Maybe for an Undergraduate. Graduate students very very rarely pay a dime in money for school in the US.
In science and engineering. In liberal arts, no. Med school-- no. Law school-- no. I think that this discussion is nearly a waste of time, most of us Slashdotters are scientists and engineers... that means we're stuck in group think and don't have a broader perspective from posters in other fields.
And even if you receive a stipend as I did, you are still paying... the difference between stipend and the salary you would have received had you gone straight for a job when you received your Bachelor's degree. Contrary to popular opinion, you never make up that deficit.
If anything, I think this country graduates too few engineers and scientists.
I disagree, I think that it overproduces them.
And the issue is with engineers, not engineers and scientists. Engineers typically have a B.S. or a Master's at most, only a minority have a PhD, and it's frowned upon. Compare that with medicine, law and science-- in those disciples you need more education, and you pay more. Since engineers get high paying jobs for less time spent in school, raising the rates for engineering degrees is just leveling the playing field.
Now out of all of the academic arenas, engineering is one of the worst offenders for over enrollment. Many schools balance that out by having enrollment in their college only after evaluation of introductory courses, many have weeder courses where they dump too much work on the lap to get rid of students who don't want to loose sleep trying to get all of their homework done. It's cruel to do that to students and the sheer number of students depress the quality of education and puts a strain on the faculty and grad students teaching.
By raising the price you will drive down the number of students, while being able to afford to hire more lecturers, faculty, increase the graduate program and then the strain is diminished. What then? Better student to teacher ratio means better quality of education, and it also means not having to weed students out.
We need more people who spend years in college learning real world skills, how to produce value. I am not dissing humanities and social sciences here. Yes you are. The benefit of a liberal arts education is a concentration on (a) critical reasoning skills, (b) writing skills and (c) effective communication. These are vital real world skills that are important in the business world, which is why many of these people who major in those areas end up in leadership positions, instead of becoming engineers and code monkeys. There is a balance between the different fields and what is needed by companies and governments. What you said smacks of tunnel vision.
J.R.R. Tolkien more or less invented high fantasy as we know it, bringing the folk tales and fables of Europe into the realm of literature. Clever, high fantasy is the silly epic struggle between good and evil. It would be obvious that the entire Fantasy genre wasn't created by Tolkien. But you're mistaken anyway, Milton's Paradise Lost also told the epic struggle, which he did by bringing in tales and elements from many cultures.
"The story is innovative in that it attempts to reconcile the Christian and Pagan traditions: like Shakespeare, Milton found Christian theology lacking, requiring something more. He tries to incorporate Paganism, classical Greek references and Christianity within the story. He greatly admired the classics but intended this work to surpass them."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise_Lost
But Tolkien's work was groundbreaking, in many ways the first of its kind. Now it should be clear that is obviously wrong.
Rowling caught the wave of popular opinion and surfed it to fame and riches; her books do not represent anything out of the ordinary I feel that exactly the same thing can be said about Tolkien. The key to their success is an unusual amount of popularity. I'm amazed how many geeks get excited by the unnecessary detail Tolkien poured into his stories. He fails to actually use most of it in the story, only using it to flesh out the world, and elements of them contradict each other in later works (compare elements of the mythos from Hobbit to Silmarillion). He fails to actually develop his characters. Rowling's world might not have the complexity of Tolkien, but at least some of her characters are dynamic. Not that it matters, modern fantasy writers have managed to write series with more complex worlds, backstories, plotlines, and complex, realistic characters.
Tolkien should be remembered in that he restarted a trend in escapist literature not altogether different from the Gothic movement in the late 18th century (Mysteries of Udolpho etc). Creating modern fantasy is not the same as creating fantasy, so let's not deify him. You might as well say that Lucas invented scifi for bringing Buck Rodgers style space opera back to the public. It's the same thing.
What's really funny is that I read the article for the bad spelling and poor grammar and I was surprised to see none. Article's writing was stuccato. It lacked articles.
So what was wrong it then?
The last paragraphs. Entirely composed of sentence fragments. Random words. Sucked.
In other words, it was alot like a James Ellroy novel!
Okay, seriously now, the excitement and exaggerated claims on that article combined with the lack of focus and structure lead me to believe that the article was written by a high school student. Well that's the wonderful nature of the net. Everyone has their voice and we have to filter out these type of stories from interesting and well written stories. oh wait I thought that was what Slashdot was for...
People predicted that offices would go paperless, and that cars would fly too. But the reality is, if you don't need the portability, why spend the extra money to get a laptop? Plus desktops will always have greater power, easier upgrades, standard hardware, and more perhiperals. Oh yeah and it was so funny when everyone thought that fax machines would go the way of the dodo, and HP stopped making them for awhile... you're so right, this is so the same thing. It's not a matter of competition, but instead a matter of people figuring out the right niche for the technology.
In TFA, they point out that fewer and fewer consumers mind the $100-$200 premium for a laptop with comparable specs. Agreed but that's not because people are not minding as much now, but rather they are not minding as much now *because that price gap used to be alot higher than $200.*
People who upgrade critical components like motherboards, cpus, and graphics cards are already very much in the "die-hard" category. Normal consumers never upgrade those things except by replacing the machine. For almost everything else, USB and Firewire suffice. I strongly disagree, there is a reason why you can get video cards in every computer and office store you walk into. And that's just one case. Anybody that wants to play computer games will want a video card, many that listen to music extensively on their pc want a sound card, etc etc these all fall into the realm of normal consumers in my book. What is true is that many people don't necessary want to dyi it for fear of breaking something, so they'll have a shop install the new hardware.
It seems to me that the only people who will stay firmly in the "desktop" category are people who by definition don't need the mobility. They are the people running computer labs, servers, and office computing systems. I expect even the high-end professional users to migrate to laptops except when laptops don't offer enough raw performance at any cost. Um you forgot home. The thing about having a computer at home is that it doesn't need to be mobile. I agree with what you said, but your emphasis implicitly implies that almost everyone needs mobility. Why exactly? I perfectly understand the person that works at both home and work, and I also understand the person that travels frequently, but what about everyone else? And the people I know that have a laptop tend to also have either a desktop at work or at home anyway!
The desktop fills a niche that the laptop can't (and vica versa). In addition to what was said in previous posts, spending extra $$$ for a better keyboard, mouse and monitor to make your laptop a home solution is more expensive than buying a desktop instead. And as was said, it's cheaper to do partial upgrades to a pc than to replace it every other year, and this is something that has been widely embraced by the market! It's easier to do that on a desktop than it is on a notebook.
As far as physics research goes, Clinton's cancellation of the already partially-constructed SSC easily set the entire field of particle physics back by 20 or so years. The LHC, which is being constructed in Europe as its "substitute" isn't even remotely as big or powerful as the SSC was originally planned to be.
Add to that NASA having to cancel science projects to divert funding to going to the moon and Mars and you see that funding for alot of the big physics projects have been cut back drastically.
I agree that we shouldn't assign all the blame to Clinton. I think that this is really a trend that started with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The DOE and DOD invested alot in scientific research during the Cold War to compete against the Soviet Union. When it collapsed the need to stay competitive in science, technology and engineering became less important and gradually the government and the American people became less interested in spending so much money on science.
Now I have real problems with the causality violation part of his idea, but getting a spontaneous change in interference pattern would be really very interesting indeed.
Yup I think that the interpretation is highly problematic but the experiment itself could be interesting. I suspect though that it will turn out like similar experiments, but it's still worth doing.
What I don't like is how Cramer advertises himself to the media, and neglects to even cite anything involving current literature in the topic. If you look at http://faculty.washington.edu/jcramer/Nonlocal_200 7.pdf or his other announcements you'll see how carefully he is to only cite older papers, and very few as if the field has been hardly touched. And he whined about not having the funding to do it-- did he even try to apply for a grant from NSF for that research? I think that Cramer has carefully created the perception that that the MAN is keeping him down.
His advertisement on his research idea (actually not his but Dopfer, but he properly credits this) and his high profile status from magazines and novels shows that he operates as a media whore, which is not how the majority of physicists conduct research. He better shape up now, if he wants this to be serious his experiment needs to be done by the book now and not as a media stunt. The way that he conducts himself from now on will reveal his true intentions.
I thought you were looking at consumers? 99% of them don't use specialist apps. And 58% of statistics are made up. The people that I know that aren't crazed computer using slashdotters are not Grandmas. You might be surprised with how many oddball apps the everyday user might have installed on their pc, and no I'm not talking about viruses. The fundamental difference between these people and the computer loving slashdotter type is not a difference of interest, but rather outlook. The majority of pc users see the computer as a tool, the uber geek sees it as an end onto it's self. That's not to say that both are not interested in using their computer, and what they can do on it. I am not satisfied with the veracity of these type of sweeping generalizations.
Perhaps the author of the article should instead complain about the way all these people make proprietary file formats and wonder how we got into the awful situation where we have to pay everybody and their brother in order to do a simple thing like listen to music on your computer. It seems to me that that's where the problem is. Patents and ridiculous companies who want their cake and eat it too by having their format be 'standard' while they still own all the rights to use it.
I agree with this, but I'll take a more moderate tone on this issue. If you want to legally play, i.e. decode mp3s, you have to either pay the royalty fee or use a software program that already has. Thinking of it that way, TFA is put out that FOSS programs haven't payed the fee on their behalf so that the Linux end user can legally listen to mp3s. And it's the same thing with playing dvds and some of the other dirty formats. You can actually pay for the decoders, and pay for LinDVD and then legally watch and listen to all those formats. Or on Windows you can use free as in beer software that has payed the royalties. Either way, somewhere along the way someone has to pay the royalties for you to legally play those formats.
If anyone should be blamed for this middleman grift, it should be the big companies that standardized proprietary formats instead of adopting free open source ones. Certainly with a cd collection, I can choose my format of choice for compression on the pc, but the record labels chose mp3 for online selling, and the mpaa chose to encrypt their dvds. We didn't have a choice in it, FSF didn't have a choice in it, and blaming Linux for lack of convenience is foolish, and smacks of demanding a free lunch. Steal it or pay for it, but don't whine about it.
Do you consider reading to be a self-evident good? If so, why? It's a largish value judgment... Given that reading warnings like "bridge is out" and "rat poison: do not ingest" can save your life, well yeah I have to say that I do indeed consider the value of reading to be self-evident!
How did we end up with pretentious ramblings about the greatness of Lord of the Rings? That's a separate issue, and imo only digs yourself in deeper since there are just as many if not more people that are unimpressed with Hobbits and travelogues as there are people that are unimpressed with conspiracies and UFOs.
I don't buy either side. I've seen every episode of X-Files two or three times, I consider myself a fan. I also happen to like both the main plot arc episodes and the one offs. The main plot arc episodes were a small minority of the total episodes. If you *only* liked those, and thought the rest were weak then you obviously only superficially enjoyed the show and thus are not a "hardcore fan." And on the flip side alot of people who didn't like the main plot arc also had trouble following it and were under the impression that it never ended. And so they obviously didn't fully appreciate the show.
Newsflash: all of the mystery surrounding the conspiracy was fully revealed by the mid to mid-late part of the series and most of the characters in the conspiracy were killed (in just one episode, how neat was that?). Why are we arguing for a conspiracy based movie when it's done?? When they tried to recreate the feeling with the supersoldier stuff (remember in the days when Duchovny had already left the show) it was just a distant echo of the older plot.
X-Files came during a good time, it was on when the UFO craze was at it's peak. The premise of the show is not as interesting to the general public now. And besides that conspiracy type of plots are interesting in a tv show because they have the time frame to properly develop it. It doesn't work in a standalone movie.
Re:Microsoft is thrilled by this news
on
Zune DRM Cracked
·
· Score: 3, Funny
First of all, it seems to me that...wait, is that a NewScientist link?
Sorry, nevermind. Exactly! Sorry to be redundant, but apparently at least some Slashdotters don't realize this-- New Scientist is not a credible reference for articles. It is filled with crackpot speculation, because it looks sexy and it sells. Don't trust them as a source of credible information.
They also don't give a good picture at all of what is important and interesting in physics. If you want to know that you're much better off directly reading the blogs of respected physicists. I rec http://cosmicvariance.com/ in particular.
And if you just look at the stats in TFA-- FF users are less than 1/2 IE users. That's no great victory, you might as well say well at least we have more than 10% are FF users. lol Some people are too quick to celebrate news that doesn't even seem noteworthy to me.
To me, the appeal of a movie is seeing it, not seeing it over and over again. If a friend has a movie I'd like to watch, I'll borrow the DVD, watch the movie and give it back to him. Even the movies I like, I can't see myself copying... I agree, most movies I only want to see once. Combine that with how affordable Netflix is, those rental boxes in the grocery stores, the instore Hollywood and Blockbuster plans etc etc... rental prices are usually $1-1.50 per dvd no matter where you go. So why copy a dvd when it's so cheap to see it these days? And if you do want to watch a movie over and over again, most dvds you can buy used for $4-10 off of Amazon, if you really want to own it.
Beginner users don't use RAID, thanks for playing.;) I think that this confusion is over context-- beginner in what? A Linux newbie is not the same as a computer newbie. Someone could have experience with RAIDs and configuring and using them under Windows, but no experience using them under Linux.
Yo I was the AC that posted about evdev being broken, and then later said that I switched to Slackware. I'm not the Mac user AC. Guess it got me off my lazy butt to login and post, maybe I'll just do that from now on instead of posting as AC.
To all the proponents of Linux On The Desktop:
1. Please stop flounting linux as totally superior. Be realistic. It sucks in many ways, but it sucks in other ways than Windows
2. Make sure that you point out that learning linux isn't as easy as windows. Really. Do it. Please.
3. Make sure you've pointed out 2.
4. Accept that Linux is a Tool, just like Windows. Every tool has its good and bad sides. Windows has a (mostly) coherent user experience, linux has not. Windows has (inflexible) wizards, Linux has extreme flexibility (at the cost of complexity). You can't have it all. EVER./rant
I agree with you. Both OSs have their strong points, if you throw away either one you might be making life harder for you. Dual boot is the answer, and zealotry is not. I think that alot of linux advocates forgot how hard it was for them when they first started. Sure linux has improved alot, but if it's easy now, then why do people still flood the forums and IRC channels wanting help?
Advocates will have you believe that Linux is supposedly easier to install than Windows, but (a) Windows usually comes preinstalled on machines so it's a moot point, and (b) the Windows installer is about the same level of difficulty as any linux installer-- select a partition, answer some questions, and then kick back. People usually blather on about security updates being a pain in the ass, but you need security updates with linux as well, and just the general updates are just as time consuming to download and install as the windows security updates.
I don't think that people should switch to linux unless they have a compelling reason to. Microsoft=evil is not a good reason. Having software that you use on linux that you can't find on windows is a good reason. You should use an OS because you have a good reason to, not on the basis of some kind of moral imperative.
By modern I was thinking of RAM > 192 MB, (people who bought bargain pcs five and more years ago would face that problem) and a processor around 2 GHz or more. If the poster above took several minutes to boot Ubuntu, it seems pretty likely that he was running into the problem that he is running an old pc.
http://www.slackware.com/install/sysreq.php "Slackware Linux doesn't require an extremely powerful system to run (though having one is quite nice:). It will run on systems as far back as the 486. Below is a list of minimum system requirements needed to install and run Slackware.
* 486 processor
* 16MB RAM (32MB suggested)
* 100-500 megabytes of hard disk space for a minimal and around 3.5GB for full install
* 3.5" floppy drive
Additional hardware may be needed if you want to run the X Window System at a usable speed or if you want network capabilities."
Hi all, this is my first post on slashdot!
Shouldn't any journaling file system keep track of the physical location of files? Why do you need to run a program to tell Ubuntu where they are? Shouldn't that be a part of the demands of the file system? (not rhetorical question, honest question-- I want to know)
It seems that if one is suffering from a *very* slow boot with Ubuntu, it's because the hardware is too old. Ubuntu seems to cater more towards people having newer pcs. It would be easier, and in the long run more beneficial to instead use Puppy, Debian, Slackware, Arch, Frugalware, Zenwalk, Vector, Gentoo, FreeBSD etc that either caters towards users with older machines or is flexible enough to customize an install for older machines.
Slashdot Mirror
In science and engineering. In liberal arts, no. Med school-- no. Law school-- no. I think that this discussion is nearly a waste of time, most of us Slashdotters are scientists and engineers... that means we're stuck in group think and don't have a broader perspective from posters in other fields.
And even if you receive a stipend as I did, you are still paying... the difference between stipend and the salary you would have received had you gone straight for a job when you received your Bachelor's degree. Contrary to popular opinion, you never make up that deficit.
I disagree, I think that it overproduces them.
And the issue is with engineers, not engineers and scientists. Engineers typically have a B.S. or a Master's at most, only a minority have a PhD, and it's frowned upon. Compare that with medicine, law and science-- in those disciples you need more education, and you pay more. Since engineers get high paying jobs for less time spent in school, raising the rates for engineering degrees is just leveling the playing field.
Now out of all of the academic arenas, engineering is one of the worst offenders for over enrollment. Many schools balance that out by having enrollment in their college only after evaluation of introductory courses, many have weeder courses where they dump too much work on the lap to get rid of students who don't want to loose sleep trying to get all of their homework done. It's cruel to do that to students and the sheer number of students depress the quality of education and puts a strain on the faculty and grad students teaching.
By raising the price you will drive down the number of students, while being able to afford to hire more lecturers, faculty, increase the graduate program and then the strain is diminished. What then? Better student to teacher ratio means better quality of education, and it also means not having to weed students out.
We need more people who spend years in college learning real world skills, how to produce value. I am not dissing humanities and social sciences here. Yes you are. The benefit of a liberal arts education is a concentration on (a) critical reasoning skills, (b) writing skills and (c) effective communication. These are vital real world skills that are important in the business world, which is why many of these people who major in those areas end up in leadership positions, instead of becoming engineers and code monkeys. There is a balance between the different fields and what is needed by companies and governments. What you said smacks of tunnel vision.They've had this idea before for a small, fast oss browser... it's called Dillo http://www.dillo.org/.
Why not fund Dillo so it can start up production again?
And for Firefox lite compare it to Gnome's browser Epiphany--
Dillo http://www.dillo.org/download/dillo-0.8.6.tar.bz2 is less than 1 MB, Epiphany http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/epiphany/2. 18/epiphany-2.18.1.tar.bz2 is less than 5 MB,
while Firefox ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/rele ases/latest-2.0/source/firefox-2.0.0.5-source.tar. bz2 is ~35 MB!!
There are many lite weight open source browsers. Why not port them to Windows instead of asking Firefox to design another browser?
In other words, it was alot like a James Ellroy novel!
Okay, seriously now, the excitement and exaggerated claims on that article combined with the lack of focus and structure lead me to believe that the article was written by a high school student. Well that's the wonderful nature of the net. Everyone has their voice and we have to filter out these type of stories from interesting and well written stories. oh wait I thought that was what Slashdot was for...
People who upgrade critical components like motherboards, cpus, and graphics cards are already very much in the "die-hard" category. Normal consumers never upgrade those things except by replacing the machine. For almost everything else, USB and Firewire suffice. I strongly disagree, there is a reason why you can get video cards in every computer and office store you walk into. And that's just one case. Anybody that wants to play computer games will want a video card, many that listen to music extensively on their pc want a sound card, etc etc these all fall into the realm of normal consumers in my book. What is true is that many people don't necessary want to dyi it for fear of breaking something, so they'll have a shop install the new hardware.
It seems to me that the only people who will stay firmly in the "desktop" category are people who by definition don't need the mobility. They are the people running computer labs, servers, and office computing systems. I expect even the high-end professional users to migrate to laptops except when laptops don't offer enough raw performance at any cost. Um you forgot home. The thing about having a computer at home is that it doesn't need to be mobile. I agree with what you said, but your emphasis implicitly implies that almost everyone needs mobility. Why exactly? I perfectly understand the person that works at both home and work, and I also understand the person that travels frequently, but what about everyone else? And the people I know that have a laptop tend to also have either a desktop at work or at home anyway!
The desktop fills a niche that the laptop can't (and vica versa). In addition to what was said in previous posts, spending extra $$$ for a better keyboard, mouse and monitor to make your laptop a home solution is more expensive than buying a desktop instead. And as was said, it's cheaper to do partial upgrades to a pc than to replace it every other year, and this is something that has been widely embraced by the market! It's easier to do that on a desktop than it is on a notebook.
Add to that NASA having to cancel science projects to divert funding to going to the moon and Mars and you see that funding for alot of the big physics projects have been cut back drastically.
I agree that we shouldn't assign all the blame to Clinton. I think that this is really a trend that started with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The DOE and DOD invested alot in scientific research during the Cold War to compete against the Soviet Union. When it collapsed the need to stay competitive in science, technology and engineering became less important and gradually the government and the American people became less interested in spending so much money on science.
Yup I think that the interpretation is highly problematic but the experiment itself could be interesting. I suspect though that it will turn out like similar experiments, but it's still worth doing.
What I don't like is how Cramer advertises himself to the media, and neglects to even cite anything involving current literature in the topic. If you look at http://faculty.washington.edu/jcramer/Nonlocal_200 7.pdf or his other announcements you'll see how carefully he is to only cite older papers, and very few as if the field has been hardly touched. And he whined about not having the funding to do it-- did he even try to apply for a grant from NSF for that research? I think that Cramer has carefully created the perception that that the MAN is keeping him down.
His advertisement on his research idea (actually not his but Dopfer, but he properly credits this) and his high profile status from magazines and novels shows that he operates as a media whore, which is not how the majority of physicists conduct research. He better shape up now, if he wants this to be serious his experiment needs to be done by the book now and not as a media stunt. The way that he conducts himself from now on will reveal his true intentions.
I agree with this, but I'll take a more moderate tone on this issue. If you want to legally play, i.e. decode mp3s, you have to either pay the royalty fee or use a software program that already has. Thinking of it that way, TFA is put out that FOSS programs haven't payed the fee on their behalf so that the Linux end user can legally listen to mp3s. And it's the same thing with playing dvds and some of the other dirty formats. You can actually pay for the decoders, and pay for LinDVD and then legally watch and listen to all those formats. Or on Windows you can use free as in beer software that has payed the royalties. Either way, somewhere along the way someone has to pay the royalties for you to legally play those formats.
If anyone should be blamed for this middleman grift, it should be the big companies that standardized proprietary formats instead of adopting free open source ones. Certainly with a cd collection, I can choose my format of choice for compression on the pc, but the record labels chose mp3 for online selling, and the mpaa chose to encrypt their dvds. We didn't have a choice in it, FSF didn't have a choice in it, and blaming Linux for lack of convenience is foolish, and smacks of demanding a free lunch. Steal it or pay for it, but don't whine about it.
How did we end up with pretentious ramblings about the greatness of Lord of the Rings? That's a separate issue, and imo only digs yourself in deeper since there are just as many if not more people that are unimpressed with Hobbits and travelogues as there are people that are unimpressed with conspiracies and UFOs.
I don't buy either side. I've seen every episode of X-Files two or three times, I consider myself a fan. I also happen to like both the main plot arc episodes and the one offs. The main plot arc episodes were a small minority of the total episodes. If you *only* liked those, and thought the rest were weak then you obviously only superficially enjoyed the show and thus are not a "hardcore fan." And on the flip side alot of people who didn't like the main plot arc also had trouble following it and were under the impression that it never ended. And so they obviously didn't fully appreciate the show.
Newsflash: all of the mystery surrounding the conspiracy was fully revealed by the mid to mid-late part of the series and most of the characters in the conspiracy were killed (in just one episode, how neat was that?). Why are we arguing for a conspiracy based movie when it's done?? When they tried to recreate the feeling with the supersoldier stuff (remember in the days when Duchovny had already left the show) it was just a distant echo of the older plot.
X-Files came during a good time, it was on when the UFO craze was at it's peak. The premise of the show is not as interesting to the general public now. And besides that conspiracy type of plots are interesting in a tv show because they have the time frame to properly develop it. It doesn't work in a standalone movie.
Would a cracked Zune gush instead of squirt?
And if you just look at the stats in TFA-- FF users are less than 1/2 IE users. That's no great victory, you might as well say well at least we have more than 10% are FF users. lol Some people are too quick to celebrate news that doesn't even seem noteworthy to me.
Yo I was the AC that posted about evdev being broken, and then later said that I switched to Slackware. I'm not the Mac user AC. Guess it got me off my lazy butt to login and post, maybe I'll just do that from now on instead of posting as AC.
I agree with you. Both OSs have their strong points, if you throw away either one you might be making life harder for you. Dual boot is the answer, and zealotry is not. I think that alot of linux advocates forgot how hard it was for them when they first started. Sure linux has improved alot, but if it's easy now, then why do people still flood the forums and IRC channels wanting help?
Advocates will have you believe that Linux is supposedly easier to install than Windows, but (a) Windows usually comes preinstalled on machines so it's a moot point, and (b) the Windows installer is about the same level of difficulty as any linux installer-- select a partition, answer some questions, and then kick back. People usually blather on about security updates being a pain in the ass, but you need security updates with linux as well, and just the general updates are just as time consuming to download and install as the windows security updates.
I don't think that people should switch to linux unless they have a compelling reason to. Microsoft=evil is not a good reason. Having software that you use on linux that you can't find on windows is a good reason. You should use an OS because you have a good reason to, not on the basis of some kind of moral imperative.
By modern I was thinking of RAM > 192 MB, (people who bought bargain pcs five and more years ago would face that problem) and a processor around 2 GHz or more. If the poster above took several minutes to boot Ubuntu, it seems pretty likely that he was running into the problem that he is running an old pc.
o pedition
:). It will run on systems as far back as the 486. Below is a list of minimum system requirements needed to install and run Slackware.
Don't believe me?
http://www.ubuntu.com/products/WhatIsUbuntu/deskt
"Ubuntu is available for PC, 64-Bit and Mac architectures. CDs require at least 256 MB of RAM. Install requires at least 2 GB of disk space."
http://www.slackware.com/install/sysreq.php
"Slackware Linux doesn't require an extremely powerful system to run (though having one is quite nice
* 486 processor
* 16MB RAM (32MB suggested)
* 100-500 megabytes of hard disk space for a minimal and around 3.5GB for full install
* 3.5" floppy drive
Additional hardware may be needed if you want to run the X Window System at a usable speed or if you want network capabilities."
Hi all, this is my first post on slashdot! Shouldn't any journaling file system keep track of the physical location of files? Why do you need to run a program to tell Ubuntu where they are? Shouldn't that be a part of the demands of the file system? (not rhetorical question, honest question-- I want to know) It seems that if one is suffering from a *very* slow boot with Ubuntu, it's because the hardware is too old. Ubuntu seems to cater more towards people having newer pcs. It would be easier, and in the long run more beneficial to instead use Puppy, Debian, Slackware, Arch, Frugalware, Zenwalk, Vector, Gentoo, FreeBSD etc that either caters towards users with older machines or is flexible enough to customize an install for older machines.