Personally, it took me a few re-watches to really understand the first movie. And of course, I've watched it no less than a thousand times.:) We've also got the second movie on DVD, so we'll be studying it as well to increase our understanding.:)
I'm sorry, you weren't paying enough attention. There was a test. It was the third movie.
* None of the questions in Reloaded are answered.
Wrong. Neo stops the sentinals because he brought part of the matrix back with him. Which is why he was able to be in the matrix while he was jacked out of the matrix. It's also why he was able to see things in the real world, even though he was blind. He could still see the world outside of the matrix like he saw the world while he was inside. But it was different. It wasn't code, but living energy. Smith entered Bane in the second movie. This was in fact explained in the first movie. Quote: "I thought you said it wasn't real!" "Your mind makes it real."
Guess what? It never comes!
Go back. Study it some more. You need to. You don't understand it yet. But don't worry, the first movie needed a few run throughs to truly grok it as well. It's that thick. Many of the answers you were looking for were actually in the second movie. And the first.
The focus is Zion.
That's because it must be. This is the Last Stand. This is Crunch Time. The final battle. Armageddon. And remember in the first movie that quote: "Most of these people aren't ready to be unplugged. They are so inured, so *dependent* on the system that they will *fight* to protect it." Not everyone wants freedom. Some of them prefer security. Steak dinners. Cigars. Not a big ol' bowl 'o snot for breakfast and doing nothing but taking orders. And at the end of the movie, it is clearly stated that those that wish to leave are free to go. Also, before the movie ends, the people of the Matrix are entirely taken over by Agent Smith, and as such are freed by his destruction.
No humanity in the characters and dialogue. The movies just don't enjoy themselves.
If the characters had been anything but completely focused on the battle that is the second and third movies, they would have lost the war. If there was any comic relief beyond what was already there ("Lipstick? There is no lipstick!" "She didn't leave it on your face!" and "But I can tell that every floor is wired with explosives." "Bad for us.") it would have been thoroughly Spielburged. This was a serious movie. The Matrix is a trilogy that will be studied in University English classes in a hundred years. (I'm sure that more than a few English majors will agree with me. My wife is one of them, and was careful to point out many of the finer points of the writing, including how the second chapter introduces many significant supporting characters well in advance so that we can come to truly care about the characters. This was also done in the first movie, but was less subtle and done in a shorter period because most of them got killed off in that first movie. You noticed this as a mixture of humour and joy that set these people apart as human beings, as opposed to their machine oppressors. In the third movie, we are introduced to the idea that the machine oppressors are also like us in that they experience emotions; they have families that they care for, they hate, they love, they envy.)
The third movie was also very much a war movie following a strong tradition. It's the story of a desperate fight for survival. Of getting your ass kicked, close calls, strategies and tactics, failures and tragedy, perfect plans falling apart and improvised plans getting the job done. If you've played real time strategy games, you would know this from experience, and if you've studied military history, you'd know this from fact.
Nobody is freed, Trinity and Neo die, and we're left with the same situation we had at the beginning of the first movie.
WRONG! As the architect points out at the end, those that wish to leave may leave. Those that wish to stay can stay. It's their choice. And moreover, we aren't beginning the cycle anew. Remember from the second movie, that all six times this cycle had happened previously, Neo had chosen not to save Trinity, but to save Zion,
From the article: Today's flare is listed as an X17.2, with an X20 being the most intense flare ever observed in that time. People living in Quebec, Canada, may recall that in March 1989 an X15 solar storm was strong enough to knock out the region's power grid.
Our ADSL network and our mail server have been really flaky lately (for other reasons, I presume). I don't think that our customers are going to believe us if this causes problems with our network.
Personally, the only thing I can see that a tablet PC gives me over a notebook is the ability to do something I don't want to do -- write in longhand.
Unless, of course, you're standing up and trying to take notes. Or trying to take notes in mathematics or physics. These applications make trying to use a keyboard an exercise in farce. Also, you need something considerably larger than a palm pilot just to write out a single integral equation.
You could just use paper and a pen, that is if you don't mind searching the notes manually afterwards. After using computers for so long, I find it irritating to go back to paper.
Of course, since I'm not going to school anymore, there's no reason for me to have a tablet, and there are other (very large) flaws with the current design. Overall, these things need to be less like computers and more like palm pilots - fast, efficient, lacking a hard drive. I wouldn't even mind too much if the screens were monochrome, especially if it means a threefold increase in battery life.
About a third of people responded to a spam, seeking more information.
And 7 percent actually bought a product or service
A spammer would read this as:
A STUPENDOUS, UNHEARD-OF 33% of people responded to a spam, ATTEMPTING TO BUY SOMETHING!!!
And A SPECTACULAR **7 PERCENT** actually bought a product or service, compared to the measly.01% response rate to television advertising, which is stupidly expensive, and tangled with all kinds of "decency" regulations, like the truth in advertising act.
Also:
A notable 20 percent of those under 30 said they responded to an e-mail offer, then later found out it was bogus.
would read as:
An AMAZING 20 percent of those under 30 said they were STUPID ENOUGH to respond to an e-mail offer, without realizing it was bogus. This makes 15 to 30 year olds our TARGET MARKET, if we actually cared about market research and give a tinker's damn about who we were spamming, instead of just doing so indiscriminately.
Well, there's the stuff at work, and the stuff at home. At work, our secondary DNS/RADIUS box is a P133 with 64 megs of ram that's been in service for about 7 or 8 years. (The company started up in 1995, I don't know when this box was installed.) We had a "secure" (probably through obscurity, not security) webserver running netscape's HTTPS server that was a P100. It was retired last year. I don't dare look at the hardware in the secondary DNS box, for fear that it might fail.;)
At home, my router/firewall is an old Frankenstein box running FreeBSD that's using the case from an old Acer Altos 700, which was a server that ran a P60 processor back when P60 processors were the fastest you could get. It's even got the fold-out feet that were used to stabilize the thing in case of god-knows-what and avoid a harddrive crash. The motherboard handily folds out on one side of the case for ease of maintenance, and the power supply is at the bottom, probably to keep the center of gravity low, although it doesn't help airflow and cooling much. Not that it really needs to.
The back of the case had to be "modded" (read, cut with a hacksaw) to accomodate the keyboard plug on the board I put in, an old Micronics server board that could be upgraded all the way to a P100 (which is what it has). It's got 48 megs of 72 pin SIMMs in it and a 1.0 Gig Quantum Fireball harddrive. It's been running nearly continuously without failure for the past 4 years, minus moving and power failures. Uptime is currently 207 days.
I honestly don't know when all this stuff was actually made. I bought the case and motherboard second hand about five years ago, and the harddrive was out of an old computer that was was second hand and obsolete even then - I'd guess its age at about 8 or 9. The other hardware is probably at least that old, as it was the fastest stuff around when it was manufactured - probably around 1995.
This is clearly what is meant by "innovation through litigation." It's about the only way Microsoft is going to make any changes to IE anymore now that it has no competition.
His main argument is that it takes many steps to install and run a virus in linux, therefore it makes it more secure. This argument may hold true, but it's the same reason that Linux isn't on the desktop in the home of Joe Sixpack. We're talking about people that don't even have the most basic word processing skills, let alone knowing about what application will open what file type. Once you start dumbing it down enough to appeal to the masses, these "security" measures go right out the window. It's one of the reasons he says Lindows is less secure.
What would really make a difference would be if software was designed with security in mind from the start. Outlook (Express) was not designed this way, and thanks to a set of spectacularly stupid decisions on the part of the developers and no doubt management and marketing as well, it functions better as a virus delivery system than it does an e-mail client. Internet Explorer doesn't help either.
This reminds me of something that Camille Paglia said about how she prefers the company of newspaper reporters over the company of university professors.
The newsies that she knows (or perhaps in general) typically talk very fast and excitedly. University professors on the other hand, are pretentiously thoughtful in her experience, and speak slowly in order to attain this image.
When I was in college though, my best instructors were the ones trying to impart as much information as fast as possible.:)
So, when will we see a distributed RBL that can stand up to distributed attacks?
I have a better question.
When are we going to see some civilization on the net? The way things are going now reminds me of many a story about the old west in America, where law enforcement is ineffective at best, nonexistant at worst, and ham-handed in the middle. Where citizens are fed up with being brutalized and form lynch mobs.
This DDOS is just an escalation in the war between spammers and everyone else. Remember how/. cheered when a few spammers were harrassed out of existence? Now that some anti-spammers are getting DDOSed out of existence, we think it's not so funny. These anti-spammers are often people who don't give the first damn about the legitimacy of complaints against their service and just do whatever they like.
What we need are real laws, enforced in a civilized, orderly manner. Not "self-regulation". Not vigilante groups armed with nuclear weapons.
Cost of OC3: $300/mo, plus $4/Gig, plus $2000/km to CO for installation in YOUR home. Cost of T1: $1300, 100 GB per month included, $6/Gig over, plus $2000 installation. Cost of ADSL: $34.95/mo, 6 GB limit, $10/Gig over. No installation fee. Having a job to pay the piddly $34.95/mo: priceless.
There are some things money can't buy. For everything else, there's Mastercard. Accepted everywhere but your mom's place.
Cringely is a blowhard trying to scare people, but frankly this isn't news. Using the 'net really doesn't make this easier - it's always been easy.
His point actually, is that with the information he got for free on CD courtesy the federal government, he could have potentially stolen something to the tune of 63 billion dollars. Sure, it's easy to steal from one person by dumpster diving or double charging, but that's chump change. When you have the identities of hundreds of thousands of people, stealing as little as $8000 from each one means you're sitting on your own private island in the carribean with as many bikini babes as you like, while you watch the entire American banking system collapse on TV.
This makes for a good argument to not raise federal taxes on gasoline to European levels.
Just imagine what the government would use that gas tax for. Wars to get more gas, more than likely. It would be seen as an investment with a return on value.
"To err is human, but to really foul things up takes a computer."
Sure, there's meatspace equivalents to hacking voting machines, but when you're dealing with paper votes, it's a long, arduous process to fudge the system. People have to do it by *hand*.
To be truly efficient at hacking the system, you need to use easily copyable electronic bits that you can modify on a whim. A small program or a few lines of code in an appropriate place will result in errors/hacks/vote stealing/ballot box stuffing on a scale of tens of millions in very short order. Any programmer or sysadmin that's ever made a mistake in a recursive program knows this. That's why we complain so loudly.
There's probably a program to do this somewhere, I just haven't looked it up yet.
What you need is a program where people requesting your time must submit it to a queue. A priority queue is probably best, as you don't want to be saying "I'm working on ticket #3341, and that server that's on fire there will be ticket #3382," although you should be the one to assign priority, not the user.
Most important though, is to make the status of this queue visible to those that submit requests. They must know that you are Very Busy, and that it will be a while before you can get around to them. If they don't like it, they can talk to your boss, and add creedence to your requests for more staff.
I've worked in the ISP industry for about 6 years now, and most of that time has been spent doing tech support for end users.
Right now, Linux is impossible to support over the phone. If someone were to call us up and ask for support for Linux, the only thing we can give them is the settings they need, and not where to put them. However, the vast majority of the people that need to call technical support for help (and that's the vast majority of the customers) need to be given more than just the server names they need. They need to have the entire set up process explained to them in fine detail. And that means that they need a standard user interface.
I think it would be great if someday a user can call up and say "I use Redhat" or "I use SuSE" and we would immediately know the exact steps needed to get their internet account set up. Quite honestly, you can give the user as much choice as possible, with a hundred different variations on the interface just so long as the particular interface that comes out of the box is complete, and has a name. The way it stands now however, practically every install is unique, in no small part because each user has to put it together themselves. You can't just install KDE and be done with it, because KDE doesn't necessarily have its own PPP program or mail program, or network setup utility. Certainly there's programs for KDE that do these tasks, but not every KDE user has them. The same is true for Gnome. And IceWM.
and the pervasiveness of the mindset that ignorance and laziness should be pandered to, rather than fixed through education, epitomises this.
1) That's like saying when you design a car, you should make its operation as complicated as possible in order to force the user to learn how it works. Most people - not to mention engineers - will say that this is an insane design methodology.
2) Just because you *know* how the thing works, does not mean that you should be forced to take the time to glue all the pieces together just to make it work. This is laziness on the part of the developer, not on the part of the user, and as such, the extra time *not* spent by the developer to make the install easier and faster is multiplied by the number of users the software acquires. The end result of this is a massive waste of time and resources that could have been fixed at the root instead of at the leaves.
3) People with knowledge and experience are typically worth more per hour than people without knowledge and experience. As a result, it is *more * important not to waste their time. If installing a program takes an experienced technical user hours when it could be modified by the developer to take minutes, what could possibly be wrong with that?
Making things easier to use does not pander to the ignorance and laziness of others. It saves time and money. It makes people more productive. And most of all, NOT making things easier to use is the way of the ignorant and lazy designer. Your arrogant attitude is invalid.
I can see how this can be a project that will be instantly way too expensive to keep going for the BBC. Because we all know that on opening day, the announcement will be here on Slashdot, home page of the entire world's geek population. And of course, we'll all be clamouring to download their entire archive all at once. If we don't make their servers beg for mercy, we'll melt their routers with the traffic.
But I guess we'll just have to see. If it hasn't been done already, we should write them and recommend Bittorrent, or perhaps find good mirroring sites.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, it took me a few re-watches to really understand the first movie. And of course, I've watched it no less than a thousand times. :) We've also got the second movie on DVD, so we'll be studying it as well to increase our understanding. :)
I'm sorry, you weren't paying enough attention. There was a test. It was the third movie.
* None of the questions in Reloaded are answered.
Wrong. Neo stops the sentinals because he brought part of the matrix back with him. Which is why he was able to be in the matrix while he was jacked out of the matrix. It's also why he was able to see things in the real world, even though he was blind. He could still see the world outside of the matrix like he saw the world while he was inside. But it was different. It wasn't code, but living energy. Smith entered Bane in the second movie. This was in fact explained in the first movie. Quote: "I thought you said it wasn't real!" "Your mind makes it real."
Guess what? It never comes!
Go back. Study it some more. You need to. You don't understand it yet. But don't worry, the first movie needed a few run throughs to truly grok it as well. It's that thick. Many of the answers you were looking for were actually in the second movie. And the first.
The focus is Zion.
That's because it must be. This is the Last Stand. This is Crunch Time. The final battle. Armageddon. And remember in the first movie that quote: "Most of these people aren't ready to be unplugged. They are so inured, so *dependent* on the system that they will *fight* to protect it." Not everyone wants freedom. Some of them prefer security. Steak dinners. Cigars. Not a big ol' bowl 'o snot for breakfast and doing nothing but taking orders. And at the end of the movie, it is clearly stated that those that wish to leave are free to go. Also, before the movie ends, the people of the Matrix are entirely taken over by Agent Smith, and as such are freed by his destruction.
No humanity in the characters and dialogue. The movies just don't enjoy themselves.
If the characters had been anything but completely focused on the battle that is the second and third movies, they would have lost the war. If there was any comic relief beyond what was already there ("Lipstick? There is no lipstick!" "She didn't leave it on your face!" and "But I can tell that every floor is wired with explosives." "Bad for us.") it would have been thoroughly Spielburged. This was a serious movie. The Matrix is a trilogy that will be studied in University English classes in a hundred years. (I'm sure that more than a few English majors will agree with me. My wife is one of them, and was careful to point out many of the finer points of the writing, including how the second chapter introduces many significant supporting characters well in advance so that we can come to truly care about the characters. This was also done in the first movie, but was less subtle and done in a shorter period because most of them got killed off in that first movie. You noticed this as a mixture of humour and joy that set these people apart as human beings, as opposed to their machine oppressors. In the third movie, we are introduced to the idea that the machine oppressors are also like us in that they experience emotions; they have families that they care for, they hate, they love, they envy.)
The third movie was also very much a war movie following a strong tradition. It's the story of a desperate fight for survival. Of getting your ass kicked, close calls, strategies and tactics, failures and tragedy, perfect plans falling apart and improvised plans getting the job done. If you've played real time strategy games, you would know this from experience, and if you've studied military history, you'd know this from fact.
Nobody is freed, Trinity and Neo die, and we're left with the same situation we had at the beginning of the first movie.
WRONG! As the architect points out at the end, those that wish to leave may leave. Those that wish to stay can stay. It's their choice. And moreover, we aren't beginning the cycle anew. Remember from the second movie, that all six times this cycle had happened previously, Neo had chosen not to save Trinity, but to save Zion,
More like "this is what happens when you use "solar flares" as an excuse when it's your most recent excuse.
Personally, I prefer this one.
From the article:
Today's flare is listed as an X17.2, with an X20 being the most intense flare ever observed in that time. People living in Quebec, Canada, may recall that in March 1989 an X15 solar storm was strong enough to knock out the region's power grid.
Our ADSL network and our mail server have been really flaky lately (for other reasons, I presume). I don't think that our customers are going to believe us if this causes problems with our network.
Personally, the only thing I can see that a tablet PC gives me over a notebook is the ability to do something I don't want to do -- write in longhand.
Unless, of course, you're standing up and trying to take notes. Or trying to take notes in mathematics or physics. These applications make trying to use a keyboard an exercise in farce. Also, you need something considerably larger than a palm pilot just to write out a single integral equation.
You could just use paper and a pen, that is if you don't mind searching the notes manually afterwards. After using computers for so long, I find it irritating to go back to paper.
Of course, since I'm not going to school anymore, there's no reason for me to have a tablet, and there are other (very large) flaws with the current design. Overall, these things need to be less like computers and more like palm pilots - fast, efficient, lacking a hard drive. I wouldn't even mind too much if the screens were monochrome, especially if it means a threefold increase in battery life.
We're doomed.
.01% response rate to television advertising, which is stupidly expensive, and tangled with all kinds of "decency" regulations, like the truth in advertising act.
Think of it this way:
About a third of people responded to a spam, seeking more information.
And 7 percent actually bought a product or service
A spammer would read this as:
A STUPENDOUS, UNHEARD-OF 33% of people responded to a spam, ATTEMPTING TO BUY SOMETHING!!!
And A SPECTACULAR **7 PERCENT** actually bought a product or service, compared to the measly
Also:
A notable 20 percent of those under 30 said they responded to an e-mail offer, then later found out it was bogus.
would read as:
An AMAZING 20 percent of those under 30 said they were STUPID ENOUGH to respond to an e-mail offer, without realizing it was bogus. This makes 15 to 30 year olds our TARGET MARKET, if we actually cared about market research and give a tinker's damn about who we were spamming, instead of just doing so indiscriminately.
*Their* implementation of tar would be closed source, and protected by a EULA. Try getting out of THAT tarball!
Well, there's the stuff at work, and the stuff at home. At work, our secondary DNS/RADIUS box is a P133 with 64 megs of ram that's been in service for about 7 or 8 years. (The company started up in 1995, I don't know when this box was installed.) We had a "secure" (probably through obscurity, not security) webserver running netscape's HTTPS server that was a P100. It was retired last year. I don't dare look at the hardware in the secondary DNS box, for fear that it might fail. ;)
:)
At home, my router/firewall is an old Frankenstein box running FreeBSD that's using the case from an old Acer Altos 700, which was a server that ran a P60 processor back when P60 processors were the fastest you could get. It's even got the fold-out feet that were used to stabilize the thing in case of god-knows-what and avoid a harddrive crash. The motherboard handily folds out on one side of the case for ease of maintenance, and the power supply is at the bottom, probably to keep the center of gravity low, although it doesn't help airflow and cooling much. Not that it really needs to.
The back of the case had to be "modded" (read, cut with a hacksaw) to accomodate the keyboard plug on the board I put in, an old Micronics server board that could be upgraded all the way to a P100 (which is what it has). It's got 48 megs of 72 pin SIMMs in it and a 1.0 Gig Quantum Fireball harddrive. It's been running nearly continuously without failure for the past 4 years, minus moving and power failures. Uptime is currently 207 days.
I honestly don't know when all this stuff was actually made. I bought the case and motherboard second hand about five years ago, and the harddrive was out of an old computer that was was second hand and obsolete even then - I'd guess its age at about 8 or 9. The other hardware is probably at least that old, as it was the fastest stuff around when it was manufactured - probably around 1995.
Talk about exceeding the MTBF!
That's the *newest* video card I have!
Asshole.
This is clearly what is meant by "innovation through litigation." It's about the only way Microsoft is going to make any changes to IE anymore now that it has no competition.
His main argument is that it takes many steps to install and run a virus in linux, therefore it makes it more secure. This argument may hold true, but it's the same reason that Linux isn't on the desktop in the home of Joe Sixpack. We're talking about people that don't even have the most basic word processing skills, let alone knowing about what application will open what file type. Once you start dumbing it down enough to appeal to the masses, these "security" measures go right out the window. It's one of the reasons he says Lindows is less secure.
What would really make a difference would be if software was designed with security in mind from the start. Outlook (Express) was not designed this way, and thanks to a set of spectacularly stupid decisions on the part of the developers and no doubt management and marketing as well, it functions better as a virus delivery system than it does an e-mail client. Internet Explorer doesn't help either.
This reminds me of something that Camille Paglia said about how she prefers the company of newspaper reporters over the company of university professors.
:)
The newsies that she knows (or perhaps in general) typically talk very fast and excitedly. University professors on the other hand, are pretentiously thoughtful in her experience, and speak slowly in order to attain this image.
When I was in college though, my best instructors were the ones trying to impart as much information as fast as possible.
So, when will we see a distributed RBL that can stand up to distributed attacks?
/. cheered when a few spammers were harrassed out of existence? Now that some anti-spammers are getting DDOSed out of existence, we think it's not so funny. These anti-spammers are often people who don't give the first damn about the legitimacy of complaints against their service and just do whatever they like.
I have a better question.
When are we going to see some civilization on the net? The way things are going now reminds me of many a story about the old west in America, where law enforcement is ineffective at best, nonexistant at worst, and ham-handed in the middle. Where citizens are fed up with being brutalized and form lynch mobs.
This DDOS is just an escalation in the war between spammers and everyone else. Remember how
What we need are real laws, enforced in a civilized, orderly manner. Not "self-regulation". Not vigilante groups armed with nuclear weapons.
Home broadband is dirt cheap for what you get.
You cant be serious?
Cost of OC3: $300/mo, plus $4/Gig, plus $2000/km to CO for installation in YOUR home.
Cost of T1: $1300, 100 GB per month included, $6/Gig over, plus $2000 installation.
Cost of ADSL: $34.95/mo, 6 GB limit, $10/Gig over. No installation fee.
Having a job to pay the piddly $34.95/mo: priceless.
There are some things money can't buy. For everything else, there's Mastercard. Accepted everywhere but your mom's place.
At least that's easier than having to figure out how to jerk off the mice!
It's easy. Kill the mice and extract the semen surgically.
Cringely is a blowhard trying to scare people, but frankly this isn't news. Using the 'net really doesn't make this easier - it's always been easy.
His point actually, is that with the information he got for free on CD courtesy the federal government, he could have potentially stolen something to the tune of 63 billion dollars. Sure, it's easy to steal from one person by dumpster diving or double charging, but that's chump change. When you have the identities of hundreds of thousands of people, stealing as little as $8000 from each one means you're sitting on your own private island in the carribean with as many bikini babes as you like, while you watch the entire American banking system collapse on TV.
This makes for a good argument to not raise federal taxes on gasoline to European levels.
Just imagine what the government would use that gas tax for. Wars to get more gas, more than likely. It would be seen as an investment with a return on value.
Significant enhancements have been made in this release, including i386 switch to ELF executable format, further W^X improvements for i386...
:D
Yes, but what *I* want to know is whether the BSD babes are going to be there.
Mmmm. Mondo cleavage and red latex!
"To err is human, but to really foul things up takes a computer."
Sure, there's meatspace equivalents to hacking voting machines, but when you're dealing with paper votes, it's a long, arduous process to fudge the system. People have to do it by *hand*.
To be truly efficient at hacking the system, you need to use easily copyable electronic bits that you can modify on a whim. A small program or a few lines of code in an appropriate place will result in errors/hacks/vote stealing/ballot box stuffing on a scale of tens of millions in very short order. Any programmer or sysadmin that's ever made a mistake in a recursive program knows this. That's why we complain so loudly.
'Leading experts agree, fun should be pleasurable.'
:)
Heh. I belong to a club where this does not hold true.
There's probably a program to do this somewhere, I just haven't looked it up yet.
What you need is a program where people requesting your time must submit it to a queue. A priority queue is probably best, as you don't want to be saying "I'm working on ticket #3341, and that server that's on fire there will be ticket #3382," although you should be the one to assign priority, not the user.
Most important though, is to make the status of this queue visible to those that submit requests. They must know that you are Very Busy, and that it will be a while before you can get around to them. If they don't like it, they can talk to your boss, and add creedence to your requests for more staff.
I've worked in the ISP industry for about 6 years now, and most of that time has been spent doing tech support for end users.
Right now, Linux is impossible to support over the phone. If someone were to call us up and ask for support for Linux, the only thing we can give them is the settings they need, and not where to put them. However, the vast majority of the people that need to call technical support for help (and that's the vast majority of the customers) need to be given more than just the server names they need. They need to have the entire set up process explained to them in fine detail. And that means that they need a standard user interface.
I think it would be great if someday a user can call up and say "I use Redhat" or "I use SuSE" and we would immediately know the exact steps needed to get their internet account set up. Quite honestly, you can give the user as much choice as possible, with a hundred different variations on the interface just so long as the particular interface that comes out of the box is complete, and has a name. The way it stands now however, practically every install is unique, in no small part because each user has to put it together themselves. You can't just install KDE and be done with it, because KDE doesn't necessarily have its own PPP program or mail program, or network setup utility. Certainly there's programs for KDE that do these tasks, but not every KDE user has them. The same is true for Gnome. And IceWM.
and the pervasiveness of the mindset that ignorance and laziness should be pandered to, rather than fixed through education, epitomises this.
1) That's like saying when you design a car, you should make its operation as complicated as possible in order to force the user to learn how it works. Most people - not to mention engineers - will say that this is an insane design methodology.
2) Just because you *know* how the thing works, does not mean that you should be forced to take the time to glue all the pieces together just to make it work. This is laziness on the part of the developer, not on the part of the user, and as such, the extra time *not* spent by the developer to make the install easier and faster is multiplied by the number of users the software acquires. The end result of this is a massive waste of time and resources that could have been fixed at the root instead of at the leaves.
3) People with knowledge and experience are typically worth more per hour than people without knowledge and experience. As a result, it is *more * important not to waste their time. If installing a program takes an experienced technical user hours when it could be modified by the developer to take minutes, what could possibly be wrong with that?
Making things easier to use does not pander to the ignorance and laziness of others. It saves time and money. It makes people more productive. And most of all, NOT making things easier to use is the way of the ignorant and lazy designer. Your arrogant attitude is invalid.
I can see how this can be a project that will be instantly way too expensive to keep going for the BBC. Because we all know that on opening day, the announcement will be here on Slashdot, home page of the entire world's geek population. And of course, we'll all be clamouring to download their entire archive all at once. If we don't make their servers beg for mercy, we'll melt their routers with the traffic.
But I guess we'll just have to see. If it hasn't been done already, we should write them and recommend Bittorrent, or perhaps find good mirroring sites.