> It's issues like this that will keep non-geeks the hell away from Linux.
No it won't. Non-geeks won't be trying to shoehorn a version of MySql in that wasn't packaged for their OS. And only a poser would try to do it and then complain when they got in over their head. A real geek would know to try something that risky in a way that would be safe, like on a backup system or in a VM.
> First, I got stuck in RPM hell.
You can only get stuck in rpm dependency hell if you are manually installing things at the command line. This isn't something non-geeks will be doing much of unless they are trying to learn how to BE a geek. Learning experiences can sometimes be painful, we all went through em.
> Try formatting your disk, take a stock XP disk, load it up and see what you can do with it.
Gotta call ya on this one. I don't 'do' Windows but I have taken advantage of some of their free test releases. Can't criticize what you haven't seen and all that jazz. The freebie XP-64 I tried on my machine saw everything except the 3D part of my video card. The test release of Vista even sees that. But after seeing Aero Glass I have to say "Where's the beef?" It just isn't all that impressive, especially when compared to the 3D eyecandy in FC6. FC6 is available now and Vista is coming "Real soon now". (The release of the business edition now was because they know no business will actually deploy yet, rather it is to allow them to start working with a 'really final beta' in preparation for rollouts next year.
Now if you are talking laptops you are 100% correct about the driver hell problem and you have a better chance for a positive experience with Linux as far as what will work right after the initial install.
> Linux has a problem with it UI for Desktop usage.
No it doesn't. Random people off the street can and DO use Linux desktops, specifically GNOME on a clone of RHEL3. I'm running it in a public library setting and people just use it, kids to senior citizens. I did make a few compromises like Crossover Office installed to run the Office viewers and most importantly IE for sites that won't render in anything else. A decision that saved our butts come Katrina when FEMA's site was IE only.
And since it is a sane multiuser OS we can give them home directories, email accounts and even allow them to install into their home directory. No public access Windows allow such freedom. And yes we have people taking advantage of this. Too many people confuse 'easy to use' with 'what I already know how to use.' But when you turn people loose for a bit they learn new things.
And if you pick your hardware carefully, like an OEM would, installation is also a no brainer. Literally just plop in the DVD and answer some simple questions like what time zone you are in and which optional package groups you want.
> Give good names to the features. Give programs names that anyone know what they are.
I don't know which distro you were looking at and how many years ago, but RH has been doing that for a few years.
> But for desktop use they are a big pain. Things like install the application and the Icon to the application is in the GUI menu, > with the correct icon.
If the icon doesn't appear correctly it is a bug to report to whoever is maintaining the package. If you are the sort of buttmuncher who insists on installing via tarball AND bitching because that doesn't work anymore in a GUI package managed world you should STFU.
> Desktop users shouldn't need to hunt down dependencies to get the application to work nor can you assume your application will be > part of the distribution list) People want to go the web site download a program and run it.
And why should we adopt lame Windows practices like forcing people to hunt down a website, download an installer and run it when we have a much better way? Take a look at a modern package manager, you can add repos to them in a very simple manner. So if a 3rd party (I assume you mean payware since free software should get into most default repos if it doesn't suck) wants to support an OS they should provide a repo and instructions for adding it to your collection. Then installing their program AND ANY DEPENDENCIES (dependencies will even be solved across repos) becomes checking a box in a GUI and keeping it current is pretty much automatic.
> Plugging it in doesn't mean it will do anything...
If it is supported it will do something. If it is partially supported you might have to futz with it. If it isn't well then it isn't. Same as owning a Mac, everything doesn't work. Everything works on Windows because ALL HARDWARE (excepting a couple of Mac only bits and bobs) is sold for Windows, of course it kinda/sorta works there.
> OS X and Windows when you plug in a camera or other hardware will load a default application which you can change who the default it.
You say that like it is a good thing. Most of the time it suxors because they are using it to try to keep you captive to their bundled app and will even geep stealing the association back. We don't play those games.
> Linux has stalled, in the desktop...
No it hasn't. Look at the progress in Fedora/RHEL, SuSE and Ubuntu in versions spanning the last couple of years and you will see major progress in all of them. Linux long since passed the point where mere mortals can use a Linux desktop in an environment where there is a professional admin, and has reached the point where an OEM preload would be viable for many users, only it isn't available.
We will probably never reach a state where Linux desktops run Windows games so if that is you benchmark just stay on Windows and play, the rest of us have work to do and no time for futzing with Norton Anti-virus.
> User: "How do I get Quake 3 to run in Linux?" > Zealot: "Oh that's easy!.....
Hey AC troll, you cut/paste that same drivel every week or two. Repetition doesn't make it any more true. Q3 came with the Loki installer and it 'just worked.' assuming you already had a working GL installation. But then I doubt the Windows Q3 installer would sort out your GL driver problems either. As for obscure LD_* fixups, nope. The only fixup I have ever needed was having to run the installer under "setarch 1386" to get it to install a 64-bit install. Because when Q3 was released bi-arch 64bit installs hadn't been conceived yet.
You are adding about as much to the conversation as the netcraft troll in every BSD thread, i.e. nothing. It isn't even a joke anymore, just lame.
> when right here and now we have animal friends who so obviously need legal right
STFU hippie. You pollute the thoughts of sentient beings with your presence by forcing us to even take the time to laugh at you. Your 'animal friends' have no rights, deal with it. The concept of a 'Right' does not exist in a vaccum, it can only exist as half of a pair. For every Right there must be an equal and opposite Responsibilty. Since an animal is incapable of exercising any such Responsibity it cannot possess any Rights.
For example the commonly accepted Right we all claim to "Life, Liberty and the Persuit of Happiness" can only be valid among a group who not only claim that right for themselves but accept the responsibility to honor everyone else's right to do likewise. But you can't extend that "Right" to a lion because he won't hold up his end of the bargain, he will chomp yer ass. This doesn't make the lion evil, it makes him a lion.
Not saying it is OK to be cruel to animals for the hell of it. If for no other reason that people who do that sort of thing are almost always wicked and evil in other ways.
Now moving back ontopic, depending on what sort of AI we end up creating, it might well be capable of making a good argument for being able to discharge the duties of Citizenship and therefore deserving the Rights up to now reserved for Free Men[1]. Wouldn't be the first time the franchise has been expanded.
[1] I hate the PC usages. English is an old laguage, deal with it's bugs.
>...it might be nice for our national policymakers to make decisions based on some kind of logical reasoning for a change.
Why does everyone just assume an AI will be superior to us in reasoning ability? We have zero idea how an AI will be implemented. If the first attempts are basically emulating a human brain it might be slow and dumb. Now imagine a verion 1.0 AI from Microsoft.... running on Windows with Dell hardware. Still sure you want it elected supreme overlord?
Well we only have one datapoint, but g-ddamn, what a datapoint. Captain Janeway should have been spaced by her own crew in the pilot for her incompetence and political correctness run amok. And then she apparently was drinking from lead pipes or something because she got even more stupid during the series, although I admit I stopped watching by the middle of season two, I had seen enough. So based on her example I'd have to say women can't command a starship.
> If things broke, I could recompile from source. But now?
Now you can still recompile from source. Admittedly the documentation isn't as good as it should be, but rpmbuild isn't rocket science and if you cut your teeth on SLS/MCC you should be able to figure out a.spec, tar.gz and some.diff files about as easy as "./configure ; make install".
> I can't wait to buy all those non-Vista compatible machines for cheap!!
Good thought. Guess I should probably carry by butt to Dallas next year and hit 1st Saturday for some bargains. I remember when corporate america was tossing all of their perfectly good CRTs because they had to buy crappy 1st generation LCD panels to keep up appearances. Lots of good deals for about a year.
> Except that Red Hat and Suse are not entirely open source.
Suse has had a spotty history, having several closed components for most of its history, becoming mostly Free after being bought by Novell and now with the Novell-Microsoft deal who the hell knows where they are going next.
RedHat on the other hand has always had a Free core distribution. In the past they have experimented with selling closed addons (Motif, Applixware, etc) and even had a couple of closed things in their boxed distros (a browser called Red Baron and a commercial X server) but long since dropped all that nonsense. No version of RHEL has any dependencies on closed source components. Paid media sets do include an "Extras" CD with the usual suspects (JDK, Flash, Acroread, etc) and there are a fair number of vendor supplied closed device drivers for RHEL, but nothing closed is required to install unless you have one of the pieces of hardware that require a driver, such as a SCSI controller.
There isn't anything with a RedHat copyright that isn't released under a license that passes the DFSG. They don't officially make binary packages for RHEL available but every SRPM is up on the mirrors and full installable binary rebuilds are available from a variety of 3rd parties. What more are they expected to do to avoid the "Microsoft of Linux" moniker?
Bitch about their engineering decisions, the quality of their support, etc vs other vendors. Reasonable people can disagree on any of those subjects, but the non-free rumors need to be put to pasture.
> I don't know that you would make any money, but at least you'd be offering something that isn't currently offered.
I doubt it. And more important than my opinion, MySQL doubts it and has the sales figures to show it. Companies don't normally kill off profitable products and services, not even evil/stupid corporations.
Haven't seen an IP over RF provider who didn't start ruthlessly choking off bandwidth to anyone who actually consumes more than a few sips of their 'high speed Internet' products. It is OK if you do a few short bursts now and again, that is the usage model they built their network around. A Blouetooth connection to a laptop implies more than that so once the network operator noticed they had users USING their network they acted quickly to fix the problem.
The crux of the problem is that no RF system that has been deployed has enough bandwidth to supply 'broadbad' like connectivity to very many people at the same time. So the early adopters get it good, tell their friends and watch it all turn to crap. Unless we see microcells on every lamppost we aren't likely to ever solve the problem either. And no amount of marketing promises can change it, you can't repeal the laws of physics.
Cable modems had exactly the same problem of a shared resource quickly becoming overused. The cable industry could solve it by breaking up their originally simplistic network into lots of small segments because they could string FIBER to backhaul all of the neighborhood networks. Unless the wireless companies want to do likewise they are never going to be a player in the broadband game as anything other than a niche product priced high (billed by the bit) enough to limit usage to the available spectrum.
> This example should resonate with the Slashdot demographic: would you prefer an oscilloscope > that has 4 buttons and knobs or 40?
If cost were not an object my ideal scope would do as much as possible for me yet still allow me to override it's decisions. For example, connect the #1 probe and a menu would appear, This signal resembles NTSC Video, would you like to start by viewing fields or lines? Make the choice and have it autosize the scale and automatically sync up to horizontal or vertical sync with clear captions showing the scales selected. Connect the second probe and the diaplay automatically rescales to allow the second signal to be perfectly sized below, synced to the first probe. A menu along the bottom would offer the most common options like superimposing the two, showing the difference, etc.
But all that automation is useless if it LOCKS me into those options. I want all of the manual controls to remain available, even if buried a bit in onscreen menus.
> Would you prefer cat or vim as your text editor.
Vim of course. Although Emacs is good too, lets not open an editor war.
> Would you prefer a mouse with 1 or 3 buttons?
Three of course, whadda ya think I am, some sort fruit? (Ok, cheap Apple bash, but dangit, why can't His Steveness offer a three button lappie?)
Because most of the/. editors became Apple fanbois back when the TiBook was released. They mouth the Open Source slogans once in awhile because that is what a lot of the readers expect but Taco & Co. long since went to the dark side.
> that PS3 Linux would be of interest to anywhere near 50% of PS3 owners
And why not? What do most people use a PC for?
1. Internet: Web, IM, etc. PS3 running Linux can do that. Especially once the installed base gets big enough to ensure things like a current Flash and other needed bits are ported in a timely manner.
2. Games. Everyone always rips linux gaming with wiseass cracks like, yea, assuming you think Tux Racer is state of the art, etc. Duh, reboot and it is a Playstation 3 again, bet that can satisfy most people's gamer cravings. Remember, this is oficially supported Linux, no modchips and no worries about being locked out of playing games.
3. Basic productivity. OO.o can do that. Running a hog like OO.o in 256M will be a bit of bother but not insurmountable if you are only doing a bit of that stuff and on small home size documents.
4. Multimedia. The thing already supports direct YUV video modes in all of the HD, ED and SD resolutions under Linux. A Media player setup is a no brainer even if you have to download the packages from Europe. MythTV's frontend will love running on one.
Given that can't you see smart parents buying the kids a PS3 instead of an Xbox360 and a PC? Or that many owners will take advantage of the ability to have a spare PC when they aren't gaming?
> or that Sony will be able to sell tens of millions of PS3s in the next couple of years
Do you think it will still be $599 by next xmas? And that the supply issues with blue lasers will still limit supply of consoles? Ok.
I just hope Sony understands just what a winning scenario this could be for everyone.
Imagine. Play this right, let the bugs settle out for a few months and then start passing out ready to go DVDs on gaming mag covers. Sell a ready to rock kit with a preloaded memory key, DVD, keyboard and mouse. Instantly a PS3 is a gaming rig, BlueRay player AND a fully functional PC, ready for web browsing, OO.o, etc. Given just a small push and penetration could easilly hit 50% of an installed base likely to number in the tens of millions within two to three years.
For Sony the upside is realizing the sales pitch that a PS3 is more than a console, being able to make the pitch that a PS3 purchase for the kids is ALSO a PC purchase. Plus if it kills a few PC sales why should Sony care? Their desktop PC division is all but dead (laptops are of course another story, they make some cool lappies) and every Windows PC sale is money in their enemy's hand.
For us penguinheads we have to grit our teeth a bit at the idea of Sony succeeding but they ARE doing it the right way in this case so we have to be ready to give em props. Just imagine millions of DESKTOP LINUX installs. Millions! If PS3 ends up selling well and that penetration percentage goes much over 50% Linux could be the #2 desktop OS, pushing Apple to #3. Talk about irony, if Apple abandoned PPC for Intel and a PPC platform ended up defeating them. Balmer wouldn't be the only Steve hurling furniture.:)
> In all fairness, you or I could probably afford to *drastically* change the standard of living for at > least one person in a developing nation.
And be pissing away your income to salve your feelings of unworthiness.
> My wife and I give to a pretty substantial percentage of our income to charity, but the truth is, that > whether we want to acknowledge it or not, we mostly choose to have stuff rather than to help people.
Do you think you are stealing your income? Are you not providing value for what you receive? Do the people who pay you think your efforts on their behalf bring them more income than what they pay you? If they thought they could get the same results by hiring someone else at a lower rate would they? Should they?
No. Odds are you are being compensated fairly so what you have is yours to do with as you see fit. Yes, it is a good thing to help others in your community, even help strangers in a faroff land a bit but it is YOUR decision how best to utilize your assets and you shouldn't let others get you on a guilt trip if you buy a plasma TV.
In the end there is only one way to help the poor, especially those in blighted third world nations. We don't need a better distribution of wealth, that only makes everyone poor. We need to enable them to create MORE wealth. Doing that requires a few things, none of which require much in the way of cash:
1. Education regarding how wealth is created and how to save and invest. Even the poorest of the poor can do it, if only on a small scale. It adds up quickly.
2. Education regarding How a Free market, Free political system and the Rule of Law work, how they interrelate and how to get all three established. Some outside cash many be required for this stage to buy guns to kill the local despot with.
3. Learning how to manage the transition from dirt poor to up and coming economy and buying some plasma TVs.:)
4. Ensuring that the Socialists who will crawl out of the woodwork wanting to redistribute the newly created wealth are promptly shot/deported.
> You cannot pass anything where 50% of the voters will vote themselves out of being able to vote, > or vote themselves a tax increase.
You aren't cynical enough. Tell me you can't see a scenario where this measure couldn't muster a majority of the poor's votes.
Proposed Amendment:
The State will ensure every Citizen a minimum standard of living. Any Citizen who can't obtain sufficient income in the free market may opt to receive a stipend from the State. Said stipend will be equal to the poverty line as currently defined in Federal Law. Affordable housing will be assured, although relocation may be required. In exchange for this support the Citizen will lose the right to vote in any election where they opted to receive this distribution in any of the preceeding twelve months.
Of course it is a totally obvious trap, but as a general rule the poor aren't bright enough to look far enough into the future to see it and the productive classes who can see it are already tired enough of the welfare state to see it as a way to just write em off to a giant housing project (read as concentration camp within a decade) in Wyoming and eliminate the endless carping, ever increasing taxes and increasingly senseless crime.
But this is a fantasy since Democrats depend on the support of those who currently 'vote for a living' that they would upend heaven and earth in their efforts to defeat such a measure, even though it could (if implemented properly) almost totally eliminate poverty in one stroke. It would eliminate so much of the current government welfare machinery, itself a large fertile field of Democratic votes.
> Actually the FairTax is the only tax reform suggested in America to completely remove the tax burden from the poor.
Which is my primary objection to the plan. The poor MUST be made to pay their 'fair share' of taxes, even though in the bigger scheme of things their contribution will be fairly minor. Otherwise we have the situation we have now, or even more specifically the situation we have here in Louisiana with the Homestead Exemption. Because the 'poor' are totally excempt from property taxes the local politicians quickly figured out they could count on the poor to vote for almost any increase in that tax if the threat was an increase in another tax (say sales tax) if the vote failed.
No, we either must ensure everyone pays enough taxes to hate the idea of raising them or we must adopt a two class political system where only taxpayers vote. Since I really like the current (legally at least) classless system we have in the US I'd prefer to spread the tax burden.
> Carving out special exceptions here and there, and taxing this person more than that one, and generally trying to do social engineering > with the tax code as a bludgeon, is a terribly flawed idea.
You are missing the point. There are dozens of better ways to raise money to run the basic machinery of the State that don't require the overhead of running the IRS. But the whole POINT isn't about money per se, it is about power and control and the Income Tax is the perfect instrument for that purpose for the exact reasons you complain about. It so easily allows social engineering through special exceptions and bludgeoning those out of political favor into adopting the policies desired by the ruling class.
> That's why you can run software BINARIES designed for 3.1 on XP (try that with Linux, which absolutely SUCKS > SUCKS SUCKS at binary compatability, which I've been bitten with more than once).
I dunno about that. I use some really old binaries on our Linux boxes around here. WP8 finally stopped working on RHEL4, before that all you needed was a libc and ld.so package from the same era (RH4.2) and you were golden. But something else has changed between RHEL3 and RHEL4 that stopped it from working. Could probably solve it but by now there aren't many documents left we can't open with something else so I didn't dig into the guts looking for what else I'd need to do.
The old Loki games still run, although some require a bit of twiddling. For example Heroes of Might and Magic III runs but I get distorted sound. For some reason if I have xmms playing when I start it (along eith export SDL_AUDIODRIVER=esd) everything mixes correctly. But that is probably more a sound driver/alsa problem that should be looked into someday. VMware 2.0 is still usable even though the vendor abandoned it. Because the kernel mods are open someone else made patches to keep them running and the main program binary is still perfectly ok.
If you are really determined you can still get pre ELF binaries running, but who needs that these days? Not many closed apps from that era and anything with source is easier to simply recompile.
> The issue comes when the kids wants to load on some Windows software that all their friends are using, then > suddenly the operating system matters dramatically. "I put in the CD that came with my iPod, but the computer > isn't working." "I got this cool game for my birthday, but it's not working."
Yea numbnuts, you have to make sure the software is compatible with your computer. Guess what, you can't stick a Gamecube disc into a PS3 either, so what? You can't play Doom3 on that old 1999 vintage Win98 box either. We all know that if you want everything to 'just work' you can buy a top of the line Dell every 12-18 months and every new console that ships. And if you are rich and stupid I guess that is a viable option.
Meanwhile the rest of us learn to read the box or in the case of us Penguin nuts we check online for supported options before buying anything. And yes you can even make the stupid iPod work if we get one as a gift or something, but if you have a clue you don't buy one in the first place, instead buying something that works better and costs less. Something that lets you just drag and drop files on it as a drive and they play without any special secret DRM magic.
> The greatest threat to our rights is hypersensitive assholes like yourself who believe that their rights > trumps everyone elses - and that threats are the only adequate means of getting a point across.
Close, but it is time we became blunt with tyrants like the original poster. The original poster is a wannabe tyrant who believes he is superior to the normal mortals standing in his way and seeks to impose his supposedly superior morality on us lesser beings through the use of force. In other words, he is a fairly typical example of a modern leftist.
They don't believe in persuasion in the customary sense that Citizens in a Free society debate issues and come to decisions because they have accumulated decades of bitter experience that when they openly discuss their goals the People reject them. So they are done talking. Convinced of their own moral superiority, intelligence, education and wisdom they are ready to impose their vision at gunpoint, by terrorism, and through blatent lies to attain power, etc. Because for them the ends justify the means.
Duh! Best according to it is GoodFact or BadFact. Remember, debate on the issue is now closed so any fact that doesn't support the Official State Truth is sedition against the State and blasphemy against Mother Gaia's wishes as She has revealed them to Al Gore. Any DoublePlus Ungood traitors trying to undermine the State must be hunted down, marked on a list to be shunned and defunded and if that doesn't solve the problem we will put em in reeducation camps after we decide it is Hatespeech.
Slashdot ate part of my post because I used a less than sign..... Here it is again fixed. Should have used preview.
> Actually Mac laptops are now quite competitive for the same feature set with other offerings.
Except the most desirable feature is now PRICE. Any new laptop is powerful enough to do what 90% of prospective users need. Go to store.apple.com, read em and weep. Starting at $1099 is starting about three hundred dollars out of the ballpark.
And I'd even dispute the competitive part. Go price out a Thinkpad R60 with roughly the same specs as the Mac and notice the $1000 pricetag. And the Thinkpad comes with an an internal modem, which is still useful if you travel out in flyover country. And while you are there notice how much customizing you can do on that ONE model of laptop from ONE vendor. Compare and contrast to the six choices you get if you opt to join the Apple Cult.
Notice I compared to a Thinkpad, a brand known for quality hardware as is Apple. Comparing to Dell wouldn't have been very fair on the one hand, but on the other it is. Millions of people opt for the pieces of crap after all.
> there is a pretty brisk discounted trade of owners selling off their older models to discount new purchases.
Who cares, I certainly don't want a second hand laptop that I don't know the history on. You damned near can't repair one so unless you KNOW it has been treated gently you can't go used unless the price is REAL CHEEP and even then it is a gamble. And if you are talking second hand PCs are going for next to nothing because of pressure from falling prices on new gear.
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> It's issues like this that will keep non-geeks the hell away from Linux.
No it won't. Non-geeks won't be trying to shoehorn a version of MySql in that wasn't packaged for their OS. And only a poser would try to do it and then complain when they got in over their head. A real geek would know to try something that risky in a way that would be safe, like on a backup system or in a VM.
> First, I got stuck in RPM hell.
You can only get stuck in rpm dependency hell if you are manually installing things at the command line. This isn't something non-geeks will be doing much of unless they are trying to learn how to BE a geek. Learning experiences can sometimes be painful, we all went through em.
> Try formatting your disk, take a stock XP disk, load it up and see what you can do with it.
Gotta call ya on this one. I don't 'do' Windows but I have taken advantage of some of their free test releases. Can't criticize what you haven't seen and all that jazz. The freebie XP-64 I tried on my machine saw everything except the 3D part of my video card. The test release of Vista even sees that. But after seeing Aero Glass I have to say "Where's the beef?" It just isn't all that impressive, especially when compared to the 3D eyecandy in FC6. FC6 is available now and Vista is coming "Real soon now". (The release of the business edition now was because they know no business will actually deploy yet, rather it is to allow them to start working with a 'really final beta' in preparation for rollouts next year.
Now if you are talking laptops you are 100% correct about the driver hell problem and you have a better chance for a positive experience with Linux as far as what will work right after the initial install.
> Linux has a problem with it UI for Desktop usage.
No it doesn't. Random people off the street can and DO use Linux desktops, specifically GNOME on a clone of RHEL3. I'm running it in a public library setting and people just use it, kids to senior citizens. I did make a few compromises like Crossover Office installed to run the Office viewers and most importantly IE for sites that won't render in anything else. A decision that saved our butts come Katrina when FEMA's site was IE only.
And since it is a sane multiuser OS we can give them home directories, email accounts and even allow them to install into their home directory. No public access Windows allow such freedom. And yes we have people taking advantage of this. Too many people confuse 'easy to use' with 'what I already know how to use.' But when you turn people loose for a bit they learn new things.
And if you pick your hardware carefully, like an OEM would, installation is also a no brainer. Literally just plop in the DVD and answer some simple questions like what time zone you are in and which optional package groups you want.
> Give good names to the features. Give programs names that anyone know what they are.
I don't know which distro you were looking at and how many years ago, but RH has been doing that for a few years.
> But for desktop use they are a big pain. Things like install the application and the Icon to the application is in the GUI menu,
> with the correct icon.
If the icon doesn't appear correctly it is a bug to report to whoever is maintaining the package. If you are the sort of buttmuncher who insists on installing via tarball AND bitching because that doesn't work anymore in a GUI package managed world you should STFU.
> Desktop users shouldn't need to hunt down dependencies to get the application to work nor can you assume your application will be
> part of the distribution list) People want to go the web site download a program and run it.
And why should we adopt lame Windows practices like forcing people to hunt down a website, download an installer and run it when we have a much better way? Take a look at a modern package manager, you can add repos to them in a very simple manner. So if a 3rd party (I assume you mean payware since free software should get into most default repos if it doesn't suck) wants to support an OS they should provide a repo and instructions for adding it to your collection. Then installing their program AND ANY DEPENDENCIES (dependencies will even be solved across repos) becomes checking a box in a GUI and keeping it current is pretty much automatic.
> Plugging it in doesn't mean it will do anything...
If it is supported it will do something. If it is partially supported you might have to futz with it. If it isn't well then it isn't. Same as owning a Mac, everything doesn't work. Everything works on Windows because ALL HARDWARE (excepting a couple of Mac only bits and bobs) is sold for Windows, of course it kinda/sorta works there.
> OS X and Windows when you plug in a camera or other hardware will load a default application which you can change who the default it.
You say that like it is a good thing. Most of the time it suxors because they are using it to try to keep you captive to their bundled app and will even geep stealing the association back. We don't play those games.
> Linux has stalled, in the desktop...
No it hasn't. Look at the progress in Fedora/RHEL, SuSE and Ubuntu in versions spanning the last couple of years and you will see major progress in all of them. Linux long since passed the point where mere mortals can use a Linux desktop in an environment where there is a professional admin, and has reached the point where an OEM preload would be viable for many users, only it isn't available.
We will probably never reach a state where Linux desktops run Windows games so if that is you benchmark just stay on Windows and play, the rest of us have work to do and no time for futzing with Norton Anti-virus.
> User: "How do I get Quake 3 to run in Linux?" .....
> Zealot: "Oh that's easy!
Hey AC troll, you cut/paste that same drivel every week or two. Repetition doesn't make it any more true. Q3 came with the Loki installer and it 'just worked.' assuming you already had a working GL installation. But then I doubt the Windows Q3 installer would sort out your GL driver problems either. As for obscure LD_* fixups, nope. The only fixup I have ever needed was having to run the installer under "setarch 1386" to get it to install a 64-bit install. Because when Q3 was released bi-arch 64bit installs hadn't been conceived yet.
You are adding about as much to the conversation as the netcraft troll in every BSD thread, i.e. nothing. It isn't even a joke anymore, just lame.
> when right here and now we have animal friends who so obviously need legal right
STFU hippie. You pollute the thoughts of sentient beings with your presence by forcing us to even take the time to laugh at you. Your 'animal friends' have no rights, deal with it. The concept of a 'Right' does not exist in a vaccum, it can only exist as half of a pair. For every Right there must be an equal and opposite Responsibilty. Since an animal is incapable of exercising any such Responsibity it cannot possess any Rights.
For example the commonly accepted Right we all claim to "Life, Liberty and the Persuit of Happiness" can only be valid among a group who not only claim that right for themselves but accept the responsibility to honor everyone else's right to do likewise. But you can't extend that "Right" to a lion because he won't hold up his end of the bargain, he will chomp yer ass. This doesn't make the lion evil, it makes him a lion.
Not saying it is OK to be cruel to animals for the hell of it. If for no other reason that people who do that sort of thing are almost always wicked and evil in other ways.
Now moving back ontopic, depending on what sort of AI we end up creating, it might well be capable of making a good argument for being able to discharge the duties of Citizenship and therefore deserving the Rights up to now reserved for Free Men[1]. Wouldn't be the first time the franchise has been expanded.
[1] I hate the PC usages. English is an old laguage, deal with it's bugs.
> ...it might be nice for our national policymakers to make decisions based on some kind of logical reasoning for a change.
Why does everyone just assume an AI will be superior to us in reasoning ability? We have zero idea how an AI will be implemented. If the first attempts are basically emulating a human brain it might be slow and dumb. Now imagine a verion 1.0 AI from Microsoft.... running on Windows with Dell hardware. Still sure you want it elected supreme overlord?
> Or any woman, for that matter!
Well we only have one datapoint, but g-ddamn, what a datapoint. Captain Janeway should have been spaced by her own crew in the pilot for her incompetence and political correctness run amok. And then she apparently was drinking from lead pipes or something because she got even more stupid during the series, although I admit I stopped watching by the middle of season two, I had seen enough. So based on her example I'd have to say women can't command a starship.
Ok, flame away!
> If things broke, I could recompile from source. But now?
.spec, tar.gz and some .diff files about as easy as "./configure ; make install".
Now you can still recompile from source. Admittedly the documentation isn't as good as it should be, but rpmbuild isn't rocket science and if you cut your teeth on SLS/MCC you should be able to figure out a
> I can't wait to buy all those non-Vista compatible machines for cheap!!
Good thought. Guess I should probably carry by butt to Dallas next year and hit 1st Saturday for some bargains. I remember when corporate america was tossing all of their perfectly good CRTs because they had to buy crappy 1st generation LCD panels to keep up appearances. Lots of good deals for about a year.
> Except that Red Hat and Suse are not entirely open source.
Suse has had a spotty history, having several closed components for most of its history, becoming mostly Free after being bought by Novell and now with the Novell-Microsoft deal who the hell knows where they are going next.
RedHat on the other hand has always had a Free core distribution. In the past they have experimented with selling closed addons (Motif, Applixware, etc) and even had a couple of closed things in their boxed distros (a browser called Red Baron and a commercial X server) but long since dropped all that nonsense. No version of RHEL has any dependencies on closed source components. Paid media sets do include an "Extras" CD with the usual suspects (JDK, Flash, Acroread, etc) and there are a fair number of vendor supplied closed device drivers for RHEL, but nothing closed is required to install unless you have one of the pieces of hardware that require a driver, such as a SCSI controller.
There isn't anything with a RedHat copyright that isn't released under a license that passes the DFSG. They don't officially make binary packages for RHEL available but every SRPM is up on the mirrors and full installable binary rebuilds are available from a variety of 3rd parties. What more are they expected to do to avoid the "Microsoft of Linux" moniker?
Bitch about their engineering decisions, the quality of their support, etc vs other vendors. Reasonable people can disagree on any of those subjects, but the non-free rumors need to be put to pasture.
> I don't know that you would make any money, but at least you'd be offering something that isn't currently offered.
I doubt it. And more important than my opinion, MySQL doubts it and has the sales figures to show it. Companies don't normally kill off profitable products and services, not even evil/stupid corporations.
Haven't seen an IP over RF provider who didn't start ruthlessly choking off bandwidth to anyone who actually consumes more than a few sips of their 'high speed Internet' products. It is OK if you do a few short bursts now and again, that is the usage model they built their network around. A Blouetooth connection to a laptop implies more than that so once the network operator noticed they had users USING their network they acted quickly to fix the problem.
The crux of the problem is that no RF system that has been deployed has enough bandwidth to supply 'broadbad' like connectivity to very many people at the same time. So the early adopters get it good, tell their friends and watch it all turn to crap. Unless we see microcells on every lamppost we aren't likely to ever solve the problem either. And no amount of marketing promises can change it, you can't repeal the laws of physics.
Cable modems had exactly the same problem of a shared resource quickly becoming overused. The cable industry could solve it by breaking up their originally simplistic network into lots of small segments because they could string FIBER to backhaul all of the neighborhood networks. Unless the wireless companies want to do likewise they are never going to be a player in the broadband game as anything other than a niche product priced high (billed by the bit) enough to limit usage to the available spectrum.
> This example should resonate with the Slashdot demographic: would you prefer an oscilloscope
> that has 4 buttons and knobs or 40?
If cost were not an object my ideal scope would do as much as possible for me yet still allow me to override it's decisions. For example, connect the #1 probe and a menu would appear, This signal resembles NTSC Video, would you like to start by viewing fields or lines? Make the choice and have it autosize the scale and automatically sync up to horizontal or vertical sync with clear captions showing the scales selected. Connect the second probe and the diaplay automatically rescales to allow the second signal to be perfectly sized below, synced to the first probe. A menu along the bottom would offer the most common options like superimposing the two, showing the difference, etc.
But all that automation is useless if it LOCKS me into those options. I want all of the manual controls to remain available, even if buried a bit in onscreen menus.
> Would you prefer cat or vim as your text editor.
Vim of course. Although Emacs is good too, lets not open an editor war.
> Would you prefer a mouse with 1 or 3 buttons?
Three of course, whadda ya think I am, some sort fruit? (Ok, cheap Apple bash, but dangit, why can't His Steveness offer a three button lappie?)
> I wonder why it's news when it's on a Mac :)
/. editors became Apple fanbois back when the TiBook was released. They mouth the Open Source slogans once in awhile because that is what a lot of the readers expect but Taco & Co. long since went to the dark side.
Because most of the
> that PS3 Linux would be of interest to anywhere near 50% of PS3 owners
And why not? What do most people use a PC for?
1. Internet: Web, IM, etc. PS3 running Linux can do that. Especially once the installed base gets big enough to ensure things like a current Flash and other needed bits are ported in a timely manner.
2. Games. Everyone always rips linux gaming with wiseass cracks like, yea, assuming you think Tux Racer is state of the art, etc. Duh, reboot and it is a Playstation 3 again, bet that can satisfy most people's gamer cravings. Remember, this is oficially supported Linux, no modchips and no worries about being locked out of playing games.
3. Basic productivity. OO.o can do that. Running a hog like OO.o in 256M will be a bit of bother but not insurmountable if you are only doing a bit of that stuff and on small home size documents.
4. Multimedia. The thing already supports direct YUV video modes in all of the HD, ED and SD resolutions under Linux. A Media player setup is a no brainer even if you have to download the packages from Europe. MythTV's frontend will love running on one.
Given that can't you see smart parents buying the kids a PS3 instead of an Xbox360 and a PC? Or that many owners will take advantage of the ability to have a spare PC when they aren't gaming?
> or that Sony will be able to sell tens of millions of PS3s in the next couple of years
Do you think it will still be $599 by next xmas? And that the supply issues with blue lasers will still limit supply of consoles? Ok.
I just hope Sony understands just what a winning scenario this could be for everyone.
:)
Imagine. Play this right, let the bugs settle out for a few months and then start passing out ready to go DVDs on gaming mag covers. Sell a ready to rock kit with a preloaded memory key, DVD, keyboard and mouse. Instantly a PS3 is a gaming rig, BlueRay player AND a fully functional PC, ready for web browsing, OO.o, etc. Given just a small push and penetration could easilly hit 50% of an installed base likely to number in the tens of millions within two to three years.
For Sony the upside is realizing the sales pitch that a PS3 is more than a console, being able to make the pitch that a PS3 purchase for the kids is ALSO a PC purchase. Plus if it kills a few PC sales why should Sony care? Their desktop PC division is all but dead (laptops are of course another story, they make some cool lappies) and every Windows PC sale is money in their enemy's hand.
For us penguinheads we have to grit our teeth a bit at the idea of Sony succeeding but they ARE doing it the right way in this case so we have to be ready to give em props. Just imagine millions of DESKTOP LINUX installs. Millions! If PS3 ends up selling well and that penetration percentage goes much over 50% Linux could be the #2 desktop OS, pushing Apple to #3. Talk about irony, if Apple abandoned PPC for Intel and a PPC platform ended up defeating them. Balmer wouldn't be the only Steve hurling furniture.
> In all fairness, you or I could probably afford to *drastically* change the standard of living for at
:)
> least one person in a developing nation.
And be pissing away your income to salve your feelings of unworthiness.
> My wife and I give to a pretty substantial percentage of our income to charity, but the truth is, that
> whether we want to acknowledge it or not, we mostly choose to have stuff rather than to help people.
Do you think you are stealing your income? Are you not providing value for what you receive? Do the people who pay you think your efforts on their behalf bring them more income than what they pay you? If they thought they could get the same results by hiring someone else at a lower rate would they? Should they?
No. Odds are you are being compensated fairly so what you have is yours to do with as you see fit. Yes, it is a good thing to help others in your community, even help strangers in a faroff land a bit but it is YOUR decision how best to utilize your assets and you shouldn't let others get you on a guilt trip if you buy a plasma TV.
In the end there is only one way to help the poor, especially those in blighted third world nations. We don't need a better distribution of wealth, that only makes everyone poor. We need to enable them to create MORE wealth. Doing that requires a few things, none of which require much in the way of cash:
1. Education regarding how wealth is created and how to save and invest. Even the poorest of the poor can do it, if only on a small scale. It adds up quickly.
2. Education regarding How a Free market, Free political system and the Rule of Law work, how they interrelate and how to get all three established. Some outside cash many be required for this stage to buy guns to kill the local despot with.
3. Learning how to manage the transition from dirt poor to up and coming economy and buying some plasma TVs.
4. Ensuring that the Socialists who will crawl out of the woodwork wanting to redistribute the newly created wealth are promptly shot/deported.
> You cannot pass anything where 50% of the voters will vote themselves out of being able to vote,
> or vote themselves a tax increase.
You aren't cynical enough. Tell me you can't see a scenario where this measure couldn't muster a majority of the poor's votes.
Proposed Amendment:
The State will ensure every Citizen a minimum standard of living. Any Citizen who can't obtain sufficient income in the free market may opt to receive a stipend from the State. Said stipend will be equal to the poverty line as currently defined in Federal Law. Affordable housing will be assured, although relocation may be required. In exchange for this support the Citizen will lose the right to vote in any election where they opted to receive this distribution in any of the preceeding twelve months.
Of course it is a totally obvious trap, but as a general rule the poor aren't bright enough to look far enough into the future to see it and the productive classes who can see it are already tired enough of the welfare state to see it as a way to just write em off to a giant housing project (read as concentration camp within a decade) in Wyoming and eliminate the endless carping, ever increasing taxes and increasingly senseless crime.
But this is a fantasy since Democrats depend on the support of those who currently 'vote for a living' that they would upend heaven and earth in their efforts to defeat such a measure, even though it could (if implemented properly) almost totally eliminate poverty in one stroke. It would eliminate so much of the current government welfare machinery, itself a large fertile field of Democratic votes.
> Actually the FairTax is the only tax reform suggested in America to completely remove the tax burden from the poor.
Which is my primary objection to the plan. The poor MUST be made to pay their 'fair share' of taxes, even though in the bigger scheme of things their contribution will be fairly minor. Otherwise we have the situation we have now, or even more specifically the situation we have here in Louisiana with the Homestead Exemption. Because the 'poor' are totally excempt from property taxes the local politicians quickly figured out they could count on the poor to vote for almost any increase in that tax if the threat was an increase in another tax (say sales tax) if the vote failed.
No, we either must ensure everyone pays enough taxes to hate the idea of raising them or we must adopt a two class political system where only taxpayers vote. Since I really like the current (legally at least) classless system we have in the US I'd prefer to spread the tax burden.
> Carving out special exceptions here and there, and taxing this person more than that one, and generally trying to do social engineering
> with the tax code as a bludgeon, is a terribly flawed idea.
You are missing the point. There are dozens of better ways to raise money to run the basic machinery of the State that don't require the overhead of running the IRS. But the whole POINT isn't about money per se, it is about power and control and the Income Tax is the perfect instrument for that purpose for the exact reasons you complain about. It so easily allows social engineering through special exceptions and bludgeoning those out of political favor into adopting the policies desired by the ruling class.
> That's why you can run software BINARIES designed for 3.1 on XP (try that with Linux, which absolutely SUCKS
> SUCKS SUCKS at binary compatability, which I've been bitten with more than once).
I dunno about that. I use some really old binaries on our Linux boxes around here. WP8 finally stopped working on RHEL4, before that all you needed was a libc and ld.so package from the same era (RH4.2) and you were golden. But something else has changed between RHEL3 and RHEL4 that stopped it from working. Could probably solve it but by now there aren't many documents left we can't open with something else so I didn't dig into the guts looking for what else I'd need to do.
The old Loki games still run, although some require a bit of twiddling. For example Heroes of Might and Magic III runs but I get distorted sound. For some reason if I have xmms playing when I start it (along eith export SDL_AUDIODRIVER=esd) everything mixes correctly. But that is probably more a sound driver/alsa problem that should be looked into someday. VMware 2.0 is still usable even though the vendor abandoned it. Because the kernel mods are open someone else made patches to keep them running and the main program binary is still perfectly ok.
If you are really determined you can still get pre ELF binaries running, but who needs that these days? Not many closed apps from that era and anything with source is easier to simply recompile.
> The issue comes when the kids wants to load on some Windows software that all their friends are using, then
> suddenly the operating system matters dramatically. "I put in the CD that came with my iPod, but the computer
> isn't working." "I got this cool game for my birthday, but it's not working."
Yea numbnuts, you have to make sure the software is compatible with your computer. Guess what, you can't stick a Gamecube disc into a PS3 either, so what? You can't play Doom3 on that old 1999 vintage Win98 box either. We all know that if you want everything to 'just work' you can buy a top of the line Dell every 12-18 months and every new console that ships. And if you are rich and stupid I guess that is a viable option.
Meanwhile the rest of us learn to read the box or in the case of us Penguin nuts we check online for supported options before buying anything. And yes you can even make the stupid iPod work if we get one as a gift or something, but if you have a clue you don't buy one in the first place, instead buying something that works better and costs less. Something that lets you just drag and drop files on it as a drive and they play without any special secret DRM magic.
> The greatest threat to our rights is hypersensitive assholes like yourself who believe that their rights
> trumps everyone elses - and that threats are the only adequate means of getting a point across.
Close, but it is time we became blunt with tyrants like the original poster. The original poster is a wannabe tyrant who believes he is superior to the normal mortals standing in his way and seeks to impose his supposedly superior morality on us lesser beings through the use of force. In other words, he is a fairly typical example of a modern leftist.
They don't believe in persuasion in the customary sense that Citizens in a Free society debate issues and come to decisions because they have accumulated decades of bitter experience that when they openly discuss their goals the People reject them. So they are done talking. Convinced of their own moral superiority, intelligence, education and wisdom they are ready to impose their vision at gunpoint, by terrorism, and through blatent lies to attain power, etc. Because for them the ends justify the means.
> Best according to what criteria?
Duh! Best according to it is GoodFact or BadFact. Remember, debate on the issue is now closed so any fact that doesn't support the Official State Truth is sedition against the State and blasphemy against Mother Gaia's wishes as She has revealed them to Al Gore. Any DoublePlus Ungood traitors trying to undermine the State must be hunted down, marked on a list to be shunned and defunded and if that doesn't solve the problem we will put em in reeducation camps after we decide it is Hatespeech.
Slashdot ate part of my post because I used a less than sign..... Here it is again fixed. Should have used preview.
> Actually Mac laptops are now quite competitive for the same feature set with other offerings.
Except the most desirable feature is now PRICE. Any new laptop is powerful enough to do what 90% of prospective users need. Go to store.apple.com, read em and weep. Starting at $1099 is starting about three hundred dollars out of the ballpark.
And I'd even dispute the competitive part. Go price out a Thinkpad R60 with roughly the same specs as the Mac and notice the $1000 pricetag. And the Thinkpad comes with an an internal modem, which is still useful if you travel out in flyover country. And while you are there notice how much customizing you can do on that ONE model of laptop from ONE vendor. Compare and contrast to the six choices you get if you opt to join the Apple Cult.
Notice I compared to a Thinkpad, a brand known for quality hardware as is Apple. Comparing to Dell wouldn't have been very fair on the one hand, but on the other it is. Millions of people opt for the pieces of crap after all.
> there is a pretty brisk discounted trade of owners selling off their older models to discount new purchases.
Who cares, I certainly don't want a second hand laptop that I don't know the history on. You damned near can't repair one so unless you KNOW it has been treated gently you can't go used unless the price is REAL CHEEP and even then it is a gamble. And if you are talking second hand PCs are going for next to nothing because of pressure from falling prices on new gear.