This comment struck a chord with me. One of the things I cannot stand about the way articles are posted on Slashdot is that every chance is taken to put MS in the worst possible light.
That's one way to look at it. Here's another (for your fair-and-balanced pleasure.:)
Microsoft IS bad. Even when making domations to India, they intended to boost their likeability and ingratiate themselves with the honest and hardworking (and I'd say clever, too) web programmers of India. Where's the money for our own people starving in Appallatia? Oh, they don't have computers.
I understand the concept of providing both sides of the argument, but we already know what Microsoft will do: anything that benefits them, no matter who gets hurt. This isn't the Microsoft that I 'grew up with' 20 years ago. This isn't about making our life easier, improving products and solving problems. Now it's about enslavement: monthly payments or the computers will stop working. It's about setting up more people so that the payments get larger per month, and making new versions of Excel/Access/etc so that people have to upgrade, too.
There is such a thing as conviction; staying the course; speaking your mind.
Hey! I've got an idea: let's go see if Saddam's still torturing his family memebers- maybe he's got a new thing to offer!
See what I mean?
Important value of French e-card
on
Cashless Society
·
· Score: 1
...of course it holds no personal information and can be spent by anyone...this is what's known in the money business as 'surrender value'.:)
[Sorry...I had to do it.]
Oh, my God. Tell me where- tell me where! I want to kill it before it grows!
No, wait- SCO _doesn't_ grow. It's the same product it was in 1989, aside from some cryptic bugfixes.
Well, if this is real, then SCO can kiss my ass. I'll send THEM a bill for all the wasted hours trying to make their laughable OS do modern things before I became aware of Linux.
Maybe they just figure they can get some income from _somewhere_......if it's real.
I get enough 'soap operas' on daytime TV and switching past the SOAP channel. Anime seems so similar to me; I just don't enjoy it- there's so much backstory...and all the flashy radiants that occur when someone says something profound cheapens it for me.
Now, if Neil Gaiman does Sandman in Anime, I'm buying the CD set!
And some of the cartoons on AS are kinda dumb...even if they have hilarious dialog. A couple of nights ago I saw a meatball set fire to the neighbor's yard...and a milkshake get abducted by Germanic aliens. It's ugly, but it's funny and absurd....and most importantly: Not been done to death!
And as boring as it might sound, I like the Katz-esque cartoon a lot. I could watch it like we did Seinfeld when it first came out. What's it
called? The one with Coach Mc Gurk...
"I don't know, Brandon...it never came up..."
Of course, I'm probably in the minority...AND I'M LOOKING FORWARD TO SEEING FUTURAMA FOR A CHANGE! I kept missing it when it was on mainstream TV somehow...
...because we're adding so many new features. Recent additions include anti-aliasing of fonts, more optional versions of the kernel (debug, bigmem, i586/i686/athlon/etc), video conferencing, GUI enhancements and more.
As time goes by, there's no need, for example, to edit/enhance the login-process, so that code stays put, and attention turns to do things like add code to allow you to authenticate with USB 'keys' and biometric measures, and the codesize grows. Ten years from now when the biometric stuff is old-hat, the time and lines needed for a new release will continue to grow...and so does funtionality.
The nice thing is, and I think it's a matter of culture more than anything else, is the inheirant flexibility of a Unix-like system. It's intentionally modular and command-line capable, beneath the beautiful 'engraved' GUIs and gorgeous fonts and integrated sounds. Even though there's a slick GUI tool for a job, you can still have cron kick off a complexly-worded command and do the same thing.
Unlike WinTel where the important stuff is rolled into a DLL or VXD and can't be changed (or even understood) to the intermediate user, or the Mac where everything is locked away, Linux finds a balance where you can have both: slick, effecient GUIs and eyecandy, as well as the ability to write, for example, and ASCII->EBCDIC conversion onto a 9-track tape in only one line.
It can be as Glitz or Geek as you wanna be. And that's soooooo very nice, in my eyes.
There was a study shown on Slashdot a few weeks back about the number of lines of code between Microsoft releases and Redhat Linux releases. The Linux code is growing almost exponentially (or let's say just really darned fast, for accuracy's sake) and the code for Microsoft is stunted. That's because there's no focus group to tell us to re-write the way something works and start from scratch. The longer code lives, the less bugs it will have, due to maturity.
There will come a time where Linux will be comprised of so much code that it would be impossible for any corporation, even Microsoft, to compete. Linux starts from a mature base and improves; Microsoft starts over in areas. Even though they're hideously tied to the DOS-days and such.
Sure, they're gonna have (mostly) functional drivers for the spiffy new hardware, but we get it, too, after a fashion. I just know this; desktop OS's increase in complexity, not decrease: at some point, no one will be able to start from scratch and start competing on the closed-source side, it's just too expensive...even if we're just measuring the price-per-line-of-code yardstick. Even with cool new programming environments.
Heck, I made a computer system that has a cargo trailer built around it. There's a main computer onboard for when I'm plugged into 'shore' power, an LTSP-style 'workstation' for doing real work, and another single-board-computer to be installed to leave 'electronic breadcrumbs' from the GPS that will be powered up at all times. The entire electronics closet has it's own ventilation system and will be sealed off from the rest of the vehicle. It'll direct my satellite TV, DVD's, Oggs, games, and anything else I like. It's part of my cruise the USA with computers lifestyle, also known as Technomadia
Be Gentle but the site is right here Countermoon.com that has some under-construction pictures, and more as they come available.
When the "Fritz Chip" comes in, will you embrace it and the corporate steamroller behind it, or "OpenSource" it and make it something we all can control?
Your name's been a part of Linux computing since the first day I booted it. I think I know the answer, I just want to be sure.:)
For the same reason that, since the 1880's, we've been able to go down the rows of a cornfield, cut it at the base, lean it over, take the ears of, then take the husks off, pull the kernels out and throw all the rest away....but for some reason something as simple as getting the tractor feed paper to bend the way it sits in the shipping box rarely ever happens.
Some of the silly stuff is just too hard, and some of the hard stuff is so easy, and we don't get to choose which is which.
Had only some neutral, perhaps governement (ANSI) standard been the only acceptable standard for web browsers, and changes been made to THAT, all of this would be academic.
Instead, lazy programmers write things to 'look cool' on a monoplist's standard, and they break all the other browsers, and vice-versa. It looked good at the time, but it caused a lot of problems we still have to deal with today.
Didn't adhere to the W3 standard? Enjoy: this is what you reap. If not, put up with it, like I do...
[Long, probably accurate discertation skipped for brevity]
I'm told, admittedly by The Learning Channel, et al, that "each galaxy has a black hole in the center." That makes me wonder...it's probably there for a reason. Yeah, I know- great place to dump the trash....but maybe it's something more. I'd like to think that perhaps they might be connected....and if we could survive the massive gravity, that would be a way around the whole speed-of-light thing, or at least shorten it a lot.
I'll bet that won't make any sense at all in the morning. I'm turning in. Night all!
"It seems like if we're looking for aliens, the last place we'd like to look is in the middle of a black hole. "
Well, you see black holes compress matter- it's like a thick-spot in space, since a mass the size of Jupiter can fit into the size of a strawberry. Imagine for a moment how many thousands of alien civilizations could fit inside these black holss...
All of them screaming, "LET US OUTTA HERE! IT'S CRAMPED AND SOMEONE FARTED!"
Yeah, I'm sure that's it.:)
It's probably signalling a change of just what kind of actual research-program we'll be running, but it'll look the same. One thing bothers me though: higher-res means slower conversion of the data. Instead of a year to examine a year's data, it could be decades...
What? What do you mean about playing slow? I've had the bad luck to have framerates no faster than about 30-40, but I get the same for Quake3. The problem I have with Q3 is that, unlike Q2, there's not as many add-ons that work with Linux (or at all). I waited for two years for a Penguin model (which was a lot of fun in Q2!)
I *did* start out with Quake, then Quake2, and Q3 was an improvement. I still like it a lot. It has a flavor all it's own. But UT has an almost object-oriented arrangement; mods work, skins work, and everything is either a.) Working perfectly (90%+) or b.) Some idiot didn't package it correctly. (~5% or so.)
It is an upgrade to the situation; another installment in the saga of FPS's on Linux. But it's all the same kinda thing. What I'm wanting is something on-par with Microsoft (Ugh) Flight Simulator. If I see another medieval hackfest (FPS or group combat) I'll puke. Give me a Mustang over Berlin and some Heinkels to shoot down!
Microsoft Innovation, my second favorite contradiction in terms, right behind military intelligence.:)
Why do people assign the phrase 'computer whiz' with Gates? They bought DOS, they just sold it in an intelligent way. The stole/annexed/'found' various technologies and kept other people from using it.
Gates isn't a *computer* god, but rather a *marketting* god.
Odd, though...how they keep a $40b warchest...in fact 20% of their income is from the interest on this money. Sounds like they're investing against a storm.
Well, back to making that storm.:)
The guy left Microsoft with IP regarding Word Documents. I'm interjecting that some of that information would simplify the transition of desktops from Microsoft to OpenSource.
How the hell is that off topic?
The only thing slowing Linux's takeover of the desktop is the ability to open Word file formats. He'd be excellent for understanding this...
I hope the right people are paying attention...
GPSDrive *is* a great solution...you just have to have roving connectivity, or trace the route before you go. Yeah, I know- I've been waiting for roving connectivity since 1978...
In the big picture, GPSDrive is probably it; the way open source works is to take requirements, tips, and inspiration from users and turns them into reality. And every day it gets more polished, better, more capable.
I've wanted to take my whole life on the road full time since 1978. I got distracted by a wife and kids, but now I'm working on it again. I've seen LEO satellites launched, go bankrupt, and get re-used. ($3000 to start, and $6 a MINUTE?!?!)
Given time, it'll be there....contact the guys at GPSDrive, offer'em help and maybe you can stay free, in the car...
Who cares? The only way we'll change anything is to vote with our feet: strange new players, detracted from the age-old standard means we all have to upgrade and follow the whim of good Ole Jack.
I say, screw'em. We've only got 30-60 years of recorded music...and almost everything we have is on mp3s anyway...and all the new stuff is so soul-less and cut-n-pasted from other bands, why pay more and get less?
If they produce a few hundred thousand of these titles and then have to pay to have'em destroyed, that'll send a bigger message than anything ever posted on SlashDot!
Like a laser mounted to an F15 is gonna be perfect? Those things rock (literally), bounce from place to place; ever hold a laser pointer while in a car? Extend that range to about a mile and imagine the interesting 'swirly' pattern of distruction it'll cause. No single pinhole precisely on the target, more like peeing in the snow...it'll be surgical...surgical like a drunk with a firehose.
I diasagree. The soul of Linux lives in every person who choses to disagree with the evil norm and go another way.
But I don't understand the Debian/Redhat rift; sure, Redhat keeps a bastardized form of the kernel (not virgin like the ones from kernel.org) but you can install it in seconds, literally. What's this about corporate lies?
There's even apt for Redhat; see http://www.apt.freshrpms.net. It's wonderful, and you don't have to learn another distro (and fight the notorious install scripts) to get that kind of quality.
But anything that puts Linux (of any kind) on desktops as simply and easily as possible is a win for the movement. No?
Oh, sure. How about a business technology that helps Penguins in low-tech towns get jobs? That'd be big. And I'm working on it! Nothing like getting jobs for 20,000 motivated Penguins, aye? (Press release when the paperwork clears.)
You guys are generally a lot younger than me; I've seen several of these scams. Here's the drill: get someething no one can prove/disprove, get a couple of scientists to go along with it, and spread it by word of mouth. Sometimes you'll get pretty far.
Ya see, peacetime is a fertile field of silliness. When we're not playing Chicken Little over one topic, we're doing it over something else.
Some famous farces:
- In 1973, we were told that the world's supply of fuel was almost exhausted. Any day we'd all be walking to work. Odd though, as soon as gas was well over a dollar a gallon, we've been able to pump another 30-40 years of fuel without fear.
- In mid-70's there an episode of Barney Miller that featured a new concept: global cooling. Yep, people thought an Ice Age was coming. Ooh! Time to get out the coats!
- Every decade or so, we get re-mystified by 'The Bermuda Triangle', but it turns out this was an example of overhype perpetrated by real-estate yahoos. Take ANY section of ocean the size of 1/4 the US and you can make the same claims. Movies, books, fear and panic...How many airliners have we lost going from NYC to Bermuda?
- Feng Shea (sp?) The perfect farce: only a practitioner can tell if things are 'wrong', and the details are shrouded in mystery, and these people extort millions to 'get things right'. And there's no threat of malpractice; no proof, no lawsuit. What a sweet gig- most city-sized 'readings' cost in excess of $200,000 USD.
- The Ozone Hole: Same thing. The common man can't see it, but government policy had to change. People were required to change out air conditioner fluids. Once the cost of these new fluids were in place and the old ones were illegal, we learn that it has no effect.
- Water saving toliets. Thanks, AlGore... Flush twice- it's a new toilet.
It goes on and on. Global warming is one of these. The man on the street can't prove or disprove, and no one wants to believe it's just the increasing amounts of concrete around these weather stations, which are typically in towns, not out in BFE. (At least, in the last few decades).
People don't understand (that is, grok) the perspective. Most people see the world through a television screen. They think that from space that all towns are back-to-back. (Actually there's a LOT of in-between space!)
And they see the sky as millions of miles high. In fact, the atomosphere is only a thin, 6-mile high coating on a planet in the neighborhood of 24,000 miles around. On a good-sized globe, the atmosphere's about the thickness of a sheet of paper.
Maybe people *have* to be afraid of something OR be at war. Maybe now that everyone's already afraid of real dangers, we can stop believing every cock-and-bull story that comes down the line.
Or, maybe certain people learn how easily we're fooled and how quickly we'll pay money for a good joke.
But right now I've gotta go. I just bought a Corvette which crashed right from the showroom. The thing was cheap: a man died in it, so I got it for a song! I just have to get the smell outta the fiberglass.
How will the marketting of this fare any better than the almost-extinct Novell, Caldera, and SCO?
It's a fair question to ask since they're almost gone (even punched cards are still in use in niche areas, so maybe nothing goes away) but SCO's graphical system hasn't changed since I first started using it in 1989. Has Novell changed in any way? Was there ever a second or third release of Caldera? (Seems like I heard they were dropping it , anyway...)
In this market, it seems like IBM's the only one who truly 'gets' it. Every other company thinks they can start embracing Linux and write their own distro...but there are now hundreds out there, now. Maybe a distro for left-handed girls from Northern Montana named Wendy?:)
Slashdot Mirror
That's one way to look at it. Here's another (for your fair-and-balanced pleasure. :)
Microsoft IS bad. Even when making domations to India, they intended to boost their likeability and ingratiate themselves with the honest and hardworking (and I'd say clever, too) web programmers of India. Where's the money for our own people starving in Appallatia? Oh, they don't have computers.
I understand the concept of providing both sides of the argument, but we already know what Microsoft will do: anything that benefits them, no matter who gets hurt. This isn't the Microsoft that I 'grew up with' 20 years ago. This isn't about making our life easier, improving products and solving problems. Now it's about enslavement: monthly payments or the computers will stop working. It's about setting up more people so that the payments get larger per month, and making new versions of Excel/Access/etc so that people have to upgrade, too.
There is such a thing as conviction; staying the course; speaking your mind.
Hey! I've got an idea: let's go see if Saddam's still torturing his family memebers- maybe he's got a new thing to offer!
See what I mean?
Oh, my God. Tell me where- tell me where! I want to kill it before it grows!
...if it's real.
No, wait- SCO _doesn't_ grow. It's the same product it was in 1989, aside from some cryptic bugfixes.
Well, if this is real, then SCO can kiss my ass. I'll send THEM a bill for all the wasted hours trying to make their laughable OS do modern things before I became aware of Linux.
Maybe they just figure they can get some income from _somewhere_...
Well get to it! Aren't you a good little drone? "How can you have any pudding, if you won't eat your meat!" :)
But what I find interesting is that *I* can't go anywhere on the site, and I'm running the same software: Apache on Linux. Isn't that ironic?
I'm not gonna bitch about it; they know better, the suits just don't. Heck, at some point the whole durned world will be running Linux.
I get enough 'soap operas' on daytime TV and switching past the SOAP channel. Anime seems so similar to me; I just don't enjoy it- there's so much backstory...and all the flashy radiants that occur when someone says something profound cheapens it for me.
Now, if Neil Gaiman does Sandman in Anime, I'm buying the CD set!
And some of the cartoons on AS are kinda dumb...even if they have hilarious dialog. A couple of nights ago I saw a meatball set fire to the neighbor's yard...and a milkshake get abducted by Germanic aliens. It's ugly, but it's funny and absurd....and most importantly: Not been done to death!
And as boring as it might sound, I like the Katz-esque cartoon a lot. I could watch it like we did Seinfeld when it first came out. What's it called? The one with Coach Mc Gurk...
"I don't know, Brandon...it never came up..."
Of course, I'm probably in the minority...AND I'M LOOKING FORWARD TO SEEING FUTURAMA FOR A CHANGE! I kept missing it when it was on mainstream TV somehow...
...because we're adding so many new features. Recent additions include anti-aliasing of fonts, more optional versions of the kernel (debug, bigmem, i586/i686/athlon/etc), video conferencing, GUI enhancements and more.
As time goes by, there's no need, for example, to edit/enhance the login-process, so that code stays put, and attention turns to do things like add code to allow you to authenticate with USB 'keys' and biometric measures, and the codesize grows. Ten years from now when the biometric stuff is old-hat, the time and lines needed for a new release will continue to grow...and so does funtionality.
The nice thing is, and I think it's a matter of culture more than anything else, is the inheirant flexibility of a Unix-like system. It's intentionally modular and command-line capable, beneath the beautiful 'engraved' GUIs and gorgeous fonts and integrated sounds. Even though there's a slick GUI tool for a job, you can still have cron kick off a complexly-worded command and do the same thing.
Unlike WinTel where the important stuff is rolled into a DLL or VXD and can't be changed (or even understood) to the intermediate user, or the Mac where everything is locked away, Linux finds a balance where you can have both: slick, effecient GUIs and eyecandy, as well as the ability to write, for example, and ASCII->EBCDIC conversion onto a 9-track tape in only one line.
It can be as Glitz or Geek as you wanna be. And that's soooooo very nice, in my eyes.
There was a study shown on Slashdot a few weeks back about the number of lines of code between Microsoft releases and Redhat Linux releases. The Linux code is growing almost exponentially (or let's say just really darned fast, for accuracy's sake) and the code for Microsoft is stunted. That's because there's no focus group to tell us to re-write the way something works and start from scratch. The longer code lives, the less bugs it will have, due to maturity.
There will come a time where Linux will be comprised of so much code that it would be impossible for any corporation, even Microsoft, to compete. Linux starts from a mature base and improves; Microsoft starts over in areas. Even though they're hideously tied to the DOS-days and such.
Sure, they're gonna have (mostly) functional drivers for the spiffy new hardware, but we get it, too, after a fashion. I just know this; desktop OS's increase in complexity, not decrease: at some point, no one will be able to start from scratch and start competing on the closed-source side, it's just too expensive...even if we're just measuring the price-per-line-of-code yardstick. Even with cool new programming environments.
Be afraid, sweaty-freak...be very afraid.
Heck, I made a computer system that has a cargo trailer built around it. There's a main computer onboard for when I'm plugged into 'shore' power, an LTSP-style 'workstation' for doing real work, and another single-board-computer to be installed to leave 'electronic breadcrumbs' from the GPS that will be powered up at all times. The entire electronics closet has it's own ventilation system and will be sealed off from the rest of the vehicle. It'll direct my satellite TV, DVD's, Oggs, games, and anything else I like. It's part of my cruise the USA with computers lifestyle, also known as Technomadia
Be Gentle but the site is right here Countermoon.com that has some under-construction pictures, and more as they come available.
Enjoy!
When the "Fritz Chip" comes in, will you embrace it and the corporate steamroller behind it, or "OpenSource" it and make it something we all can control?
Your name's been a part of Linux computing since the first day I booted it. I think I know the answer, I just want to be sure. :)
For the same reason that, since the 1880's, we've been able to go down the rows of a cornfield, cut it at the base, lean it over, take the ears of, then take the husks off, pull the kernels out and throw all the rest away....but for some reason something as simple as getting the tractor feed paper to bend the way it sits in the shipping box rarely ever happens.
Some of the silly stuff is just too hard, and some of the hard stuff is so easy, and we don't get to choose which is which.
Had only some neutral, perhaps governement (ANSI) standard been the only acceptable standard for web browsers, and changes been made to THAT, all of this would be academic.
Instead, lazy programmers write things to 'look cool' on a monoplist's standard, and they break all the other browsers, and vice-versa. It looked good at the time, but it caused a lot of problems we still have to deal with today.
Didn't adhere to the W3 standard? Enjoy: this is what you reap. If not, put up with it, like I do...
[Long, probably accurate discertation skipped for brevity]
I'm told, admittedly by The Learning Channel, et al, that "each galaxy has a black hole in the center." That makes me wonder...it's probably there for a reason. Yeah, I know- great place to dump the trash....but maybe it's something more. I'd like to think that perhaps they might be connected....and if we could survive the massive gravity, that would be a way around the whole speed-of-light thing, or at least shorten it a lot.
I'll bet that won't make any sense at all in the morning. I'm turning in. Night all!
"It seems like if we're looking for aliens, the last place we'd like to look is in the middle of a black hole. "
Well, you see black holes compress matter- it's like a thick-spot in space, since a mass the size of Jupiter can fit into the size of a strawberry. Imagine for a moment how many thousands of alien civilizations could fit inside these black holss...
All of them screaming, "LET US OUTTA HERE! IT'S CRAMPED AND SOMEONE FARTED!"
Yeah, I'm sure that's it. :)
It's probably signalling a change of just what kind of actual research-program we'll be running, but it'll look the same. One thing bothers me though: higher-res means slower conversion of the data. Instead of a year to examine a year's data, it could be decades...
What? What do you mean about playing slow? I've had the bad luck to have framerates no faster than about 30-40, but I get the same for Quake3. The problem I have with Q3 is that, unlike Q2, there's not as many add-ons that work with Linux (or at all). I waited for two years for a Penguin model (which was a lot of fun in Q2!)
I *did* start out with Quake, then Quake2, and Q3 was an improvement. I still like it a lot. It has a flavor all it's own. But UT has an almost object-oriented arrangement; mods work, skins work, and everything is either a.) Working perfectly (90%+) or b.) Some idiot didn't package it correctly. (~5% or so.)
It is an upgrade to the situation; another installment in the saga of FPS's on Linux. But it's all the same kinda thing. What I'm wanting is something on-par with Microsoft (Ugh) Flight Simulator. If I see another medieval hackfest (FPS or group combat) I'll puke. Give me a Mustang over Berlin and some Heinkels to shoot down!
Microsoft Innovation, my second favorite contradiction in terms, right behind military intelligence. :)
Why do people assign the phrase 'computer whiz' with Gates? They bought DOS, they just sold it in an intelligent way. The stole/annexed/'found' various technologies and kept other people from using it.
Gates isn't a *computer* god, but rather a *marketting* god.
Odd, though...how they keep a $40b warchest...in fact 20% of their income is from the interest on this money. Sounds like they're investing against a storm.
Well, back to making that storm. :)
The guy left Microsoft with IP regarding Word Documents. I'm interjecting that some of that information would simplify the transition of desktops from Microsoft to OpenSource. How the hell is that off topic?
The only thing slowing Linux's takeover of the desktop is the ability to open Word file formats. He'd be excellent for understanding this... I hope the right people are paying attention...
GPSDrive *is* a great solution...you just have to have roving connectivity, or trace the route before you go. Yeah, I know- I've been waiting for roving connectivity since 1978...
In the big picture, GPSDrive is probably it; the way open source works is to take requirements, tips, and inspiration from users and turns them into reality. And every day it gets more polished, better, more capable.
I've wanted to take my whole life on the road full time since 1978. I got distracted by a wife and kids, but now I'm working on it again. I've seen LEO satellites launched, go bankrupt, and get re-used. ($3000 to start, and $6 a MINUTE?!?!)
Given time, it'll be there....contact the guys at GPSDrive, offer'em help and maybe you can stay free, in the car...
Who cares? The only way we'll change anything is to vote with our feet: strange new players, detracted from the age-old standard means we all have to upgrade and follow the whim of good Ole Jack.
I say, screw'em. We've only got 30-60 years of recorded music...and almost everything we have is on mp3s anyway...and all the new stuff is so soul-less and cut-n-pasted from other bands, why pay more and get less?
If they produce a few hundred thousand of these titles and then have to pay to have'em destroyed, that'll send a bigger message than anything ever posted on SlashDot!
Charming. Haven't tried it in years, but still want to make a comment. Linux is user friendly...it's just picky about it's friends...
Like a laser mounted to an F15 is gonna be perfect? Those things rock (literally), bounce from place to place; ever hold a laser pointer while in a car? Extend that range to about a mile and imagine the interesting 'swirly' pattern of distruction it'll cause. No single pinhole precisely on the target, more like peeing in the snow...it'll be surgical...surgical like a drunk with a firehose.
I diasagree. The soul of Linux lives in every person who choses to disagree with the evil norm and go another way.
But I don't understand the Debian/Redhat rift; sure, Redhat keeps a bastardized form of the kernel (not virgin like the ones from kernel.org) but you can install it in seconds, literally. What's this about corporate lies?
There's even apt for Redhat; see http://www.apt.freshrpms.net. It's wonderful, and you don't have to learn another distro (and fight the notorious install scripts) to get that kind of quality.
But anything that puts Linux (of any kind) on desktops as simply and easily as possible is a win for the movement. No?
Oh, sure. How about a business technology that helps Penguins in low-tech towns get jobs? That'd be big. And I'm working on it! Nothing like getting jobs for 20,000 motivated Penguins, aye? (Press release when the paperwork clears.)
...must be a sysadmin. :)
You guys are generally a lot younger than me; I've seen several of these scams. Here's the drill: get someething no one can prove/disprove, get a couple of scientists to go along with it, and spread it by word of mouth. Sometimes you'll get pretty far.
Ya see, peacetime is a fertile field of silliness. When we're not playing Chicken Little over one topic, we're doing it over something else.
Some famous farces:
- In 1973, we were told that the world's supply of fuel was almost exhausted. Any day we'd all be walking to work. Odd though, as soon as gas was well over a dollar a gallon, we've been able to pump another 30-40 years of fuel without fear.
- In mid-70's there an episode of Barney Miller that featured a new concept: global cooling. Yep, people thought an Ice Age was coming. Ooh! Time to get out the coats!
- Every decade or so, we get re-mystified by 'The Bermuda Triangle', but it turns out this was an example of overhype perpetrated by real-estate yahoos. Take ANY section of ocean the size of 1/4 the US and you can make the same claims. Movies, books, fear and panic...How many airliners have we lost going from NYC to Bermuda?
- Feng Shea (sp?) The perfect farce: only a practitioner can tell if things are 'wrong', and the details are shrouded in mystery, and these people extort millions to 'get things right'. And there's no threat of malpractice; no proof, no lawsuit. What a sweet gig- most city-sized 'readings' cost in excess of $200,000 USD.
- The Ozone Hole: Same thing. The common man can't see it, but government policy had to change. People were required to change out air conditioner fluids. Once the cost of these new fluids were in place and the old ones were illegal, we learn that it has no effect.
- Water saving toliets. Thanks, AlGore...
Flush twice- it's a new toilet.
It goes on and on. Global warming is one of these. The man on the street can't prove or disprove, and no one wants to believe it's just the increasing amounts of concrete around these weather stations, which are typically in towns, not out in BFE. (At least, in the last few decades).
People don't understand (that is, grok) the perspective. Most people see the world through a television screen. They think that from space that all towns are back-to-back. (Actually there's a LOT of in-between space!)
And they see the sky as millions of miles high. In fact, the atomosphere is only a thin, 6-mile high coating on a planet in the neighborhood of 24,000 miles around. On a good-sized globe, the atmosphere's about the thickness of a sheet of paper.
Maybe people *have* to be afraid of something OR be at war. Maybe now that everyone's already afraid of real dangers, we can stop believing every cock-and-bull story that comes down the line.
Or, maybe certain people learn how easily we're fooled and how quickly we'll pay money for a good joke.
But right now I've gotta go. I just bought a Corvette which crashed right from the showroom. The thing was cheap: a man died in it, so I got it for a song! I just have to get the smell outta the fiberglass.
(Another one of my favorites!)
How will the marketting of this fare any better than the almost-extinct Novell, Caldera, and SCO?
:)
It's a fair question to ask since they're almost gone (even punched cards are still in use in niche areas, so maybe nothing goes away) but SCO's graphical system hasn't changed since I first started using it in 1989. Has Novell changed in any way? Was there ever a second or third release of Caldera? (Seems like I heard they were dropping it , anyway...)
In this market, it seems like IBM's the only one who truly 'gets' it. Every other company thinks they can start embracing Linux and write their own distro...but there are now hundreds out there, now. Maybe a distro for left-handed girls from Northern Montana named Wendy?