I would simply stop stocking any product that forced me to sell at price higher than the market could bear.
This is one of those areas where government regulation protects you. Another area of regulation will make sure you are screwed even worse if this regulation is removed.
Let's imagine they have their way. You can stop selling stuff that's over priced, but you would still be stuck with it. Right now, you can reduce the price to recover part of the money you wasted on something you thought would sell better. This happens all the time. Not being able to recover that money would make more business go bankrupt and then everyone is stuck with the losses.
Really though, this is about what you do with what you own and we should not undo a century of sensible policy. Once you buy something you own it and can do what you want, right down to giving it away. Why give up that right? So McSoft can make more money? No one but monopoly providers will benefit from this.
Finally, the insane state of US patent law means that you may not have a competing product to buy and sell. What can you do then?
Just stroll through the most-viewed clips every now and again and tally up home-made vs capped videos.
That's missleading. You need to know what percentage of the traffic the top ten make up as a whole before you can say that Google is living off other broadcasts. The best indicator of this is netflicks, which goes through the entire catalog of film much more than you would expect. The "blockbuster world" is an artifact of previously inferior distribution that was unable to keep up with people's broad tastes. The number one clip may make up less than a fraction of a percent of viewership. I can't tell you for sure because the top ten can easily be rigged.
The smaller the number of blockbusters are relative to total viewership, the easier they are to rig. A company like Mediasentry could be hired to botnet demand Viacom clips and strengthen the Viacom lawsuit. Surely an honest entertainment company would never do anything like that, would they?
... the problem here: the police are treating people with dissenting political views as potential criminals
No, we are all potential criminals. When you spy on, lie to and jail people, you are treating them as criminals.
The problem is preemptive justice. "Disrupting" your fellow citizens before they do anything is bullshit. When you give government to jail and torture you without evidence, trial or chance to defend yourself, you have not made yourself more secure, you have created a government that's a dangerous and frightening as any other terrorist organization.
I did not like hearing about domestic spying in the first place. The massive abuse shown here is worse than I expected.
Mark this down, all you big brother assholes, I'm voting you out next election. I have voted republican since Ronald Reagan told me he thought that small business were America's largest employer, best innovators and most deserving of encouragement. I liked the party that fought and out competed the Soviet Union. What I see now is a bunch of whores who get along with big business as they do with Communist China. The party who's diplomats were just stomping around Nato saying, "The West is an outdated concept," has lost more than one kind of compass. No, I'm voting for anyone but you.
So when the NYPD catches Bin Laden, they'll sodomize him with a baton? And then give him to the LAPs who beat up Rodney King? Hmmm...I'm beginning to like your idea.
Great. Spying and torture. Someone tell me what we are doing in Iraq again? Like Robin William said before it stopped being funny, "We gave them our constitution. We were not using it anyway."
How is a party that "keeps tabs" and jails potential protesters any better than the Bathists or Iranian Revolutionary Guard?
Another way to look at it is as Saint Heinlein did, "Stupidity cannot be cured with money, or through education, or by legislation. Stupidity is not a sin, the victim can't help being stupid. But stupidity is the only universal capital crime; the sentence is death, there is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without pity." The punishment is in the use.
I cannot conceive of any "reasonable" modification of copyright law that could pertain to this, however. Can you clarify?
You will have to ask my favorite copyright lawyer, Lawrence Lessing for real advice. I don't mind sharing what I think because the law is supposed to reflect the moral sense of the governed. Right now, it reflects the best interests of a few powerful companies and that needs to change. The large list of changes required shows just how far into negative territory things have sunk.
In short, my opinion is that:
Copyright violation is not a crime against the public and penalties should reflect the scale of real losses.
Copyright should only last 20 years.
It should be easy to tell if a work is copyrighted and who owns it.
Commercial reuse of material should be easy and cheap.
The entire concept may be outdated.
Copyright is a created right that's supposed to encourage the spread of knowledge and entertainment. The creation clause of the US constitution was reasonable at the time and it's spirit offers good guidance today. Copyright is supposed to be temporary and government is not supposed to be a burden or anti-competitive tool. Works of merit should become public domain while they are still current and valuable to society. With electronic publication, it may be that the best way to encourage the spread of knowledge and entertainment is to eliminate copyright.
Penalties for any violation are supposed to be proportional to the offense. Few members of the public believe that someone should lose their house and livelyhood because they shared their music and movie collection. Indeed, most people believe in public libraries and that sharing is good. Decades of industry propaganda have not and will not convince people that copyright violation is the moral equivalent of theft and murder, nor has it convince them that jailtime and $250,000 penalties are justified where physical equivalents carry no such penalty.
As the jib jab fiasco proves, copyright should not be nebulous. It is in the public interest to establish a database of copyrighted material and it's owners. Right now, it's difficult to share because the presumption is that everything is owned and the copyright owners say that you can't.
Finally, recorded history needs to be liberated. It is outrageous that so much of the world's recorded history is owned by so few companies. A copyright database won't really facilitate use and reuse of commercial works if there's only one owner who can charge outrageous fees. Copyright extensions have robbed the public of what they rightly expected to own when the works were created. The owners have used the profits to strengthen their position and rob the public further. The DMCA must be abolished and digital restrictions should be abandoned because they extend copyright beyond the law in a way that deserves no public protection.
I don't get it though, there has to be another side to this.... Is there anything we're not being told?
What's the worst thing you could be told? That the mom is a dirty bad pirate, someone who had the nerve to download gangsta rap? Would that justify any of this? I don't think so. Don't stick your head in the sand!
What you are left with is the slimy reign of terror that Rogers and Beckerman describe. Thousands of people have been threatened this way. They face the loss of all their possesions, livelihoods and jailtime. Many if not all are innocent. They turn to next of kin when one victim escapes to promote further terror: we will get your kids next! The very tactic proves they don't know who really did what they accuse. It's ugly because extortion is always that way. It's horrifying because huge companies should not act like gangsters. The reality is so horrible that people want to reject it outright rather than believe they live in such an ugly and threatening world. That fearful denial is one of the greatest assets of any tyranny.
The publishers behind these suits are not really interested in infringement, they want to control the internet itself and shut down all possible competition. The RIAA is a shell organization for the incumbent media companies, publishers, broadcasters and others dinosaurs that want to maintain their current monoply position. They want you to be afraid to share and they dream of charging you for every trivial enjoyment of your own culture. These lawsuits lay bare the true nature of non free publishing, perpetual copyrights, monoploy broadcasting and owned culture.
But the subtext to your posts in this thread is "You shouldn't have to boot up at all, silly person, you should be using sleep modes. Look at my l33t uptimes." What use is it to say that? Is it just trying to divert criticism from the fact that yes, fresh stock installs of popular Linux distros do actually tend to take more time to boot up than fresh installs of Windows XP on comparable hardware?
No, I've said that long gnu/linux boot times are bullhit and that they don't matter. There's no diversion going on there, it's a denial of bullshit. Nothing boots faster for me than a default Etch desktop, not even your supposedly "fresh" XP install. Once you add on anti-virus and the inevitable mal and spyware, the Windoze system is a brick that takes forever to boot and has to be reinstalled, how convenient! There's nothing leet about using features out of the box like I do. APM is as easy to use as closing the lid on your laptop. I like to share that because it's a great time saver and advantage everyone can and should enjoy.
How do you get a laptop reseller to let you install Linux on a laptop to try before you buy? Or alternatively, How do you test all hardware (including hibernate) with a live cd?
You use a live CD to test the hardware. If it does not work, don't buy it. If you don't want to risk writing out a file for hibernate suspend, take it home and do it there. It's really easier for everyone for you to just do it there with the demo machine, which they "restore" all the time anyway.
The bottom line is getting what you want or not parting with your money. If something does not work the way you want it to, you should not buy it. If you buy something and are not happy with it, you should get your money back. If the store won't give your money back, you should not do business with them anymore. I pay a small premium to local mom and pop computer stores because they let me try things before I buy them and have been very cool about things that don't work for me. Even Walmart has the good sense to let people bring back electronic gadgets that don't work.
I'd love my next laptop to be a walk in the park, but I've never had much luck..
I've had good luck with used Thinkpads. Newer hardware is always a pain, until Dell and other major vendors get smart. The easiest way to tell is to just try it before you buy it.
Denying the problem doesn't make it go away, really. All the hibernation and sleep modes in the world don't change the fact that Linux boot times are much longer than, say, Windows XP's.
I've never seen this happen. Reapeating this FUD does not convince me it is true.
for many laptops [power management does not work]
If your laptop does not work, you need to get your money back. Take it back and tell them why. Better yet, test it before you buy it. Don't buy things that waste your time.
You insult lots of experienced Linux users who do care about their machines booting several times slower than an XP pc.
That's an insult to everyone's intelligence. There is no such machine, unless you have serious hardware problems and the present article is the "more power to you" that I mentioned. Many live CDs boot faster than XP and most installed distributions boot faster than that.
You may have a laptop and you may be happy with "hibernating" it, but many of us need to power off PCs. An office PC I power on every day, my home's PC I power on and off when I get and leave home.
You should happy be like me. I'm aware of the issue. Ultimately, if you care about power consumption you are going to get a laptop or desktop with reasonable power management. Test it out before you buy it or send it back if you can't and it does not work. Microsoft continues to design complex and "extensible" non standards for power management, so it's not easy. Comfort yourself by knowing that M$'s dirty tricks make things harder for their own users than they are for you.
Of course, there are benefits to having at least one machine that you never turn off and that never sleeps. I have contact information, archives of photos, music, movies and work that I can get to anywhere by sftp and KDE makes it all look local. This is much easier than syncing three or four laptops and desktops. Wake on lan might be nice, but my equipment is all so old, I've never bothered trying. For at least one machine, I never will. A modest server consumes 50 watts or less, kind of like some light bulbs I never turn off. I get more use by far out of the servers than I do light bulbs. Your business might also consider that a reasonable convenience.
A common complaint about Linux is the amount of time the operating system takes to start.
Actually, it's a common insult and FUD. Understanding your boot process is nice and all, but your distribution already does this and has come to reasonable compromises. If you want to tweak with it, more power to you but you won't really save much. With proper power management you don't have to boot at all. For instance, the laptop I'm using says:
I put it to sleep when I'm done and it wakes up when I need it. I can't tell you how much time I saved by not having to reopen all of my applications and remember what I'm working on every day. The price of booting is far greater than the minute or so it takes to get your desktop, it's a loss of placekeeping and continuity. If I were using Windoze, I'd probably have to wipe and reload by now.
People who complain about long gnu/linux boot times have either not learned how to use their much better systems yet or are FUDing astroturfers.
It's obvious that GNU/Linux is a woman. She's high maintenance, expects everything to be given to her for free, and no matter what goes wrong... it's your fault.
Sounds awful, I suggest you try another distribution and support group.
Stay away from Windoze though, she's all that but is only interested in your money. She looks pretty from a distance but stinks up close from years of neglect and terrible diseases. Inside, she is filled with malice and hatred for her users and seldom does all that's promissed. An honest and open relationship with your peers is far preferable to this kind of double dealing.
3rd ad: Linux can do the things that Mac and Windows can. And can do it on any hardware.
This is the worst of the lot. Given that interpretation, you end up with two Linux's on the screen (cute woman and fat guy) and one Mac. Not a good message there.
That would be three, but who's counting?
This was the best of the three adds. The story is that free software does all things for all people, if you give it a chance, and is nothing to be snotty about. Overall, that's a much nicer message than either M$ or Mac have put out.
You mean a site called "desktoplinux.com" has a negative opinion of Windows Vista? Surely you jest!
Judge for yourself. They have screen shots and honest descriptions.
Desktop Linux is not alone in panning Vista and Microsoft digital restrictions. You might note that the PC in question was an updated version of the Media PC that DRM self destructed for a Washington Post reviewer a year ago. It's DRM that drives the desktop linux reviewer crazy under Vista which works better than XP did. The equipment worked under all three OSes, but only gnu/linux gives you the control everyone wants. That's not to say most hardware actually works under Vista, the opposite is true. I've read estimates that less than half of the world's existing PCs are "Vista Ready" and 94% flunk "Vista Premium" which is what you really want. Not surprisingly, reviews of Vista have been universally bad, with few outright "get this now" recommendations. Here's the BBC take on it. How about hard core fanboy, Mossburg? Nope, he says to wait too. Here's another from the BBC, where they go so far as to call it a threat to internet freedom. Even Paul Thuriot is disapointed. If that's not bad enough, vendors don't have enough confidence in Vista's one remaining feature, it's looks, to advertise them, placing screenshots of OSX on top of PC monitors to make them look good. But hey, they point Safari to M$'s fab Vista web page so it looks like Vista!
If anything, Desktoplinux was too easy on Vista's unfriendly dual boot capability. Last week, I tried to help out a fellow graduate student who wanted a fortran compiler but was unable to shrink the Windoze partition with qtparted or make a smaller install with the "recovery CD" that came with his laptop. Few people are going to have more than the recovery CD, so they are currently prevented from dual booting unless they by another hard drive or a retail copy of Vista.
I doubt they [CBC] have an official position of open source software, or are otherwise in the habit of recommending a particular Linux distro to their readers.
Nah, might as well dismiss it as another crackpot letter to the editor, right? Wrong. The guy is a regular contributor with other articles, like this one to his name. So, yes, the author and the institution have issued an opinion. There will be more like that too.
If you listen to the BBC, you won't be using Vista anytime soon. As M$ jumps up the breakage of XP, there will be lots of people trying and liking free software.
I can not state with authority that 1 in 4 computers are in a botnet, because I am citing an unscientific estimate.
I'm not asking you to better Michael Dell and Vint Cerf's estimate, I'm asking you to show me evidence of any significant gnu/linux worm. There's nothing wrong with that estimate, if you use it in rough way and that's what I've done. A one in four estimate means that they pegged their estimate around there. Based on Windoze survival time studdies, I'd say the rate is more like 95%, but you don't really care for my opinion so I'll quote Dell who has much to gain from underestimating the problem. Now, it's your turn. Go ahead and find me some news about any significant gnu/linux worm or quit wasting my time. If you can't, just adjust that 25% up by M$'s smaller than unitary share of internet connected computers because the botnet is all M$ powered.
That is what the only person I knew to use egg drop ever did with it. He was and still is a M$ user. Looking up eggdrop, was fun but it did not find the run away gnu/linux viruse you claimed it was. Have you found any of those outside a lab yet?
You're the one denying that "1 in 4 computers" could include operating systems that you don't loathe and despise with every beat of your blackened, shriveled heart.
No, I just think the botnet rate for all non M$ OS is vanishingly small. Show me a study that proves something different, you insulting pest.
Slashdot Mirror
I would simply stop stocking any product that forced me to sell at price higher than the market could bear.
This is one of those areas where government regulation protects you. Another area of regulation will make sure you are screwed even worse if this regulation is removed.
Let's imagine they have their way. You can stop selling stuff that's over priced, but you would still be stuck with it. Right now, you can reduce the price to recover part of the money you wasted on something you thought would sell better. This happens all the time. Not being able to recover that money would make more business go bankrupt and then everyone is stuck with the losses.
Really though, this is about what you do with what you own and we should not undo a century of sensible policy. Once you buy something you own it and can do what you want, right down to giving it away. Why give up that right? So McSoft can make more money? No one but monopoly providers will benefit from this.
Finally, the insane state of US patent law means that you may not have a competing product to buy and sell. What can you do then?
Just stroll through the most-viewed clips every now and again and tally up home-made vs capped videos.
That's missleading. You need to know what percentage of the traffic the top ten make up as a whole before you can say that Google is living off other broadcasts. The best indicator of this is netflicks, which goes through the entire catalog of film much more than you would expect. The "blockbuster world" is an artifact of previously inferior distribution that was unable to keep up with people's broad tastes. The number one clip may make up less than a fraction of a percent of viewership. I can't tell you for sure because the top ten can easily be rigged.
The smaller the number of blockbusters are relative to total viewership, the easier they are to rig. A company like Mediasentry could be hired to botnet demand Viacom clips and strengthen the Viacom lawsuit. Surely an honest entertainment company would never do anything like that, would they?
Sugar is sticky and it can jack up electronics. I don't think that's a good thing...
Unless your blood is the nearest source of sugar.
No, we are all potential criminals. When you spy on, lie to and jail people, you are treating them as criminals.
The problem is preemptive justice. "Disrupting" your fellow citizens before they do anything is bullshit. When you give government to jail and torture you without evidence, trial or chance to defend yourself, you have not made yourself more secure, you have created a government that's a dangerous and frightening as any other terrorist organization.
I did not like hearing about domestic spying in the first place. The massive abuse shown here is worse than I expected.
Mark this down, all you big brother assholes, I'm voting you out next election. I have voted republican since Ronald Reagan told me he thought that small business were America's largest employer, best innovators and most deserving of encouragement. I liked the party that fought and out competed the Soviet Union. What I see now is a bunch of whores who get along with big business as they do with Communist China. The party who's diplomats were just stomping around Nato saying, "The West is an outdated concept," has lost more than one kind of compass. No, I'm voting for anyone but you.
So when the NYPD catches Bin Laden, they'll sodomize him with a baton? And then give him to the LAPs who beat up Rodney King? Hmmm...I'm beginning to like your idea.
Great. Spying and torture. Someone tell me what we are doing in Iraq again? Like Robin William said before it stopped being funny, "We gave them our constitution. We were not using it anyway."
How is a party that "keeps tabs" and jails potential protesters any better than the Bathists or Iranian Revolutionary Guard?
what are the other 74.9% doing?
What's right. Extortionists should be jailed, not paid.
Does that mean you then legally have rights to the music you pirated?
No, and those who settle can't use iPod or Google either, especially the ones that never downloaded anything to begin with.
What choice do they have but to settle really?
75% decided not to settle. I'd say fighting is the overwhelming popular choice.
So far as I can see, the guy could take the money and still be using vista.
Dude, don't you know that you don't get the Wow if Vista is not Genuine? Where have you been?
Another way to look at it is as Saint Heinlein did, "Stupidity cannot be cured with money, or through education, or by legislation. Stupidity is not a sin, the victim can't help being stupid. But stupidity is the only universal capital crime; the sentence is death, there is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without pity." The punishment is in the use.
I cannot conceive of any "reasonable" modification of copyright law that could pertain to this, however. Can you clarify?
You will have to ask my favorite copyright lawyer, Lawrence Lessing for real advice. I don't mind sharing what I think because the law is supposed to reflect the moral sense of the governed. Right now, it reflects the best interests of a few powerful companies and that needs to change. The large list of changes required shows just how far into negative territory things have sunk.
In short, my opinion is that:
Copyright is a created right that's supposed to encourage the spread of knowledge and entertainment. The creation clause of the US constitution was reasonable at the time and it's spirit offers good guidance today. Copyright is supposed to be temporary and government is not supposed to be a burden or anti-competitive tool. Works of merit should become public domain while they are still current and valuable to society. With electronic publication, it may be that the best way to encourage the spread of knowledge and entertainment is to eliminate copyright.
Penalties for any violation are supposed to be proportional to the offense. Few members of the public believe that someone should lose their house and livelyhood because they shared their music and movie collection. Indeed, most people believe in public libraries and that sharing is good. Decades of industry propaganda have not and will not convince people that copyright violation is the moral equivalent of theft and murder, nor has it convince them that jailtime and $250,000 penalties are justified where physical equivalents carry no such penalty.
As the jib jab fiasco proves, copyright should not be nebulous. It is in the public interest to establish a database of copyrighted material and it's owners. Right now, it's difficult to share because the presumption is that everything is owned and the copyright owners say that you can't.
Finally, recorded history needs to be liberated. It is outrageous that so much of the world's recorded history is owned by so few companies. A copyright database won't really facilitate use and reuse of commercial works if there's only one owner who can charge outrageous fees. Copyright extensions have robbed the public of what they rightly expected to own when the works were created. The owners have used the profits to strengthen their position and rob the public further. The DMCA must be abolished and digital restrictions should be abandoned because they extend copyright beyond the law in a way that deserves no public protection.
I don't get it though, there has to be another side to this. ... Is there anything we're not being told?
What's the worst thing you could be told? That the mom is a dirty bad pirate, someone who had the nerve to download gangsta rap? Would that justify any of this? I don't think so. Don't stick your head in the sand!
What you are left with is the slimy reign of terror that Rogers and Beckerman describe. Thousands of people have been threatened this way. They face the loss of all their possesions, livelihoods and jailtime. Many if not all are innocent. They turn to next of kin when one victim escapes to promote further terror: we will get your kids next! The very tactic proves they don't know who really did what they accuse. It's ugly because extortion is always that way. It's horrifying because huge companies should not act like gangsters. The reality is so horrible that people want to reject it outright rather than believe they live in such an ugly and threatening world. That fearful denial is one of the greatest assets of any tyranny.
The publishers behind these suits are not really interested in infringement, they want to control the internet itself and shut down all possible competition. The RIAA is a shell organization for the incumbent media companies, publishers, broadcasters and others dinosaurs that want to maintain their current monoply position. They want you to be afraid to share and they dream of charging you for every trivial enjoyment of your own culture. These lawsuits lay bare the true nature of non free publishing, perpetual copyrights, monoploy broadcasting and owned culture.
It is time to make copyright reasonable again.
One of my dedicated fans calls me a snob:
But the subtext to your posts in this thread is "You shouldn't have to boot up at all, silly person, you should be using sleep modes. Look at my l33t uptimes." What use is it to say that? Is it just trying to divert criticism from the fact that yes, fresh stock installs of popular Linux distros do actually tend to take more time to boot up than fresh installs of Windows XP on comparable hardware?
No, I've said that long gnu/linux boot times are bullhit and that they don't matter. There's no diversion going on there, it's a denial of bullshit. Nothing boots faster for me than a default Etch desktop, not even your supposedly "fresh" XP install. Once you add on anti-virus and the inevitable mal and spyware, the Windoze system is a brick that takes forever to boot and has to be reinstalled, how convenient! There's nothing leet about using features out of the box like I do. APM is as easy to use as closing the lid on your laptop. I like to share that because it's a great time saver and advantage everyone can and should enjoy.
How do you get a laptop reseller to let you install Linux on a laptop to try before you buy? Or alternatively, How do you test all hardware (including hibernate) with a live cd?
You use a live CD to test the hardware. If it does not work, don't buy it. If you don't want to risk writing out a file for hibernate suspend, take it home and do it there. It's really easier for everyone for you to just do it there with the demo machine, which they "restore" all the time anyway.
The bottom line is getting what you want or not parting with your money. If something does not work the way you want it to, you should not buy it. If you buy something and are not happy with it, you should get your money back. If the store won't give your money back, you should not do business with them anymore. I pay a small premium to local mom and pop computer stores because they let me try things before I buy them and have been very cool about things that don't work for me. Even Walmart has the good sense to let people bring back electronic gadgets that don't work.
I'd love my next laptop to be a walk in the park, but I've never had much luck..
I've had good luck with used Thinkpads. Newer hardware is always a pain, until Dell and other major vendors get smart. The easiest way to tell is to just try it before you buy it.
Denying the problem doesn't make it go away, really. All the hibernation and sleep modes in the world don't change the fact that Linux boot times are much longer than, say, Windows XP's.
I've never seen this happen. Reapeating this FUD does not convince me it is true.
for many laptops [power management does not work]
If your laptop does not work, you need to get your money back. Take it back and tell them why. Better yet, test it before you buy it. Don't buy things that waste your time.
Thinkpads usually work out of the box. I usually turn off ACPI and use APM, but ACPI works too.
You insult lots of experienced Linux users who do care about their machines booting several times slower than an XP pc.
That's an insult to everyone's intelligence. There is no such machine, unless you have serious hardware problems and the present article is the "more power to you" that I mentioned. Many live CDs boot faster than XP and most installed distributions boot faster than that.
You may have a laptop and you may be happy with "hibernating" it, but many of us need to power off PCs. An office PC I power on every day, my home's PC I power on and off when I get and leave home.
You should happy be like me. I'm aware of the issue. Ultimately, if you care about power consumption you are going to get a laptop or desktop with reasonable power management. Test it out before you buy it or send it back if you can't and it does not work. Microsoft continues to design complex and "extensible" non standards for power management, so it's not easy. Comfort yourself by knowing that M$'s dirty tricks make things harder for their own users than they are for you.
Of course, there are benefits to having at least one machine that you never turn off and that never sleeps. I have contact information, archives of photos, music, movies and work that I can get to anywhere by sftp and KDE makes it all look local. This is much easier than syncing three or four laptops and desktops. Wake on lan might be nice, but my equipment is all so old, I've never bothered trying. For at least one machine, I never will. A modest server consumes 50 watts or less, kind of like some light bulbs I never turn off. I get more use by far out of the servers than I do light bulbs. Your business might also consider that a reasonable convenience.
21 users on a laptop? Doesn't it get a bit crowded around the keyboard?
I use a lot of Gnome terminals.
I log into it myself from other machines from time to time but dhcp networking makes sharing it with other people impractical.
A common complaint about Linux is the amount of time the operating system takes to start.
Actually, it's a common insult and FUD. Understanding your boot process is nice and all, but your distribution already does this and has come to reasonable compromises. If you want to tweak with it, more power to you but you won't really save much. With proper power management you don't have to boot at all. For instance, the laptop I'm using says:
12:47:33 up 65 days, 15:12, 21 users, load average: 1.20, 1.50, 1.61
I put it to sleep when I'm done and it wakes up when I need it. I can't tell you how much time I saved by not having to reopen all of my applications and remember what I'm working on every day. The price of booting is far greater than the minute or so it takes to get your desktop, it's a loss of placekeeping and continuity. If I were using Windoze, I'd probably have to wipe and reload by now.
People who complain about long gnu/linux boot times have either not learned how to use their much better systems yet or are FUDing astroturfers.
It's obvious that GNU/Linux is a woman. She's high maintenance, expects everything to be given to her for free, and no matter what goes wrong... it's your fault.
Sounds awful, I suggest you try another distribution and support group.
Stay away from Windoze though, she's all that but is only interested in your money. She looks pretty from a distance but stinks up close from years of neglect and terrible diseases. Inside, she is filled with malice and hatred for her users and seldom does all that's promissed. An honest and open relationship with your peers is far preferable to this kind of double dealing.
This is the worst of the lot. Given that interpretation, you end up with two Linux's on the screen (cute woman and fat guy) and one Mac. Not a good message there.
That would be three, but who's counting?
This was the best of the three adds. The story is that free software does all things for all people, if you give it a chance, and is nothing to be snotty about. Overall, that's a much nicer message than either M$ or Mac have put out.
An AC asks:
You mean a site called "desktoplinux.com" has a negative opinion of Windows Vista? Surely you jest!
Judge for yourself. They have screen shots and honest descriptions.
Desktop Linux is not alone in panning Vista and Microsoft digital restrictions. You might note that the PC in question was an updated version of the Media PC that DRM self destructed for a Washington Post reviewer a year ago. It's DRM that drives the desktop linux reviewer crazy under Vista which works better than XP did. The equipment worked under all three OSes, but only gnu/linux gives you the control everyone wants. That's not to say most hardware actually works under Vista, the opposite is true. I've read estimates that less than half of the world's existing PCs are "Vista Ready" and 94% flunk "Vista Premium" which is what you really want. Not surprisingly, reviews of Vista have been universally bad, with few outright "get this now" recommendations. Here's the BBC take on it. How about hard core fanboy, Mossburg? Nope, he says to wait too. Here's another from the BBC, where they go so far as to call it a threat to internet freedom. Even Paul Thuriot is disapointed. If that's not bad enough, vendors don't have enough confidence in Vista's one remaining feature, it's looks, to advertise them, placing screenshots of OSX on top of PC monitors to make them look good. But hey, they point Safari to M$'s fab Vista web page so it looks like Vista!
If anything, Desktoplinux was too easy on Vista's unfriendly dual boot capability. Last week, I tried to help out a fellow graduate student who wanted a fortran compiler but was unable to shrink the Windoze partition with qtparted or make a smaller install with the "recovery CD" that came with his laptop. Few people are going to have more than the recovery CD, so they are currently prevented from dual booting unless they by another hard drive or a retail copy of Vista.
I doubt they [CBC] have an official position of open source software, or are otherwise in the habit of recommending a particular Linux distro to their readers.
Nah, might as well dismiss it as another crackpot letter to the editor, right? Wrong. The guy is a regular contributor with other articles, like this one to his name. So, yes, the author and the institution have issued an opinion. There will be more like that too.
If you listen to the BBC, you won't be using Vista anytime soon. As M$ jumps up the breakage of XP, there will be lots of people trying and liking free software.
See for yourself in this blow by blow install and feature compare. Summary here. A lack of drivers and compatibility were only the start of the author's problems which digital restrictions greatly multiplied.
As usual, the Microsoft story is worse than you would expect.
I can not state with authority that 1 in 4 computers are in a botnet, because I am citing an unscientific estimate.
I'm not asking you to better Michael Dell and Vint Cerf's estimate, I'm asking you to show me evidence of any significant gnu/linux worm. There's nothing wrong with that estimate, if you use it in rough way and that's what I've done. A one in four estimate means that they pegged their estimate around there. Based on Windoze survival time studdies, I'd say the rate is more like 95%, but you don't really care for my opinion so I'll quote Dell who has much to gain from underestimating the problem. Now, it's your turn. Go ahead and find me some news about any significant gnu/linux worm or quit wasting my time. If you can't, just adjust that 25% up by M$'s smaller than unitary share of internet connected computers because the botnet is all M$ powered.
That is what the only person I knew to use egg drop ever did with it. He was and still is a M$ user. Looking up eggdrop, was fun but it did not find the run away gnu/linux viruse you claimed it was. Have you found any of those outside a lab yet?
You're the one denying that "1 in 4 computers" could include operating systems that you don't loathe and despise with every beat of your blackened, shriveled heart.
No, I just think the botnet rate for all non M$ OS is vanishingly small. Show me a study that proves something different, you insulting pest.