Asterisk has been doing this right for a LONG time. Making a flavor that runs on the desktop, is packaged with a nice client and tied into a SIP directory service would give you Peer-to-Peer. That amount of work would be less than a week for one good dev. Within a month you'd have something Mr. N00b could handle.
Yeah, it doesn't run in a browser but it's also a real VOIP link with open standards and no corporate intervention.
... it seems like most US internet users (even the savvy users on Slashdot) likewise believe that US web censorship is only for blocking IP infringement, and never for censoring political discussion.
So it would seem that Chinese and US internet users are equally misinformed and complacent about their own governments' internet censorship.
The Sovereignty Movement gets blocked constantly. It used to be limited to tax avoidance information. Now it's more. The materials can still be found online but they eventually get shut down. They're a great bell weather because their political speech often constitutes a real threat to the US status quo rather than the typical Democratic, Republican or even Communist viewpoints which is comfortably within that boundary.
You mean the direction that smart phones should have gone in the first place? Leave the phone itself as a fairly dumb device. Stuff it into a headset, with a big battery, voice command, and little power hungry processing power. Remove all long range communications from the big clunky handheld device,....
I'd like the thing doing the long range microwave communications to be a few feet from my head. I don't care how big the cell transceiver is but I don't want it in my f**king ear.
If their radio development is anything like ours we're unlikely to detect anything. We've had detectable radio signals for a little less than 100 years and then started deploying spread spectrum (which looks a whole lot like background noise). We also do quite a bit of broadcasts that are aimed down at the planet. Whoever is looking for an obvious radio signal from earth better hurry up. As for Gliese, let's hope they like to produce coherent patterns in radio waves.
ron_ivi you NAILED IT. When they hired Terry Semel the first thing that happened was they fattened up the home page with a bunch of digital Vegas. This bullshit that search and email are entertainment is a disease.
One has to assume that the patent examiner in this case doesn't know what a multi-player game is. Isn't there some way to force a patent examiner to recuse him or herself from applications about which they know NOTHING? Jesus! Hey Gramps, remember at Thanksgiving when your great grandson was clicking the new-fangled thing with the button next to the plastic box with the antenna and flashing lights?!
And as far as the compression claim... WTF??!! Is there a specific algorithm to go with that, maybe, please? ANYTHING? Hi we're compressing network traffic to reduce latency on something highly interactive; can we have a patent?... Sure sonny, let me go get my teeth and change my diaper and I'll be right back with my rubber stamp. You sure are clever and you're glad you got me as your examiner. All these other slackers spend all day playing games on their phones and laptops and such.
Hello, tech support? Can you send a plumber to connect the tube up to the back of my computer so I can get the Internet? Ooops, I farted and a part of my body fell off. Wait a minute.... Okay, hmmm, this next patent app is for a means of exchanging oxygen and carbon dioxide by drawing air in and out of your lungs.... Hey, didn't someone do that before?
I was beating you up over the "stream of electrons" comment. Ones and zeros are from analogue changes in voltage. They "become digital" when they are interpreted as either passing a threshold voltage or not.
And titanium binary shielding to prevent bit leakage, drift, and collisions.
Bit leakage? What happened to checksums? If the cable, or wire or board doesn't FAIL then it delivers 100% of the ones and zeros. It might take a few more microseconds to do so and that's what caching is for. You can be guaranteed that any decent system is delivering 100% of the bits read at the source to the DAC. Once you're at the DAC and reading the analogue signal out the other side you're in audiophile land and signal to noise matters. Until then the whole discussion of transmission quality is a joke.
Get some decent data cables that don't fall apart and be happy.
9 years old is old enough to know quite a bit. When I was 9 (a loong time ago) I was building little electronic project like sequenced LEDs.... You got a book, got the stuff, followed some directions, did some trouble shooting.... That's a thousand times easier with network administration and the Google. There a plenty of things that would actually be pretty hard to fight against. How easy would it be for the kid to get local access to a server?
20 years from now (or whenever Intellectual Ventures gets so mired in whatever befalls it that it can't open another lawsuit) this giant backlog of IP will all be free. In the meantime these guys are doing a kind of cheesypoof R&D shop that gets to the idea stage.... Wouldn't it be awesome if that was the hard part?
The people who do it first and do it most have the most say. If someone has enough going to fork and succeed at getting adoption and support then they had enough doers. Requirements requests and bug fixes are information for doers, not votes. Doers respond because they care about the quality of what they do and they trust that there is a relationship between delivering quality and satisfying those requests.
The reason Open Source has flourished instead of getting mired in bs is precisely because it avoids direct enslavement to the dollar and the vote. Political bs in open source either kills a thing pretty fast or results in a new creation often superior to the one that got bogged down.
Amen.
Looking for a cyber-terrorist THREAT is a bit like looking for a needle in a haystack. Looking for VULNERABILITIES to a cyber-terrorist attack is like wading through mud in a swamp. You can't write tomes of complaints about security vulnerabilities in OSes, lame users getting cracked, and slack admin practices and then chimes in about how cyber-terrorism is no big deal?! We're sitting ducks.
Call a meeting. Get an old box running the company standard stuff. Tell them its no different from their box and that if it were connected to the company network it could infect everyone EVEN THEIR BOSS. Then DISCONNECT IT FROM ANY NETWORK ACCESS. And infect it with a virus that torches the drive. Not many people have actually seen a virus turn a perfectly good machine into a basket case.
No! This isn't going a bit far. The blind PAY TAXES TOO. They have every right to expect to access government data with as much ease as the industry can deliver.
This also shows a really sad design bias. People who called themselves designers before the advent of the web would have NO PROBLEM with a requirement to accommodate blind people. None! That's because design used to be a profession focused on human beings in the world. Now anything graphic is referred to as design. That's a fail for the entire discipline in my book. The idea that the web and computers are inherently visual media is part of a lame consensus that's a big part of that fail. How about thinking a bit less like Microsoft and CREATING something UNFAMILIAR?
The outrage here is that these guys were paid millions and millions of dollars and didn't get around to delivering quality accessibility. That's profoundly lame.
As for your experience with government exception handling on 508 compliance.... Yeah, that's lame that they don't take it into account when a handicap isn't represented in a trainee population.
Still, sorry the whole world can't see your cool 3D effect dude. They don't all speak English or have electricity 24/7.... If your website or app includes them in the target user group its pretty unconscionable to treat their needs as an annoying afterthought.
The idea that Linux is a competitive advantage they don't want to advertise would only hold up if they actually kept it as a trade secret.
They likely don't want to mention Linux because the general population, if it thinks of it at all, thinks of it as a complex thing for geeks. Radio-type devices are supposed to be easy and cool. They know they've got the Linux crowd and that the Linux crowd will find out about their product no matter what they say in their go-to-market strategy. That leads to an interesting situation where a louder signal about Linux captures interest that is already captured while potentially alienating people who aren't (yet) enthusiasts.
If they're smart they will keep the Linux signal down in their go-to-market and turn the signal up in follow-up communications like the manual for the product, the support forum, special offers, promotion of any community API stuff.... Then the message is, "Hey, non-geek, this cool device is affordable and has all kinds of awesome possibilities because it runs a thing called Linux. Some guys did a really useful app that does X. It's free and you can find it over here." You lead with that and people think of the device as complex. You follow with it and they feel lucky.
your convenently side stepping the fact there is no motivation for virus writers... no one in the linux world seems to believe in antivirus
I run antivirus software on my Linux desktop for the purpose of avoiding forwarding infected files. So... there's one Linux user who cares about viruses. As for motivation, there's certainly deep motivation to crack Linux servers.
You don't have to distrust any of these nations to accept the notion that they are acting in the best interest of their country AS THEIR LEADERS VIEW THAT INTEREST. Any dictatorship is likely to do whatever it takes to perpetuate its own power. Sometimes providing economic and social benefits to its people is in the dictatorships best interest.... Sometimes not. Sometimes dealing in a perfectly strait-forward way with other players is in the dictator's best interest.... sometimes not.
The fact that a state acts in its own best interest and is willing to spy and lie doesn't make it automatically an enemy. It makes it a STATE. Its in the nature of international power to build and deploy weapons, spy on other players and lie when necessary.
The mistake the US has made continually about China is to presume that the scope of China's self interest is identical to the US scope of self interest, namely, free market economic prosperity and growth. I've actually talked to financiers who think that they have the option of "pulling their capital" if China acts outside of the realm of what we consider reasonable. Like their ownership is somehow independent of the willingness of China to enforce it. What are they going to do. Go into China and take back a bunch of factory equipment?!
China can close its doors to the world again tomorrow and have tons of raw materials, inventories and productive capacity to keep their society pretty damn comfortable for the next 50 years.
Bottom line. Is their mandated nanny software a potential weapon? Yes. Can we defend against it by cutting off contact? Yes. Can a day come when its in China's best interest to beat up the US or other nations' internet knowing that the attack can't last forever? Yes.
Surprise, surprise. China is an independent, autonomous state with weapons and secrets that we need to watch carefully. I would hope that the NSA et al look at all international traffic with an eye toward potential threats. Its part of their job.
But Why not just say so immediately?! Most people won't bother listening to what you have to say if they need too use a search engine to figure out key pieces of information just to understand the context of your words!
Slashdot would probably begin to suck if people followed this kind of full service philosophy on every post. The posts would be longer, there would be information presented within the posts that a large number of users already know (or could find out with less than 5 SECONDS of effort). I, for one, don't read slashdot for some newsy eye massage with release.
BTW - Given the readership numbers for slashdot, I think we've proven that most people HERE do listen even though we sometimes need a search engine. I also have a dictionary on my shelf....
On the general topic: People don't complain about Linux, they ASK about problems with Linux. They ask about those problems ALL THE TIME. It's the greatest thing about the community that it hasn't fallen apart at the shear barrage of questions. The reason people COMPLAIN about certain operating systems is because they PAY for them and expect that they can ASK the manufacturer and... well... at least in Microsoft's case that can be painful and costly for n00bs... okay for a wide swath of developers and admins in the middle ground... and extraordinarily painful and costly when they hit a severe edge case. I've heard good things about Mac support and have had a few VERY decent experiences with it (I own an iMac, Windows XP box and a laptop running Ubuntu).
On this ATI example and the thousands like it: First, we're really talking about desktop Linux here. When people setup servers they should be expected to do a bit of research on things like compatibility. Your post is spot on from the perspective of driving adoption in general but it kind of misses a key point. There isn't a n00b in the world who loads LINUX on their machine. They load a distro like Ubuntu or Fedora or Slax....
Linux is different than all those other operating system in many respects but this is the most critical. Linux is a community around a CORE operating system with various expressions in the form of distros. This means that there will NEVER be a consistent level of quality reaching userland. NEVER EVER. And that's FINE. I WANT to see distros that come from basements and start with edges and have some particular attitude and focus. Without that emergence we wouldn't have seen all the cool media boxes and easy grid servers and... and... name it!
So the fact that userland will experience their desktop Linux via a distro begs for a simple starting point for a solution that can be promoted along with the distros. The first line of defense against these types of userland disappointments is a USER FRIENDLY hardware compatibility list for Linux in general and each distro specifically. Boot-from-CD distros and testing tools can come in handy in helping end users figure out if everything's going to work before they have a profoundly bad experience. Ubuntu's been great about getting n00bs to not be afraid. Let's bang on them to make awareness of hardware compatibility a palatable thing.:)
That's step one. A black list is step two. When you have a manufacturer who SOOOO doesn't give a sh*t about Linux, put their black flag up early and often.
I've personally been profoundly lucky. I tend to load desktop Linux distros onto somewhat older hardware and typically the drivers have caught up and the install is butter. I also encourage people with older boxes to try out a boot-from-CD distro (after asking what the box has). Linux has a rich pile of nasty edge cases and THAT'S OKAY. Communities of all kinds tend to have a rich pile of edge cases - its in the nature of having a crowd and a commons.
I TELL that to people that I encourage them to use Linux and it prepares them to be delighted when their ass isn't handed to them. You're not going to get better than that at the level of Linux. You can definitely get WAY better than that at the distro level.
If the message anyone wants to put out is that LINUX qua LINUX is an alternative for userland n00bs. IT AIN'T. I don't even compare it that way. I tell users, "Hey, there's a community of people who built an operating system that's awesome and they build different versions of it for various levels of expertise. Try booting this CD and play around with it. If it does what you want, back your stuff up and load that distro on that box over there. If you run into questions search them up in forums." If they don't get lucky or aren't willing to embrace some learning they can use XP or Mac and pretend that its RADICALLY BETTER when it's only really quite a bit better sometimes.
would risk the contamination of our precious bodily fluids. Twice, no less.
Only if cosmonauts piss FLOURIDE?!...to whit...
Ripper: Do you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous Communist plot we have ever had to face?.......You know when fluoridation first began?....1946. 1946, Mandrake. How does that coincide with your post-war commie conspiracy?
Slashdot Mirror
Asterisk has been doing this right for a LONG time. Making a flavor that runs on the desktop, is packaged with a nice client and tied into a SIP directory service would give you Peer-to-Peer. That amount of work would be less than a week for one good dev. Within a month you'd have something Mr. N00b could handle.
Yeah, it doesn't run in a browser but it's also a real VOIP link with open standards and no corporate intervention.
... it seems like most US internet users (even the savvy users on Slashdot) likewise believe that US web censorship is only for blocking IP infringement, and never for censoring political discussion.
So it would seem that Chinese and US internet users are equally misinformed and complacent about their own governments' internet censorship.
The Sovereignty Movement gets blocked constantly. It used to be limited to tax avoidance information. Now it's more. The materials can still be found online but they eventually get shut down. They're a great bell weather because their political speech often constitutes a real threat to the US status quo rather than the typical Democratic, Republican or even Communist viewpoints which is comfortably within that boundary.
You mean the direction that smart phones should have gone in the first place? Leave the phone itself as a fairly dumb device. Stuff it into a headset, with a big battery, voice command, and little power hungry processing power. Remove all long range communications from the big clunky handheld device, ....
I'd like the thing doing the long range microwave communications to be a few feet from my head. I don't care how big the cell transceiver is but I don't want it in my f**king ear.
This specific idea was written up in an academic paper more than a decade ago http://www.veniceconsulting.com/docs/ryan.intrusion.pdf.
If their radio development is anything like ours we're unlikely to detect anything. We've had detectable radio signals for a little less than 100 years and then started deploying spread spectrum (which looks a whole lot like background noise). We also do quite a bit of broadcasts that are aimed down at the planet. Whoever is looking for an obvious radio signal from earth better hurry up. As for Gliese, let's hope they like to produce coherent patterns in radio waves.
Space is such a beautiful desolate hell. Enough gravity to be round, not enough to hold a big, asteroid-burning atmosphere.
ron_ivi you NAILED IT. When they hired Terry Semel the first thing that happened was they fattened up the home page with a bunch of digital Vegas. This bullshit that search and email are entertainment is a disease.
One has to assume that the patent examiner in this case doesn't know what a multi-player game is. Isn't there some way to force a patent examiner to recuse him or herself from applications about which they know NOTHING? Jesus! Hey Gramps, remember at Thanksgiving when your great grandson was clicking the new-fangled thing with the button next to the plastic box with the antenna and flashing lights?!
And as far as the compression claim... WTF??!! Is there a specific algorithm to go with that, maybe, please? ANYTHING? Hi we're compressing network traffic to reduce latency on something highly interactive; can we have a patent?... Sure sonny, let me go get my teeth and change my diaper and I'll be right back with my rubber stamp. You sure are clever and you're glad you got me as your examiner. All these other slackers spend all day playing games on their phones and laptops and such.
Hello, tech support? Can you send a plumber to connect the tube up to the back of my computer so I can get the Internet? Ooops, I farted and a part of my body fell off. Wait a minute.... Okay, hmmm, this next patent app is for a means of exchanging oxygen and carbon dioxide by drawing air in and out of your lungs.... Hey, didn't someone do that before?
Put the steel wool on he end of a flexible wire, light it and spin it! Pretty sparks!
Agreed.
I was beating you up over the "stream of electrons" comment. Ones and zeros are from analogue changes in voltage. They "become digital" when they are interpreted as either passing a threshold voltage or not.
Since when does a SATA Cable deliver analog voltage? It delivers a stream of electrons.
Look up how a computer (hence a computer cable) differentiates between a one and a zero. It uses "analogue" voltage.
And titanium binary shielding to prevent bit leakage, drift, and collisions.
Bit leakage? What happened to checksums? If the cable, or wire or board doesn't FAIL then it delivers 100% of the ones and zeros. It might take a few more microseconds to do so and that's what caching is for. You can be guaranteed that any decent system is delivering 100% of the bits read at the source to the DAC. Once you're at the DAC and reading the analogue signal out the other side you're in audiophile land and signal to noise matters. Until then the whole discussion of transmission quality is a joke.
Get some decent data cables that don't fall apart and be happy.
9 years old is old enough to know quite a bit. When I was 9 (a loong time ago) I was building little electronic project like sequenced LEDs.... You got a book, got the stuff, followed some directions, did some trouble shooting.... That's a thousand times easier with network administration and the Google. There a plenty of things that would actually be pretty hard to fight against. How easy would it be for the kid to get local access to a server?
20 years from now (or whenever Intellectual Ventures gets so mired in whatever befalls it that it can't open another lawsuit) this giant backlog of IP will all be free. In the meantime these guys are doing a kind of cheesypoof R&D shop that gets to the idea stage.... Wouldn't it be awesome if that was the hard part?
The people who do it first and do it most have the most say. If someone has enough going to fork and succeed at getting adoption and support then they had enough doers. Requirements requests and bug fixes are information for doers, not votes. Doers respond because they care about the quality of what they do and they trust that there is a relationship between delivering quality and satisfying those requests. The reason Open Source has flourished instead of getting mired in bs is precisely because it avoids direct enslavement to the dollar and the vote. Political bs in open source either kills a thing pretty fast or results in a new creation often superior to the one that got bogged down. Amen.
This just begs for it.
Looking for a cyber-terrorist THREAT is a bit like looking for a needle in a haystack. Looking for VULNERABILITIES to a cyber-terrorist attack is like wading through mud in a swamp. You can't write tomes of complaints about security vulnerabilities in OSes, lame users getting cracked, and slack admin practices and then chimes in about how cyber-terrorism is no big deal?! We're sitting ducks.
Call a meeting. Get an old box running the company standard stuff. Tell them its no different from their box and that if it were connected to the company network it could infect everyone EVEN THEIR BOSS. Then DISCONNECT IT FROM ANY NETWORK ACCESS. And infect it with a virus that torches the drive. Not many people have actually seen a virus turn a perfectly good machine into a basket case.
No! This isn't going a bit far. The blind PAY TAXES TOO. They have every right to expect to access government data with as much ease as the industry can deliver.
This also shows a really sad design bias. People who called themselves designers before the advent of the web would have NO PROBLEM with a requirement to accommodate blind people. None! That's because design used to be a profession focused on human beings in the world. Now anything graphic is referred to as design. That's a fail for the entire discipline in my book. The idea that the web and computers are inherently visual media is part of a lame consensus that's a big part of that fail. How about thinking a bit less like Microsoft and CREATING something UNFAMILIAR?
The outrage here is that these guys were paid millions and millions of dollars and didn't get around to delivering quality accessibility. That's profoundly lame.
As for your experience with government exception handling on 508 compliance.... Yeah, that's lame that they don't take it into account when a handicap isn't represented in a trainee population.
Still, sorry the whole world can't see your cool 3D effect dude. They don't all speak English or have electricity 24/7.... If your website or app includes them in the target user group its pretty unconscionable to treat their needs as an annoying afterthought.
The idea that Linux is a competitive advantage they don't want to advertise would only hold up if they actually kept it as a trade secret.
They likely don't want to mention Linux because the general population, if it thinks of it at all, thinks of it as a complex thing for geeks. Radio-type devices are supposed to be easy and cool. They know they've got the Linux crowd and that the Linux crowd will find out about their product no matter what they say in their go-to-market strategy. That leads to an interesting situation where a louder signal about Linux captures interest that is already captured while potentially alienating people who aren't (yet) enthusiasts.
If they're smart they will keep the Linux signal down in their go-to-market and turn the signal up in follow-up communications like the manual for the product, the support forum, special offers, promotion of any community API stuff.... Then the message is, "Hey, non-geek, this cool device is affordable and has all kinds of awesome possibilities because it runs a thing called Linux. Some guys did a really useful app that does X. It's free and you can find it over here." You lead with that and people think of the device as complex. You follow with it and they feel lucky.
Users... Don't you just love them?
your convenently side stepping the fact there is no motivation for virus writers ... no one in the linux world seems to believe in antivirus
I run antivirus software on my Linux desktop for the purpose of avoiding forwarding infected files. So... there's one Linux user who cares about viruses. As for motivation, there's certainly deep motivation to crack Linux servers.
You don't have to distrust any of these nations to accept the notion that they are acting in the best interest of their country AS THEIR LEADERS VIEW THAT INTEREST. Any dictatorship is likely to do whatever it takes to perpetuate its own power. Sometimes providing economic and social benefits to its people is in the dictatorships best interest.... Sometimes not. Sometimes dealing in a perfectly strait-forward way with other players is in the dictator's best interest.... sometimes not.
The fact that a state acts in its own best interest and is willing to spy and lie doesn't make it automatically an enemy. It makes it a STATE. Its in the nature of international power to build and deploy weapons, spy on other players and lie when necessary.
The mistake the US has made continually about China is to presume that the scope of China's self interest is identical to the US scope of self interest, namely, free market economic prosperity and growth. I've actually talked to financiers who think that they have the option of "pulling their capital" if China acts outside of the realm of what we consider reasonable. Like their ownership is somehow independent of the willingness of China to enforce it. What are they going to do. Go into China and take back a bunch of factory equipment?!
China can close its doors to the world again tomorrow and have tons of raw materials, inventories and productive capacity to keep their society pretty damn comfortable for the next 50 years.
Bottom line. Is their mandated nanny software a potential weapon? Yes. Can we defend against it by cutting off contact? Yes. Can a day come when its in China's best interest to beat up the US or other nations' internet knowing that the attack can't last forever? Yes.
Surprise, surprise. China is an independent, autonomous state with weapons and secrets that we need to watch carefully. I would hope that the NSA et al look at all international traffic with an eye toward potential threats. Its part of their job.
But Why not just say so immediately?! Most people won't bother listening to what you have to say if they need too use a search engine to figure out key pieces of information just to understand the context of your words!
See top search result: http://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1CHMC_enUS291US305&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=ltsp
Slashdot would probably begin to suck if people followed this kind of full service philosophy on every post. The posts would be longer, there would be information presented within the posts that a large number of users already know (or could find out with less than 5 SECONDS of effort). I, for one, don't read slashdot for some newsy eye massage with release.
BTW - Given the readership numbers for slashdot, I think we've proven that most people HERE do listen even though we sometimes need a search engine. I also have a dictionary on my shelf....
On the general topic: People don't complain about Linux, they ASK about problems with Linux. They ask about those problems ALL THE TIME. It's the greatest thing about the community that it hasn't fallen apart at the shear barrage of questions. The reason people COMPLAIN about certain operating systems is because they PAY for them and expect that they can ASK the manufacturer and... well... at least in Microsoft's case that can be painful and costly for n00bs... okay for a wide swath of developers and admins in the middle ground... and extraordinarily painful and costly when they hit a severe edge case. I've heard good things about Mac support and have had a few VERY decent experiences with it (I own an iMac, Windows XP box and a laptop running Ubuntu).
On this ATI example and the thousands like it: First, we're really talking about desktop Linux here. When people setup servers they should be expected to do a bit of research on things like compatibility. Your post is spot on from the perspective of driving adoption in general but it kind of misses a key point. There isn't a n00b in the world who loads LINUX on their machine. They load a distro like Ubuntu or Fedora or Slax....
Linux is different than all those other operating system in many respects but this is the most critical. Linux is a community around a CORE operating system with various expressions in the form of distros. This means that there will NEVER be a consistent level of quality reaching userland. NEVER EVER. And that's FINE. I WANT to see distros that come from basements and start with edges and have some particular attitude and focus. Without that emergence we wouldn't have seen all the cool media boxes and easy grid servers and... and... name it!
So the fact that userland will experience their desktop Linux via a distro begs for a simple starting point for a solution that can be promoted along with the distros. The first line of defense against these types of userland disappointments is a USER FRIENDLY hardware compatibility list for Linux in general and each distro specifically. Boot-from-CD distros and testing tools can come in handy in helping end users figure out if everything's going to work before they have a profoundly bad experience. Ubuntu's been great about getting n00bs to not be afraid. Let's bang on them to make awareness of hardware compatibility a palatable thing. :)
That's step one. A black list is step two. When you have a manufacturer who SOOOO doesn't give a sh*t about Linux, put their black flag up early and often.
I've personally been profoundly lucky. I tend to load desktop Linux distros onto somewhat older hardware and typically the drivers have caught up and the install is butter. I also encourage people with older boxes to try out a boot-from-CD distro (after asking what the box has). Linux has a rich pile of nasty edge cases and THAT'S OKAY. Communities of all kinds tend to have a rich pile of edge cases - its in the nature of having a crowd and a commons.
I TELL that to people that I encourage them to use Linux and it prepares them to be delighted when their ass isn't handed to them. You're not going to get better than that at the level of Linux. You can definitely get WAY better than that at the distro level.
If the message anyone wants to put out is that LINUX qua LINUX is an alternative for userland n00bs. IT AIN'T. I don't even compare it that way. I tell users, "Hey, there's a community of people who built an operating system that's awesome and they build different versions of it for various levels of expertise. Try booting this CD and play around with it. If it does what you want, back your stuff up and load that distro on that box over there. If you run into questions search them up in forums." If they don't get lucky or aren't willing to embrace some learning they can use XP or Mac and pretend that its RADICALLY BETTER when it's only really quite a bit better sometimes.
would risk the contamination of our precious bodily fluids. Twice, no less.
Only if cosmonauts piss FLOURIDE?! ...to whit...
Ripper: Do you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous Communist plot we have ever had to face?.... ...You know when fluoridation first began? ....1946. 1946, Mandrake. How does that coincide with your post-war commie conspiracy?