Little do these little punks realize the true l337 P0W3R granted by a cell phone, the phone number to Child Protective Services, and petty vindictiveness.
I've got nothing against GTA stuff. I've played a couple of them. What I was trying to say is that it is the stuff that refers to itself as "Mature" or "For Adults" which tends to be juvenile. Take porn: it is "Adult entertainment" for "mature audiences", but there isn't really anything adult or mature about it. Its juvenile. When I take a gander at my massive collection of the stuff, I'm in no way confused that it is anything other than juvenile stuff.
Old Yeller is a movie that came out ages ago and was G rated. But I'd never refer to it as juvenile.
My previous laptop had Intel wireless so it wasn't a problem under Ubuntu. A friend has a Broadcom chipset and things were a little stickier.
Slackware may truly said to be venerable. The oldest and still highly respected distro.
I have been curious about OS X and I've toyed with getting a Mac laptop, but there are two things: 1) I love my Tadpole's keyboard; it has a Sun UNIX layout and the keys have a good feel to them. 2) OS X is the selling point and, having not used it, I'm hesitant to throw that much cash down on one. While OS X has me curious (as the terminal is easily accessible), Apple's reputation for making long lasting hardware is a real (potentially) selling point. If I wind up not liking OS X and I wipe it for some other Unix, I don't know if that would void the warranty...
As I put in my direct reply to him, if he's curious, then he ought to just grab a live CD and give it a test run. In my replies to you, I'm just chatting with you.
I didn't have a PC at all for two or three years and when I got one it had XP. Ran fine; no significant problems. As it had been so long since I had done anything, I was initially content to just use XP. Didn't last:)
Although initially I wasn't thinking about Linux at all, somebody somewhere mentioned a Debian based distro called Ubuntu. So, I figured what the hell and installed it on 1/10th of my drive... then that ran out of room so redid the install with 1/4 and ran out of room. Six weeks after my initial "curiousity install" I just got rid of XP because I simply didn't like it as much as Ubuntu. Nothing was wrong with XP, just prefered something else.
One interesting thing that I have discovered since that time (about two years ago) is that the Unix-ness of Linux I really dig. I like a lot of the other stuff as well, but I really like my shell and pipes and all that good stuff. So I have Solaris on my laptop and Ubuntu on my desktop... well I kind of have to have Solaris on my laptop as it is an UltraSparc machine that no Linux will run on. (It was the single most bizarre laptop I'd ever heard of... I couldn't resist...)
Background story of me and my old 386: It came with DOS 5 and Windows 3. I hated Windows 3. Passionately. I rather liked DOS; it did what I told it to do.
Now that I think about it, I believe that what kept me from being one of those people who (way back in the day) complained about Windows but stuck with it was the fact that I had previously made a choice regarding my operating environment; when I realized I hated Windows 95, it didn't occur to me that I had no other choice, so I started asking around. And as I had previously rejected a graphical environment for a text one, the (then) necessity for command line stuff didn't bug me at all.
One positive Windows 95 memory I have was of using LiteStep as the gui shell. I made an interface only I could use:)
It could have been Malibu Barbie's Dream Operating System if it would have crashed less than Windows 95. But it wasn't MBDOS that was available as an alternative, it was Linux. But it was not Linux I was looking for, specifically; it was just Something Not Windows 95.
There was not yet the desire to explore and tinker. The guys that mentioned Linux touted the open nature of it, but all I cared about was "Does it crash less?" Getting a yes, I was on my way.
If it wasn't Linux, but OS/2, MacOS or something else, then I almost certainly never would have gotten the tinkering bug for the same reason that I did not get it when I had Windows 95: lack of immediate availability.
So I only knew that I wanted Linux because of what it did beyond what my initial desire for "crashes less". If it wasn't available then, I would currently be a content and clueless Malibu Barbie user now.
"If[...]you don't know why you'd want/need linux, then there probably isn't much point."
Oddly, I didn't know why I'd want/need linux (aside from being told it was a lot less crash prone than Win 95) until I had been using it for awhile. It was only after getting comfortable with it that I really started poking around and discovered the myriad of neat things I could do with a home computer that I never thought of doing because, on Windows, it wasn't just there.
It is like WAY back when I had a C64 and it came with BASIC so you could write your own programs. Because it was just there, I did. With DOS 5, Windows 3 and 95, it wasn't just there so I never even thought about doing anything like that.
I think WoW runs under Wine, but it may require some setup. Once I was a gamer, thus dual booted, but I'm so tired of the upgrade treadmill that I just bought a PS3 so I no longer really care about PC games.
As for why you might want to, why not just download the ISO and run the LiveCD and test out for yourself?
If you like it, great! If not, then at least you gave it a shot.
While I'm pretty sure no one is going to read this, seeing how many comments have been made so far, I thought that I'd toss out some of my own nuttiness.
Insofar as I can tell, border areas (which includes international airports) are an odd variation of a no man's land. Legally, you are not in the country so the general laws do not apply, but you are in the power of the country, so laws specifically for this stuff do apply (and you can't just turn around and leave.) So assuming no other rules apply (treaties and whatnot) they can pretty much do whatever they want to you.
Seeing as there is so much extra horizontal room with widescreen monitors and laptops, would it not make sense to use that space, rather than the smaller amount of vertical space for the interface?
1997 - Got my second computer ever to play Quake on. OS was Windows 95. I hated Windows 95 as much as I hated Windows 3 on the 386 that had died a few years before; I liked DOS 5 because it did what I told it to do. But I hated Windows 3 for its uselessness to me. I hated Windows 95 for being unstable, randomly crashing piece of crap.
"You can play Quake on Linux," somebody on #quake said. Found out what Linux was and bought a Red Hat box (4.2, I want to say). Needed to have the case off and a flashlight handy so I could read the numbers of the chips on the motherboard during install.
Getting X to work was a huge headache; much printing of HOWTOs was done. But eventually it did work. It must have been around this point that Linux became interesting in itself to me. Settled on WindowMaker as my window manager of choice after experimenting with different possible ways to graphically interface with the computer.
And, of course, I got Quake up and rolling.
Yeah, Ubuntu isn't perfect. I too had problems getting my 22" monitor properly done. For some bizarre reason it takes 30 seconds for the change background box to pop up after selecting it. With three external drives hooked up, opening Nautilus after the drives have spun down takes way too damn long.
Even with all this, I still prefer it to Windows, any version.
BTW, I'm not even trying to make a counter point, but I have fond memories of that initial encounter with Linux as that is what began my decade long fascination with computers. Just thought I'd share:)
I thought I was the only one who knew this... how many others are aware of this problem? The parents want their kids to do well, which is perfectly well and good. But they have substituted "good grades" for "being educated" and thus their kids will get the better grades since mom is doing the work, but surprise! kid knows squat.
I worked at a Barnes and Noble and an astonishing number of mothers would come in there to buy reading list stuff and the only question was "which ones are the shortest?" And then would proceed to ask for the Cliff Notes, too.
At some point, I think, getting positive results became an end which was no longer connected to striving. Here we have it in education, but there is an appreciable number of people who see the steroid-athlete thing and say its only a problem if you get caught. The desire for a reputation of excellence is losing its connection with the desire to be excellent.
European city structure is rather different from American city structure. While there are heavily built up areas in America, most American cities are places that cars are pretty much required. Thus gasoline prices are a major factor in doing things in America, much more so than in the EU.
You are more right than any decent person should ever be.. I work for a library, just a county-sized library system in one of the poorer states and the waste is insane. The program used to check stuff in and out can print out receipts with the due date, but instead "because that is always how we've done it" there are the cards to be stamped which, by a very rough estimate costs the taxpayers about $60000/year. Just to stamp cards.
The people who run the various branches don't actually do anything other than fill out paperwork all day, every day for the centralized bureaucracy who is constantly adding new forms to be filled out, statistics to be manually collected, etc. The timesheet is FOUR pages long and must be turned in one week before the time period ends because it takes the accountants that long to go through them all.
I'd estimate that 1/4th of all library employees (probably me included) are needed just because of all the paperwork that the bureaucracy demands that the full librarians. The full librarians do little more than paperwork. The stuff that keeps the system running are done by the techs and the college kids. And even they have to fill out paperwork.
They skimp on the core of the system, which if you search for books on plumbing will give you the title "Dracula" by Bram Stoker as number one match. They spent tens of thousands on custom printer software and hardware so as to save a couple of thousand dollars worth of paper from overprinting. And the software is buggy and crashes frequently, which then requires the employees to manually find and print the damn thing.
I'm not even going to go into the "thinking" required to insist that each and every one of the hundreds of computers spread all over the place geographically have networking manually configured and other stuff of that sort.
This is just a single library system... what the hell must the Federal bureaucracy be like...
Bureaucracy, public or private, is a creation of the devil...
If you heard it in an effete British accent which sort of resembles a John Cleese wearing a Robin Hood outfit speaking to a collection of little people with a map, then you are on target.
Oh, thank you! My, what a friendly bunch of abject servants you all are. I simply must tell all my fellow FOSS overlords all about how sweet you all have been in accepting the yoke placed around your necks by our imperious hands.
In the Discourses of Epictetus, he relates the way people will try to get information out of you by giving information about themselves using the argument that it would be unfair for you to know something about themselves while they do not know any of your secrets. Epictetus' counter to this is that you told me something about yourself because you thought it appropriate for you to do so; that does not mean that it is appropriate for me to tell you anything about myself.
Little do these little punks realize the true l337 P0W3R granted by a cell phone, the phone number to Child Protective Services, and petty vindictiveness.
"And what ... you don't care about your photos, docs and music???"
No, not really.
But my porn on the other hand...
I've got nothing against GTA stuff. I've played a couple of them. What I was trying to say is that it is the stuff that refers to itself as "Mature" or "For Adults" which tends to be juvenile. Take porn: it is "Adult entertainment" for "mature audiences", but there isn't really anything adult or mature about it. Its juvenile. When I take a gander at my massive collection of the stuff, I'm in no way confused that it is anything other than juvenile stuff.
Old Yeller is a movie that came out ages ago and was G rated. But I'd never refer to it as juvenile.
Has anyone ever noticed that anytime something is labeled "Adult" or "Mature", it is almost inevitably juvenile?
That's easy:
Girlfriend looked at new computer. "That's not a Mac," she commented.
Later that night, while asleep on the couch, he dreamed of marketing slogans.
My previous laptop had Intel wireless so it wasn't a problem under Ubuntu. A friend has a Broadcom chipset and things were a little stickier.
:)
Slackware may truly said to be venerable. The oldest and still highly respected distro.
I have been curious about OS X and I've toyed with getting a Mac laptop, but there are two things: 1) I love my Tadpole's keyboard; it has a Sun UNIX layout and the keys have a good feel to them. 2) OS X is the selling point and, having not used it, I'm hesitant to throw that much cash down on one. While OS X has me curious (as the terminal is easily accessible), Apple's reputation for making long lasting hardware is a real (potentially) selling point. If I wind up not liking OS X and I wipe it for some other Unix, I don't know if that would void the warranty...
Who says off topic is bad?
As I put in my direct reply to him, if he's curious, then he ought to just grab a live CD and give it a test run. In my replies to you, I'm just chatting with you.
:)
:)
I didn't have a PC at all for two or three years and when I got one it had XP. Ran fine; no significant problems. As it had been so long since I had done anything, I was initially content to just use XP. Didn't last
Although initially I wasn't thinking about Linux at all, somebody somewhere mentioned a Debian based distro called Ubuntu. So, I figured what the hell and installed it on 1/10th of my drive... then that ran out of room so redid the install with 1/4 and ran out of room. Six weeks after my initial "curiousity install" I just got rid of XP because I simply didn't like it as much as Ubuntu. Nothing was wrong with XP, just prefered something else.
One interesting thing that I have discovered since that time (about two years ago) is that the Unix-ness of Linux I really dig. I like a lot of the other stuff as well, but I really like my shell and pipes and all that good stuff. So I have Solaris on my laptop and Ubuntu on my desktop... well I kind of have to have Solaris on my laptop as it is an UltraSparc machine that no Linux will run on. (It was the single most bizarre laptop I'd ever heard of... I couldn't resist...)
Background story of me and my old 386: It came with DOS 5 and Windows 3. I hated Windows 3. Passionately. I rather liked DOS; it did what I told it to do.
Now that I think about it, I believe that what kept me from being one of those people who (way back in the day) complained about Windows but stuck with it was the fact that I had previously made a choice regarding my operating environment; when I realized I hated Windows 95, it didn't occur to me that I had no other choice, so I started asking around. And as I had previously rejected a graphical environment for a text one, the (then) necessity for command line stuff didn't bug me at all.
One positive Windows 95 memory I have was of using LiteStep as the gui shell. I made an interface only I could use
It could have been Malibu Barbie's Dream Operating System if it would have crashed less than Windows 95. But it wasn't MBDOS that was available as an alternative, it was Linux. But it was not Linux I was looking for, specifically; it was just Something Not Windows 95.
There was not yet the desire to explore and tinker. The guys that mentioned Linux touted the open nature of it, but all I cared about was "Does it crash less?" Getting a yes, I was on my way.
If it wasn't Linux, but OS/2, MacOS or something else, then I almost certainly never would have gotten the tinkering bug for the same reason that I did not get it when I had Windows 95: lack of immediate availability.
So I only knew that I wanted Linux because of what it did beyond what my initial desire for "crashes less". If it wasn't available then, I would currently be a content and clueless Malibu Barbie user now.
That made me laugh. :)
"If[...]you don't know why you'd want/need linux, then there probably isn't much point."
Oddly, I didn't know why I'd want/need linux (aside from being told it was a lot less crash prone than Win 95) until I had been using it for awhile. It was only after getting comfortable with it that I really started poking around and discovered the myriad of neat things I could do with a home computer that I never thought of doing because, on Windows, it wasn't just there.
It is like WAY back when I had a C64 and it came with BASIC so you could write your own programs. Because it was just there, I did. With DOS 5, Windows 3 and 95, it wasn't just there so I never even thought about doing anything like that.
I think WoW runs under Wine, but it may require some setup. Once I was a gamer, thus dual booted, but I'm so tired of the upgrade treadmill that I just bought a PS3 so I no longer really care about PC games.
As for why you might want to, why not just download the ISO and run the LiveCD and test out for yourself?
If you like it, great! If not, then at least you gave it a shot.
While I'm pretty sure no one is going to read this, seeing how many comments have been made so far, I thought that I'd toss out some of my own nuttiness.
Insofar as I can tell, border areas (which includes international airports) are an odd variation of a no man's land. Legally, you are not in the country so the general laws do not apply, but you are in the power of the country, so laws specifically for this stuff do apply (and you can't just turn around and leave.) So assuming no other rules apply (treaties and whatnot) they can pretty much do whatever they want to you.
As you can see from how you were modded, no critique is to acceptable. The open minded have declared it sacrosanct.
Seeing as there is so much extra horizontal room with widescreen monitors and laptops, would it not make sense to use that space, rather than the smaller amount of vertical space for the interface?
"It requires some rouge kernel hackers that dont care about licensing"
Unfortunately, Linux kernel hackers are mostly license conscious. I also hear that they are mostly azure, like the Smurfs.
"Think back when you weren't a Linux geek."
:)
1997 - Got my second computer ever to play Quake on. OS was Windows 95. I hated Windows 95 as much as I hated Windows 3 on the 386 that had died a few years before; I liked DOS 5 because it did what I told it to do. But I hated Windows 3 for its uselessness to me. I hated Windows 95 for being unstable, randomly crashing piece of crap.
"You can play Quake on Linux," somebody on #quake said. Found out what Linux was and bought a Red Hat box (4.2, I want to say). Needed to have the case off and a flashlight handy so I could read the numbers of the chips on the motherboard during install.
Getting X to work was a huge headache; much printing of HOWTOs was done. But eventually it did work. It must have been around this point that Linux became interesting in itself to me. Settled on WindowMaker as my window manager of choice after experimenting with different possible ways to graphically interface with the computer.
And, of course, I got Quake up and rolling.
Yeah, Ubuntu isn't perfect. I too had problems getting my 22" monitor properly done. For some bizarre reason it takes 30 seconds for the change background box to pop up after selecting it. With three external drives hooked up, opening Nautilus after the drives have spun down takes way too damn long.
Even with all this, I still prefer it to Windows, any version.
BTW, I'm not even trying to make a counter point, but I have fond memories of that initial encounter with Linux as that is what began my decade long fascination with computers. Just thought I'd share
"Far too often, parents do their kid's homework"
I thought I was the only one who knew this... how many others are aware of this problem? The parents want their kids to do well, which is perfectly well and good. But they have substituted "good grades" for "being educated" and thus their kids will get the better grades since mom is doing the work, but surprise! kid knows squat.
I worked at a Barnes and Noble and an astonishing number of mothers would come in there to buy reading list stuff and the only question was "which ones are the shortest?" And then would proceed to ask for the Cliff Notes, too.
At some point, I think, getting positive results became an end which was no longer connected to striving. Here we have it in education, but there is an appreciable number of people who see the steroid-athlete thing and say its only a problem if you get caught. The desire for a reputation of excellence is losing its connection with the desire to be excellent.
European city structure is rather different from American city structure. While there are heavily built up areas in America, most American cities are places that cars are pretty much required. Thus gasoline prices are a major factor in doing things in America, much more so than in the EU.
You are more right than any decent person should ever be.. I work for a library, just a county-sized library system in one of the poorer states and the waste is insane. The program used to check stuff in and out can print out receipts with the due date, but instead "because that is always how we've done it" there are the cards to be stamped which, by a very rough estimate costs the taxpayers about $60000/year. Just to stamp cards.
The people who run the various branches don't actually do anything other than fill out paperwork all day, every day for the centralized bureaucracy who is constantly adding new forms to be filled out, statistics to be manually collected, etc. The timesheet is FOUR pages long and must be turned in one week before the time period ends because it takes the accountants that long to go through them all.
I'd estimate that 1/4th of all library employees (probably me included) are needed just because of all the paperwork that the bureaucracy demands that the full librarians. The full librarians do little more than paperwork. The stuff that keeps the system running are done by the techs and the college kids. And even they have to fill out paperwork.
They skimp on the core of the system, which if you search for books on plumbing will give you the title "Dracula" by Bram Stoker as number one match. They spent tens of thousands on custom printer software and hardware so as to save a couple of thousand dollars worth of paper from overprinting. And the software is buggy and crashes frequently, which then requires the employees to manually find and print the damn thing.
I'm not even going to go into the "thinking" required to insist that each and every one of the hundreds of computers spread all over the place geographically have networking manually configured and other stuff of that sort.
This is just a single library system... what the hell must the Federal bureaucracy be like...
Bureaucracy, public or private, is a creation of the devil...
I am utterly baffled as to why I react to the P0n13Z thing as if it is the summit of comedic genius...
If you heard it in an effete British accent which sort of resembles a John Cleese wearing a Robin Hood outfit speaking to a collection of little people with a map, then you are on target.
:)
Otherwise you are just wrong
Oh, thank you! My, what a friendly bunch of abject servants you all are. I simply must tell all my fellow FOSS overlords all about how sweet you all have been in accepting the yoke placed around your necks by our imperious hands.
...and I for one welcome our new karma whoring overlords!
Will there be ponies?
I think you meant "A well 'misplaced' 220 volt cable may be able to solve that"
In the Discourses of Epictetus, he relates the way people will try to get information out of you by giving information about themselves using the argument that it would be unfair for you to know something about themselves while they do not know any of your secrets. Epictetus' counter to this is that you told me something about yourself because you thought it appropriate for you to do so; that does not mean that it is appropriate for me to tell you anything about myself.