What im saying is that if youve cracked through to the hypervisor, they have some serious problems. If you manage to get root access to the box, all bets are off, especially if they have some kind of clustering-- you could potentially provision scads more VMs, and they would be loadbalanced.
Any claim that the universe exists has to contend with the solipsist argument, exemplified by Douglas Adams' Ruler of the Universe: "What world outside? The door is closed."
Noone actually believes that, or they would never leave the house.
Anyone seriously pursuing a degree in theology generally isnt going to go to Berkeley's theology department; theres this thing called "Seminary" for those who actually want to study it seriously.
Theres an infinite variety of "science" based "facts"; for every theological loon you pull up I could probably pull up 2 scientific quacks (I have a large selection to choose from: anyone who backs homeopathy, for one).
The fact that some people are "wrong" doesn't mean you get to label EVERYONE wrong. SOMEONE is right about religion.
I imagine a sufficiently clever hacker could think of a way to bypass the guest OS and the hypervisor and do wacky things
Someone who could figure out how to do that would rent a private virtual server from Rackspace and go to town. I imagine there would be far more lucrative targets than a desktop.
There simply is no assertion that He is beholden to explain anything at all.
It is implied when people insist on an answer to things like "why is there evil" (which is, to be fair, not the same as what you asked).
It was not, by the way, my intention to accuse you of pride in that matter. I was speaking generally, to a perceived common retort to my statement. That you did not make the statement, nor think it, you are obviously not one I had in mind. Honestly, that was aimed as much at myself as at anyone else.
I do not disagree, survival is a strong instinct. But then you assert that there are no people practicing self-revelation, and no one conciously training their own will to never fall into such traps
In Romans 7, Paul remarks about how he seems to keep sinning and doing things he abhors, even though he "knows better"-- he knows the traps to avoid, and yet he keeps doing "that which I do not want to do". I think the idea that we can work harder to avoid sin is a myth, but I would be interested to speak to one who would claim that they had successfully gotten all ill intentions, motivations, and deeds out of their life.
I would also point out that while you certainly can see (at least some of) the deeds of a man's life, you will never have access to their will. On that point however I would be surprised if you could even produce a man whose external deeds had been made faultless.
It getting it right or wrong has nothing to do with it. I'm not sure what your comment regarding secularism and communism is about, or how they are connected to this argument.
The point was this: When communism was first bandied about, one might be excused for thinking it a great idea. After seeing it fail many times, one would only have oneself to blame for supporting it through another failure-- it had already demonstrated a lack of credibility.
With the Bible, on every observation it makes about things we can directly see-- humans in action-- I find it to be spot on in a way that I have not found secular humanism to be. Humanism, that I have encountered, seems to say "we can get rid of societal-- or even personal-- evil". I am unaware of such attempts ever meeting anything but failure.
That the Bible reflects man's self centerdness is not a point in your favour. The Bible is Word of God, written by Man.
It seems that a God who desired his word to be known would be fairly impotent if he could not even preserve his message.
. To wager is to through the die, if you will. I'm not throwing any. I see no point.
If you were told, you must throw this die and wager or else you will be executed, and you said "I dont see the point", it would tell a bystander one of two things: Either A) you do not believe the threat, or B) you do not care about your life.
Now, lets say the situation were slightly different. Lets say you were told "You MUST wager about whether I always tell the truth, or you will be killed". Assuming B is not true (which I will, and correct me if I am wrong), this means that for you to refuse on grounds of irrelevancy means that, in your head at least, you have already wagered-- you have wagered that he does not always tell the truth.
According to the Bible, there is no "middle ground". You are either for God, or you are rejecting him and are subject to judgement. To say "Whether you tell the truth or not I will not wager" means either that you do not care about such judgement, or else that you do not take that message seriously (that is, you believe it false). You have, in fact wagered.
If everything is of God then God is already revealed in plain sight and I need not question.
That assumes that God is pro-you, which I think is an unsafe assumption unless you have strong reason to believe otherwise.
Incidentally, your words are very similar to a quot
That you say this kind of nonsense with a straight face is an example of YOUR arrogance. There are plenty of people in the Linux/FOSS community who don't want to set up their GUI for hours on end. They form distributions.
"I prefer X, so YOU are the asshole".
Might want to reread my post. I didnt say any of that. I just remarked that the idea that "Windows 7 UI is a farce" sort of implies that im incompetent or ignorant for liking it, which I disagree(d) with.
Please stop and read the one-sided gibberish you're spouting
A good starting point would be if YOU re-read what I wrote, because you seem to have utterly misread it. I wasnt saying people are stupid for using Linux DEs, I was saying I find setting them up for hours on end to be a waste of MY time, and that I know others who agree with me.
Decisions are made based on political ideology in ignorance of (or despite) evidence.
The problem, as with religion, is that the evidence available doesnt fit many people's idea of "sufficient", but you nevertheless must choose. This means making do with what you have.
And then people vote based on those justifications and spin, rather than on actual evidence.
That does happen, and I wont deny that there are cultural / familial "christians" with no real conviction or depth of belief. That does not take away from those who have made a choice with depth behind it.
Besides, a big part of the problem here was Flash which, totally outside distro control, has always been a poster child with crappy Linux support.
That claim falls short when flash worked fine (I wont say perfectly) in prior versions, and there was absolutely nothing wrong with ALSA for desktop users.
Are you perchance talking about an Ubuntu problem, and not a Linux problem?
.... Which is roughly the problem de Icaza was talking about. If its an Ubuntu problem, and Fedora has some totally incompatible sound system that requires a rewrite to be compatible with, then it is a Linux problem. Ubuntu and Fedora and Debian dont reside in some vacuum all by themselves; when every major distro ends largely incompatible with the others, what do you think that says to a dev considering porting to Linux?
And the problem is not confined to Ubuntu; in the past few years we now have 2 versions of Grub running around (the newer of which is by all accounts a disaster of complexity), 4-5 different init replacements (all causing their own incompatibilities which I have personally experienced), 3 versions of Gnome running around, and some 4 soundsystems supported variously, at least one of which has been the cause of massive problems. Choice can be good, but this is a disaster.
We asked again, and again and again, and nothing changes.
There are answers in the Bible for some of your questions, but for others the answer is "we arent told". This isnt evasion, and its perfectly valid: once you accept the premise that "there is a God", the assertion that he is beholden to explain Himself becomes rather absurd. That he condescended to do so to such a degree already, and one would demand yet more, I think indicates clearly a flaw that all of us have: pride. It is, among many other behaviors and inclinations I see, a strong support for the Bible's claims about the character and nature of man.
"Why do bad things happen to good people?"
This is generally regarded as a difficult question; and I dont intend to say my answer will satisfy everyone. But at the core of it, the problem is that your question is wrong: There are no good people. I would assert that there are far more people than would like to admit it that in the right situation could be as brutal as Stalin, and feel fully justified in doing so. I would challenge anyone who thinks otherwise of themselves to reflect on whether their deeds, thoughts, and motivations are truly without blame. And I would assert that anyone who thinks they are is practicing self-deception, and that a single day watching that person could show the lie.
"How do we know God is real?"
I think there are many good evidences of that, and for me the biggest is how often the Bible gets it right-- it is to me a credible source. When raw secularism will try to say that communism can work and that there is nothing wrong with man, I can judge its credibility based on how often it has gotten it right. When the Bible says that all men are wicked, and even their best deeds are filled with flawed motivations, I can look and see ample evidence of that. Between the two, the Bible is thus established as much more credible as regards the human state.
There are other examples, but what is convincing for me would perhaps not be convincing for you; if this were truly something important to you (which you say it is not) you could find out whether the bible is credible by reading it.
And what is it about the stance that feels "easy" to you?
I think you are-- forgive me if this is offensive-- deceiving yourself. You have already acknowledged that if God does exist, then is the most important thing in the world; the only way you can feel it irrelevant is by wagering that he does not exist at all.
To quote CS Lewis, Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.
For Linux the best way to download and install a package is to use a package manager be it yum, apt-get or a GUI implementation of them.
This works if you are dealing with a program that is in a repository. There are a number that are not; off the top of my head, a backup program that I use (CrashPlan) is not. Also, for quite some time (no longer the case) if you wanted decent nVidia drivers you had to download their shell script and make sure you had compilation libraries (it is now in many package manager repos).
There are others, but they tend to be things that some vendor decided to support, and didnt particularly feel like hooking up a full repo for. The absolute best examples of these are remote-helpdesk programs like Bomgar and LogMeIn Rescue. We use Bomgar, and as of 9.10 / earlier you could just click the download button, get a.desktop file, and double click it to start the session; with 10.04 and above, that no longer works (due to new executable-bit requirements for.desktop files). Thats fine and all, but the question of whether it works on a particular distro pretty much depends on whether youre using one of the main 3.
Bomgar is unusually good about supporting new versions, and they patch pretty quickly-- but there are a lot of vendors who are not, and it really is a crapshoot for whether youll be able to install your program.
That this is "insightful" says something about the arrogance of the Linux community, at least on forums such as this.
I have used Linux, and it was my main desktop for several years. I do IT work and support VMWare, lots of Windows, some Linux, some Solaris, and have messed with unixes (AIX, FreeBSD). I have sampled a few WMs / DEs (KDE 3 / 4, Gnome 2/3, XFCE, whatever Puppy uses).
And honestly, I prefer the Win7 UI-- over Gnome2, over KDE4, over Aqua (OSX). It is exactly what I want, and with very few exceptions (lack of a native "always on top" option-- solved with DeskPins) theres not really anything about me that I would want to change. You might surmise that "if only I knew better I'd be happier", and you would be wrong. I dont want to learn new and wonderful ways of relating to my computer-- the way I have now works, it requires no fiddling to achieve "computing zen", and its common to basically any computer I can get on.
Believe it or not, there are people who simply find the idea of spending time to set up the GUI to be an utter waste of time when they like the GUI they have. I find my time much better spent actually using my computer, not setting it up for hours on end.
I haven't had trouble with Linux audio in about 10 years.
Thats wonderful. But the forums between about 6.10 and 8.10 were filled with issues related to sound breaking, especially after upgrades, especially with flash, and especially with pulseaudio. I myself experienced them, along with many many other issues.
The fact that you said the equivalent of "Works for me, youre doing it wrong" exactly illustrates the problem.
Ive run into a lot of the issues he mentioned, and they do suck when you run into them. I dont really think its relevant what poor choices hes made-- not a huge mono fan, and not a huge fan of it being hammered into distros-- but that doesnt mean he didnt make a lot of really valid points.
Maybe youre one of those users with a perfectly compatible systems that never has sound issues. But certainly there were lots of people who could identify with the issues raised.
He (de Icaza) hits "the problem" on the head with these choice quotes:
Why bother setting up the audio? It will likely break again and will force me to go on a hunting expedition to find out more than I ever wanted to know about the new audio system and the drivers technology we are using..... When faced with "this does not work", the community response was usually "you are doing it wrong".
Anyone who has used a recent distro (last 5-6 years) has probably faced this at least once. Its lots of fun the first time, learning the ins and outs of Linux. Then 6 months passes, a new version of the distro rolls out, you upgrade.....and your sound doesnt work again. Somehow, this time, the prospect of spending another Saturday learning about the new soundsystem is less exciting.
Seriously, I wish I could blame this on Ubuntu and say "its all your fault", but we now have how many init replacements? How many incompatible soundsystems (OSSv4, OSSv5, ALSA, PulseAudio)? How many X11 backend doohickies?
Choice is great, but not when things dont "just work", and cause this reality:
This killed the ecosystem for third party developers trying to target Linux on the desktop. You would try once, do your best effort to support the "top" distro or if you were feeling generous "the top three" distros. Only to find out that your software no longer worked six months later.
When a developer doesnt support the new WIndows, its not a huge deal really. You delay your rollout for 6months to a year till they get their act together, then you upgrade, and youre good for 2, 3, 4 or more years-- there will be MAYBE one additional Windows version in the intervening time, and it is highly likely your dev will continue to support you with updates throughout that time."
With Linux, you get maybe 6 months of grace, before the new version comes. Will your dev continue to support your version? Will he support the next one? Did he even decide to support RedHat/Fedora, or did they just go with Ubuntu?
Its a fair bet that if they say "supports linux" that youll get some kind of script that will probably work, but on occasion it just doesnt, leading to more fun chases figuring out what library is missing or what dependency is unfilled....
I dont know what the solution is, and I dont really care who the fault lies with, but surely this is not how things should be. All the frills in the world on a composited desktop mean jack squat if your user has no sound and cant figure out why.
there you tend to have both a lack of a consistent theory and a lack of verifiable evidence. And on top of that you're supposed to make major life choices based on it... how is that *not* silly?
Basically any political ideology fits all 3 of those criteria, yet it is not considered silly to take up such an affiliation. In MANY situations with no evidence where major life choices are required, people have no problem making such decisions; why the double standard with religion?
I would also disagree with the "no consistent theory" thing-- there is such a thing as "systematic theology" which lays it out, but basically ANY religious conception is at its core a "consistent theory" of what one thinks of spiritual things. Whether it is right or wrong is, of course, a different matter altogether.
I dont intend anything in this post to offend, but to provoke thought; please do not take it as anything else.
I would say that your notion is attempting to create an easy way out, when in fact there is not one. If God does in fact exist, and is in fact as powerful as believed, then your relationship to him is, bar none, the most important thing in the world-- whether or not you recognize it. If you are in opposition to Him, there would be no power that could protect you from His ire.
There are many views on theism, and (by necessary truth) all of them save one are wrong. I think the view that "it does not matter" manages to be the most wrong-- because it doesnt just get the answer wrong, it gets the question wrong too. I would challenge you to consider on what grounds you consider the question "irrelevant"-- I would wonder if there were not some reason you avoid the question.
Being Christian I can not simply leave the question here-- It is my belief that there is in fact a God, and that he is so opposed to wrongdoing and to upholding justice as to place all of us who have ever committed a wrong in deed or thought in a terrible bind; I would contend that this includes you, me, and every other person who has lived. I would urge you to read through the book of Romans and determine whether you could still say that the question is irrelevant.
So in the days of Josue the sun stopped still, isn't it?
This is only a problem if you start with the assumption that there is no God, which is to say circular logic.
Well, obviously the intended audience included our modern day society or else, what's the point in make a faith today based on that book?
Fair point, but there was definitely an immediate audience which we are not. It can be written with the knowledge that we would read it, and still be written for a specific people.
. My point there is about people claiming to speak for God when it's obviously a very convenient little pocket sized God that does what it's told when it's taken out at convenient times.
Lots of people claim lots of things on lots of topics, all the time. As with all such things, for religious subjects you need to judge credibility and check the sources yourself.
Yes, that would involve checking their claims against the bible. No, thats not a 5 minute job; but as with any other topic, to check if someone were a fraud (physics for example) you would need more than 5 minutes.
I dont believe I said anything in my posts to warrant such a response. If you want to have a dialogue about something, firing off personal attacks and profanity generally arent a good way to start.
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What im saying is that if youve cracked through to the hypervisor, they have some serious problems. If you manage to get root access to the box, all bets are off, especially if they have some kind of clustering-- you could potentially provision scads more VMs, and they would be loadbalanced.
Any claim that the universe exists has to contend with the solipsist argument, exemplified by Douglas Adams' Ruler of the Universe: "What world outside? The door is closed."
Noone actually believes that, or they would never leave the house.
Gratz, you discovered Decartes "I think, therefore I am."
Anyone seriously pursuing a degree in theology generally isnt going to go to Berkeley's theology department; theres this thing called "Seminary" for those who actually want to study it seriously.
Theres an infinite variety of "science" based "facts"; for every theological loon you pull up I could probably pull up 2 scientific quacks (I have a large selection to choose from: anyone who backs homeopathy, for one).
The fact that some people are "wrong" doesn't mean you get to label EVERYONE wrong. SOMEONE is right about religion.
I imagine a sufficiently clever hacker could think of a way to bypass the guest OS and the hypervisor and do wacky things
Someone who could figure out how to do that would rent a private virtual server from Rackspace and go to town. I imagine there would be far more lucrative targets than a desktop.
There simply is no assertion that He is beholden to explain anything at all.
It is implied when people insist on an answer to things like "why is there evil" (which is, to be fair, not the same as what you asked).
It was not, by the way, my intention to accuse you of pride in that matter. I was speaking generally, to a perceived common retort to my statement. That you did not make the statement, nor think it, you are obviously not one I had in mind. Honestly, that was aimed as much at myself as at anyone else.
I do not disagree, survival is a strong instinct. But then you assert that there are no people practicing self-revelation, and no one conciously training their own will to never fall into such traps
In Romans 7, Paul remarks about how he seems to keep sinning and doing things he abhors, even though he "knows better"-- he knows the traps to avoid, and yet he keeps doing "that which I do not want to do". I think the idea that we can work harder to avoid sin is a myth, but I would be interested to speak to one who would claim that they had successfully gotten all ill intentions, motivations, and deeds out of their life.
I would also point out that while you certainly can see (at least some of) the deeds of a man's life, you will never have access to their will. On that point however I would be surprised if you could even produce a man whose external deeds had been made faultless.
It getting it right or wrong has nothing to do with it. I'm not sure what your comment regarding secularism and communism is about, or how they are connected to this argument.
The point was this: When communism was first bandied about, one might be excused for thinking it a great idea. After seeing it fail many times, one would only have oneself to blame for supporting it through another failure-- it had already demonstrated a lack of credibility.
With the Bible, on every observation it makes about things we can directly see-- humans in action-- I find it to be spot on in a way that I have not found secular humanism to be. Humanism, that I have encountered, seems to say "we can get rid of societal-- or even personal-- evil". I am unaware of such attempts ever meeting anything but failure.
That the Bible reflects man's self centerdness is not a point in your favour. The Bible is Word of God, written by Man.
It seems that a God who desired his word to be known would be fairly impotent if he could not even preserve his message.
. To wager is to through the die, if you will. I'm not throwing any. I see no point.
If you were told, you must throw this die and wager or else you will be executed, and you said "I dont see the point", it would tell a bystander one of two things: Either A) you do not believe the threat, or B) you do not care about your life.
Now, lets say the situation were slightly different. Lets say you were told "You MUST wager about whether I always tell the truth, or you will be killed". Assuming B is not true (which I will, and correct me if I am wrong), this means that for you to refuse on grounds of irrelevancy means that, in your head at least, you have already wagered-- you have wagered that he does not always tell the truth.
According to the Bible, there is no "middle ground". You are either for God, or you are rejecting him and are subject to judgement. To say "Whether you tell the truth or not I will not wager" means either that you do not care about such judgement, or else that you do not take that message seriously (that is, you believe it false). You have, in fact wagered.
If everything is of God then God is already revealed in plain sight and I need not question.
That assumes that God is pro-you, which I think is an unsafe assumption unless you have strong reason to believe otherwise.
Incidentally, your words are very similar to a quot
That you say this kind of nonsense with a straight face is an example of YOUR arrogance. There are plenty of people in the Linux/FOSS community who don't want to set up their GUI for hours on end. They form distributions.
"I prefer X, so YOU are the asshole".
Might want to reread my post. I didnt say any of that. I just remarked that the idea that "Windows 7 UI is a farce" sort of implies that im incompetent or ignorant for liking it, which I disagree(d) with.
Please stop and read the one-sided gibberish you're spouting
A good starting point would be if YOU re-read what I wrote, because you seem to have utterly misread it. I wasnt saying people are stupid for using Linux DEs, I was saying I find setting them up for hours on end to be a waste of MY time, and that I know others who agree with me.
Decisions are made based on political ideology in ignorance of (or despite) evidence.
The problem, as with religion, is that the evidence available doesnt fit many people's idea of "sufficient", but you nevertheless must choose. This means making do with what you have.
And then people vote based on those justifications and spin, rather than on actual evidence.
That does happen, and I wont deny that there are cultural / familial "christians" with no real conviction or depth of belief. That does not take away from those who have made a choice with depth behind it.
Besides, a big part of the problem here was Flash which, totally outside distro control, has always been a poster child with crappy Linux support.
That claim falls short when flash worked fine (I wont say perfectly) in prior versions, and there was absolutely nothing wrong with ALSA for desktop users.
Are you perchance talking about an Ubuntu problem, and not a Linux problem?
.... Which is roughly the problem de Icaza was talking about. If its an Ubuntu problem, and Fedora has some totally incompatible sound system that requires a rewrite to be compatible with, then it is a Linux problem. Ubuntu and Fedora and Debian dont reside in some vacuum all by themselves; when every major distro ends largely incompatible with the others, what do you think that says to a dev considering porting to Linux?
And the problem is not confined to Ubuntu; in the past few years we now have 2 versions of Grub running around (the newer of which is by all accounts a disaster of complexity), 4-5 different init replacements (all causing their own incompatibilities which I have personally experienced), 3 versions of Gnome running around, and some 4 soundsystems supported variously, at least one of which has been the cause of massive problems. Choice can be good, but this is a disaster.
We asked again, and again and again, and nothing changes.
There are answers in the Bible for some of your questions, but for others the answer is "we arent told". This isnt evasion, and its perfectly valid: once you accept the premise that "there is a God", the assertion that he is beholden to explain Himself becomes rather absurd. That he condescended to do so to such a degree already, and one would demand yet more, I think indicates clearly a flaw that all of us have: pride. It is, among many other behaviors and inclinations I see, a strong support for the Bible's claims about the character and nature of man.
"Why do bad things happen to good people?"
This is generally regarded as a difficult question; and I dont intend to say my answer will satisfy everyone. But at the core of it, the problem is that your question is wrong: There are no good people. I would assert that there are far more people than would like to admit it that in the right situation could be as brutal as Stalin, and feel fully justified in doing so. I would challenge anyone who thinks otherwise of themselves to reflect on whether their deeds, thoughts, and motivations are truly without blame. And I would assert that anyone who thinks they are is practicing self-deception, and that a single day watching that person could show the lie.
"How do we know God is real?"
I think there are many good evidences of that, and for me the biggest is how often the Bible gets it right-- it is to me a credible source. When raw secularism will try to say that communism can work and that there is nothing wrong with man, I can judge its credibility based on how often it has gotten it right. When the Bible says that all men are wicked, and even their best deeds are filled with flawed motivations, I can look and see ample evidence of that. Between the two, the Bible is thus established as much more credible as regards the human state.
There are other examples, but what is convincing for me would perhaps not be convincing for you; if this were truly something important to you (which you say it is not) you could find out whether the bible is credible by reading it.
And what is it about the stance that feels "easy" to you?
I think you are-- forgive me if this is offensive-- deceiving yourself. You have already acknowledged that if God does exist, then is the most important thing in the world; the only way you can feel it irrelevant is by wagering that he does not exist at all.
To quote CS Lewis,
Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.
Sory for double-post-- clicked submit too soon.
For Linux the best way to download and install a package is to use a package manager be it yum, apt-get or a GUI implementation of them.
This works if you are dealing with a program that is in a repository. There are a number that are not; off the top of my head, a backup program that I use (CrashPlan) is not. Also, for quite some time (no longer the case) if you wanted decent nVidia drivers you had to download their shell script and make sure you had compilation libraries (it is now in many package manager repos).
There are others, but they tend to be things that some vendor decided to support, and didnt particularly feel like hooking up a full repo for. The absolute best examples of these are remote-helpdesk programs like Bomgar and LogMeIn Rescue. We use Bomgar, and as of 9.10 / earlier you could just click the download button, get a .desktop file, and double click it to start the session; with 10.04 and above, that no longer works (due to new executable-bit requirements for .desktop files). Thats fine and all, but the question of whether it works on a particular distro pretty much depends on whether youre using one of the main 3.
Bomgar is unusually good about supporting new versions, and they patch pretty quickly-- but there are a lot of vendors who are not, and it really is a crapshoot for whether youll be able to install your program.
Wrong! I will agree with you on Fedora however Redhat supports a Redhat distribution over 7 years
You misunderstand. Im not talking about distro support, im talking about third party vendor support.
Maybe he could write the shell script and sell it to OP for $19.94.
Well it is annoying to have to rebuild things when the kernel is updated, vmware comes to mind.
AFAIK and as far as I could find in searches, VMWare is not nor ever was Linux-based. If you have information to the contrary I would be interested.
That this is "insightful" says something about the arrogance of the Linux community, at least on forums such as this.
I have used Linux, and it was my main desktop for several years. I do IT work and support VMWare, lots of Windows, some Linux, some Solaris, and have messed with unixes (AIX, FreeBSD). I have sampled a few WMs / DEs (KDE 3 / 4, Gnome 2/3, XFCE, whatever Puppy uses).
And honestly, I prefer the Win7 UI-- over Gnome2, over KDE4, over Aqua (OSX). It is exactly what I want, and with very few exceptions (lack of a native "always on top" option-- solved with DeskPins) theres not really anything about me that I would want to change. You might surmise that "if only I knew better I'd be happier", and you would be wrong. I dont want to learn new and wonderful ways of relating to my computer-- the way I have now works, it requires no fiddling to achieve "computing zen", and its common to basically any computer I can get on.
Believe it or not, there are people who simply find the idea of spending time to set up the GUI to be an utter waste of time when they like the GUI they have. I find my time much better spent actually using my computer, not setting it up for hours on end.
I haven't had trouble with Linux audio in about 10 years.
Thats wonderful. But the forums between about 6.10 and 8.10 were filled with issues related to sound breaking, especially after upgrades, especially with flash, and especially with pulseaudio. I myself experienced them, along with many many other issues.
The fact that you said the equivalent of "Works for me, youre doing it wrong" exactly illustrates the problem.
Ive run into a lot of the issues he mentioned, and they do suck when you run into them. I dont really think its relevant what poor choices hes made-- not a huge mono fan, and not a huge fan of it being hammered into distros-- but that doesnt mean he didnt make a lot of really valid points.
Maybe youre one of those users with a perfectly compatible systems that never has sound issues. But certainly there were lots of people who could identify with the issues raised.
He (de Icaza) hits "the problem" on the head with these choice quotes:
Why bother setting up the audio? ....
It will likely break again and will force me to go on a hunting expedition to find out more than I ever wanted to know about the new audio system and the drivers technology we are using.
When faced with "this does not work", the community response was usually "you are doing it wrong".
Anyone who has used a recent distro (last 5-6 years) has probably faced this at least once. Its lots of fun the first time, learning the ins and outs of Linux. Then 6 months passes, a new version of the distro rolls out, you upgrade.....and your sound doesnt work again. Somehow, this time, the prospect of spending another Saturday learning about the new soundsystem is less exciting.
Seriously, I wish I could blame this on Ubuntu and say "its all your fault", but we now have how many init replacements? How many incompatible soundsystems (OSSv4, OSSv5, ALSA, PulseAudio)? How many X11 backend doohickies?
Choice is great, but not when things dont "just work", and cause this reality:
This killed the ecosystem for third party developers trying to target Linux on the desktop. You would try once, do your best effort to support the "top" distro or if you were feeling generous "the top three" distros. Only to find out that your software no longer worked six months later.
When a developer doesnt support the new WIndows, its not a huge deal really. You delay your rollout for 6months to a year till they get their act together, then you upgrade, and youre good for 2, 3, 4 or more years-- there will be MAYBE one additional Windows version in the intervening time, and it is highly likely your dev will continue to support you with updates throughout that time."
With Linux, you get maybe 6 months of grace, before the new version comes. Will your dev continue to support your version? Will he support the next one? Did he even decide to support RedHat/Fedora, or did they just go with Ubuntu?
Its a fair bet that if they say "supports linux" that youll get some kind of script that will probably work, but on occasion it just doesnt, leading to more fun chases figuring out what library is missing or what dependency is unfilled....
I dont know what the solution is, and I dont really care who the fault lies with, but surely this is not how things should be. All the frills in the world on a composited desktop mean jack squat if your user has no sound and cant figure out why.
there you tend to have both a lack of a consistent theory and a lack of verifiable evidence. And on top of that you're supposed to make major life choices based on it... how is that *not* silly?
Basically any political ideology fits all 3 of those criteria, yet it is not considered silly to take up such an affiliation. In MANY situations with no evidence where major life choices are required, people have no problem making such decisions; why the double standard with religion?
I would also disagree with the "no consistent theory" thing-- there is such a thing as "systematic theology" which lays it out, but basically ANY religious conception is at its core a "consistent theory" of what one thinks of spiritual things. Whether it is right or wrong is, of course, a different matter altogether.
I dont intend anything in this post to offend, but to provoke thought; please do not take it as anything else.
I would say that your notion is attempting to create an easy way out, when in fact there is not one. If God does in fact exist, and is in fact as powerful as believed, then your relationship to him is, bar none, the most important thing in the world-- whether or not you recognize it. If you are in opposition to Him, there would be no power that could protect you from His ire.
There are many views on theism, and (by necessary truth) all of them save one are wrong. I think the view that "it does not matter" manages to be the most wrong-- because it doesnt just get the answer wrong, it gets the question wrong too. I would challenge you to consider on what grounds you consider the question "irrelevant"-- I would wonder if there were not some reason you avoid the question.
Being Christian I can not simply leave the question here-- It is my belief that there is in fact a God, and that he is so opposed to wrongdoing and to upholding justice as to place all of us who have ever committed a wrong in deed or thought in a terrible bind; I would contend that this includes you, me, and every other person who has lived. I would urge you to read through the book of Romans and determine whether you could still say that the question is irrelevant.
So in the days of Josue the sun stopped still, isn't it?
This is only a problem if you start with the assumption that there is no God, which is to say circular logic.
Well, obviously the intended audience included our modern day society or else, what's the point in make a faith today based on that book?
Fair point, but there was definitely an immediate audience which we are not. It can be written with the knowledge that we would read it, and still be written for a specific people.
. My point there is about people claiming to speak for God when it's obviously a very convenient little pocket sized God that does what it's told when it's taken out at convenient times.
Lots of people claim lots of things on lots of topics, all the time. As with all such things, for religious subjects you need to judge credibility and check the sources yourself.
Yes, that would involve checking their claims against the bible. No, thats not a 5 minute job; but as with any other topic, to check if someone were a fraud (physics for example) you would need more than 5 minutes.
I dont believe I said anything in my posts to warrant such a response. If you want to have a dialogue about something, firing off personal attacks and profanity generally arent a good way to start.