$1000 is a lot more than $600 for a lot of people.
And $500 is a lot of money when you can just get Mepis. It's a newbie friendly live CD that has a nice GUI installer. Five clicks through a GUI and you have it. I think it does dual boot too, so there's no need for the extra clunker with Winblows or a new Mac. After a while of using spamassasin to block spam and Mozilla or Konqueror to browse the clean web, you will come to love your old PC again.
Macs are nice, but you can have your old PC and make it useful with free software. There are a few areas in which the Mac still excells but there are fewer and fewer of them.
Before you go spend $500 on a Mac, you might consider Simply Mepis. For the price of one Live CD, you get rid of spyware, spam and keep your hardware and sanity. It's easier to learn than a Mac, because they use KDE's interface which is close enough to Windows to be instantly usable to anyone who's suffered Microsoft stuff. I carry a copy to give to anyone interested. It's impressive and they are happy when they try it. Mac is nice and it's worth the price but you can have the most important things Mac offers without spending $500.
Well, you could have pushed Linux until you said non-technical. Otherwise this thread could pretty much just be an ad for the Apple Mac Mini or even the iMac G5.
This is not an advertisement, it's a fact of life and a popular uprising. Not even Microsoft's massive PR efforts can keep their users happy any more. If it were an advertisement, it might have mentioned alternate platforms or placed blame where it belonged. Linux, Apple, Solaris, BSD and other systems that are not plagued were not mentioned. Instead of Microsoft's poor design and implementation, "openness" and "features" were blamed.
The easiest install I've seen to date is Simply Mepis. It runs as a live CD, so you can see if your particular system works. Most systems these days actually look better when booted into a well configured KDE desktop, which includes beautiful fonts, icons and wallpaper. When you like what you see, the install is about five mouse clicks away using a desktop icon, "installation center". It takes about 20 minutes and EVERYTHING is done in the GUI with help files and descriptions. Anyone who's suffered though a fresh Windoze install can do it. Using it is just as easy if not easier than anything Microsoft has. It just works.
I just dropped my big drive into an old box (P90 from the garbage) and use it via sftp and konqueror's built in handler. The only trick was to use another disk to boot it, and not fool with BIOS other than that so that the kernel sees the big drive and bios ignores it. Everything to be backed up gets written to CDROM then moved to the big archive. Current stuff gets a copy on my local machine and a copy on the archive drive. It's not perfect, but it seems to work well enough. Everything active has two live coppies which are synced by hand or tar -u or find -newer than old tar. Everything old goes to CD.
KDAR, if it uses KDE's sftp handler, could be used the same way and that would be much nicer.
I could have sworn that KDE had a synching program but can't remember it's name. That too would be helpful, but I'm too lazy.
And again, "M$" worked four years ago just fine, as it does today. Remember RH 6.x? Debian? 'nuff said. Fine servers, absolutely unuseable desktops. People like you seem to consistently forget history when it suits you.
No, I remember Red Hat 5 and 6 because that's my first distro. Back then, things took some work, especially the horrid hardware I used. They were and still are better than Winblows 98 in many ways though harder to use, but so what?
The free software world has continued to improve while M$ has been sitting on it's ass. Today's free software is superior to M$ junk in every way. Now as competition in the developing world, M$ puts forth this reduced feature set monstrosity? You have to be kidding me!
This crappy little distro from Redmond is going to sink like a stone. Only total shills can advocate it's use or M$'s sanity.
in four years we'll be having this nice conversation again
I doubt Microsoft will survive that long. If this is their answer to competition from free software, they are doomed.
ROFL, "old"? This was an operating system that was released after Windows XP. Old? Is that your excuse?
Yes, Fedora Core One is old. Winblows XP is ancient, what four years old now? I'm sure that chunks of XP are unchanged from fifteen years ago, so what? Using that crap is like a time machine. M$ can't keep up, is there a virtue to that?
But that was not an excuse as none was needed. The problems ESR had are mostly fixed and may not have ever existed in Mepis.
If you want to compare to a crippled version of "Winblows", go right ahead if it makes you feel better. It lacks what it lacks because it was designed that way, not because it's broken.
Actually, I compared it to M$'s best, which is broken, and thought it was stupid. I can't really compare this "crippled" version because no one, not even the author of this supposed "review" has access to it. That M$'s best sucks and they are trying to remove features to better compete is screwed up, kind of like the original poster claimed.
Eric S. Raymond disagrees with you, big time [about the ease of setting up CUPS].
He used old software. Fedora Core One has been supplanted by Core two and Simply Mepis never had this problem to begin with because it was properly configured to use KDE's walk through. I set up a network printer with KDE 3.2 tools two months ago and it was really a walk in the park. I just chose network printer then the printer model from a pulldown list. It was that easy. Had I been using Mepis, I would not have even had to know that the subsystem was CUPS, because it just worked!
Let's compare this to the Winblows we have on hand, shall we? First we note that what ESR tried to do CAN NOT be done because Starter Edition does not include LAN printing or file sharing. Good luck to all those technicians who run across this beast in the future. Next, even local printers are a headache under windoze. I can't tell you how many hair pullers I've heard of using hideous all in one devices. That's with all the vaunted vendor support. You can bet that Starter Edition will receive ME type vendor support.
I sort of figured that "Windows" and "Windows 3.x" would fit the bill there..... After all the US PC market was just catching on about the time windows was initially released
Despite much hype, Windows 3.1 did not have a useful manual either. Moving from DOS to 3.1 was a frustrating experience. I read the manual and it had nothing in it that made life easy. A friend took five minutes to show me a few shortcuts that made the thing work. It would have taking them one page of print to get those basics across, but their manual was filled with shine on instead. I imagine their goofey computer based tutorials are about as useful as that old manual. Where my friend learned, is a mystery, but I'll bet is was just someone else and that's the easiest way to spread knowledge.
Steer away, Gartner advises. Show stoppers were lack of LAN, file and print sharing and only being able to run three (!) applications at once. Worse, without a clear upgrade path, the sucker who buys this gets stuck paying the full retail price for the real winblows. All of the show stoppers are still there and still suck hard despite Paul's insane defense of them. They even added a new detail, the max resolution of 800x600.
The defense is native language support and a bunch of edutainment about how to use a mouse. KDE, Gnome and OO all have native language support done by the natives themselves. Microsoft's inability to get their limited software translated is pathetic and underlines the inferiority of the closed source model. The stuff about using mice is not intuitive, as Paul noticed, but can better be taken care of by a decent three page manual, which should have shipped with windoze 3.1 but did not. Failing that, you would think the wonders of the free market would teach people and it does. Five minutes with a friend back in 1993 taught me everything I needed to know about mice and cutting and pasting in any GUI. If extensive user studdies gave them this starter edition, they really asked the wrong questions.
I'm so tired of reading this flambait. Garbage like this had some kernel of truth to it back in 1998 of so. Even then, you would be hard pressed to find a friendlier group than free software users. Today that group is being joined by the same people who once made using Windoze easy, everyone else. Insults to users and developers are not going to help anyone, so you Microsoft Astroturfers had better cut it out. Desktop Linux is here and it's better than Bill Gates' computer wet dreams.
Unfortunately, it comes down to this. Linux is essentially developed by geeks for geeks, and, as a generality, geeks have little time/patience with the "clueless newbie unwashed" who need their hands held.
And somehow closed source developers who have little time/patience for even their PEERS are better? What crap, the thing that support people are sick of is M$ problems, not the users Microsoft likes to blame for them. Users themselves are sick of junk that breaks so easily and being blamed for the problems. If you want real attitude problems, look to Redmond.
M$ computer "support" comes from two places, people who help their friends and $50/hr phone calls to M$. The second group is famous for being as helpful as psychic friends network, but less friendly. The first group is dumping Microsoft and all of it's problems and insults.
If Linux is ever going to conquer the desktop, it will take the effort of many dedicated people who not only have the time & the patience, but also obsess about the user experience of the aforementioned unwashed.
Where have you been? Desktop Linux is here and it's easier to use than Winblows. Distributions like Mepis install in less than 20 minutes and run great. The kernel does the hardware detection, so the user does not have to read arcane manuals, feed the computer floppies and CDs and reboot six or seven times. Printer configuration through CUPS and KDE is likewise a walk in the park. The KDE UI is both more powerful and easier to use than Winblows' pathetic, single screen ugly. 99% of what normal users want is there by default, where M$ users have to visit a store and spend hundreds of dollars and get the extra pleasures of DRM, DLL hell and other nasties. Getting specialized software is as easy as a no cost click with programs like Synaptic or Kpackage. Most importantly, free software keeps working. It stays up longer, for those who care, and it does not get eaten by automated worms, spyware, malware and other M$ born infection.
Unlike the average/. reader, the majority of people view the computer as a tool, a means to an end, not as a hobby and not as the end itself.
The average slashdot reader is well aware of that. Those that want to keep their reputation for recommending the best now recommend free software.
This really makes you wonder about the guys you never hear about, the ones that don't get caught.:-/
I agree, the most disturbing thing about all of this is the low level of knowledge of the hacker. He was nothing but a script kiddie on his resume and he was caught with obvious mistakes. We can be sure that TMobile and others are still owned by more sophisticated crackers who will not be caught.
The article links to a 2001 resume which never mentions GNU and only once mentions Unix but lots of Windozed based cracker toys and garbage. His efforts, while many, were too narrowly focused.
It does not look like he mastered Windoze cracking or much else by the time he was caught three years later. Besides being dumb enough to try to sell information, he accepted a proxy from a stranger. Someone who knew what they were doing would have a botnet proxy they set up themselves that could never be traced through. What else is windoze cracking good for?
The whole mindset was script kiddie. Own a phone service and collect stuff. What a waste of time.
He got his resume wish in a perverse way. He wanted a job is computer security. Now he's a felon and gets to spend some quality time as a government slave, snitching on his friends till he's all used up. Or he can go to jail and take the usual felon jobs: dishwasher, garbage man and other highly undesirable manual labor in tiny shops that know they can abuse you. Those jobs will be waiting for him when the government is through with him.
I mean come on people. How much *money* you spend on your net infrastructure dictates how well it will survive.
Both groups did what they thought would be enough. One group failed. I doubt either were crimped for cash. Why make excuses when you don't really know what happened?
What software you put on the same hardware makes a big difference too. If I had a single PC I can promise you that Apache would do better than IIS and cost less. In commercial settings with all the money in the world to spend, you might recall the Microsoft Hotmail dissaster. It's a dramatic enough demonstration of the difference an OS makes.
In this case, all we know is OSX 2, M$ 0. That's what was reported. It's not surprising, and even you yawned.
The astroturf responses are thick today. Lots of "The article is flamebait", many "there's got to be mitigating circumstances" and a few "but the OSX performance really was horrible". It's curious how many posts have been moderated as insightful or informative for pointing out nothing. It would be nice to see something from someone who knows what happened instead of all of the above crap.
Then why did you bring it up and only mention what servers they were running?
Because that's all they knew and all they could say. OSX up, OSX up and sluggish, M$ down all day. That's the news, and it's a common story.
Worms are another complex and common story.
Microsoft competitors software not working on Microsoft OS are another complex and common story.
BSA raids are another complex and common story.
When you look into the details of these complex stories you usually find something unflattering to Microsoft. Microsoft uptimes are low and in some cases reboot is enforced by the OS every 14 days. 90% of all spam originates from worm infested M$ OS. Microsoft's anti competitive behavior was detailed and documented in weeks of testimony by industry leaders during the anti-turst trials. The BSA encourages disgruntled employees to slander employers, so that raids can be conducted. In all of these things, M$ PR has slick answers. Every now and then we find an exception, so cautious people hold their tongue (sometimes in cheek, as Netcraft's quote of PaidContent, which flattered M$) when they don't know.
why present it [obvious performance difference] in such a flamebaiting way?
The real question is why the submitter had to act like there was some other reason for the difference. Oh yeah, unless you bend over backward and consider all software equal, or everything inferior to M$, you are a Zealot.
Sorry, but reality is not always what the Microsoft PR department wants. The Netcraft people did not mince words.
What happens when hordes of Mac enthusiasts stress-test Apple and Microsoft products in head-to-head performance?... Mac OS X, experienced some slowdowns but was largely available. Apple's online store (also on Mac OS X) struggled, however, experiencing outages and lengthy response times. Faring even worse was the official site for MacWorld Expo, which runs on Windows Server 2003, and was offline for hours following the show's keynote address by Apple CEO Steve Jobs.
The graphs show the thing off line all day.
There are a lot of things that are more complicated than your choice of OS, but we should not ignore the larger trends when looking at smaller details. Microsoft uptimes and security are lower than anyone else's and the average user experience will be poor. The exceptions simply prove the rule by surprising us.
Too much judo had me seeing chokes and throws on people outside the dojo. It's kind of nice till you find yourself analyzing the way your mom or wife is standing.
In other news, SuSe eyes Redhat customers, Carl Jrs eyes McDonalds' customers, and Bubs' Concessions Stand eyes Kmart customers.
Few other companies care to use FUD marketing of the sort Microsoft is the master of. Novel may indeed want Red Hat customers, but they are not going to make an announcement of Red Hat's impending doom that will be echoed by an unbelievable chorus of PC pulp pushers and pundits with Dido qualifications. The uncertainty here is about as manufactured as IBM's supposed abandonment of OS/2 before M$ was able to get it's next OS in order. In that case, the same pundits did the same kind of echoing and were dead wrong. IBM's sales of OS/2 were greater than any other software available at the time and they held onto OS/2 for years and several releases afterwards.
Imagine the reaction if senior Chinese officials started calling for the internal laws of the US to be altered to suit Chinese business interests.
It happens all the time. Regular Chinese propaganda is ignored. Regular donations to the Democratic party cause a scandal no one has time to care about. The second calling earned China most favorable nation status under Clinton, so both internal and international laws were tuned to suit Chinese business interests.
Sock Puppets. While they don't say anything about the origin of the term, it seems obvious. They also have a nice talk about trolls which has a sadly flattering summary.
You could carry a laptop to your outbuilding as needed
Good idea. That's how a cone truck I worked on solved the problem. They used an old thinkpad and it was tough. It was fanless too, so you did not have to worry as much about dust. The purpose of the cone truck was to shove a rod (cone) into the ground to determine soil types. It was a hot and dirty environment, but the Thinkpad collected data for years. Eventually, the keys got sticky.
You can pick up 486 and pentium laptops for next to nothing on ebay. If the thing has trouble booting of a CD, just get a $10 adaptor and install it in a faster computer. Woody works on my old thinkpad and so did Potato. Afterstep or Window Maker run well within 24MB or RAM and you can use Dillo and other packages chosen by Feather Linux to get your work done. Don't forget PCMCIA packages! The screens are genreally only 640x480, but they look good.
Stallman is quoted here saying that game engines should be free, but approves of the notion that graphics, music, and stories could all be separate and treated differently (i.e., "Non-Free.")
We have to ask ourselves what Stallman actually said before we swallow the summary. The summary does fly in the face of the underlying ethos of Stallman articles such as The Right to Read. It contradicts what others, like Lessing have to say. It even contradicts what the article itself seems to say, when it compares Stallman to Martin Luther, who translated the bible so everyone could read it.
The right to read clearly demonstrates the cultural consequences of non-free software: complete enslavement to those who control publishing. The reasoning is that no one is equal to the sum of all previous work and that we all need access to knowledge. Those who control that knowledge control society. The phrase "free as in speech" makes it just about impossible to consider art "non free". Nothing could be freer that your ability to sing Woody Guthrie tunes.
People like Laurence Lessing have extrapolated Stallman's concepts and filled in the details for art and culture. His book Free Culture, attributes Stallman as the visionary who first realized how technology and certain anti-social tendencies could cause great social harm. As in technology, if we are not free to build on what has come before, we are lost, ignorant, dependent and enslaved.
We can take this a step further by realizing that the most important knowledge is not practical at all. The "Liberal Arts" are those that involve persuasion, and are called so because their study was once restricted to "liber" or free men. Slaves were not allowed to learn how to persuade their neighbors, though they could be taught all manner of practical knowledge. It does not matter what we know, if we are unable to convince others of what is right.
So, what did Stallman say?
A game scenario can be considered art/fiction rather than software. So it is okay to split the game into engine and scenario, then treat the engine as software and the scenario as art/fiction.
That's it and there's really no direct contradiction. The author claims that the story and art work should be covered by copyright law. That's a world different from saying it should be "non-free" as if the author has suddenly adopted the most Zealous stance of the Copyright Warrior. It does not have Richard Stallman claiming that copyright law, as it exists, is correct. The authors of the Creative Commons and the Free Documentation License are not suddenly endorsing "Digital Rights Management". All it says is that source code and pure art are different.
You are fundamentally confused when you ask:
according to stallman's views, should a graphics artist not be able to freely obtain the art of a game so he could modify it, without having to pay for it? after all, that is what he demands of software.
Source code has the ability to be far more restrictive than any previous form of artwork and applying those restrictions to art is a cultural dissaster. You already have the ability to quote graphics and other art work. You may indeed take someone else's image and modify it and present it as your own. You can do the same thing with a song too. No one can keep your from studying a painting and making one of your own. If you think otherwise, it is because people like Bill Gates have expanded and misapplied copyright laws to cover non human readable formats and perverted trademark to cover common words and phrases. The whole idea that you can't use even the smallest quote or part of someone else's work is absurd as someone owning "Word". If you think you don't have this ability, the copyright warriors own your soul.
If your XP and 2000 machines can't go past 3 days, that's sad. No really, I wonder what you do that makes them go under so fast.
I did nothing to them. Really, nothing but my job and let the support staff at both companies deal with it. I did install Mozilla, which you would think helped. Other than that, zippo and they both got flaky.
Now the funny thing is that, like you, at home my Linux runtimes are much better. Woody and Sarge last longer than my electricity. Even Experimental and unstable stay up for months if I don't swap out kernels. It works like that on boxes that I've cobbled together myself, sometimes litterally from other people's garbage. These machines perform all of my computing tasks, from compiling to spam filtering and they do it all with free software.
And XP is NOT as buggy as Windows 3.1. I doubt you ever used 3.1 then if you can say THAT with a straight face.
I administered Windows 3.1 as part of a job for two years. They were connedted directly to the internet and were no worse than any modern Microsoft junk. Windows 3.1 was on the second computer I owned personally. Dos, 3.1, 95, 98, XP and 2000, that makes four upgrade train steps I've seen. Since DOS, the overall quality and usefulness of Microsoft operating systems has remained constant. A Dell bought today will be bundled with software that does exactly the same thing as the 486 I bought from them in 1993, and it won't do it much faster. I still have a copy of that 1993 software on a not much newer computer, just for kicks. I'm working on running it in Bosch.
All my earnings are reported, all my tax breaks pre-calculculated, interest reported by the banks. Only thing I have to add are tax deductible donations like Red Cross stuff.
It could Take me about 15 seconds to do my taxes.
I have NO privacy in my life, but it is not easy.
Really, Uncle Sam gets reports from everyone and "voluntary compliance" is a fiction. Even charities have forms to fill out.
My wife thinks they should have a web site that has the forms filled out and a little button, "I agree" or "make changes". The I agree button would take all of no seconds to push and Uncle Sam knows where my money is, so the next screen should present payment options. Make changes should let you enter things they might not know about, which would be rare, or let you file a complaint that a human being actually has to look at.
Don't let your ideology get in the way of cheap, efficient, widely avaiable software that'll make your life easier.
It may be cheap and easy but it might not make my life easier. Most non free companies have a way of making things miserable for their users and I refuse to fund them.
It was turbo tax's mistaken use of the master boot record for copy protection that put a freeze on any new non free software installation. I don't want tax time to wipe out grub for me. This also rules out using something like crossover office. While it might be easy to repair the damage, I refuse to pay money to be screwed that way or others.
The bottom line is that if I don't trust the bastards with my hardware, why should I trust them with tax records? My bank already sold me out so that my snail mailbox is flooded with Mortage applications. They sent me a form that I have to snail mail back with a signature to opt out of their spam program. What turds. A company that writes out to my MBR is liable to be as fast and lose with my tax information.
My ideology is firmly based in the practical. It does not hurt me to do my taxes by hand and by doing so I avoid many other problems. My avoidance of Windoze has saved me countless hours of upkeep that I used to spend due to bugs, worms and all of it was compounded by stupid shit like the registry. It's problems like this that free software is made to avoid. Non free software is designed to exert control over you and that control almost always spells more hassle than it's worth.
Dreamwever and even Front Page and the like have been invaluable in getting large numbers of people creating their own web based material...
Why spend $400, when you can get a perfectly good html editor for nothing with Mozilla? The editor has three or four tabs which display varying levels of code, from WYSIWYG to plain text, so you can use the GUI and see the tags even if you are stuck on Windoze.
Those looking to move up in the world can try out Bluefish and Quanta. Bluefish is an excellent html editor that does CSS, tables, frames and has excellent project management all in easy to use pulldown menus and tabbed button bars. Quanta has the same but like most KDE things, it follows Microsoft examples more closely and has autocomplete and document trees as well as file trees. I prefer bluefish, but that's only because I don't have much html to write.
The whole issue of templates looks overblown to me. As the author says:
Include files can also create more difficult maintenance. Say you have the common case of having header and footer include files. What happens when you want to add another standard piece of HTML in the middle of the page? You would have to visit each file that uses the include files and add a token for a third include file.
It's hard for me to imagine that common situation. Why can't you just modify the header or the footer to include the information? Can't you put dynamic information in the middle of both the header and the footer file by using a php script? If so, I don't understand why it's so hard to modify the "middle" of a document.
It's also hard for me to imagine what's hard about finding your pages if you have good project management like Bluefish has.
Its all very well saying "learn to do it properly and use vi to write your code" for the average user the experience of seeing a web page being generated is something akin to magical and they would run a mile from a text editor.
Yikes! You might want to use some valoline and at least recommend kate at that rate. Vi rocks for remote administration because it's always there, but a neophyte should at least have syntax highlighting to help them along. Well, I suppose there's nothing wrong with cutting and pasting between X or virtual terminals, but the tools above are much easier on the nooooobie.
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And $500 is a lot of money when you can just get Mepis. It's a newbie friendly live CD that has a nice GUI installer. Five clicks through a GUI and you have it. I think it does dual boot too, so there's no need for the extra clunker with Winblows or a new Mac. After a while of using spamassasin to block spam and Mozilla or Konqueror to browse the clean web, you will come to love your old PC again.
Macs are nice, but you can have your old PC and make it useful with free software. There are a few areas in which the Mac still excells but there are fewer and fewer of them.
This is not an advertisement, it's a fact of life and a popular uprising. Not even Microsoft's massive PR efforts can keep their users happy any more. If it were an advertisement, it might have mentioned alternate platforms or placed blame where it belonged. Linux, Apple, Solaris, BSD and other systems that are not plagued were not mentioned. Instead of Microsoft's poor design and implementation, "openness" and "features" were blamed.
The easiest install I've seen to date is Simply Mepis. It runs as a live CD, so you can see if your particular system works. Most systems these days actually look better when booted into a well configured KDE desktop, which includes beautiful fonts, icons and wallpaper. When you like what you see, the install is about five mouse clicks away using a desktop icon, "installation center". It takes about 20 minutes and EVERYTHING is done in the GUI with help files and descriptions. Anyone who's suffered though a fresh Windoze install can do it. Using it is just as easy if not easier than anything Microsoft has. It just works.
KDAR, if it uses KDE's sftp handler, could be used the same way and that would be much nicer.
I could have sworn that KDE had a synching program but can't remember it's name. That too would be helpful, but I'm too lazy.
No, I remember Red Hat 5 and 6 because that's my first distro. Back then, things took some work, especially the horrid hardware I used. They were and still are better than Winblows 98 in many ways though harder to use, but so what?
The free software world has continued to improve while M$ has been sitting on it's ass. Today's free software is superior to M$ junk in every way. Now as competition in the developing world, M$ puts forth this reduced feature set monstrosity? You have to be kidding me!
This crappy little distro from Redmond is going to sink like a stone. Only total shills can advocate it's use or M$'s sanity.
in four years we'll be having this nice conversation again
I doubt Microsoft will survive that long. If this is their answer to competition from free software, they are doomed.
Yes, Fedora Core One is old. Winblows XP is ancient, what four years old now? I'm sure that chunks of XP are unchanged from fifteen years ago, so what? Using that crap is like a time machine. M$ can't keep up, is there a virtue to that?
But that was not an excuse as none was needed. The problems ESR had are mostly fixed and may not have ever existed in Mepis.
If you want to compare to a crippled version of "Winblows", go right ahead if it makes you feel better. It lacks what it lacks because it was designed that way, not because it's broken.
Actually, I compared it to M$'s best, which is broken, and thought it was stupid. I can't really compare this "crippled" version because no one, not even the author of this supposed "review" has access to it. That M$'s best sucks and they are trying to remove features to better compete is screwed up, kind of like the original poster claimed.
He used old software. Fedora Core One has been supplanted by Core two and Simply Mepis never had this problem to begin with because it was properly configured to use KDE's walk through. I set up a network printer with KDE 3.2 tools two months ago and it was really a walk in the park. I just chose network printer then the printer model from a pulldown list. It was that easy. Had I been using Mepis, I would not have even had to know that the subsystem was CUPS, because it just worked!
Let's compare this to the Winblows we have on hand, shall we? First we note that what ESR tried to do CAN NOT be done because Starter Edition does not include LAN printing or file sharing. Good luck to all those technicians who run across this beast in the future. Next, even local printers are a headache under windoze. I can't tell you how many hair pullers I've heard of using hideous all in one devices. That's with all the vaunted vendor support. You can bet that Starter Edition will receive ME type vendor support.
Despite much hype, Windows 3.1 did not have a useful manual either. Moving from DOS to 3.1 was a frustrating experience. I read the manual and it had nothing in it that made life easy. A friend took five minutes to show me a few shortcuts that made the thing work. It would have taking them one page of print to get those basics across, but their manual was filled with shine on instead. I imagine their goofey computer based tutorials are about as useful as that old manual. Where my friend learned, is a mystery, but I'll bet is was just someone else and that's the easiest way to spread knowledge.
The defense is native language support and a bunch of edutainment about how to use a mouse. KDE, Gnome and OO all have native language support done by the natives themselves. Microsoft's inability to get their limited software translated is pathetic and underlines the inferiority of the closed source model. The stuff about using mice is not intuitive, as Paul noticed, but can better be taken care of by a decent three page manual, which should have shipped with windoze 3.1 but did not. Failing that, you would think the wonders of the free market would teach people and it does. Five minutes with a friend back in 1993 taught me everything I needed to know about mice and cutting and pasting in any GUI. If extensive user studdies gave them this starter edition, they really asked the wrong questions.
Unfortunately, it comes down to this. Linux is essentially developed by geeks for geeks, and, as a generality, geeks have little time/patience with the "clueless newbie unwashed" who need their hands held.
And somehow closed source developers who have little time/patience for even their PEERS are better? What crap, the thing that support people are sick of is M$ problems, not the users Microsoft likes to blame for them. Users themselves are sick of junk that breaks so easily and being blamed for the problems. If you want real attitude problems, look to Redmond.
M$ computer "support" comes from two places, people who help their friends and $50/hr phone calls to M$. The second group is famous for being as helpful as psychic friends network, but less friendly. The first group is dumping Microsoft and all of it's problems and insults.
If Linux is ever going to conquer the desktop, it will take the effort of many dedicated people who not only have the time & the patience, but also obsess about the user experience of the aforementioned unwashed.
Where have you been? Desktop Linux is here and it's easier to use than Winblows. Distributions like Mepis install in less than 20 minutes and run great. The kernel does the hardware detection, so the user does not have to read arcane manuals, feed the computer floppies and CDs and reboot six or seven times. Printer configuration through CUPS and KDE is likewise a walk in the park. The KDE UI is both more powerful and easier to use than Winblows' pathetic, single screen ugly. 99% of what normal users want is there by default, where M$ users have to visit a store and spend hundreds of dollars and get the extra pleasures of DRM, DLL hell and other nasties. Getting specialized software is as easy as a no cost click with programs like Synaptic or Kpackage. Most importantly, free software keeps working. It stays up longer, for those who care, and it does not get eaten by automated worms, spyware, malware and other M$ born infection.
Unlike the average /. reader, the majority of people view the computer as a tool, a means to an end, not as a hobby and not as the end itself.
The average slashdot reader is well aware of that. Those that want to keep their reputation for recommending the best now recommend free software.
I agree, the most disturbing thing about all of this is the low level of knowledge of the hacker. He was nothing but a script kiddie on his resume and he was caught with obvious mistakes. We can be sure that TMobile and others are still owned by more sophisticated crackers who will not be caught.
The article links to a 2001 resume which never mentions GNU and only once mentions Unix but lots of Windozed based cracker toys and garbage. His efforts, while many, were too narrowly focused.
It does not look like he mastered Windoze cracking or much else by the time he was caught three years later. Besides being dumb enough to try to sell information, he accepted a proxy from a stranger. Someone who knew what they were doing would have a botnet proxy they set up themselves that could never be traced through. What else is windoze cracking good for?
The whole mindset was script kiddie. Own a phone service and collect stuff. What a waste of time.
He got his resume wish in a perverse way. He wanted a job is computer security. Now he's a felon and gets to spend some quality time as a government slave, snitching on his friends till he's all used up. Or he can go to jail and take the usual felon jobs: dishwasher, garbage man and other highly undesirable manual labor in tiny shops that know they can abuse you. Those jobs will be waiting for him when the government is through with him.
Both groups did what they thought would be enough. One group failed. I doubt either were crimped for cash. Why make excuses when you don't really know what happened?
What software you put on the same hardware makes a big difference too. If I had a single PC I can promise you that Apache would do better than IIS and cost less. In commercial settings with all the money in the world to spend, you might recall the Microsoft Hotmail dissaster. It's a dramatic enough demonstration of the difference an OS makes.
In this case, all we know is OSX 2, M$ 0. That's what was reported. It's not surprising, and even you yawned.
The astroturf responses are thick today. Lots of "The article is flamebait", many "there's got to be mitigating circumstances" and a few "but the OSX performance really was horrible". It's curious how many posts have been moderated as insightful or informative for pointing out nothing. It would be nice to see something from someone who knows what happened instead of all of the above crap.
Because that's all they knew and all they could say. OSX up, OSX up and sluggish, M$ down all day. That's the news, and it's a common story.
Worms are another complex and common story.
Microsoft competitors software not working on Microsoft OS are another complex and common story.
BSA raids are another complex and common story.
When you look into the details of these complex stories you usually find something unflattering to Microsoft. Microsoft uptimes are low and in some cases reboot is enforced by the OS every 14 days. 90% of all spam originates from worm infested M$ OS. Microsoft's anti competitive behavior was detailed and documented in weeks of testimony by industry leaders during the anti-turst trials. The BSA encourages disgruntled employees to slander employers, so that raids can be conducted. In all of these things, M$ PR has slick answers. Every now and then we find an exception, so cautious people hold their tongue (sometimes in cheek, as Netcraft's quote of PaidContent, which flattered M$) when they don't know.
The real question is why the submitter had to act like there was some other reason for the difference. Oh yeah, unless you bend over backward and consider all software equal, or everything inferior to M$, you are a Zealot.
Sorry, but reality is not always what the Microsoft PR department wants. The Netcraft people did not mince words.
What happens when hordes of Mac enthusiasts stress-test Apple and Microsoft products in head-to-head performance? ... Mac OS X, experienced some slowdowns but was largely available. Apple's online store (also on Mac OS X) struggled, however, experiencing outages and lengthy response times. Faring even worse was the official site for MacWorld Expo, which runs on Windows Server 2003, and was offline for hours following the show's keynote address by Apple CEO Steve Jobs.
The graphs show the thing off line all day.
There are a lot of things that are more complicated than your choice of OS, but we should not ignore the larger trends when looking at smaller details. Microsoft uptimes and security are lower than anyone else's and the average user experience will be poor. The exceptions simply prove the rule by surprising us.
Few other companies care to use FUD marketing of the sort Microsoft is the master of. Novel may indeed want Red Hat customers, but they are not going to make an announcement of Red Hat's impending doom that will be echoed by an unbelievable chorus of PC pulp pushers and pundits with Dido qualifications. The uncertainty here is about as manufactured as IBM's supposed abandonment of OS/2 before M$ was able to get it's next OS in order. In that case, the same pundits did the same kind of echoing and were dead wrong. IBM's sales of OS/2 were greater than any other software available at the time and they held onto OS/2 for years and several releases afterwards.
It happens all the time. Regular Chinese propaganda is ignored. Regular donations to the Democratic party cause a scandal no one has time to care about. The second calling earned China most favorable nation status under Clinton, so both internal and international laws were tuned to suit Chinese business interests.
Good idea. That's how a cone truck I worked on solved the problem. They used an old thinkpad and it was tough. It was fanless too, so you did not have to worry as much about dust. The purpose of the cone truck was to shove a rod (cone) into the ground to determine soil types. It was a hot and dirty environment, but the Thinkpad collected data for years. Eventually, the keys got sticky.
You can pick up 486 and pentium laptops for next to nothing on ebay. If the thing has trouble booting of a CD, just get a $10 adaptor and install it in a faster computer. Woody works on my old thinkpad and so did Potato. Afterstep or Window Maker run well within 24MB or RAM and you can use Dillo and other packages chosen by Feather Linux to get your work done. Don't forget PCMCIA packages! The screens are genreally only 640x480, but they look good.
It might be in your bochs. If it works on OS/2, it's got to work for you!
Don't forget to save an image before you blow it up.
Stallman is quoted here saying that game engines should be free, but approves of the notion that graphics, music, and stories could all be separate and treated differently (i.e., "Non-Free.")
We have to ask ourselves what Stallman actually said before we swallow the summary. The summary does fly in the face of the underlying ethos of Stallman articles such as The Right to Read. It contradicts what others, like Lessing have to say. It even contradicts what the article itself seems to say, when it compares Stallman to Martin Luther, who translated the bible so everyone could read it.
The right to read clearly demonstrates the cultural consequences of non-free software: complete enslavement to those who control publishing. The reasoning is that no one is equal to the sum of all previous work and that we all need access to knowledge. Those who control that knowledge control society. The phrase "free as in speech" makes it just about impossible to consider art "non free". Nothing could be freer that your ability to sing Woody Guthrie tunes.
People like Laurence Lessing have extrapolated Stallman's concepts and filled in the details for art and culture. His book Free Culture, attributes Stallman as the visionary who first realized how technology and certain anti-social tendencies could cause great social harm. As in technology, if we are not free to build on what has come before, we are lost, ignorant, dependent and enslaved.
We can take this a step further by realizing that the most important knowledge is not practical at all. The "Liberal Arts" are those that involve persuasion, and are called so because their study was once restricted to "liber" or free men. Slaves were not allowed to learn how to persuade their neighbors, though they could be taught all manner of practical knowledge. It does not matter what we know, if we are unable to convince others of what is right.
So, what did Stallman say?
A game scenario can be considered art/fiction rather than software. So it is okay to split the game into engine and scenario, then treat the engine as software and the scenario as art/fiction.
That's it and there's really no direct contradiction. The author claims that the story and art work should be covered by copyright law. That's a world different from saying it should be "non-free" as if the author has suddenly adopted the most Zealous stance of the Copyright Warrior. It does not have Richard Stallman claiming that copyright law, as it exists, is correct. The authors of the Creative Commons and the Free Documentation License are not suddenly endorsing "Digital Rights Management". All it says is that source code and pure art are different.
You are fundamentally confused when you ask:
according to stallman's views, should a graphics artist not be able to freely obtain the art of a game so he could modify it, without having to pay for it? after all, that is what he demands of software.
Source code has the ability to be far more restrictive than any previous form of artwork and applying those restrictions to art is a cultural dissaster. You already have the ability to quote graphics and other art work. You may indeed take someone else's image and modify it and present it as your own. You can do the same thing with a song too. No one can keep your from studying a painting and making one of your own. If you think otherwise, it is because people like Bill Gates have expanded and misapplied copyright laws to cover non human readable formats and perverted trademark to cover common words and phrases. The whole idea that you can't use even the smallest quote or part of someone else's work is absurd as someone owning "Word". If you think you don't have this ability, the copyright warriors own your soul.
I did nothing to them. Really, nothing but my job and let the support staff at both companies deal with it. I did install Mozilla, which you would think helped. Other than that, zippo and they both got flaky.
Now the funny thing is that, like you, at home my Linux runtimes are much better. Woody and Sarge last longer than my electricity. Even Experimental and unstable stay up for months if I don't swap out kernels. It works like that on boxes that I've cobbled together myself, sometimes litterally from other people's garbage. These machines perform all of my computing tasks, from compiling to spam filtering and they do it all with free software.
And XP is NOT as buggy as Windows 3.1. I doubt you ever used 3.1 then if you can say THAT with a straight face.
I administered Windows 3.1 as part of a job for two years. They were connedted directly to the internet and were no worse than any modern Microsoft junk. Windows 3.1 was on the second computer I owned personally. Dos, 3.1, 95, 98, XP and 2000, that makes four upgrade train steps I've seen. Since DOS, the overall quality and usefulness of Microsoft operating systems has remained constant. A Dell bought today will be bundled with software that does exactly the same thing as the 486 I bought from them in 1993, and it won't do it much faster. I still have a copy of that 1993 software on a not much newer computer, just for kicks. I'm working on running it in Bosch.
All my earnings are reported, all my tax breaks pre-calculculated, interest reported by the banks. Only thing I have to add are tax deductible donations like Red Cross stuff.
It could Take me about 15 seconds to do my taxes.
I have NO privacy in my life, but it is not easy.
Really, Uncle Sam gets reports from everyone and "voluntary compliance" is a fiction. Even charities have forms to fill out.
My wife thinks they should have a web site that has the forms filled out and a little button, "I agree" or "make changes". The I agree button would take all of no seconds to push and Uncle Sam knows where my money is, so the next screen should present payment options. Make changes should let you enter things they might not know about, which would be rare, or let you file a complaint that a human being actually has to look at.
It may be cheap and easy but it might not make my life easier. Most non free companies have a way of making things miserable for their users and I refuse to fund them.
It was turbo tax's mistaken use of the master boot record for copy protection that put a freeze on any new non free software installation. I don't want tax time to wipe out grub for me. This also rules out using something like crossover office. While it might be easy to repair the damage, I refuse to pay money to be screwed that way or others.
The bottom line is that if I don't trust the bastards with my hardware, why should I trust them with tax records? My bank already sold me out so that my snail mailbox is flooded with Mortage applications. They sent me a form that I have to snail mail back with a signature to opt out of their spam program. What turds. A company that writes out to my MBR is liable to be as fast and lose with my tax information.
My ideology is firmly based in the practical. It does not hurt me to do my taxes by hand and by doing so I avoid many other problems. My avoidance of Windoze has saved me countless hours of upkeep that I used to spend due to bugs, worms and all of it was compounded by stupid shit like the registry. It's problems like this that free software is made to avoid. Non free software is designed to exert control over you and that control almost always spells more hassle than it's worth.
Why spend $400, when you can get a perfectly good html editor for nothing with Mozilla? The editor has three or four tabs which display varying levels of code, from WYSIWYG to plain text, so you can use the GUI and see the tags even if you are stuck on Windoze.
Those looking to move up in the world can try out Bluefish and Quanta. Bluefish is an excellent html editor that does CSS, tables, frames and has excellent project management all in easy to use pulldown menus and tabbed button bars. Quanta has the same but like most KDE things, it follows Microsoft examples more closely and has autocomplete and document trees as well as file trees. I prefer bluefish, but that's only because I don't have much html to write.
The whole issue of templates looks overblown to me. As the author says:
Include files can also create more difficult maintenance. Say you have the common case of having header and footer include files. What happens when you want to add another standard piece of HTML in the middle of the page? You would have to visit each file that uses the include files and add a token for a third include file.
It's hard for me to imagine that common situation. Why can't you just modify the header or the footer to include the information? Can't you put dynamic information in the middle of both the header and the footer file by using a php script? If so, I don't understand why it's so hard to modify the "middle" of a document.
It's also hard for me to imagine what's hard about finding your pages if you have good project management like Bluefish has.
Its all very well saying "learn to do it properly and use vi to write your code" for the average user the experience of seeing a web page being generated is something akin to magical and they would run a mile from a text editor.
Yikes! You might want to use some valoline and at least recommend kate at that rate. Vi rocks for remote administration because it's always there, but a neophyte should at least have syntax highlighting to help them along. Well, I suppose there's nothing wrong with cutting and pasting between X or virtual terminals, but the tools above are much easier on the nooooobie.