Just for the sake of argument, why would I _not_ want to move to Canada? (I currently live in the U.S.). I've certainly considered living in other countries, if only just for a while to see more of the world, but I don't want to fall victim to the "grass is always greener" illusion.
As background, let's say that I'm a moderate with a bit of a leftward bent (Kucinich is looking surprisingly good for a Democrat), and I don't think national healthcare is such a bad idea at all. What might I find to be worse were I to relocate to Canada?
ClearChannel is all about the commoditization of music. The goal of ClearChannel is to make money by selling advertising, and the music is largely irrelevant. That's why it is in their best interest to push music which is "inoffensive" to the largest number of listeners, because then they can charge more for advertising. It is to their benefit to play music which is bland.
Many people who are passionate about music resent this greatly. Music is art, not something to be packaged and sold like Instant Oatmeal. For the same reason, foodies don't like McDonalds and many coders don't like Microsoft. REAL innovation can never happen in these environments. You'll never see a radical shift in computing from Microsoft, amazing new flavors from McDonalds (or even places like T.G.I. Fridays), or musical breakthroughs on ClearChannel. They'll wait until things have been largely sorted out so that those pesky rough edges can be smoothed away, and they can sell everyone the equivalent of safety scissors. Revolutionary ideas make people uncomfortable, and that's just not good for sales.
Downloading MP3s? Are you kidding? I work for a radio station! Besides, we're all snobs who demand high quality VBR in our compressed music, which pretty much means "rip yer own."
I'm confused as to what my computer would have to do with my roommate having drugs, though. I thought that they could just take your house if illegal narcotics were found on the premises (not sure how it works if you're in an apartment).
Are you certain that DMA mode is enabled on your disk (assuming you're using IDE, which most people are)? Running a system from a hard disk in PIO mode can be agonizing in comparison.
(fdisk is the tool, in case you weren't sure).
Also, make sure there are not any old, slow devices on the same IDE channel, as it will be forced to cater to the worst thing attached.
They already do "repo" computer systems for filesharing. In the case of some of the university students who were charged, their computers were taken (along with pretty much everything attached, like an oh-so-dangerous power strip), and they could make no progress in getting them back. Apparently that's the way it goes: you'll get your stuff back eventually, but it's more practical to just give up.
Didn't, and don't. Care, that is, or at least not in real life. Do you really think that most blank tapes and CDs sold account for home recording? The RIAA and labels know about casual copying. They know people make copies of CDs for their friends. They know that they can't really put a stop to this (although they still speak out against it in public, and make some effort to correct it, but that always fails. Always.)
The problem is one of scale, and the reason there can be any attempt at a solution is that filesharing uses the public network. Suddenly, you can share your music with a lot more people for a lot less effort. All sorts of people are/were doing it, just like all sorts of people make (and have been making) copies of CDs or "mix tapes" (probably not tapes these days) for their friends. The problem is that by using a popular filesharing service, you're practically ADVERTISING the fact that you're illegally copying music. The RIAA can't help but fight something like this.
However, this bill is talking about ten copies of a song. Not 2,000,000, not even 20. This is talking about permanantly constraining your rights as a citizen for letting 10 people listen to some of the music you bought.
We've been using Quark at our college newspaper for a few years now, since we decided that we had outgrown Pagemaker. I have a special "hate place" in my heart for Quark, especially its explicit lack of support for working with files while they're still on a fileserver. But let's talk about image quality (baby).
We've had numerous issues (no pun intended), from colors not being quite right in images to images being squished to 25% of their size. We've also had font troubles. What I mean by this is that what we (thought we) had when we finished the paper in Quark was not what we got back in newsprint format the next day. These appear to have been Quark -> Quark issues. With PDF, there wouldn't have been a problem, because WYS is really WYG.
The new Macs will of course have OS X, and rather than shell out the cash for Quark again (academic prices are a bit better at $900 for an 8-user license, but of course we also have far less money), I would like to go to Indesign or something else. Our printer will happily take PDFs. I've been keeping an eye on Scribus for a while, but I haven't been able to play with it since I wrote a review for Newsforge (about a year ago, might still be there, not going to bother finding it). I can guarantee that we'll at least look at it, because Quark isn't good at doing PDFs (which we want to use for various things), and because our production staff is tired of literally losing sleep to Quark every week.
While it's true that no consumer would have to return the TV, they might have trouble getting it fixed. The recording studio at WMBC has a 24-channel mixer by Behringer. Behringer totally ripped of the design from Mackie, was sued, and lost. So the last time I got it fixed, it was $12 parts and $375 labor, because it's impossible to get information about it. "Get another one" is not an option for a college station.
Now, this shouldn't be a problem with Linux in the long run, as whatever code is deemed to be infringing (if any) can be removed/replaced. Heck, if I had to, I could revert all our machines back to 2.2.x until it all blew over. Fortunately, software is a lot more flexible than hardware. I just hope that, in the event that SCO wins, there aren't any Linux appliances out there that can't be easily updated to the "new" kernel.
Some bands do still actually attempt to create albums that have coherent collections of songs. If you listen to a band like Hefner, you can see that the songs off of Dead Media can easily be grouped together, as they have a different sound than any of their previous albums. Same with Bruce Hornsby and his latest.
If it was really just about the limitations of the media, then bands would fit as many songs as possible on each album. But that wouldn't "work as an album", as they say. Believe it or not, good artists actually sit down and think about tracks that belong together as part of a whole, and an order for those tracks that makes a good listening experience. Yes, tracks are left off of albums and saved for later because they "don't fit."
Now, it's true that not everyone will like every track from every album, and that making a mix tape/CD can be its own art form for those who do it well. My favorite DJs do the same sort of thing (as do I, as best as I can). But I still like the idea of an album, because otherwise all anyone would hear is those songs that were paid^H^H^H^Hselected to go on the radio.
> Cheaply produced chicken for instance, pumped > with water to increase weight, moved half way > across the globe packed *with conservatives* is > one downside for instance.
(emphasis added)
You know, I'd really have to weigh the benefits of that one. I'm opposed to commercial mass-farming of animals, but if they were stuffed with the likes of Bill O'Reilly and Michael Savage...mmm...
(I think you meant preservatives, but I can dream)
Re:looks like Moz is getting serious
on
The Mozilla Foundation
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I guess the question is: If you replaced their shortcut to IE with a shortcut to Mozilla that used the IE icon, would they notice? There are themes for Mozilla which are designed to make it look identical to IE. OK, so they would wonder where all the popops went, but other than that, could someone such as this tell the difference?
(Yes, I know that there are a small percentage of sites out there that are brain-dead and REQUIRE IE, but if my parents never come across them, I'm betting many other people don't either. If you believe Jakob Nielson, users encountering such a site would just go find another one anyway, unless they needed it for work, banking, etc.)
[And no, I didn't trick my parents like that. They're sentient enough that I can explain to them why to use Mozilla instead of IE, and they like it better anyway.]
So it isn't a closed format, but OpenOffice is still really annoying when you don't want to use its format. MS Office doesn't badger you but once; after you've decided that you really want to save a file as RTF no matter what the scary dialog boxes say, it doesn't ask you again. Why should OpenOffice continally harass me about "Oh, the lost information!" if I'm just writing a simple text document?
Similarly, I'd like to be able to set it to save in a format like.doc by default, as that's what is needed at our school paper (for some reason, Quark's RTF import loses italics, which is just not acceptable).
Where do you think many of the "independant vinyl freaks" show up? College radio! Most college radio stations that I've encountered get at least some funding from the school, and also pay reduced ASCAP/BMI/SESAC fees as non-commercial broadcasters. If you can get the administration to support you (or at least not actively oppose you), it's easier to start a radio station there than "on the outside".
When WJHU (which has now changed call letters to something inane) was sold out from under the students and turned into an NPR station, the student radio station was left without a means to broadcast. UMBC's radio station has never had one (under part 15, we can cover the campus with AM, and we also do Internet broadcasting, but that's it.) I'm sure there are many other universities anxiously watching the LPFM struggle.
You want to use Mozilla, which has all of these things right now.
#4 is not quite what you propose, because that would be a serious and unnecessary drain on a Web site's bandwidth. A site can specify whether a link is allowed to be pre-cached (not by default), and Mozilla will pre-cache it for you if you've enabled this feature (also not by default).
Jon Lasser (of Bastille) once stated on the umbclinux list that Linux would never be accepted in the enterprise until it had [devfs-style] device names (like Solaris, etc.)./dev/hda is fine if you're just a desktop user with an IDE disk or two, but when you've got stacks of SCSI disks attached to a machine, you NEED a nomenclature that's more precise. If you've never seen the need/problem, that's fine for you, but don't assume that one doesn't exist.
Having a dynamic/dev is just a good idea. If I see that/dev/whatever exists, then I can be reasonably certain that it actually means something (i.e., there's a driver currently loaded for a piece of hardware to which the entry in/dev refers). This also helps out with embedded systems, which would otherwise have to have a custom/dev (with all devices that MIGHT be attached some day, like a NIC) to save space.
Everyone and their brother is probably writing an installer (although more people are apparently writing MP3 jukeboxes, Web image galleries, and CMSs. Trust me.) Can't say I'm seeing a "clear winner" though, which is also the case with apt front-ends.
Security is always a tradeoff between the effort required and the risk entailed. SSH is more secure than telnet. Even more secure is making all of your employees carry around OTP calculators, but most places don't do this because for them, it's not worth the effort. At a certain point, the "price/performance" tradeoff curve of security starts to get very steep in the direction of "price", and the only way to get 100% security is to have 0% usability (as often noted by the example of unplugging the computer and encasing it in concrete).
So, how much do you need to trust your packages? Do you have enough work and not enough top-secret data that you can trust the package maintainer, the upstream maintainer, and your copy of MD5? For most people, the answer is "yes". This does not apply to X Random Freshmeat App; if you're downloading a new program and installing it yourself, you should check it out first (if you have the means), since sometimes even good authors do things that are unintentionally destructive. But most people can afford to trust that a package which has been around for a while and comes from a reputable distributor is reasonably safe, especially if they're doing the work of 3 people, maintaining 5 platforms, and just trying to keep up.
Unless you're in a situation where many people want your very important data, you can usually afford at least a little well-placed trust. Otherwise, just keeping up with updates is going to consume an inordinate amount of your time, and the rest of your duties will suffer.
It's in Debian, but I don't know about Red Hat. Can't be that hard to get, since it's a simple program.
At the peak of my radio-station-ing (summer means slowness for college stations), I was reviewing at least two or three CDs per week, and I had to screen about five times that many. Almost every single Linux CD player was just too fragile for the job, messing up after about 3 CDs worth of abuse (heavy track skipping, seeking, frequent disc changing, etc.) xplaycd is the one I tried that worked (and continues to work).
As per another poster, I think that some of your problems might be in hardware. I have a Plextor ATAPI CD-RW (and they are so worth the extra $$), and I haven't had a single problem. Well, except for the fact that it can write dodgy media that other drives won't be good enough to read, but I tossed that stuff and haven't had a problem since I started using Computer Renaissance CD-Rs.
apt-get IS awfully nice:) When I want a new program, I'm surprised if I DON'T find it with "apt-cache search [program]". And having configured several MTAs, I'd have to say that Postfix is probably the easiest (although sendmail is not as hard as people say, even with a few funky options). But if all you need is a basic config, you may be happy to know that Debian packages ask you a set of questions to get themselves up and running when they're installed, rather than just dumping the files on your drive and saying "Good luck!"
I'm sorry, but I have a hard time believing that you read my post.
I'm not a "Mac person." Again, I HAVE NEVER OWNED A MACINTOSH. For my own personal needs, I prefer Debian. I considered Windows and Mac OS a toss-up for "least bad" until Mac OS X came out.
I did not say that Mac hardware did not double in performance every two years (in fact, that would be faster than Moore's law). I said that PC hardware REQUIREMENTS double every two or three years. I was talking about the requirements for Windows and Office, not games.
I was also not talking about most people, or home computer usage. I was talking about publishing, in an office. This is a specific niche. I happen to believe that Macs are easier for most people to use as a home computer, but that had nothing to do with what I said. Saying that they "don't work" for most other people is like saying that most other people "can't play the sitar." For the most part, it's not because they have owned a Mac and found them to not work. I'm convinced that most people use Windows largely because most people use Windows.
Please don't continue to repeat the same misconceptions about the Apple platform that haven't been true for years. They use the same hardware that's inside PC and now Sun machines (PCI, serial, USB, ATA, SCSI, etc.) and have done so for several years now. They do cost more than a cheap PC, but not much more than a good PC with a good service contract, and you can keep them around far longer because the hardware requirements don't double every two years or so.
The "standards" in (paper) publishing have always been available on the Macintosh platform. Basically, that means Acrobat, Photoshop, and (sadly) Quark. If you meant some other standards, please be more specific. They have also always had far better color sync technology, which means that colors on the printed page will look like the colors on the screen.
Also, as the post to which you replied pointed out, PDF is a central component of OS X, as opposed to Windows where it is just an add-on. If you work with PDF, and work with printed material, it just makes more sense to go with an Apple platform, now more than ever.
[No, I have never owned Apple hardware myself, only out-of-date PCs running Linux, as I only have the budget to buy tiny bits of hardware twice a year or so, and I'm one of the 3 people in the universe that likes Debian better than Mac OS X. But I've done IT for a college newspaper for about 4 years now. Incidentally, one of the last things I did was replace the '98 desktops in the newsroom with eMacs, so now we're down to two platforms (Apple desktops and Linux servers).]
I've done all of those things. Mind if I do some poo-poohing?
I'll happily admit that Windows 2000 is a definite improvement over previous Microsoft operating systems. Sadly, the release of XP indicates that they must have thought that was a mistake or something. But Windows 2000 is actually a pretty good business desktop. Of course, in settings like a university lab, you need to re-image the machines using something like Ghost on a very regular basis to keep them from degenerating into sludge, but you already pointed that out.
Equating Windows to the SUV would really be more appropriate here. It has greater hardware requirements, is less safe to operate, is the choice of the majority, is used in many situations where its features are overkill, and is in many ways a symbol of corporate culture. Meanwhile, you have the racecar: heavily tuned by enthusiasts, largely operated by professionals, plenty of customization possible (OK, here the analogy is not as strong, because you _can_ theoretically customize an SUV as much as a racecar, but you'd have a new car when you were done). It does exactly what it is supposed to do. It's interesting that you chose "compatibility" as the merit of Free software, as most people use that as a point to argue in Microsoft's favor.
As another poster noted, your post reads a bit on the trollish side. Microsoft has certainly made great strides in the area of stability, and I agree that zealotry is pointless, but your analogy is reversed.
As for me, I've done the Win2k clients/Linux servers office setup (.com job and current office) and found it satisfactory. But in a different office, where aging '98 machines needed to be replaced and I got to call the shots, I went with eMacs (still Linux on the server, because there's no way we could get the mileage out of our servers we do if they ran Windows, and a college newspaper can't afford an IT army or new server hardware just because).
Being aware of her surroundings and knowning how to not get into a bad situation is the best way for a woman to avoid getting raped.
Carrying a gun may not even be the second best way. When my aunt was a teenager delivering pizzas, she carried a gun. Because of her unwillingness to use it, her attacker took it and used it on her. Non-fatal wound (fun fact: knife wounds are twice as deadly as gun wounds), but not helpful.
Guns are not magical. If a person attacks with a blade from several feet away and you have to draw your gun, their momentum may kill you even if you shoot them. Learning how to be aware of your surroundings and avoid bad situations is the best defense. Personally, I rank practical martial arts as the next best defense. You will always have them, and with the good ones, you can change the severity of your response to fit the situation. You don't want to kill or seriously injure your drunken friend.
As for protecting one's family, my father keeps a baseball bat by the side of his bed. His theory is that he could surprise and knock out an attacker with it, but it would be far less likely to kill one of us. (No, he doesn't have any training).
Was it made explicitly legal? Last I checked, everything but the missionary position was technically illegal in Maryland (yes, even oral). Again, not that it's ever enforced (at least, not to my knowledge).
Er, a thin terminal is a desktop solution. In fact, it's the one that often makes the most sense in education and business environments (like the city of Largo, or the Agape House in Baltimore ). Lower costs, easier administration.
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Just for the sake of argument, why would I _not_ want to move to Canada? (I currently live in the U.S.). I've certainly considered living in other countries, if only just for a while to see more of the world, but I don't want to fall victim to the "grass is always greener" illusion.
As background, let's say that I'm a moderate with a bit of a leftward bent (Kucinich is looking surprisingly good for a Democrat), and I don't think national healthcare is such a bad idea at all. What might I find to be worse were I to relocate to Canada?
Yes, hdparm, not fdisk. Gah. Working from 7:30 - 4pm is very bad for a nightowl.
ClearChannel is all about the commoditization of music. The goal of ClearChannel is to make money by selling advertising, and the music is largely irrelevant. That's why it is in their best interest to push music which is "inoffensive" to the largest number of listeners, because then they can charge more for advertising. It is to their benefit to play music which is bland.
Many people who are passionate about music resent this greatly. Music is art, not something to be packaged and sold like Instant Oatmeal. For the same reason, foodies don't like McDonalds and many coders don't like Microsoft. REAL innovation can never happen in these environments. You'll never see a radical shift in computing from Microsoft, amazing new flavors from McDonalds (or even places like T.G.I. Fridays), or musical breakthroughs on ClearChannel. They'll wait until things have been largely sorted out so that those pesky rough edges can be smoothed away, and they can sell everyone the equivalent of safety scissors. Revolutionary ideas make people uncomfortable, and that's just not good for sales.
Downloading MP3s? Are you kidding? I work for a radio station! Besides, we're all snobs who demand high quality VBR in our compressed music, which pretty much means "rip yer own."
I'm confused as to what my computer would have to do with my roommate having drugs, though. I thought that they could just take your house if illegal narcotics were found on the premises (not sure how it works if you're in an apartment).
Are you certain that DMA mode is enabled on your disk (assuming you're using IDE, which most people are)? Running a system from a hard disk in PIO mode can be agonizing in comparison.
(fdisk is the tool, in case you weren't sure).
Also, make sure there are not any old, slow devices on the same IDE channel, as it will be forced to cater to the worst thing attached.
They already do "repo" computer systems for filesharing. In the case of some of the university students who were charged, their computers were taken (along with pretty much everything attached, like an oh-so-dangerous power strip), and they could make no progress in getting them back. Apparently that's the way it goes: you'll get your stuff back eventually, but it's more practical to just give up.
Didn't, and don't. Care, that is, or at least not in real life. Do you really think that most blank tapes and CDs sold account for home recording? The RIAA and labels know about casual copying. They know people make copies of CDs for their friends. They know that they can't really put a stop to this (although they still speak out against it in public, and make some effort to correct it, but that always fails. Always.)
The problem is one of scale, and the reason there can be any attempt at a solution is that filesharing uses the public network. Suddenly, you can share your music with a lot more people for a lot less effort. All sorts of people are/were doing it, just like all sorts of people make (and have been making) copies of CDs or "mix tapes" (probably not tapes these days) for their friends. The problem is that by using a popular filesharing service, you're practically ADVERTISING the fact that you're illegally copying music. The RIAA can't help but fight something like this.
However, this bill is talking about ten copies of a song. Not 2,000,000, not even 20. This is talking about permanantly constraining your rights as a citizen for letting 10 people listen to some of the music you bought.
We've been using Quark at our college newspaper for a few years now, since we decided that we had outgrown Pagemaker. I have a special "hate place" in my heart for Quark, especially its explicit lack of support for working with files while they're still on a fileserver. But let's talk about image quality (baby).
We've had numerous issues (no pun intended), from colors not being quite right in images to images being squished to 25% of their size. We've also had font troubles. What I mean by this is that what we (thought we) had when we finished the paper in Quark was not what we got back in newsprint format the next day. These appear to have been Quark -> Quark issues. With PDF, there wouldn't have been a problem, because WYS is really WYG.
The new Macs will of course have OS X, and rather than shell out the cash for Quark again (academic prices are a bit better at $900 for an 8-user license, but of course we also have far less money), I would like to go to Indesign or something else. Our printer will happily take PDFs. I've been keeping an eye on Scribus for a while, but I haven't been able to play with it since I wrote a review for Newsforge (about a year ago, might still be there, not going to bother finding it). I can guarantee that we'll at least look at it, because Quark isn't good at doing PDFs (which we want to use for various things), and because our production staff is tired of literally losing sleep to Quark every week.
While it's true that no consumer would have to return the TV, they might have trouble getting it fixed. The recording studio at WMBC has a 24-channel mixer by Behringer. Behringer totally ripped of the design from Mackie, was sued, and lost. So the last time I got it fixed, it was $12 parts and $375 labor, because it's impossible to get information about it. "Get another one" is not an option for a college station.
Now, this shouldn't be a problem with Linux in the long run, as whatever code is deemed to be infringing (if any) can be removed/replaced. Heck, if I had to, I could revert all our machines back to 2.2.x until it all blew over. Fortunately, software is a lot more flexible than hardware. I just hope that, in the event that SCO wins, there aren't any Linux appliances out there that can't be easily updated to the "new" kernel.
Some bands do still actually attempt to create albums that have coherent collections of songs. If you listen to a band like Hefner, you can see that the songs off of Dead Media can easily be grouped together, as they have a different sound than any of their previous albums. Same with Bruce Hornsby and his latest.
If it was really just about the limitations of the media, then bands would fit as many songs as possible on each album. But that wouldn't "work as an album", as they say. Believe it or not, good artists actually sit down and think about tracks that belong together as part of a whole, and an order for those tracks that makes a good listening experience. Yes, tracks are left off of albums and saved for later because they "don't fit."
Now, it's true that not everyone will like every track from every album, and that making a mix tape/CD can be its own art form for those who do it well. My favorite DJs do the same sort of thing (as do I, as best as I can). But I still like the idea of an album, because otherwise all anyone would hear is those songs that were paid^H^H^H^Hselected to go on the radio.
> Cheaply produced chicken for instance, pumped
> with water to increase weight, moved half way
> across the globe packed *with conservatives* is
> one downside for instance.
(emphasis added)
You know, I'd really have to weigh the benefits of that one. I'm opposed to commercial mass-farming of animals, but if they were stuffed with the likes of Bill O'Reilly and Michael Savage...mmm...
(I think you meant preservatives, but I can dream)
I guess the question is: If you replaced their shortcut to IE with a shortcut to Mozilla that used the IE icon, would they notice? There are themes for Mozilla which are designed to make it look identical to IE. OK, so they would wonder where all the popops went, but other than that, could someone such as this tell the difference?
(Yes, I know that there are a small percentage of sites out there that are brain-dead and REQUIRE IE, but if my parents never come across them, I'm betting many other people don't either. If you believe Jakob Nielson, users encountering such a site would just go find another one anyway, unless they needed it for work, banking, etc.)
[And no, I didn't trick my parents like that. They're sentient enough that I can explain to them why to use Mozilla instead of IE, and they like it better anyway.]
So it isn't a closed format, but OpenOffice is still really annoying when you don't want to use its format. MS Office doesn't badger you but once; after you've decided that you really want to save a file as RTF no matter what the scary dialog boxes say, it doesn't ask you again. Why should OpenOffice continally harass me about "Oh, the lost information!" if I'm just writing a simple text document?
.doc by default, as that's what is needed at our school paper (for some reason, Quark's RTF import loses italics, which is just not acceptable).
Similarly, I'd like to be able to set it to save in a format like
Where do you think many of the "independant vinyl freaks" show up? College radio! Most college radio stations that I've encountered get at least some funding from the school, and also pay reduced ASCAP/BMI/SESAC fees as non-commercial broadcasters. If you can get the administration to support you (or at least not actively oppose you), it's easier to start a radio station there than "on the outside".
When WJHU (which has now changed call letters to something inane) was sold out from under the students and turned into an NPR station, the student radio station was left without a means to broadcast. UMBC's radio station has never had one (under part 15, we can cover the campus with AM, and we also do Internet broadcasting, but that's it.) I'm sure there are many other universities anxiously watching the LPFM struggle.
You want to use Mozilla, which has all of these things right now.
#4 is not quite what you propose, because that would be a serious and unnecessary drain on a Web site's bandwidth. A site can specify whether a link is allowed to be pre-cached (not by default), and Mozilla will pre-cache it for you if you've enabled this feature (also not by default).
Jon Lasser (of Bastille) once stated on the umbclinux list that Linux would never be accepted in the enterprise until it had [devfs-style] device names (like Solaris, etc.). /dev/hda is fine if you're just a desktop user with an IDE disk or two, but when you've got stacks of SCSI disks attached to a machine, you NEED a nomenclature that's more precise. If you've never seen the need/problem, that's fine for you, but don't assume that one doesn't exist.
/dev is just a good idea. If I see that /dev/whatever exists, then I can be reasonably certain that it actually means something (i.e., there's a driver currently loaded for a piece of hardware to which the entry in /dev refers). This also helps out with embedded systems, which would otherwise have to have a custom /dev (with all devices that MIGHT be attached some day, like a NIC) to save space.
Having a dynamic
http://freshmeat.net/search/?q=installshieldp ://freshmeat.net/search/?q=installer
htt
Everyone and their brother is probably writing an installer (although more people are apparently writing MP3 jukeboxes, Web image galleries, and CMSs. Trust me.) Can't say I'm seeing a "clear winner" though, which is also the case with apt front-ends.
Security is always a tradeoff between the effort required and the risk entailed. SSH is more secure than telnet. Even more secure is making all of your employees carry around OTP calculators, but most places don't do this because for them, it's not worth the effort. At a certain point, the "price/performance" tradeoff curve of security starts to get very steep in the direction of "price", and the only way to get 100% security is to have 0% usability (as often noted by the example of unplugging the computer and encasing it in concrete).
So, how much do you need to trust your packages? Do you have enough work and not enough top-secret data that you can trust the package maintainer, the upstream maintainer, and your copy of MD5? For most people, the answer is "yes". This does not apply to X Random Freshmeat App; if you're downloading a new program and installing it yourself, you should check it out first (if you have the means), since sometimes even good authors do things that are unintentionally destructive. But most people can afford to trust that a package which has been around for a while and comes from a reputable distributor is reasonably safe, especially if they're doing the work of 3 people, maintaining 5 platforms, and just trying to keep up.
Unless you're in a situation where many people want your very important data, you can usually afford at least a little well-placed trust. Otherwise, just keeping up with updates is going to consume an inordinate amount of your time, and the rest of your duties will suffer.
It's in Debian, but I don't know about Red Hat. Can't be that hard to get, since it's a simple program.
:) When I want a new program, I'm surprised if I DON'T find it with "apt-cache search [program]". And having configured several MTAs, I'd have to say that Postfix is probably the easiest (although sendmail is not as hard as people say, even with a few funky options). But if all you need is a basic config, you may be happy to know that Debian packages ask you a set of questions to get themselves up and running when they're installed, rather than just dumping the files on your drive and saying "Good luck!"
At the peak of my radio-station-ing (summer means slowness for college stations), I was reviewing at least two or three CDs per week, and I had to screen about five times that many. Almost every single Linux CD player was just too fragile for the job, messing up after about 3 CDs worth of abuse (heavy track skipping, seeking, frequent disc changing, etc.) xplaycd is the one I tried that worked (and continues to work).
As per another poster, I think that some of your problems might be in hardware. I have a Plextor ATAPI CD-RW (and they are so worth the extra $$), and I haven't had a single problem. Well, except for the fact that it can write dodgy media that other drives won't be good enough to read, but I tossed that stuff and haven't had a problem since I started using Computer Renaissance CD-Rs.
apt-get IS awfully nice
I'm sorry, but I have a hard time believing that you read my post.
I'm not a "Mac person." Again, I HAVE NEVER OWNED A MACINTOSH. For my own personal needs, I prefer Debian. I considered Windows and Mac OS a toss-up for "least bad" until Mac OS X came out.
I did not say that Mac hardware did not double in performance every two years (in fact, that would be faster than Moore's law). I said that PC hardware REQUIREMENTS double every two or three years. I was talking about the requirements for Windows and Office, not games.
I was also not talking about most people, or home computer usage. I was talking about publishing, in an office. This is a specific niche. I happen to believe that Macs are easier for most people to use as a home computer, but that had nothing to do with what I said. Saying that they "don't work" for most other people is like saying that most other people "can't play the sitar." For the most part, it's not because they have owned a Mac and found them to not work. I'm convinced that most people use Windows largely because most people use Windows.
Please don't continue to repeat the same misconceptions about the Apple platform that haven't been true for years. They use the same hardware that's inside PC and now Sun machines (PCI, serial, USB, ATA, SCSI, etc.) and have done so for several years now. They do cost more than a cheap PC, but not much more than a good PC with a good service contract, and you can keep them around far longer because the hardware requirements don't double every two years or so.
The "standards" in (paper) publishing have always been available on the Macintosh platform. Basically, that means Acrobat, Photoshop, and (sadly) Quark. If you meant some other standards, please be more specific. They have also always had far better color sync technology, which means that colors on the printed page will look like the colors on the screen.
Also, as the post to which you replied pointed out, PDF is a central component of OS X, as opposed to Windows where it is just an add-on. If you work with PDF, and work with printed material, it just makes more sense to go with an Apple platform, now more than ever.
[No, I have never owned Apple hardware myself, only out-of-date PCs running Linux, as I only have the budget to buy tiny bits of hardware twice a year or so, and I'm one of the 3 people in the universe that likes Debian better than Mac OS X. But I've done IT for a college newspaper for about 4 years now. Incidentally, one of the last things I did was replace the '98 desktops in the newsroom with eMacs, so now we're down to two platforms (Apple desktops and Linux servers).]
I've done all of those things. Mind if I do some poo-poohing?
I'll happily admit that Windows 2000 is a definite improvement over previous Microsoft operating systems. Sadly, the release of XP indicates that they must have thought that was a mistake or something. But Windows 2000 is actually a pretty good business desktop. Of course, in settings like a university lab, you need to re-image the machines using something like Ghost on a very regular basis to keep them from degenerating into sludge, but you already pointed that out.
Equating Windows to the SUV would really be more appropriate here. It has greater hardware requirements, is less safe to operate, is the choice of the majority, is used in many situations where its features are overkill, and is in many ways a symbol of corporate culture. Meanwhile, you have the racecar: heavily tuned by enthusiasts, largely operated by professionals, plenty of customization possible (OK, here the analogy is not as strong, because you _can_ theoretically customize an SUV as much as a racecar, but you'd have a new car when you were done). It does exactly what it is supposed to do. It's interesting that you chose "compatibility" as the merit of Free software, as most people use that as a point to argue in Microsoft's favor.
As another poster noted, your post reads a bit on the trollish side. Microsoft has certainly made great strides in the area of stability, and I agree that zealotry is pointless, but your analogy is reversed.
As for me, I've done the Win2k clients/Linux servers office setup (.com job and current office) and found it satisfactory. But in a different office, where aging '98 machines needed to be replaced and I got to call the shots, I went with eMacs (still Linux on the server, because there's no way we could get the mileage out of our servers we do if they ran Windows, and a college newspaper can't afford an IT army or new server hardware just because).
Being aware of her surroundings and knowning how to not get into a bad situation is the best way for a woman to avoid getting raped.
Carrying a gun may not even be the second best way. When my aunt was a teenager delivering pizzas, she carried a gun. Because of her unwillingness to use it, her attacker took it and used it on her. Non-fatal wound (fun fact: knife wounds are twice as deadly as gun wounds), but not helpful.
Guns are not magical. If a person attacks with a blade from several feet away and you have to draw your gun, their momentum may kill you even if you shoot them. Learning how to be aware of your surroundings and avoid bad situations is the best defense. Personally, I rank practical martial arts as the next best defense. You will always have them, and with the good ones, you can change the severity of your response to fit the situation. You don't want to kill or seriously injure your drunken friend.
As for protecting one's family, my father keeps a baseball bat by the side of his bed. His theory is that he could surprise and knock out an attacker with it, but it would be far less likely to kill one of us. (No, he doesn't have any training).
Was it made explicitly legal? Last I checked, everything but the missionary position was technically illegal in Maryland (yes, even oral). Again, not that it's ever enforced (at least, not to my knowledge).
Er, a thin terminal is a desktop solution. In fact, it's the one that often makes the most sense in education and business environments (like the city of Largo, or the Agape House in Baltimore ). Lower costs, easier administration.