solid week to get my Feisty setup to where it felt like "home". Dual monitors by hacking the xorg.conf, getting vpn to work, mail and web settings amongst others.
The difference between now and then is that I'm not having recurring pain like I did with XP. No nagging spyware worries is a big one. Knowing that the whole thing has source that anyone can read is also a relief. Knowing that I can upgrade for free and not have everything arbitrarily change on me, just to milk some more fees is another (although I suppose if Canonical are only charging for support, the easiest thing to do once Ubuntu is on enough PCs would be to arbitrarily change things around (like Vista did) so that you are one step ahead when it comes time to offering support. But someone can still fork the code, so much less worry than MS.)
It's also the difference between the linux of 5+ years ago and Ubuntu today. Rather than spyware hell, it was dependency hell, or driver hell, or something else just not working. Now it works.
He's talking about an intergenerational difference in people, which is why he mentions youth having no training in ethics, while most people can be said to be "basically honest". His main thrust is the following:
"So today you have a lot of young people who have no character, no ethics and they find no problem in defrauding somebody or stealing from somebody or cheating somebody. Until we change that, crime is just going to get easier, faster, more global, harder to detect."
I think he's focusing on the symptoms rather than the underlying causes, especially as it applies to the USA.
Take a cage of social animals (e.g. primates, lions, wolves, deer, bison etc) at the zoo. Within their cage, they will have a subset of behaviors within the realm of possible behaviors. That subset could be said to be an ethic. We remove the boundaries to each cage, competition to the same finite set of resources commences, and then we wonder why the set of observable interspecies behaviors is larger than the subsets formerly displayed within each cage, by a group of animals whose genetic code has been selected over millions of years to increase the frequency of their own genes.
He is right in a sense, that technology enables competition for finite resources. But as to his half-baked idea of a solution? i.e. Papering over the underlying reality of the USA with mandatory ethics classes in schools, and a 4 year course that only an idiot with no concept of earning enough money to provide for a family would take? It's a joke.
I guess it depends on how much of a gaming addict you are. It's a bit of a continuum. If you absolutely MUST play the latest game, you need XP or a console.
There are other people (like me) who can get a fix from a good game and don't tire of playing the same few games over and over again. Before there were computer games, people used to play chess, football, backgammon, cards, etc. A lot of people would play the same thing over and over again, because each time it was different, they enjoyed the competition, and starting a new game every week would mean they would remain forever a n00b.
There is a middle ground between the two, those who like a bit of eye candy or something approximating a modern game in addictiveness and not looking like it came bundled with windows 3.1, but are content to play it over and over and over again (due to multiplayer). Games like Tremulous, Nexuiz, and Wesnoth are there.
If you like the idea of using and becoming part of the userbase of a FOSS operating system, and you can addict yourself to games such as I have just mentioned, then Ubuntu works fine. Installing is as simple as opening synaptic, typing the above, checking a box or two, and clicking "apply".
"And does anybody even know what something like bonobo-activation-daemon does?"
I'm not exactly sure, but I'm picturing Sigourney Weaver (as Dian Fossey) marching around before dawn, clanging some trash can lids together.
Absolutely. I'm blown away by how good it is. (Nexuiz is pretty damn good too, way better than openarena.) And with ubuntu, it's as simple an install as typing tremulous into synaptic, check, apply.
There aren't many high quality FOSS games, but they certainly exist. For those people who think FOSS is a noble cause, and don't have ADD (or the urge to pirate) to the point where they must have whatever shiny new game is out there now, Ubuntu certainly checks the boxes.
Now, you'd best be getting out of the way of my tyrant...
Fixed that for you. ;)