I'm going to be marked as troll and care very little about it but:
There is something to be said about using an OS 90+% of the population uses. There are intangible and tangible benefits, like hardware working properly and to full capacity (not the lowest common denominator support Linux often boasts), like MS Office working well, saving you the effort of mucking about with Libre/Openoffice, Strange IE-only sites not being a issue, not worrying about updates breaking your system (updates are much more likely to break things under Linux), A stable video-editor (Linux has nothing compared to the windows side), being able to connect to a projector.
There is also the stability you get when you buy a complete desktop OS from the same vendor, with everything from the kernel to the UI because closely coordinated. This is better than the Linux approach of fiefdoms with everything being plugged together by the distros, praying that updating one package won't break another package because it's often impossible to test all the possible configuration variables.
When MS introduced UAC, discouraged the use of the registry (preferring a local approach to settings management), and separated the update manager from the browser windows and began offering a decent AV, all in vista, windows became a superior option. Linux offers litter benefit to the user because MS has largely addressed their problems.
Has anyone else noticed a steadily negative response to Linux news in general on Slashdot? All the distro release announcements barely get any comments, the DE related news just get berated by angry users. and the FLOSS politics just gets ignored.
I think the fanboys are burnt out, what are they defending after all? Bad desktop environments? A ~70MB kernel written in C? The hopelessly radical "Free" software movement? It's just pathetic and frankly a lost cause.
Work for free so Shuttleworth can abuse his users? That sounds like something i'd love to do.
If canonical is going to do things in secret, ignore privacy concerns and adopt an apple like "we know best" attitude they should just hire people to fix their software. You've got to be pretty naive to work on an Canonical product at this point.
When looking for a hard to find file, torrents by their nature aren't always the best route. Yandex, unlike google doesn't remove results because of a DMCA takedown request.
They want a microkernel because it's theoretically prettier, the practicalities be damned. It's just pedantic bullshit. GNUs goal is to produce a free kernel, they can take Linux, modify it and have one. GNU has a lot more pressing things to worry about, they're losing mindshare and are stuck in the 90s.
The whole microkernel vs monolithic kernel "debate" has been done. It's clear what the world (you know, people who do things) has gone with for anything more than academic research, monolithic kernels are easier to debug, write/modify.
I'm probably giving these people too much attention, if they want to waste their efforts, it makes no overall difference but they're doing themselves a disservice by acting like butthurt children.
Slashdot articles about Fedora don't get a lot of comments. I think the world has moved on, Fedora tries to explain itself as a nice "workstation distro" but what does that even mean?
Opensuse, Debian and Ubuntu both have different features that make them useful to different people. What does Fedora have?
I wonder how many active developers fedora has? Does the linux community give fedora undeserved attention because of its past glory? How much resources does redhat put into it? They've (rightly) said that they think "Desktop Linux" is a dead cause. Is fedora just a testing ground for RHEL, officialy no, but is that true?
Why is the CS faculty full of these socially inept people who feel the need to obnoxiously prove how good they are to everyone? What is it about CS that attracts people who lack the ability to perceive social context?
I'm an elec. engineering student and I've taken some CS, business and science courses. Without the doubt the CS people are always snarky, pedantic, condescending and down right rude more than any other discipline by a long shot. They're incredibly annoying to work/study with.
Not to mention they're, well, downright runty. I originally thought its just the insular and challenging nature of CS but that's not true, engineering and the hard sciences are just and rigorous and insular as CS (if not more) and for the most part, they're fill of normal people.
What about a trillion and one dollar coin? How about a Trillion dollar bank note? How about making a pebble in the white house garden worth a trillion dollars?
Mitts strategy was to rely on moderate Republicans (who vote for the party and what it ideally stands for, even if it falls short) and appease the far right, in an effort to push him over the line. Essentially playing the numbers game (Hey, it made him rich!).
The Republicans didn't bother trying to engage broader America. This is now proven to be a loser move (and demographics are against this). So: Is the Republican party going to move towards the centre or go further right? A reagan-esque war is about to happen in the GOP.
It's been interesting to see the public perception of Kim Dotcom morph from "evil bastard who got his comeuppance" to "cult hero and victim".
He would have had to be an idiot to an unbelievable level not to have known that his mega* services were for the most part being used for piracy. On the other hand the mega* could have been used for legitimate purposes as well and they did provided a mechanism for entities to declare infringement and have the offending files removed. It seems like he has following the law to the letter and nothing more (which is all we can ask).
The next question is: Did he do anything he shouldn't have? He provided storage for files in exchange for advertising. It's previously been ruled that a service provider is not responsible for the content users store, until they have been given proper notice of illegal activity in which case they must act appropriately.
However this pans out it's going to be precedent setting.
I'm getting mine on the 28th May (Australia). I ordered it on opening day.
Also,
What exactly does "non-profit" mean? Are they paying themselves? Does making enough money for R&D and staff count as profit? It a non-profit doesn't meet its objectives (i.e. the pi's get sold to slashdotters, and schools balk at it) what happens?
Why don't we see a lot more 'small businesses' doing this for the tax break? There's nothing stopping a non-profit from switching back to for-profit later, right?
In all fairness, the person who installed the malware might just be a guy off the streets who attended a rally. I hear there are occasionally thousands of them protesting.
The insination here is that the regime managed to infiltrate a fifth column styled group by getting a guy to accept an.exe over skype. It's safer to assume he's not in the upper echelons of dissent.
Some of the protesters over at wall street might just have easily fell for such a ruse.
This isn't surprising. I really doubt the US gov is stupid enough to think that Iran wouldn't censor it. They likely built it so Iran can censor it. It's just another PR stunt by the US to further alienate Iran from the rest of the world.
It isn't a coincidence that Spies are outed in the US at very politically expedient times. The Russian spies were "found" during the peak of anti-missile talks , an Iranian spy was "found" recently just when Iran's Nuclear issues were reemerging. A Syrian spy was found recently as well. It seems clear that the US gov knows and tolerates these people, until they can score an advantage out of them. Monitoring known spies is better than kicking them out and giving foreign intelligence a chance to refine their skills.
It pains me to say this but out of OSX, Windows and Linux - Win7 has the most usable Desktop Interface. It has decent window management for multiple instances of a program, you can actually minimize windows and the start menu is the least annoying of the lot ( the search is near instantaneous).
KDE is perpetually almost ready. There is always some beyond annoying bug (In my case the window list randomly crashing) or some weird graphical glitch such as icons not showing up for a few seconds. The list of minor bugs goes on and on really...
I know i sound like a troll but i'm really not. I found myself enjoying desktop Linux less and less since GNOME3 and Unity, mere window management is a chore, i think most people are thinking the same way. Win7 is a pretty good, well thought out OS, a Linux user isn't going to get malware on the machine. UAC seems to have done it's job (Overall there are very few show stopping threats).
I constantly hear things like "I made do with xfce/lxde/fvwm" but the simple act of adding an entry to the panel for these environment involves editing a config file or digging through multiple layers of a configuration application. It's just not good enough for 2011, it's not as if i'm running ancient hardware. Using one of these DEs is compromise.
This requires money, long term thinking and wide consensus. These are things our politicians are not capable of even dreaming about. This is not even taking into account all the fiddly vested interests.
Lets not forget that deciding what to do with this worlds changing climate has stalled for the good part of 30 years.
Unless our governments are transformed to autocratic beurocracies we're simply doomed.
There's a reason why autocrats can build beautiful cities while democracies can't put forward the planning for a new building without decades worth of argy-bargy.
Canonical will likely keep the image _as close_ to CD size as possible.
In order to attract new home users they have got to be as small as the can. ~750meg is movie size, 1.5gig isn't and a lot of people will balk at it.
Ubuntu should look at some sort of base install that will get the user booting and and into browser. The less critical apps can be downloaded in the background.
This is definitely a pivot in history, we'll look back on this time and mark it as the beginning of a new world perspective.
The amount that is being withheld is US60 million.
Another world powers (or a coalition of like-minded states) could easily fill the gap and buy more influence.
China who wants to tote itself as a Modern country might quite like the PR.
One interesting vote is going to be the one that aims to recognize Palestine as a state. I would love to see the US withhold funding to the UNSC!! Imagine the glee on the faces of the Chinese and Russians when they realise that the US is diminishing its influence, just so Israel can continue to build illegal towns and dawdle on peace talks. I'm sure China and Russia would gladly pay the funding void!
Slashdot Mirror
I'm going to be marked as troll and care very little about it but:
There is something to be said about using an OS 90+% of the population uses. There are intangible and tangible benefits, like hardware working properly and to full capacity (not the lowest common denominator support Linux often boasts), like MS Office working well, saving you the effort of mucking about with Libre/Openoffice, Strange IE-only sites not being a issue, not worrying about updates breaking your system (updates are much more likely to break things under Linux), A stable video-editor (Linux has nothing compared to the windows side), being able to connect to a projector.
There is also the stability you get when you buy a complete desktop OS from the same vendor, with everything from the kernel to the UI because closely coordinated. This is better than the Linux approach of fiefdoms with everything being plugged together by the distros, praying that updating one package won't break another package because it's often impossible to test all the possible configuration variables.
When MS introduced UAC, discouraged the use of the registry (preferring a local approach to settings management), and separated the update manager from the browser windows and began offering a decent AV, all in vista, windows became a superior option. Linux offers litter benefit to the user because MS has largely addressed their problems.
Has anyone else noticed a steadily negative response to Linux news in general on Slashdot? All the distro release announcements barely get any comments, the DE related news just get berated by angry users. and the FLOSS politics just gets ignored.
I think the fanboys are burnt out, what are they defending after all? Bad desktop environments? A ~70MB kernel written in C? The hopelessly radical "Free" software movement? It's just pathetic and frankly a lost cause.
Work for free so Shuttleworth can abuse his users? That sounds like something i'd love to do.
If canonical is going to do things in secret, ignore privacy concerns and adopt an apple like "we know best" attitude they should just hire people to fix their software. You've got to be pretty naive to work on an Canonical product at this point.
When looking for a hard to find file, torrents by their nature aren't always the best route. Yandex, unlike google doesn't remove results because of a DMCA takedown request.
They want a microkernel because it's theoretically prettier, the practicalities be damned. It's just pedantic bullshit. GNUs goal is to produce a free kernel, they can take Linux, modify it and have one. GNU has a lot more pressing things to worry about, they're losing mindshare and are stuck in the 90s.
The whole microkernel vs monolithic kernel "debate" has been done. It's clear what the world (you know, people who do things) has gone with for anything more than academic research, monolithic kernels are easier to debug, write/modify.
I'm probably giving these people too much attention, if they want to waste their efforts, it makes no overall difference but they're doing themselves a disservice by acting like butthurt children.
Why don't they fork Linux, remove all the blobs and call it the Hurd kernel?
Probably because like most of GNU, it's mismanagement is fanatical, snail-paced and a circle jerk.
Slashdot articles about Fedora don't get a lot of comments. I think the world has moved on, Fedora tries to explain itself as a nice "workstation distro" but what does that even mean?
Opensuse, Debian and Ubuntu both have different features that make them useful to different people. What does Fedora have?
I wonder how many active developers fedora has? Does the linux community give fedora undeserved attention because of its past glory? How much resources does redhat put into it? They've (rightly) said that they think "Desktop Linux" is a dead cause. Is fedora just a testing ground for RHEL, officialy no, but is that true?
It's all spread out so probably a processing plant for something with a high risk of exploding of burning.
If you look at the second image you'll notice there's a fair bit of greenery nearby and what appears to be residential blocks.
Why is the CS faculty full of these socially inept people who feel the need to obnoxiously prove how good they are to everyone? What is it about CS that attracts people who lack the ability to perceive social context?
I'm an elec. engineering student and I've taken some CS, business and science courses. Without the doubt the CS people are always snarky, pedantic, condescending and down right rude more than any other discipline by a long shot. They're incredibly annoying to work/study with.
Not to mention they're, well, downright runty. I originally thought its just the insular and challenging nature of CS but that's not true, engineering and the hard sciences are just and rigorous and insular as CS (if not more) and for the most part, they're fill of normal people.
What about a trillion and one dollar coin? How about a Trillion dollar bank note? How about making a pebble in the white house garden worth a trillion dollars?
The wording will be interesting.
Mitts strategy was to rely on moderate Republicans (who vote for the party and what it ideally stands for, even if it falls short) and appease the far right, in an effort to push him over the line. Essentially playing the numbers game (Hey, it made him rich!).
The Republicans didn't bother trying to engage broader America. This is now proven to be a loser move (and demographics are against this). So: Is the Republican party going to move towards the centre or go further right? A reagan-esque war is about to happen in the GOP.
So, has anyone ever tried to resolve an Adsense dispute with Google and not have it ignored or denied?
It's been interesting to see the public perception of Kim Dotcom morph from "evil bastard who got his comeuppance" to "cult hero and victim".
He would have had to be an idiot to an unbelievable level not to have known that his mega* services were for the most part being used for piracy. On the other hand the mega* could have been used for legitimate purposes as well and they did provided a mechanism for entities to declare infringement and have the offending files removed. It seems like he has following the law to the letter and nothing more (which is all we can ask).
The next question is: Did he do anything he shouldn't have? He provided storage for files in exchange for advertising. It's previously been ruled that a service provider is not responsible for the content users store, until they have been given proper notice of illegal activity in which case they must act appropriately.
However this pans out it's going to be precedent setting.
I'm getting mine on the 28th May (Australia). I ordered it on opening day.
Also,
What exactly does "non-profit" mean? Are they paying themselves? Does making enough money for R&D and staff count as profit? It a non-profit doesn't meet its objectives (i.e. the pi's get sold to slashdotters, and schools balk at it) what happens?
Why don't we see a lot more 'small businesses' doing this for the tax break? There's nothing stopping a non-profit from switching back to for-profit later, right?
In all fairness, the person who installed the malware might just be a guy off the streets who attended a rally. I hear there are occasionally thousands of them protesting.
.exe over skype. It's safer to assume he's not in the upper echelons of dissent.
The insination here is that the regime managed to infiltrate a fifth column styled group by getting a guy to accept an
Some of the protesters over at wall street might just have easily fell for such a ruse.
This isn't surprising. I really doubt the US gov is stupid enough to think that Iran wouldn't censor it. They likely built it so Iran can censor it. It's just another PR stunt by the US to further alienate Iran from the rest of the world.
It isn't a coincidence that Spies are outed in the US at very politically expedient times. The Russian spies were "found" during the peak of anti-missile talks , an Iranian spy was "found" recently just when Iran's Nuclear issues were reemerging. A Syrian spy was found recently as well. It seems clear that the US gov knows and tolerates these people, until they can score an advantage out of them. Monitoring known spies is better than kicking them out and giving foreign intelligence a chance to refine their skills.
It pains me to say this but out of OSX, Windows and Linux - Win7 has the most usable Desktop Interface. It has decent window management for multiple instances of a program, you can actually minimize windows and the start menu is the least annoying of the lot ( the search is near instantaneous).
KDE is perpetually almost ready. There is always some beyond annoying bug (In my case the window list randomly crashing) or some weird graphical glitch such as icons not showing up for a few seconds. The list of minor bugs goes on and on really...
I know i sound like a troll but i'm really not. I found myself enjoying desktop Linux less and less since GNOME3 and Unity, mere window management is a chore, i think most people are thinking the same way. Win7 is a pretty good, well thought out OS, a Linux user isn't going to get malware on the machine. UAC seems to have done it's job (Overall there are very few show stopping threats).
I constantly hear things like "I made do with xfce/lxde/fvwm" but the simple act of adding an entry to the panel for these environment involves editing a config file or digging through multiple layers of a configuration application. It's just not good enough for 2011, it's not as if i'm running ancient hardware. Using one of these DEs is compromise.
This requires money, long term thinking and wide consensus. These are things our politicians are not capable of even dreaming about. This is not even taking into account all the fiddly vested interests.
Lets not forget that deciding what to do with this worlds changing climate has stalled for the good part of 30 years.
Unless our governments are transformed to autocratic beurocracies we're simply doomed.
There's a reason why autocrats can build beautiful cities while democracies can't put forward the planning for a new building without decades worth of argy-bargy.
There exists such a project currently:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDisc
Couple this with the selection from OSS-WIN solves your dilemma significantly: http://osswin.sourceforge.net/
I WANT EXPONENTIAL GROWTH. NO MATTER WHAT.
IF THAT GRAPH DOESN'T REACH INFINTITY THEN YOUR DOING A BAD JOB.
Honestly the MS shareholders should shut their pieholes. They should be grateful the stock hasn't dipped and dived like the rest of them.
This is a ploy by Mozilla to bankrupt MS one cake at a time.
Canonical will likely keep the image _as close_ to CD size as possible.
In order to attract new home users they have got to be as small as the can. ~750meg is movie size, 1.5gig isn't and a lot of people will balk at it.
Ubuntu should look at some sort of base install that will get the user booting and and into browser. The less critical apps can be downloaded in the background.
This is definitely a pivot in history, we'll look back on this time and mark it as the beginning of a new world perspective.
The amount that is being withheld is US60 million.
Another world powers (or a coalition of like-minded states) could easily fill the gap and buy more influence.
China who wants to tote itself as a Modern country might quite like the PR.
One interesting vote is going to be the one that aims to recognize Palestine as a state. I would love to see the US withhold funding to the UNSC!! Imagine the glee on the faces of the Chinese and Russians when they realise that the US is diminishing its influence, just so Israel can continue to build illegal towns and dawdle on peace talks. I'm sure China and Russia would gladly pay the funding void!
It also seems a little more stable on Linux than Firefox.
I'm not a big extension user. flashblock and a basic adblock is all i install.
I haven't noticed a speed difference between the two.
They'll never change anyone's behavior. The genie is out of the bottle, people have no qualms about sharing things.
All they're doing is challenging devs to create better p2p mechanisms.