The big problem with Linux Wifi is not necessarily the drivers, but the usability of the rest of the stack. On Windows and Mac it's easy to connect to a wireless network; you can do it in a few clicks and enter a password, because the Wifi tool is part of the GUI. Then you are done.
On Linux, the Wifi tool may (or may not) be part of your desktop environment. There may be several possibilities for your desktop environment and included in your distribution. As a new user, you will not know which is the right one. If you find the right one, then it may (or may not) work. If it does work, then it may support WPA2 and other modern Wifi standards, or it may be limited to WEP. Finally, even if everything has worked so far, it may (or may not) remember the settings for next time.
No wonder we all end up hacking wpa_supplicant.conf.
It's good that we get driver source code. Thanks Broadcom. But really, thanks to ndiswrapper (awesome software!) drivers haven't been a big issue for a while. The rest of the stack is, as always, the problem.
We have the same prison overpopulation problem in Britain. I think there's a feedback loop as well - the prisons are less effective at deterrence/correction, so more people go to prison, so the prisons become less effective, etc. I do think that order could be maintained within prisons, but as you rightly say, it's all a matter of money in the end.
Sounds good to me. Prisons need to be tough but there's no reason why they can't also be nice to people who play by the rules. And regarding reform of the drug laws, I'm with you.
Like you say, it is possible to prevent these prisoners being a problem.
The human rights angle is important, but when we think about human rights violations, we tend to only consider those violations perpetrated by the state, represented here by the prison guards. However, violations perpetrated by the prisoners themselves are just as important. If by taking away a few human rights from all prisoners, the guards can absolutely prevent all such acts, then I'd say that's well worth doing. This is exactly the argument for prison in the first place - take away some of the rights of the dangerous few, and make them live without freedom at all, so that the majority of people can live in freedom and safety.
Then I'd ask why prison isn't working that way now, when it once did work exactly that way. What has changed? Why can't prison work that way?
Nobody should be raped in prison. There should be no gangs in prison. There should be no contraband in prison.
I mentioned liberalism because HateBreeder did. I think he really means "progressivism". And progressive attitudes to prison have certainly brought reforms. Some of these have been good, but others have simply given more freedom to people who shouldn't have any freedom, with the result that people like me are afraid of the other prisoners and not at all afraid of the system itself. Which is totally backwards.
As a not-liberal not-hippie I think I would prefer prison.
Not only could your devices go wrong by triggering early, they could also go wrong by not triggering at all, or by being temporarily removed (which happens a lot in the UK). I'd prefer the bad guys to be locked up in a proper prison, run according to a ultra-authoritarian regime that kept absolute order and completely prevented all the nasty things that currently happen in prison, such as rape, gang fights and drug dealing.
All of which have been ironically enabled by misguided "prison reforms", and are apparently now considered an inevitable consequence of prison, which apparently also "inevitably" makes people worse. I cannot understand why it is now considered impossible to keep order within a fucking prison. A hundred years ago our ancestors had no trouble keeping absolute control of prisoners.
It's like the basic idea of prison has been forgotten. We put the bad guys in prison so that the rest of us don't have to live in a prison. We subject the criminals to authoritarianism so that the rest of us can live in freedom. Why is this hard to understand?
Also, for most first time offenders prison is too much punishment (eg. 20% will be raped, many will catch AIDS, etc.).
Another perspective is that there isn't enough punishment in prison. It's supposed to be this incredibly secure place where nobody has any freedom, and yet people are forming gangs, dealing drugs, raping each other...?
WTF. How in hell is this considered acceptable? Why can't the prison authorities put an absolute stop to all the lawlessness within their prisons?
But I think we all know why. It's because, to some, merely putting someone in prison is punishment enough. Actually taking away their freedom - well, that would just be a step too far, wouldn't it? Better make sure they are free to torment the other prisoners instead.
If prison isn't working, then maybe that's because it's allowing too much freedom, and instead of using that freedom constructively, *shock* many of the criminals use it for crime.
But you know, I don't think it's a sad excuse at all. Sad would be thinking that you can make a difference, voting and campaigning in a system which has been designed to ensure that you cannot make a difference. Even if you are elected President, you would struggle to improve even the slightest thing. Remember Obama? Exactly.
We used to say that the parties were like Pepsi versus Coca-cola. But at least those taste different. Why should I take part in this ludicrous sham "voting theater", designed to fool the masses into believing that they can somehow affect how the government operates? "Not contributing" is the only thing I actually have the power to do.
I've been mistaken for a Republican on here and modded down for it on quite a few occasions. People have assumed I'm a paid shill*.
On the whole, people are not paid to shill for the parties. They do it for free, because they believe it's the right thing to do. Take this thread - we've got a very comprehensive defense of the Democrats from circletimessquare, right at the top. Is he being paid, does he have some underhand motive? Very, very unlikely. He's doing what he thinks is right.
Political supporters of all types tend to assume that the odds are tilted against them. On one side, people believe in "the liberal media" and their lies and distortions. On the other side, it's "the corporations" and FOX News. The perceived imbalance excuses all sorts of bad behavior.
For example, the troll mod on the GP is an attempt to correct the imbalance in the right direction. It preempts the inevitable "+1, Republican" mod that is no doubt coming soon from the supposed worldwide anti-Democrat conspiracy.
This sort of thing happens not because of bribes, but because the media is so very good at dividing us. Making out that the guys over there are totally evil and responsible for all the problems, and if only we would support the guys over here, then everything would be great. That's the sort of thing that brings in the viewers. Whether you're FOX or MSNBC, you pick a side and flatter that crowd, never even considering the real issues, like how both parties have become essentially the same, and the real power is held by the civil service. The sad thing is that even after Obama, Democrats continue to believe their party represents progress and change, and even after Bush, Republicans continue to believe their party is conservative. But I cannot blame them, because the media makes it seem real.
* In fact, I am not even an amateur Republican; I just hate that party slightly less than the Democrats.
Because you can't actually elect the government. You can only elect its spokesmen. The real government is the civil service: DOS, EPA, etc. These people can't be replaced.
So, Democrat, republican, who the hell cares? The candidates have no power to do anything. Who cares what they appear to think, or what they say? Even the President is just a Beeblebrox figure, distracting attention away from power. If USG actually worked like a business, the President would have the power to sack anyone and reform anything in order to make things better, like Steve Jobs with nukes. If only... But the President doesn't have that power, or much power at all, and by extension, nor do any of us.
Thugs and mafia? That sounds like an argument for the government running the police force. And most libertarians would agree with you: they would say that policing, national defense and a justice system should be the proviso of government.
As in any sort of political philosophy, there are extremists, and some libertarians think there should be no government at all, but assuming that all libertarians are "like that" is rather like assuming all Muslims are like Osama bin Laden.
Many (most) are firm believers in the rule of law, and would like it very much if the government would get on with the job of creating a safe and fair society, without also providing a make-work scheme for an army of bureaucrats or trying to impose some sort of tax-funded ideological vision of "social justice" or "equality" or whatever the latest buzzword is.
What you have presented isn't an argument for having the government run anything other than policing and justice, and coincidentally those are exactly the sorts of things the government should be doing.
Furthermore the current system is hardly accountable. What say do you really have in how the government spends your money? Like if some moron neo conservative decides to go start a war on the other side of the world, can you say "I'm not paying for that"? No. Equally if some other moron decides to bail out the insurance industry with something he laughably calls "healthcare reform", can you say "Not with my money"? Again, no. The system is abusing you all the time, and you have no way to hold it to account.
It works like that in theory, but not in reality. Just fixing minor bugs is not the answer. To fix up Linux, you need an overall vision of how things should work. But when you try to impose that on the people who already developed parts of Linux, you encounter political problems. They think you are wrong! Their way of doing it is already the right way. And if their component doesn't fit very well with its surroundings, well, the surroundings must be wrong. Not them.
Now, if you are Steve Jobs and they work for you, then you can cut through this bullshit by giving them orders. "Do as I say or hit the road". Result: in a few years you get the system working how you want, and (for some reason) a large number of former free software fanatics migrate over to it.
That doesn't work on Linux. Well, it works in the kernel, with Torvalds as the Jobs figure. But not in user space, and user space is just as important. You can fork everything to create what you want, but you can expect a lot of spite from everyone whose code you have forked, because they don't accept your vision and are angry that you've tried to impose it.
I think that Shuttleworth started out with a vision and good intentions. But he's run into exactly this sort of political problem, where you can't fix X, Y and Z because your fixes don't match the vision of maintainers A, B and C, and the FSF is constantly bitching at you for not conforming to their ideal of "freedom". So now he is just tweaking things, like the fonts, because although minor changes are pointless, they don't create a political Armageddon in our "meritocratic" software utopia.
By "stability" I do not mean resistance to crashes, I mean the other definition, as in "a stable base for third party applications".
In this area, Linux's record is nowhere near that of Windows. Although the system call API is extremely stable, the user space APIs (provided by layers and layers of libraries) are not. In this, I include everything that might be needed to run an application: not just libc but also the GNOME/KDE libraries, SDL, libstdc++, Alsa, Pulseaudio, i18n stuff, libkitchensink, and so on.
On Linux we typically rely on recompiling each application to match each distribution, and this way there is a perfect match with the available libraries. But that approach can only ever work for a minority of applications, and it also encourages the distributor to make modifications, which could break the software -- and I know you're a professional so you will already know how fragile it can be. This could be a matter of releasing something that isn't ready, as happened with the Ubuntu Pulseaudio fiasco, and it could even be extremely serious and undetected for years, as with the Debian OpenSSL fiasco.
Really, to support third party applications, Linux needs to provide an incredibly stable Microsoft-like environment for those applications. Even - especially - if they are closed-source. It must be possible to rely on an application not breaking from release to release, distribution to distribution, and we shouldn't need to rely on installing the old libraries and using LD_LIBRARY_PATH to bring them in. Windows provides this because Microsoft are rightly paranoid about it. But Linux user space developers often do not care, because "you can recompile everything that matters". Some even actually want to break support for third-party commercial software because they are ideologically opposed to such applications: Flash would be the prime example of this.
Why are such applications important? Because free software hackers shouldn't waste their time reimplementing commercial software. Instead, the commercial software should come to us. That means welcoming it: "no, you don't need to test against the two most recent versions of the ten most common distributions, because all of those distributions share bit-for-bit identical versions of the same core libraries".
That's part of what I'm getting at. But it goes further. I grant that Linux installers and working environments have got better, but still if something breaks, you are editing configuration files. It's expert friendly, not user friendly. In any Linux distribution you are always hoping that the distributor won't break something in an upgrade, and unfortunately this hope is often shattered. For instance, Ubuntu upgrades are notorious for breaking graphics and sound drivers. The problems can be fixed, yes, but not by the unlucky average user whose digital sound output has stopped working. In that sense we are still in the 90s: we have clever installers that do most things right (but so did Mandrake circa 1999). However, when things break, the user-friendly GUI tools are no help and an expert's help is required. This really hasn't changed. A Windows user reinstalls an application or driver; an Ubuntu user goes on the forums to beg for the arcane incantations that will get his WiFi working on Wanking Walrus ("they worked on Pissed Panda, why does this break every time I upgrade!??!").
Of course, none of this applies to the embedded systems maker who has absolute control of every component of Linux that's on the system. Linux succeeds in that environment, and it also succeeds in the server environment where the real users see only a web interface and the admins are all experts. But on the desktop or the netbook? Only if an expert owns the machine. For everyone else there isn't the stability nor the usability. The issue of providing these things hasn't been considered holistically. In Linux, we all do our own thing and hope that somehow it will all come together. But it doesn't. As the last decade shows.
Right. Although I wonder if option (3) is really so undesirable. We save space by having packages that use libz.so depend on "zlib1g" or whatever... but how much? Not so much that it's really a big issue in these days of terabyte hard disks and gigabytes of RAM.
Static bundling trades a small amount of space for a huge amount of usability, because the same package will work on any Linux with a minimum kernel version. It's not a good strategy for the core packages on the system, but for every "after market addon", you really want exactly one package that will work on all Linuxes forever: a bit like a Windows program on Windows;).
If we don't like option (3), then the only other option is to have a fixed, well-known baseline of packages that are always installed and always the same version on every distribution. But getting people to agree what these packages should be is a politically impossible problem, solvable only by a Steve Jobs/Linus Torvalds-style "dictator". And while Linus' dictation works well in the kernel, and has kept everything nicely backward compatible, it doesn't apply on the other side of the system call barrier.
Detecting all the drivers is one of the most basic things the OS should be able to do. This has improved on Linux but other aspects of usability have not. This is an ideal place to wistfully remember recompiling the sound module to change the default SoundBlaster IRQ to 7 instead of 5, because back then it wasn't even a command line option. That's got better. But this is basic stuff.
Wireless continues to be a pain; I bought a specific brand of laptop in order to have a supported chipset and avoid ndiswrapper but was still stung by the clusterfuck of wpa_supplicant, its horrible configuration file, Avahi (the Pulseaudio of the network world), and of course a slew of half-working GUI wireless network managers which are only useful under very specific circumstances. But I dealt with it. I threw out all the GUIs (after trying them all) and I edit the wpa_supplicant.conf file by hand for each network I need to connect to. It works for me, but there's no way it would work for a typical user.
People who switched from Linux to MacOS, such as yourself, are very well placed to point this sort of thing out, if they can be bothered to deal with the inevitable rage it will kick up. I'm not a fan of MacOS but must admit that a great deal of effort has been put into making things work nicely. Everything has been considered; there has been a lot of usability testing, and the result is that every user gets an excellent baseline. Same on Windows. Just creating this baseline of usability and stability seems to be the sticking point for Linux.
Actually I use Linux every day, at work and home, by choice. I still think it is the best of all available options for me, I just don't think it's perfect and in some respects it is still in the mid 90s.
Any comment criticising Linux is bound to be controversial here and I really don't have the energy to respond to everyone who has called me a Microsoft shill.
The people who make a living from Linux, like myself, are those who are best placed to point out where it is lacking. On the server side or for embedded systems, it is great. For me, on my home computer, Linux is also great. Or at least better than the alternatives. But then I have a lot of experience with it, as I said. I'm one of the people who can dump Windows, and indeed that's exactly what I did.
To me, Linux (1996-2010) is a sad story. Both Windows and MacOS have made huge leaps forward in terms of usability, stability and security, and Linux has hardly moved. The "year of the Linux desktop" has turned from something we all hoped for into something that will clearly never happen. In fact, it already happened with those Linux netbooks: but, once again, Linux just wasn't ready to do that. There was no Linux environment ready to go on a netbook that would do everything a netbook user wanted to do, and I'd say there still isn't.
Linux is hamstrung by idiotic free software politics and the problem that nobody wants to do the unattractive but important work, like usability testing or making a stable platform for commercial software. And what do we do when we hear of these problems? We say "That's FUD" or "You're a Microsoft shill". Until we can admit that the problems are there, we are never going to get any improvement.
Why isn't there a bullet point for using Ubuntu if you just want a machine to browse the internet? Could Dell at least toss Ubuntu a bone and say "Linux currently suffers from less viruses than Windows"?
Well, this is a good point, but even for that relatively simple job there are big problems with Ubuntu. You only need to flick through the archives of Linux Hater to get some idea of what these are.
When I first visited Linux Hater, I thought I was dealing with extreme ignorance. But it quickly became apparent that he/she is actually an expert authority on software in general and Linux in particular. Familiarity has bred contempt. These days I have to concede that he/she is basically right in most cases. One thing about Linux hasn't changed at all in the 14 years I've been using it: users still need to have in-depth knowledge to do basic stuff, like install new applications. Things got slightly better, but it's still way more difficult than it should be. Even with a user-friendly package manager you are still faced with a huge noise to signal ratio created by the large amount of applications that might do what you want, none of which are the application you've heard of. And I'm certain that the web-only user is going to want to use a few things other than the web browser.
It pains me to say it, but Dell is right. Ubuntu could be a great web terminal but it still just isn't, and blaming Dell and Microsoft isn't going to change that. Linux is still for experts and keen amateurs, and that's what Dell is saying. Dell (and Linux Hater) are actually doing us all a huge favour by pointing out where improvements are needed. If only we'd listen.
In this subject there are no definite answers. Avoiding contact with other people when young certainly does not help, but it doesn't necessarily mean that the skills will not be acquired at all, or that they cannot later be learned. You are absolutely right that there is no way to measure this. I posted a comment here only to point out that exercise is just one of the benefits of letting your children play out with other children, and it may even be quite a marginal one in comparison to socialisation.
Backwards? But it isn't just about the exercise. It's also about social skills. Keep them "safely" indoors all day and, well, you know what happens... you'll have met kids like this in forums and online games. They are not pleasant to be with; they are rude, selfish people, and it's because they are poorly socialised. Some of them are technically adults - they are the saddest examples. We can get used to ignoring the flames, the trolls and the gamer rage on the Internet, but imagine how such people cope in the real world. "Not very well" is the answer.
I respectfully beg to differ. Capitalism is democracy because all the power lies in the hands of the people. They have the money, they make the choices. Although some individuals and corporations have a larger slice than others, most of the money is in the hands of average people, who vastly outnumber the rich.
The most successful lie of Marxism is the notion that only the very rich are really "capitalists". Not so. Everyone is a capitalist. Everyone fits into both of the classically Marxist roles of "worker" and "exploiter".
Finally, regarding Fascism. Under Mussolini, history's only true Fascist, the government wasn't controlled by the corporations. It was the other way around. Mussolini was not a capitalist: private companies had free reign only to do as he said. Sometimes we call this "state capitalism", because the state acts as a corporation, with all the conventional corporations as wholly-owned subsidiaries.
Fascism is adaptive. It uses different excuse for different people. "Terrorists" and "child porn" are the usual ones - they work on most people, but most Slashdotters will see through them.
But there are other excuses for fascism that do work here. There is a "war on polluters", and just as the war on child porn has very little to do with helping children, the war on pollution ("climate change") has little to do with saving the planet and everything to do with more government control and more power for the corrupt. And yet if you speak out against it here, you will be modded to negative infinity by people who really do not want to hear any criticism of their "Patriot Act".
It's important that people feel that their sensible, intelligent and government-approved views are under constant attack from the ignorant masses. If you can make someone feel like that, he'll defend just about anything the government wants to do without really thinking about it. And this is how government goes from bad to worse - with the thunderous applause of those who demand 'hope' and 'change' at any cost.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, agreed.
The big problem with Linux Wifi is not necessarily the drivers, but the usability of the rest of the stack. On Windows and Mac it's easy to connect to a wireless network; you can do it in a few clicks and enter a password, because the Wifi tool is part of the GUI. Then you are done.
On Linux, the Wifi tool may (or may not) be part of your desktop environment. There may be several possibilities for your desktop environment and included in your distribution. As a new user, you will not know which is the right one. If you find the right one, then it may (or may not) work. If it does work, then it may support WPA2 and other modern Wifi standards, or it may be limited to WEP. Finally, even if everything has worked so far, it may (or may not) remember the settings for next time.
No wonder we all end up hacking wpa_supplicant.conf.
It's good that we get driver source code. Thanks Broadcom. But really, thanks to ndiswrapper (awesome software!) drivers haven't been a big issue for a while. The rest of the stack is, as always, the problem.
Uh, first of all he is ex-president. What threats of his powers are you talking about?
That doesn't always matter. Stalin was only General Secretary of the Party. On paper, he had no power at all. In reality...
That's a very well informed response, thankyou.
We have the same prison overpopulation problem in Britain. I think there's a feedback loop as well - the prisons are less effective at deterrence/correction, so more people go to prison, so the prisons become less effective, etc. I do think that order could be maintained within prisons, but as you rightly say, it's all a matter of money in the end.
And why was that? Was it perhaps because their prisons were actually effective?
Sounds good to me. Prisons need to be tough but there's no reason why they can't also be nice to people who play by the rules. And regarding reform of the drug laws, I'm with you.
Like you say, it is possible to prevent these prisoners being a problem.
The human rights angle is important, but when we think about human rights violations, we tend to only consider those violations perpetrated by the state, represented here by the prison guards. However, violations perpetrated by the prisoners themselves are just as important. If by taking away a few human rights from all prisoners, the guards can absolutely prevent all such acts, then I'd say that's well worth doing. This is exactly the argument for prison in the first place - take away some of the rights of the dangerous few, and make them live without freedom at all, so that the majority of people can live in freedom and safety.
Then I'd ask why prison isn't working that way now, when it once did work exactly that way. What has changed? Why can't prison work that way?
Nobody should be raped in prison. There should be no gangs in prison. There should be no contraband in prison.
I mentioned liberalism because HateBreeder did. I think he really means "progressivism". And progressive attitudes to prison have certainly brought reforms. Some of these have been good, but others have simply given more freedom to people who shouldn't have any freedom, with the result that people like me are afraid of the other prisoners and not at all afraid of the system itself. Which is totally backwards.
As a not-liberal not-hippie I think I would prefer prison.
Not only could your devices go wrong by triggering early, they could also go wrong by not triggering at all, or by being temporarily removed (which happens a lot in the UK). I'd prefer the bad guys to be locked up in a proper prison, run according to a ultra-authoritarian regime that kept absolute order and completely prevented all the nasty things that currently happen in prison, such as rape, gang fights and drug dealing.
All of which have been ironically enabled by misguided "prison reforms", and are apparently now considered an inevitable consequence of prison, which apparently also "inevitably" makes people worse. I cannot understand why it is now considered impossible to keep order within a fucking prison. A hundred years ago our ancestors had no trouble keeping absolute control of prisoners.
It's like the basic idea of prison has been forgotten. We put the bad guys in prison so that the rest of us don't have to live in a prison. We subject the criminals to authoritarianism so that the rest of us can live in freedom. Why is this hard to understand?
Also, for most first time offenders prison is too much punishment (eg. 20% will be raped, many will catch AIDS, etc.).
Another perspective is that there isn't enough punishment in prison. It's supposed to be this incredibly secure place where nobody has any freedom, and yet people are forming gangs, dealing drugs, raping each other...?
WTF. How in hell is this considered acceptable? Why can't the prison authorities put an absolute stop to all the lawlessness within their prisons?
But I think we all know why. It's because, to some, merely putting someone in prison is punishment enough. Actually taking away their freedom - well, that would just be a step too far, wouldn't it? Better make sure they are free to torment the other prisoners instead.
If prison isn't working, then maybe that's because it's allowing too much freedom, and instead of using that freedom constructively, *shock* many of the criminals use it for crime.
Mod -1, Thoughtcrime.
Ouch! I'm just trying to contribute here.
But you know, I don't think it's a sad excuse at all. Sad would be thinking that you can make a difference, voting and campaigning in a system which has been designed to ensure that you cannot make a difference. Even if you are elected President, you would struggle to improve even the slightest thing. Remember Obama? Exactly.
We used to say that the parties were like Pepsi versus Coca-cola. But at least those taste different. Why should I take part in this ludicrous sham "voting theater", designed to fool the masses into believing that they can somehow affect how the government operates? "Not contributing" is the only thing I actually have the power to do.
I've been mistaken for a Republican on here and modded down for it on quite a few occasions. People have assumed I'm a paid shill*.
On the whole, people are not paid to shill for the parties. They do it for free, because they believe it's the right thing to do. Take this thread - we've got a very comprehensive defense of the Democrats from circletimessquare, right at the top. Is he being paid, does he have some underhand motive? Very, very unlikely. He's doing what he thinks is right.
Political supporters of all types tend to assume that the odds are tilted against them. On one side, people believe in "the liberal media" and their lies and distortions. On the other side, it's "the corporations" and FOX News. The perceived imbalance excuses all sorts of bad behavior.
For example, the troll mod on the GP is an attempt to correct the imbalance in the right direction. It preempts the inevitable "+1, Republican" mod that is no doubt coming soon from the supposed worldwide anti-Democrat conspiracy.
This sort of thing happens not because of bribes, but because the media is so very good at dividing us. Making out that the guys over there are totally evil and responsible for all the problems, and if only we would support the guys over here, then everything would be great. That's the sort of thing that brings in the viewers. Whether you're FOX or MSNBC, you pick a side and flatter that crowd, never even considering the real issues, like how both parties have become essentially the same, and the real power is held by the civil service. The sad thing is that even after Obama, Democrats continue to believe their party represents progress and change, and even after Bush, Republicans continue to believe their party is conservative. But I cannot blame them, because the media makes it seem real.
* In fact, I am not even an amateur Republican; I just hate that party slightly less than the Democrats.
Because you can't actually elect the government. You can only elect its spokesmen. The real government is the civil service: DOS, EPA, etc. These people can't be replaced.
So, Democrat, republican, who the hell cares? The candidates have no power to do anything. Who cares what they appear to think, or what they say? Even the President is just a Beeblebrox figure, distracting attention away from power. If USG actually worked like a business, the President would have the power to sack anyone and reform anything in order to make things better, like Steve Jobs with nukes. If only... But the President doesn't have that power, or much power at all, and by extension, nor do any of us.
Thugs and mafia? That sounds like an argument for the government running the police force. And most libertarians would agree with you: they would say that policing, national defense and a justice system should be the proviso of government.
As in any sort of political philosophy, there are extremists, and some libertarians think there should be no government at all, but assuming that all libertarians are "like that" is rather like assuming all Muslims are like Osama bin Laden.
Many (most) are firm believers in the rule of law, and would like it very much if the government would get on with the job of creating a safe and fair society, without also providing a make-work scheme for an army of bureaucrats or trying to impose some sort of tax-funded ideological vision of "social justice" or "equality" or whatever the latest buzzword is.
What you have presented isn't an argument for having the government run anything other than policing and justice, and coincidentally those are exactly the sorts of things the government should be doing.
Furthermore the current system is hardly accountable. What say do you really have in how the government spends your money? Like if some moron neo conservative decides to go start a war on the other side of the world, can you say "I'm not paying for that"? No. Equally if some other moron decides to bail out the insurance industry with something he laughably calls "healthcare reform", can you say "Not with my money"? Again, no. The system is abusing you all the time, and you have no way to hold it to account.
It works like that in theory, but not in reality. Just fixing minor bugs is not the answer. To fix up Linux, you need an overall vision of how things should work. But when you try to impose that on the people who already developed parts of Linux, you encounter political problems. They think you are wrong! Their way of doing it is already the right way. And if their component doesn't fit very well with its surroundings, well, the surroundings must be wrong. Not them.
Now, if you are Steve Jobs and they work for you, then you can cut through this bullshit by giving them orders. "Do as I say or hit the road". Result: in a few years you get the system working how you want, and (for some reason) a large number of former free software fanatics migrate over to it.
That doesn't work on Linux. Well, it works in the kernel, with Torvalds as the Jobs figure. But not in user space, and user space is just as important. You can fork everything to create what you want, but you can expect a lot of spite from everyone whose code you have forked, because they don't accept your vision and are angry that you've tried to impose it.
I think that Shuttleworth started out with a vision and good intentions. But he's run into exactly this sort of political problem, where you can't fix X, Y and Z because your fixes don't match the vision of maintainers A, B and C, and the FSF is constantly bitching at you for not conforming to their ideal of "freedom". So now he is just tweaking things, like the fonts, because although minor changes are pointless, they don't create a political Armageddon in our "meritocratic" software utopia.
By "stability" I do not mean resistance to crashes, I mean the other definition, as in "a stable base for third party applications".
In this area, Linux's record is nowhere near that of Windows. Although the system call API is extremely stable, the user space APIs (provided by layers and layers of libraries) are not. In this, I include everything that might be needed to run an application: not just libc but also the GNOME/KDE libraries, SDL, libstdc++, Alsa, Pulseaudio, i18n stuff, libkitchensink, and so on.
On Linux we typically rely on recompiling each application to match each distribution, and this way there is a perfect match with the available libraries. But that approach can only ever work for a minority of applications, and it also encourages the distributor to make modifications, which could break the software -- and I know you're a professional so you will already know how fragile it can be. This could be a matter of releasing something that isn't ready, as happened with the Ubuntu Pulseaudio fiasco, and it could even be extremely serious and undetected for years, as with the Debian OpenSSL fiasco.
Really, to support third party applications, Linux needs to provide an incredibly stable Microsoft-like environment for those applications. Even - especially - if they are closed-source. It must be possible to rely on an application not breaking from release to release, distribution to distribution, and we shouldn't need to rely on installing the old libraries and using LD_LIBRARY_PATH to bring them in. Windows provides this because Microsoft are rightly paranoid about it. But Linux user space developers often do not care, because "you can recompile everything that matters". Some even actually want to break support for third-party commercial software because they are ideologically opposed to such applications: Flash would be the prime example of this.
Why are such applications important? Because free software hackers shouldn't waste their time reimplementing commercial software. Instead, the commercial software should come to us. That means welcoming it: "no, you don't need to test against the two most recent versions of the ten most common distributions, because all of those distributions share bit-for-bit identical versions of the same core libraries".
That's part of what I'm getting at. But it goes further. I grant that Linux installers and working environments have got better, but still if something breaks, you are editing configuration files. It's expert friendly, not user friendly. In any Linux distribution you are always hoping that the distributor won't break something in an upgrade, and unfortunately this hope is often shattered. For instance, Ubuntu upgrades are notorious for breaking graphics and sound drivers. The problems can be fixed, yes, but not by the unlucky average user whose digital sound output has stopped working. In that sense we are still in the 90s: we have clever installers that do most things right (but so did Mandrake circa 1999). However, when things break, the user-friendly GUI tools are no help and an expert's help is required. This really hasn't changed. A Windows user reinstalls an application or driver; an Ubuntu user goes on the forums to beg for the arcane incantations that will get his WiFi working on Wanking Walrus ("they worked on Pissed Panda, why does this break every time I upgrade!??!").
Of course, none of this applies to the embedded systems maker who has absolute control of every component of Linux that's on the system. Linux succeeds in that environment, and it also succeeds in the server environment where the real users see only a web interface and the admins are all experts. But on the desktop or the netbook? Only if an expert owns the machine. For everyone else there isn't the stability nor the usability. The issue of providing these things hasn't been considered holistically. In Linux, we all do our own thing and hope that somehow it will all come together. But it doesn't. As the last decade shows.
Right. Although I wonder if option (3) is really so undesirable. We save space by having packages that use libz.so depend on "zlib1g" or whatever... but how much? Not so much that it's really a big issue in these days of terabyte hard disks and gigabytes of RAM.
Static bundling trades a small amount of space for a huge amount of usability, because the same package will work on any Linux with a minimum kernel version. It's not a good strategy for the core packages on the system, but for every "after market addon", you really want exactly one package that will work on all Linuxes forever: a bit like a Windows program on Windows ;).
If we don't like option (3), then the only other option is to have a fixed, well-known baseline of packages that are always installed and always the same version on every distribution. But getting people to agree what these packages should be is a politically impossible problem, solvable only by a Steve Jobs/Linus Torvalds-style "dictator". And while Linus' dictation works well in the kernel, and has kept everything nicely backward compatible, it doesn't apply on the other side of the system call barrier.
Detecting all the drivers is one of the most basic things the OS should be able to do. This has improved on Linux but other aspects of usability have not. This is an ideal place to wistfully remember recompiling the sound module to change the default SoundBlaster IRQ to 7 instead of 5, because back then it wasn't even a command line option. That's got better. But this is basic stuff.
Wireless continues to be a pain; I bought a specific brand of laptop in order to have a supported chipset and avoid ndiswrapper but was still stung by the clusterfuck of wpa_supplicant, its horrible configuration file, Avahi (the Pulseaudio of the network world), and of course a slew of half-working GUI wireless network managers which are only useful under very specific circumstances. But I dealt with it. I threw out all the GUIs (after trying them all) and I edit the wpa_supplicant.conf file by hand for each network I need to connect to. It works for me, but there's no way it would work for a typical user.
People who switched from Linux to MacOS, such as yourself, are very well placed to point this sort of thing out, if they can be bothered to deal with the inevitable rage it will kick up. I'm not a fan of MacOS but must admit that a great deal of effort has been put into making things work nicely. Everything has been considered; there has been a lot of usability testing, and the result is that every user gets an excellent baseline. Same on Windows. Just creating this baseline of usability and stability seems to be the sticking point for Linux.
Actually I use Linux every day, at work and home, by choice. I still think it is the best of all available options for me, I just don't think it's perfect and in some respects it is still in the mid 90s.
Any comment criticising Linux is bound to be controversial here and I really don't have the energy to respond to everyone who has called me a Microsoft shill.
The people who make a living from Linux, like myself, are those who are best placed to point out where it is lacking. On the server side or for embedded systems, it is great. For me, on my home computer, Linux is also great. Or at least better than the alternatives. But then I have a lot of experience with it, as I said. I'm one of the people who can dump Windows, and indeed that's exactly what I did.
To me, Linux (1996-2010) is a sad story. Both Windows and MacOS have made huge leaps forward in terms of usability, stability and security, and Linux has hardly moved. The "year of the Linux desktop" has turned from something we all hoped for into something that will clearly never happen. In fact, it already happened with those Linux netbooks: but, once again, Linux just wasn't ready to do that. There was no Linux environment ready to go on a netbook that would do everything a netbook user wanted to do, and I'd say there still isn't.
Linux is hamstrung by idiotic free software politics and the problem that nobody wants to do the unattractive but important work, like usability testing or making a stable platform for commercial software. And what do we do when we hear of these problems? We say "That's FUD" or "You're a Microsoft shill". Until we can admit that the problems are there, we are never going to get any improvement.
Why isn't there a bullet point for using Ubuntu if you just want a machine to browse the internet? Could Dell at least toss Ubuntu a bone and say "Linux currently suffers from less viruses than Windows"?
Well, this is a good point, but even for that relatively simple job there are big problems with Ubuntu. You only need to flick through the archives of Linux Hater to get some idea of what these are.
When I first visited Linux Hater, I thought I was dealing with extreme ignorance. But it quickly became apparent that he/she is actually an expert authority on software in general and Linux in particular. Familiarity has bred contempt. These days I have to concede that he/she is basically right in most cases. One thing about Linux hasn't changed at all in the 14 years I've been using it: users still need to have in-depth knowledge to do basic stuff, like install new applications. Things got slightly better, but it's still way more difficult than it should be. Even with a user-friendly package manager you are still faced with a huge noise to signal ratio created by the large amount of applications that might do what you want, none of which are the application you've heard of. And I'm certain that the web-only user is going to want to use a few things other than the web browser.
It pains me to say it, but Dell is right. Ubuntu could be a great web terminal but it still just isn't, and blaming Dell and Microsoft isn't going to change that. Linux is still for experts and keen amateurs, and that's what Dell is saying. Dell (and Linux Hater) are actually doing us all a huge favour by pointing out where improvements are needed. If only we'd listen.
In this subject there are no definite answers. Avoiding contact with other people when young certainly does not help, but it doesn't necessarily mean that the skills will not be acquired at all, or that they cannot later be learned. You are absolutely right that there is no way to measure this. I posted a comment here only to point out that exercise is just one of the benefits of letting your children play out with other children, and it may even be quite a marginal one in comparison to socialisation.
I assume this must be a reply to a different post.
Backwards? But it isn't just about the exercise. It's also about social skills. Keep them "safely" indoors all day and, well, you know what happens... you'll have met kids like this in forums and online games. They are not pleasant to be with; they are rude, selfish people, and it's because they are poorly socialised. Some of them are technically adults - they are the saddest examples. We can get used to ignoring the flames, the trolls and the gamer rage on the Internet, but imagine how such people cope in the real world. "Not very well" is the answer.
I respectfully beg to differ. Capitalism is democracy because all the power lies in the hands of the people. They have the money, they make the choices. Although some individuals and corporations have a larger slice than others, most of the money is in the hands of average people, who vastly outnumber the rich.
The most successful lie of Marxism is the notion that only the very rich are really "capitalists". Not so. Everyone is a capitalist. Everyone fits into both of the classically Marxist roles of "worker" and "exploiter".
Finally, regarding Fascism. Under Mussolini, history's only true Fascist, the government wasn't controlled by the corporations. It was the other way around. Mussolini was not a capitalist: private companies had free reign only to do as he said. Sometimes we call this "state capitalism", because the state acts as a corporation, with all the conventional corporations as wholly-owned subsidiaries.
Fascism is adaptive. It uses different excuse for different people. "Terrorists" and "child porn" are the usual ones - they work on most people, but most Slashdotters will see through them.
But there are other excuses for fascism that do work here. There is a "war on polluters", and just as the war on child porn has very little to do with helping children, the war on pollution ("climate change") has little to do with saving the planet and everything to do with more government control and more power for the corrupt. And yet if you speak out against it here, you will be modded to negative infinity by people who really do not want to hear any criticism of their "Patriot Act".
It's important that people feel that their sensible, intelligent and government-approved views are under constant attack from the ignorant masses. If you can make someone feel like that, he'll defend just about anything the government wants to do without really thinking about it. And this is how government goes from bad to worse - with the thunderous applause of those who demand 'hope' and 'change' at any cost.