My wife had no problem at all switching from Windows 98 to Fedora Core 2. I actually did the install because I have very STRONG opinions on the layout of filesystems, but she could have done it herself using "auto-partition." Post-installation, the only thing that HAD to be changed was switching the desktop from GNOME to KDE, although I did install Firefox and Thunderbird for her. Initially, I did ALL the adminning on her box because she just wanted to USE it.
She has now gotten familiar enough with Linux that I am starting to give her some admin rights via "sudo" but otherwise the box "just works" for her at the level of use she wants.
RTFA. It said no encrypted files were found on the computer. He was convicted on the testimony of a 9 year old "model" he had photograpehed and a repeated history of web searches for "Lolitas."
This ruling is really really evil. It could be extended to "Having nmap and ethereal installed on your computer is evidence of criminal intent of to crack systems."
Beyond that, Windows may be easy for us geeks to use but it's NOT for the end users. You show me ONE, *one* home user that hasn't managed to fuck up their computer just by using it (not deleting stuff) then I'd like to meet this person. Seriously - all you do is browse and you get spyware, EVEN IF YOU NEVER CLICK YES to a dialogue. There's been so many automatic-install vulnerabilities in IE that it takes zero user interaction to get infected with the shit.
Just like any other "computer guy" out there I'm forced to fix friend and family computers all the time. Sometimes it takes hours to clean up someone's machine after spyware has ravaged it, and it's never been updated.
This is a serious situation and a major imposition on geekdom... so I put a price on baling out relatives' trashed machines...
I tell 'em "I'll fix it by installing Linux and I'll admin the box remotely from my home office. You do NOT get root access and you cannot install anything anywhere except in your $HOME. Your other option is to pay a shop to fix the problem you caused because I don't do Windows."
Works every time... I do zero support for family except on my wife's Linux box. It's nice to live in a Microsoft-free household without having to pay for Apple hardware.
Here is where you miss the point of "out of the box". When your average idiot buys a computer from Dell, Gateway, HP, $RESELLER. He gets it home, opens the box, plugs it in, and lo and behold it WORKS. That is what the phrase means. All Joe Luser knows about Windows is that he buys a computer and turns it on and it WORKS.
Currently, you cannot do this with Linux. Mainly because almost no one sells preconfigured Linux boxes that you can just plug in and work. Lindows barely scratches the surface.
I beg to differ. I bought my wife a "house-brand" Athlon box from Fry's for $199.99. It had Lindows Linspire 4.5 preinstalled on it. I plugged it up, ran a long-ass CAT-5 cable from my office to hers, turned it on and it booted right into the KDE desktop and grabbed an IP from my router's DHCP server with no problems.
"Straight out of the box" that's about the best You can hope for with Windows unless you are buying a box with half of BestBuy's software department bundled as demos versions by the manufacturer.
I must admit that I thought Lindows's $4.95 a month for "Click-and-Run" was kinda lame, so I pointed the apt configuration at the canonical Debian sources... which promptly trashed the Lindows installation.
I told my wife, "I'll either run the 'restore' disk or install Fedora, your call." She asked what the difference was and I explained "You can have Lindows with click-and-run for $60/year or you can have everything you would get from click-and-run free with Fedora." She chose Fedora and has never looked back. I have installed exactly ONE program that is not distributed by the Fedora project on her machine, although I'm thinking about adding gxine have a better media player than the crippled version of xmms included with the distro.
I've even noticed her beginning to make catty remarks about "being forced" to use Windows at work... my GOD, I've created a Penguinista!
Quoth the poster: I am slightly older than you and live in Europe, yet I knew what the TSA was, and I knew it before this story, just from the regular news. This suggests one of two things:
1. The news in the United States is so far gone down the drain that they don't cover important current events anymore. And I would say that the establishment of the TSA and the measures to give it teeth in the past 3 years were current events, and given their impact on anyone ever wanting to travel by air (which I am told is a substantial part of the US population), I'd classify it as important current events as well.
2. You are either too lazy or dumb to follow the news at all.
I am ashamed to have to admit it, but here in the US the answers to your suggestions are:
1. Yes it has, and
2. I don't know about your parent poster, but the average "voter" in America is just that lazy and dumb. They respond to "sound bites" and the directions of the leader of whatever subgroup of society they fancy themselves to be a part.
Sad, but true... and to think it was only about 40 years ago that John F. Kennedy said, "The ignorance of one voter anywhere threatens the freedom of all voters everywhere."
... and it only seems to happen in places like the Ukraine, Kyrzygstan, and Lebanon, where the people are tired of their corrupt politicians and petty dictators,[.]... under the sponsorship of US-gov't-backed "NGO"'s...
Quoth the poster ... the world population ripping itself apart for a few years, and then trying to learn to survive without all the modern conveniences. I think the anarchy wouldn't last long before people organized again[,]
and given the human experience, I'd bet that the person with the biggest gun and the least hesitation about using it, will wind up as a "monarch" whose power is absolute. Would that were otherwise, but it just ain't so.
In general I agree with you rather well-written discourse on the importance of a dialog on issues of public morality in society, but must disagree with your dismissal of the GP poster's point.
The problem we are faced with is that we have a government in place that is using "moral issues" as a smokescreen while it actively works at dismantling free speech, freedom of association, any and all social safety net programs and the constitutionally mandated system of checks and balances and separation of powers. All in the name of more tax breaks for the wealthiest 0.8% of income earners and at the expense of the other 99.2%.
Poverty, the presumption of innocence, freedom from cruel and unusual punishments, torture, freedom of conscience and social justice are also "moral issues," but I don't see that government breaking its arm patting itself on the back over their stands on these issues. The "moral issues" debate in this country is purely a matter of an excessive neo-conservative President and his cronies in Congress pandering to a group of wealthy fundametalists (and worse!) and their flocks of obedient followers in order to cement their grip on political power. There is no serious interest in the "morality" of the President's stand on the issues he is promoting, it's ALL about keeping the Radical Religious (dare I say "theocratic") Right-wing "core-of-the-power-base" group happy.
Solaris really does scale VERY well... far better than any Linux distro other than SGIs does (scalability limit for a single-system image is 2048 processors), but Linux scales better than Windows does and Irix scales better than ANY of them (scalability limit is... how much a/c and power did you say you can you afford). The Altix boxes from SGI are indeed impressive, but until you've seen something like a BIG Origin 3000 you haven't seen a supercomputer...
And regardless, the vast majority of Windows apps DO look the same and use native widgets, have buttons in the same place, have the same menu items, use the same keyboard shortcuts, and can copy-paste damn near anything between each other.
I have NO idea what the hell you're talking about. Copy-paste between damn near ANYTHING? How about copy-paste between a text editor using Motif widgets on my Ultra10 running Solaris/GNOME 2.0 at work and a Word Preocessor using gtk+ widgets (openoffice.org) running on my Linux/KDE box at home... 18 miles away... over a connection that is encrypted with a 1024-bit key. You want to show me how well Windows interoperates again? How everything is standardized under Windows? Bull!
Actually, this is very close to the default theme that Sun has shipped with GNOME ever since they beta-released GNOME 2 for Solaris about a year and a half ago.
Quoth the poster: Bout time? Sorry, but you're still waiting unless you've got the $$ and contacts to get one of these prototype vehicles. Hey, it's cheaper to get a ride up to the space station and visit the fuel cells up there.
Check out the cost of H2 conversion kits for gasoline engines. They're not free, but they are quite reasonably priced if you want to opt-out of contributing to global warming.
Odd you should mention that. Later analysis of the Hindenburg disaster has indicated that the initial contributor to the fire was the cellulose nitrate dope used to stiffen the canvas covering the fuselage of the airship, not the hydrogen lifting gas. By the time the hydrogen bags ruptured and the hydrogen caught fire, the Hindenburg was already effectively destroyed.
It is well-documented that animals are more sensitive to precursor events related to seismic activity than people in general are. However, every time it has been studied, there was sufficient evidence of low level physical changes in the environment to rule out any 'psi' theories.
The specific phenomenon that triggers this behavior is less well known and probably varies from species to species.
That some people would feel "uneasy" shortly before a natural disaster is the phenomenon that requires the "in general" in my first sentence. Again, no objective evidence of psychic or paranormal activity has been documented to date.
Quoth the poster: If anyone's wondering, the majority of my linux users are your typical computer user, and are happy with linux.
Exactly... if you can get them to try it thinking they are getting a BIG benefit, like your promise of free support, they'll be openminded about it and find out it ain't all that hard and it works BETTER!
My experience is just the opposite. 99.995% of home users just want to browse the net, read e-mail, write a letter, d/l pics from their digicam and play a game or three. If they're into puzzle-type games rather than the latest and greatest FPS/RTS/MMOG, then Linux is fine for them, and I can admin it it for them remotely. yes, even from Starbucks using my Zaurus!
The government can't say boo about it, but you had better read the definition of "Income" in the Internal Revenue Code before you decide you don't need to declare the value of goods acquired through barter as income.
Hell, you even have to declare the proceeds of illegal activities as income unless you want to go the way of Al Capone. As a federal judge told a madame just before he sentenced her to federal prison for income tax evasion, "Madame, the wages of sin are, indeed, taxable."
I agree on the rates... when I was doing solo network consulting I charged $100.00/hour, flat. I also required that the client purchase any hardware/materials I might need so that I didn't have to do the sales tax thing. I would, if asked, give them vendor recommendations where I knew they would get a reasonable price, but I made it clear that I was not a vendor and I had no interest in WHERE they bought the stuff.
Wear a shirt and possibly even a tie.
I agree with the sibling poster. I would always wear slacks and an open collar shirt... polo in the summer. You can even adopt a beard if you want to, after all, it's part of the geek image. Above all, be neat, clean and professional. Think Sid Dabster of Userfriendly or Nick from GPF, NOT Dexter or Fooker. They may be alpha geeks but a professional alpha geek is a different breed entirely.
no money, however, I am a full-time n*x admin and I tell them that if they want me to support their computer, they have to make it easy for me... I tell them I will install and configure Fedora on their computer and I will admin the box for them remotely, including setting up any substitute applications that they have to use to provide the functionality they need. I tell them I have not used or supported Windows in almost four years and that I do not think it is reasonable for them to want me to learn a system I'm not familiar with just so they don't have to pay for Best Buy to fix their problems.
Funny thing is, I've only had one taker so far... my wife... and she has become a militant penguinista... I don't think I could PAY her to go back to Windows.
Oh... you mean the patented encryption technique that RSA stole from the US Government and then monopolized for 17 years? I hardly consider that a boon to the software industry. I consider it a classic case of theft from the taxpayers of the US that they (RSA) did the research with gov't funding then patented the results so that nobody but them could use it. I notice that US gov't research contracts are MUCH more carefully worded regarding assignment of patents nowadays...
This is true, but I do not believe SCOX to be a viable candidate for Chapter 11. One of the most important requirements of a Chapter 11 plan is that the unsecured creditors must receive more under the plan than they would in a Chapter 7 (liquidation) bankruptcy. Since SCOX has nothing (Unixware?... oh come now) that will generate enough of a revenue stream to provide this $ > 0 amont of money I seriously doubt they could get a Chapter 11 plan approved by the court.
There is a sort of hybrid Chapter 11 bankruptcy option available in which the court appoints a trustee to oversee a prolonged liquidation of the company's assets, rather than seel them off at "fire sale" prices, but I seriously doubt that SCOX has sufficient salable assets to justify the trustee's and lawyers' fees that a Chapter 11 liquidation invariably generates and still produce an increased payout to the unsecureds.
Quoth the poster: "Work on improving the economy and hunger will take care of itself."
Thank you President Reagan.
"As for Brazil, they really, really need to work on establishing a viable middle class."
Like the one that the current US administration is industriously seeking to destroy?
"The situation right now looks like a validation of marxist idiot-ology."
Ooooo -- we've been listening to Rush and watching O'Reilly recently, have we?
Fact... the US spends $400 billion a year on the Department of Defense... more than 10 times what our largest-spending potential adversary spends... $20 billion (just 5% of the Defense budget) would eliminate hunger in the world. $10 billion (that's 2.5%) would rebuild all the substandard schools in the US. Watch this for the details.
Of course solving social problems doesn't QUITE give the same testosterone rush as wearing flight suits on carrier flight decks, so it isn't going to fly with this empero^H^H^H^H^H^Hpresident.
Relax, take a deep breath... Fox was merely reporting what was said at the conference not extolling the virtue of FOSS... and DEFINITELY not endorsing the things said at the conference. If you will note, they did say "Activists at a leftist gathering... " in their opening blurb.
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My wife had no problem at all switching from Windows 98 to Fedora Core 2. I actually did the install because I have very STRONG opinions on the layout of filesystems, but she could have done it herself using "auto-partition." Post-installation, the only thing that HAD to be changed was switching the desktop from GNOME to KDE, although I did install Firefox and Thunderbird for her. Initially, I did ALL the adminning on her box because she just wanted to USE it.
She has now gotten familiar enough with Linux that I am starting to give her some admin rights via "sudo" but otherwise the box "just works" for her at the level of use she wants.
Try again to tell me it's not "Grandma friendly."
RTFA. It said no encrypted files were found on the computer. He was convicted on the testimony of a 9 year old "model" he had photograpehed and a repeated history of web searches for "Lolitas."
This ruling is really really evil. It could be extended to "Having nmap and ethereal installed on your computer is evidence of criminal intent of to crack systems."
There are more places in Houston with duplex Starbucks than just the River Oaks Center ...
This is a serious situation and a major imposition on geekdom
I tell 'em "I'll fix it by installing Linux and I'll admin the box remotely from my home office. You do NOT get root access and you cannot install anything anywhere except in your $HOME. Your other option is to pay a shop to fix the problem you caused because I don't do Windows."
Works every time
I beg to differ. I bought my wife a "house-brand" Athlon box from Fry's for $199.99. It had Lindows Linspire 4.5 preinstalled on it. I plugged it up, ran a long-ass CAT-5 cable from my office to hers, turned it on and it booted right into the KDE desktop and grabbed an IP from my router's DHCP server with no problems.
"Straight out of the box" that's about the best You can hope for with Windows unless you are buying a box with half of BestBuy's software department bundled as demos versions by the manufacturer.
I must admit that I thought Lindows's $4.95 a month for "Click-and-Run" was kinda lame, so I pointed the apt configuration at the canonical Debian sources
I told my wife, "I'll either run the 'restore' disk or install Fedora, your call." She asked what the difference was and I explained "You can have Lindows with click-and-run for $60/year or you can have everything you would get from click-and-run free with Fedora." She chose Fedora and has never looked back. I have installed exactly ONE program that is not distributed by the Fedora project on her machine, although I'm thinking about adding gxine have a better media player than the crippled version of xmms included with the distro.
I've even noticed her beginning to make catty remarks about "being forced" to use Windows at work
Quoth the poster:
... and to think it was only about 40 years ago that John F. Kennedy said, "The ignorance of one voter anywhere threatens the freedom of all voters everywhere."
I am slightly older than you and live in Europe, yet I knew what the TSA was, and I knew it before this story, just from the regular news. This suggests one of two things:
1. The news in the United States is so far gone down the drain that they don't cover important current events anymore. And I would say that the establishment of the TSA and the measures to give it teeth in the past 3 years were current events, and given their impact on anyone ever wanting to travel by air (which I am told is a substantial part of the US population), I'd classify it as important current events as well.
2. You are either too lazy or dumb to follow the news at all.
I am ashamed to have to admit it, but here in the US the answers to your suggestions are:
1. Yes it has, and
2. I don't know about your parent poster, but the average "voter" in America is just that lazy and dumb. They respond to "sound bites" and the directions of the leader of whatever subgroup of society they fancy themselves to be a part.
Sad, but true
Quoth the poster
... the world population ripping itself apart for a few years, and then trying to learn to survive without all the modern conveniences. I think the anarchy wouldn't last long before people organized again[,]
and given the human experience, I'd bet that the person with the biggest gun and the least hesitation about using it, will wind up as a "monarch" whose power is absolute. Would that were otherwise, but it just ain't so.
In general I agree with you rather well-written discourse on the importance of a dialog on issues of public morality in society, but must disagree with your dismissal of the GP poster's point.
The problem we are faced with is that we have a government in place that is using "moral issues" as a smokescreen while it actively works at dismantling free speech, freedom of association, any and all social safety net programs and the constitutionally mandated system of checks and balances and separation of powers. All in the name of more tax breaks for the wealthiest 0.8% of income earners and at the expense of the other 99.2%.
Poverty, the presumption of innocence, freedom from cruel and unusual punishments, torture, freedom of conscience and social justice are also "moral issues," but I don't see that government breaking its arm patting itself on the back over their stands on these issues. The "moral issues" debate in this country is purely a matter of an excessive neo-conservative President and his cronies in Congress pandering to a group of wealthy fundametalists (and worse!) and their flocks of obedient followers in order to cement their grip on political power. There is no serious interest in the "morality" of the President's stand on the issues he is promoting, it's ALL about keeping the Radical Religious (dare I say "theocratic") Right-wing "core-of-the-power-base" group happy.
Peace,
ninewands
Somebody mod parent up!
... far better than any Linux distro other than SGIs does (scalability limit for a single-system image is 2048 processors), but Linux scales better than Windows does and Irix scales better than ANY of them (scalability limit is ... how much a/c and power did you say you can you afford). The Altix boxes from SGI are indeed impressive, but until you've seen something like a BIG Origin 3000 you haven't seen a supercomputer ...
Solaris really does scale VERY well
And regardless, the vast majority of Windows apps DO look the same and use native widgets, have buttons in the same place, have the same menu items, use the same keyboard shortcuts, and can copy-paste damn near anything between each other.
... 18 miles away ... over a connection that is encrypted with a 1024-bit key. You want to show me how well Windows interoperates again? How everything is standardized under Windows? Bull!
I have NO idea what the hell you're talking about. Copy-paste between damn near ANYTHING? How about copy-paste between a text editor using Motif widgets on my Ultra10 running Solaris/GNOME 2.0 at work and a Word Preocessor using gtk+ widgets (openoffice.org) running on my Linux/KDE box at home
Actually, this is very close to the default theme that Sun has shipped with GNOME ever since they beta-released GNOME 2 for Solaris about a year and a half ago.
Quoth the poster:
Bout time? Sorry, but you're still waiting unless you've got the $$ and contacts to get one of these prototype vehicles. Hey, it's cheaper to get a ride up to the space station and visit the fuel cells up there.
Check out the cost of H2 conversion kits for gasoline engines. They're not free, but they are quite reasonably priced if you want to opt-out of contributing to global warming.
Odd you should mention that. Later analysis of the Hindenburg disaster has indicated that the initial contributor to the fire was the cellulose nitrate dope used to stiffen the canvas covering the fuselage of the airship, not the hydrogen lifting gas. By the time the hydrogen bags ruptured and the hydrogen caught fire, the Hindenburg was already effectively destroyed.
It is well-documented that animals are more sensitive to precursor events related to seismic activity than people in general are. However, every time it has been studied, there was sufficient evidence of low level physical changes in the environment to rule out any 'psi' theories.
The specific phenomenon that triggers this behavior is less well known and probably varies from species to species.
That some people would feel "uneasy" shortly before a natural disaster is the phenomenon that requires the "in general" in my first sentence. Again, no objective evidence of psychic or paranormal activity has been documented to date.
Quoth the poster:
... if you can get them to try it thinking they are getting a BIG benefit, like your promise of free support, they'll be openminded about it and find out it ain't all that hard and it works BETTER!
If anyone's wondering, the majority of my linux users are your typical computer user, and are happy with linux.
Exactly
My experience is just the opposite. 99.995% of home users just want to browse the net, read e-mail, write a letter, d/l pics from their digicam and play a game or three. If they're into puzzle-type games rather than the latest and greatest FPS/RTS/MMOG, then Linux is fine for them, and I can admin it it for them remotely. yes, even from Starbucks using my Zaurus!
The government can't say boo about it, but you had better read the definition of "Income" in the Internal Revenue Code before you decide you don't need to declare the value of goods acquired through barter as income.
Hell, you even have to declare the proceeds of illegal activities as income unless you want to go the way of Al Capone. As a federal judge told a madame just before he sentenced her to federal prison for income tax evasion, "Madame, the wages of sin are, indeed, taxable."
I agree on the rates ... when I was doing solo network consulting I charged $100.00/hour, flat. I also required that the client purchase any hardware/materials I might need so that I didn't have to do the sales tax thing. I would, if asked, give them vendor recommendations where I knew they would get a reasonable price, but I made it clear that I was not a vendor and I had no interest in WHERE they bought the stuff.
... polo in the summer. You can even adopt a beard if you want to, after all, it's part of the geek image. Above all, be neat, clean and professional. Think Sid Dabster of Userfriendly or Nick from GPF, NOT Dexter or Fooker. They may be alpha geeks but a professional alpha geek is a different breed entirely.
Wear a shirt and possibly even a tie.
I agree with the sibling poster. I would always wear slacks and an open collar shirt
no money, however, I am a full-time n*x admin and I tell them that if they want me to support their computer, they have to make it easy for me ... I tell them I will install and configure Fedora on their computer and I will admin the box for them remotely, including setting up any substitute applications that they have to use to provide the functionality they need. I tell them I have not used or supported Windows in almost four years and that I do not think it is reasonable for them to want me to learn a system I'm not familiar with just so they don't have to pay for Best Buy to fix their problems.
... my wife ... and she has become a militant penguinista ... I don't think I could PAY her to go back to Windows.
Funny thing is, I've only had one taker so far
Oh ... you mean the patented encryption technique that RSA stole from the US Government and then monopolized for 17 years? I hardly consider that a boon to the software industry. I consider it a classic case of theft from the taxpayers of the US that they (RSA) did the research with gov't funding then patented the results so that nobody but them could use it. I notice that US gov't research contracts are MUCH more carefully worded regarding assignment of patents nowadays ...
This is true, but I do not believe SCOX to be a viable candidate for Chapter 11. One of the most important requirements of a Chapter 11 plan is that the unsecured creditors must receive more under the plan than they would in a Chapter 7 (liquidation) bankruptcy. Since SCOX has nothing (Unixware? ... oh come now) that will generate enough of a revenue stream to provide this $ > 0 amont of money I seriously doubt they could get a Chapter 11 plan approved by the court.
There is a sort of hybrid Chapter 11 bankruptcy option available in which the court appoints a trustee to oversee a prolonged liquidation of the company's assets, rather than seel them off at "fire sale" prices, but I seriously doubt that SCOX has sufficient salable assets to justify the trustee's and lawyers' fees that a Chapter 11 liquidation invariably generates and still produce an increased payout to the unsecureds.
Quoth the poster:
... the US spends $400 billion a year on the Department of Defense ... more than 10 times what our largest-spending potential adversary spends ... $20 billion (just 5% of the Defense budget) would eliminate hunger in the world. $10 billion (that's 2.5%) would rebuild all the substandard schools in the US. Watch this for the details.
"Work on improving the economy and hunger will take care of itself."
Thank you President Reagan.
"As for Brazil, they really, really need to work on establishing a viable middle class."
Like the one that the current US administration is industriously seeking to destroy?
"The situation right now looks like a validation of marxist idiot-ology."
Ooooo -- we've been listening to Rush and watching O'Reilly recently, have we?
Fact
Of course solving social problems doesn't QUITE give the same testosterone rush as wearing flight suits on carrier flight decks, so it isn't going to fly with this empero^H^H^H^H^H^Hpresident.
Relax, take a deep breath ... Fox was merely reporting what was said at the conference not extolling the virtue of FOSS ... and DEFINITELY not endorsing the things said at the conference. If you will note, they did say "Activists at a leftist gathering ... " in their opening blurb.
... all is normal.
Breathe deeply, calm down
go see your corporate counsel (lawyer) Right Fscking Now!