I don't get why people, on slashdot of all places, seem so mortified when an OS default setting gets changed - as though they're not only using the defaults, but don't know how to change them other than by switching distro...
In the choice of desktops, the idea of a default is not to be taken that lightly. It is in a much higher league than just another app, like a default editor or eMail client. It is so much part of the OS.
I feel that the default desktop of a distro is the one that gets the lion's share of the TLC, and the alternative desktop is tossed in in case anyone really wants that combination. I may be wrong. I like KDE and would therefore only consider using OpenSUSE, Chakra, Mepis or Mageia. Sorry.
it looks like I may be going back to Mandriva, or hunting for another good distro that supports KDE.
[K]Ubuntu was never that good at KDE. While many distros offer KDE as an alternative to Gnome, if KDE is not the default I feel that it is likely to get less love and attention.
The best distro for KDE is OpenSUSE, but it is a heavyweight and not really for beginners. Mepis is a KDE distro, gets praise, and is said to be simple to install - I have never tried it myself. Chakra is a newish KDE distro that is also getting high praise.
However, if KDE goes the way of Gnome, people will start turning to Xfce as a more traditional and lightweight alternative
You can argue that buying a Honda Civic gives you the right to reproduce them at will, but dont be surprised when society and its judical system disagrees with you.
No, he is arguing that he can drive it on what what road he likes. And this bit of society (me) agrees with him.
Unfortunately, simply putting more capacity on individual trains (longer double deckers) won't create any more competition... and the level of current competition is approximately zero.
The competition is not zero. The competition is cars and coaches.
Yes, it is ironic that the GP invoked the GWR. Brunel built to a bigger scale than any other railway engineer, but much of his work was undone by pygmies who followed him. Every railway engineer today (I have been one) wishes that Brunels broad gauge track had become the standard instead of George Stevenson's mean 4' 8.5". Today perhaps a 2m gauge would be great.
But you may be confusing some readers between track gauge and loading gauge.
The re-gauging of the GWR in the 1890's was a reduction in track gauge - not too hard as one of the rails was simply moved inwards on the same sleepers. Much of the track was dual-gauge already.
Increasing the loading gauge (the train superstructure envelope - for the benefit of some readers) is a much harder project. As the GP said, tunnels will need re-boring, bridges raised, platforms moved. Because Britain pioneered railways it was other countries which benefited from the pioneering mistakes such as the stingy loading gauge.
However I believe the Great Central Railway (London to Manchester etc), the last main line built before the Channel Tunnel Link, was built to Continental European loading gauge; but Beeching closed it - brilliant.
Famous example of Bill Gates being short with people:-
www.blinkenlights.com/classiccmp/gateswhine.html
OK, being short was not really his style. Not sure he has a style at all, most unusual for a successful business man which points to his success being by luck rather than judgement. He is more the sneaky type. His public performances that I have seen are pathetic, embarassing:-
www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5y_Mu1vVKo
.... (gets interesting after about 45 seconds) it's not about the equipment failure, but his poor handling of the situation.
"Give him kudos if anything - he's not only putting his money where his mouth is"
Not much in proportion to his wealth, and what else does an old man do with more money than he could physically spend on himself? He is trying to buy himself that kudos before he passes away.
Yes, but what else does a guy do with more money than is physically possible to spend on himself? A billion dollars is only 2% of his wealth and he remains the second richest guy in the world [www.forbes.com/wealth/billionaires] - I would be impressed only if he gave away money such as to leave himself no better off than the average US citizen. Did you ever hear the Bible story of the widow's mite?
And how did he get that money he is being so generous with? By shady and sometimes downright illegal business practices. First thing he should do if he has a guilty conscience would be to re-imburse the customers and companies at some of what his company has ripped off them over the years. He cannot give back Microsoft money, but he could at least return some of his portion; then let them decide if they want to give any to charity, and if so to a charity of their own choice, not Gates' choice.
He is following the likes of Carnegie, Rockefeller and Nobel - when they retired from their unsavoury business lives they also panicked about how history would remember them, so they threw some of their excess money around too.
But in your system, having trash taken away would, in effect, be an option, and one which would need paying for. Guess what would happen if trash collection was not a government service paid for by compulsory tax? Many people would simply load it in their car at night and drive somewhere else to dump it. Others would even have no compunction about leaving it in their back yard.
You can see this in poorer areas now with items that (in the UK) do cost money to take away, such as old cookers and fridges. I know a guy with that sort of junk filling his front and back gardens (in Southmead, Bristol, if anyone else here knows that shitehole). You also see such items by the side of the road or outside disused factories, but at least they are not unhygenic, just an eyesore. Extend collection charging to other waste and there would be rotting unhygenic stuff too.
Yeah but when you google "problem XYZ ubuntu" the solutions are almost always going to be Unity, not Gnome2/3/KDE. Gnome3 losing official support from Ubuntu was the kiss of death for me.
Linux != Ubuntu as you seem to think. In fact Linux users are leaving Ubuntu behind and going to other distributions instead. Many are going to Mint, I have gone to Open Suse.
Getting support for problems on Ubuntu using KDE... I'm too old to be fiddling with crap like that these days, sorry.
By running KDE on Ubuntu, it is you who is "fiddling with crap". Don't do it. As I said, Linux != Ubuntu. For KDE, Open Suse or Mageia are much better distros.
But you are overlooking the fact that, for Joe Sixpack and Polly Filla, the demise of their Windows box with malware overload (they do not realise that, but it just seems slow and flaky to them) is a wonderful excuse to go out and buy new shiny. The new shiny PC does of course run faster (at first) so they feel fully justified.
You don't seriously think that Joe and Polly would ever want to try to re-install anything themselves, do you?
It is similar to the situation with cars; I've known guys delighted when their 2 yo car develops a "funny noise" (probably the fan belt needs changing) as it gives them an excuse (to their wife and to their own conscience) to trade in for new shiny.
I often take things to my local council rubbish dump ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H recyling centre and while I am there I notice rows of discarded PCs out in the rain and mud that are much newer and probably more powerful than my own - all infected Windows boxen no doubt.
And the politicians tell us to "Re-use, re-cycle"!
"Gates, realizing he is old, is furiously working on some of his karma debt before he dies"
Indeed, well expressed.
I hope you don't mind me quoting that in future when people tell me Gates is a great guy for giving money to charity, when he has so much that it would physically impossible to spend it all on himself in his lifetime. He is just doing what Carnegie, Nobel and other similar rich bar stewards did.
"The larger point is that the system as shipped from the factory exceeded the user's needs. It is nearly a certainty that the system is viewed as an appliance to be used and not something to be tinkered with."
Actually, the larger point of this/. discussion is meant to be whether Linux will be locked out of PC's, not whether typical PC's exceeed typical user's needs. Scroll up to the title and see.
Again, as I said to a similar poster above, the point is not about the power of the PC, it is that typical buyers would not take the slightest account of whether Secure Boot could be disabled or not.
The problem, as you ask and do not seem to have spotted yet, is that it will not be possible to kick Windows off a PC and install Linux or BSD instead - if Secure Boot cannot not be switched off.
That might not be a problem for her, or you, but it will be for me because I am outnumbered by such typical buyers to the extent that the market might not bother to cater for me, except perhaps if I pay a premium.
Reminds me of a cartoon I once saw; I wish I had scanned it
The scene is an impoverished African village in the jungle with starving natives lying around.
A transport plane has just passed overhead and descending from it with a cluster of parachutes is a large platform. On the platform is a long table with a dozen white guys in suits sat around it, paperwork and glasses of water in front of them.
One of the dying Africans is pointing up to it and saying, in the caption :
Thier share price has increased about 1000% in the last 10 years and nearly 25% in the last year. That is similar to Apple, but without much advertising or notice from the media.
This year they are on course to have $1 billion in revenue, with $200 million profit. Doesn't everyone know that Linus Torvalds became a millionaire because he had shares in Red Hat?
Anthony Mouse (elsewhere in this topic) has described a scenario where Red Hat will be taking money to the bank because of recession. In fact they already are.
I too am fed up with Linux being promoted as a cheap (and implicitly nasty) option. We have seen some ultra-bottom end PC's sold with Linux badly installed which only worstened the reputation, and Lindows was another example.
I am no Linux evangalist but sometimes the subject crops up (eg with the guys at work) and I actually try to avoid mentioning that it costs nothing, because the immediate reaction of most people is that they suddenly change their attititude from interested to dismissive - "You only get what you pay for!" is the typical remark. In fact I have never found that particular meme to be true in any area.
The angle I came at to Linux was recognising it was a Unix system, something I had always held in some awe compared with the DOS I was obliged to grow up with. I used to think "If only my PC was powerful enough to run Unix instead of this Windows-on-DOS crap"; well, now it is.
Secure boot is outside the Windows scenario already. As I understand it, it is a BIOS matter. During booting, the BIOS will interrogate whatever is in the HDD Master Boot Record (or its new equivalent) for a password and will only hand over control to whatever is there if the correct password is given. That response could be from Windows 8, or, equally, some future Linux, BSD, Solaris or whatever. So it is not just a Windows matter.
So by requiring Secure Boot for Windows 8 certification, MS are already "dictat[ing] what OEMs do or don't with their PCs outside a Windows scenario" as you put it, because it does affect other OS's if MS do not also require that the end user also has the power to disable it to allow another OS to be installed or booted . But in the Windows 8 certification there is no such requirement - that is the concern.
As for voting with your vallet [sic], forget it; with respect, your wallet is puny, even if added to mine. We will be drowned under a wave of Coolaid being swallowed by ordinary Windows users who will believe this is for their own good, and that we should think so too. They would not understand this issue even if you spent a thousand years explaining it to them.
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I don't get why people, on slashdot of all places, seem so mortified when an OS default setting gets changed - as though they're not only using the defaults, but don't know how to change them other than by switching distro...
In the choice of desktops, the idea of a default is not to be taken that lightly. It is in a much higher league than just another app, like a default editor or eMail client. It is so much part of the OS.
I feel that the default desktop of a distro is the one that gets the lion's share of the TLC, and the alternative desktop is tossed in in case anyone really wants that combination. I may be wrong. I like KDE and would therefore only consider using OpenSUSE, Chakra, Mepis or Mageia. Sorry.
it looks like I may be going back to Mandriva, or hunting for another good distro that supports KDE.
[K]Ubuntu was never that good at KDE. While many distros offer KDE as an alternative to Gnome, if KDE is not the default I feel that it is likely to get less love and attention.
The best distro for KDE is OpenSUSE, but it is a heavyweight and not really for beginners. Mepis is a KDE distro, gets praise, and is said to be simple to install - I have never tried it myself. Chakra is a newish KDE distro that is also getting high praise.
However, if KDE goes the way of Gnome, people will start turning to Xfce as a more traditional and lightweight alternative
You can argue that buying a Honda Civic gives you the right to reproduce them at will, but dont be surprised when society and its judical system disagrees with you.
No, he is arguing that he can drive it on what what road he likes. And this bit of society (me) agrees with him.
ToddinSF wrote :- I wonder if you have the same problem with the existence of the EU
I certainly do.
"many angry that game content that had shipped on the physical disc was locked away"
Isn't Windows like that too? The various versions are all there, but locked out except for the one you bought.
Unfortunately, simply putting more capacity on individual trains (longer double deckers) won't create any more competition ... and the level of current competition is approximately zero.
The competition is not zero. The competition is cars and coaches.
Yes, it is ironic that the GP invoked the GWR. Brunel built to a bigger scale than any other railway engineer, but much of his work was undone by pygmies who followed him. Every railway engineer today (I have been one) wishes that Brunels broad gauge track had become the standard instead of George Stevenson's mean 4' 8.5". Today perhaps a 2m gauge would be great.
But you may be confusing some readers between track gauge and loading gauge.
The re-gauging of the GWR in the 1890's was a reduction in track gauge - not too hard as one of the rails was simply moved inwards on the same sleepers. Much of the track was dual-gauge already.
Increasing the loading gauge (the train superstructure envelope - for the benefit of some readers) is a much harder project. As the GP said, tunnels will need re-boring, bridges raised, platforms moved. Because Britain pioneered railways it was other countries which benefited from the pioneering mistakes such as the stingy loading gauge.
However I believe the Great Central Railway (London to Manchester etc), the last main line built before the Channel Tunnel Link, was built to Continental European loading gauge; but Beeching closed it - brilliant.
I was brought up in South London. I always thought The North means north of the Thames.
North Londoners are supposed to think that The North starts at Watford.
Famous example of Bill Gates being short with people :-
:-
.... (gets interesting after about 45 seconds) it's not about the equipment failure, but his poor handling of the situation.
www.blinkenlights.com/classiccmp/gateswhine.html
OK, being short was not really his style. Not sure he has a style at all, most unusual for a successful business man which points to his success being by luck rather than judgement. He is more the sneaky type. His public performances that I have seen are pathetic, embarassing
www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5y_Mu1vVKo
"Give him kudos if anything - he's not only putting his money where his mouth is"
Not much in proportion to his wealth, and what else does an old man do with more money than he could physically spend on himself? He is trying to buy himself that kudos before he passes away.
Yes, but what else does a guy do with more money than is physically possible to spend on himself? A billion dollars is only 2% of his wealth and he remains the second richest guy in the world [www.forbes.com/wealth/billionaires] - I would be impressed only if he gave away money such as to leave himself no better off than the average US citizen. Did you ever hear the Bible story of the widow's mite?
And how did he get that money he is being so generous with? By shady and sometimes downright illegal business practices. First thing he should do if he has a guilty conscience would be to re-imburse the customers and companies at some of what his company has ripped off them over the years. He cannot give back Microsoft money, but he could at least return some of his portion; then let them decide if they want to give any to charity, and if so to a charity of their own choice, not Gates' choice.
He is following the likes of Carnegie, Rockefeller and Nobel - when they retired from their unsavoury business lives they also panicked about how history would remember them, so they threw some of their excess money around too.
But in your system, having trash taken away would, in effect, be an option, and one which would need paying for. Guess what would happen if trash collection was not a government service paid for by compulsory tax? Many people would simply load it in their car at night and drive somewhere else to dump it. Others would even have no compunction about leaving it in their back yard.
You can see this in poorer areas now with items that (in the UK) do cost money to take away, such as old cookers and fridges. I know a guy with that sort of junk filling his front and back gardens (in Southmead, Bristol, if anyone else here knows that shitehole). You also see such items by the side of the road or outside disused factories, but at least they are not unhygenic, just an eyesore. Extend collection charging to other waste and there would be rotting unhygenic stuff too.
Back to medieval times in fact.
Hadlock wrote :-
Yeah but when you google "problem XYZ ubuntu" the solutions are almost always going to be Unity, not Gnome2/3/KDE. Gnome3 losing official support from Ubuntu was the kiss of death for me.
Linux != Ubuntu as you seem to think. In fact Linux users are leaving Ubuntu behind and going to other distributions instead. Many are going to Mint, I have gone to Open Suse.
Getting support for problems on Ubuntu using KDE... I'm too old to be fiddling with crap like that these days, sorry.
By running KDE on Ubuntu, it is you who is "fiddling with crap". Don't do it. As I said, Linux != Ubuntu. For KDE, Open Suse or Mageia are much better distros.
jellomizer wrote :
:-
: I can call spirits from the vasty deep. : Why, so can I, or so can any man;
And if there is a problem I can call technical support and complain
Are you trying to be modded "funny"? That bit made me laugh anyway. Have you ever tried phoning for technical advice?
Here is some Shakespeare
Glendower
Hotspur
But will they come when you do call for them?
[Ref : Henry IV, Part 1]
For you and me, indeed.
But you are overlooking the fact that, for Joe Sixpack and Polly Filla, the demise of their Windows box with malware overload (they do not realise that, but it just seems slow and flaky to them) is a wonderful excuse to go out and buy new shiny. The new shiny PC does of course run faster (at first) so they feel fully justified.
You don't seriously think that Joe and Polly would ever want to try to re-install anything themselves, do you?
It is similar to the situation with cars; I've known guys delighted when their 2 yo car develops a "funny noise" (probably the fan belt needs changing) as it gives them an excuse (to their wife and to their own conscience) to trade in for new shiny.
I often take things to my local council rubbish dump ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H recyling centre and while I am there I notice rows of discarded PCs out in the rain and mud that are much newer and probably more powerful than my own - all infected Windows boxen no doubt.
And the politicians tell us to "Re-use, re-cycle"!
morganaux wrote :-
"Gates, realizing he is old, is furiously working on some of his karma debt before he dies"
Indeed, well expressed.
I hope you don't mind me quoting that in future when people tell me Gates is a great guy for giving money to charity, when he has so much that it would physically impossible to spend it all on himself in his lifetime. He is just doing what Carnegie, Nobel and other similar rich bar stewards did.
Title says it
You wrote :-
/. discussion is meant to be whether Linux will be locked out of PC's, not whether typical PC's exceeed typical user's needs. Scroll up to the title and see.
"The larger point is that the system as shipped from the factory exceeded the user's needs. It is nearly a certainty that the system is viewed as an appliance to be used and not something to be tinkered with."
Actually, the larger point of this
Again, as I said to a similar poster above, the point is not about the power of the PC, it is that typical buyers would not take the slightest account of whether Secure Boot could be disabled or not.
The problem, as you ask and do not seem to have spotted yet, is that it will not be possible to kick Windows off a PC and install Linux or BSD instead - if Secure Boot cannot not be switched off.
That might not be a problem for her, or you, but it will be for me because I am outnumbered by such typical buyers to the extent that the market might not bother to cater for me, except perhaps if I pay a premium.
We are supposed to get the point that typical buyers would not take the slightest account of whether Secure Boot could be disabled or not.
Reminds me of a cartoon I once saw; I wish I had scanned it
The scene is an impoverished African village in the jungle with starving natives lying around.
A transport plane has just passed overhead and descending from it with a cluster of parachutes is a large platform. On the platform is a long table with a dozen white guys in suits sat around it, paperwork and glasses of water in front of them.
One of the dying Africans is pointing up to it and saying, in the caption :
"Thank God, an Aid Committee!"
Ferment revolution? Much more interesting to surf for porn, play games, dally on Facebook and, for serious business, brew 419 scams.
Don't worry, there were plenty of revolutions before the internet or phones were invented, if thats what floats your boat.
Hairy Feet's argument would be plausible except for the fact that Red Hat are spectacularly successful.
http://www.selftrade.co.uk/quote-red-hat-inc---RHT
Thier share price has increased about 1000% in the last 10 years and nearly 25% in the last year. That is similar to Apple, but without much advertising or notice from the media.
This year they are on course to have $1 billion in revenue, with $200 million profit. Doesn't everyone know that Linus Torvalds became a millionaire because he had shares in Red Hat?
Anthony Mouse (elsewhere in this topic) has described a scenario where Red Hat will be taking money to the bank because of recession. In fact they already are.
I too am fed up with Linux being promoted as a cheap (and implicitly nasty) option. We have seen some ultra-bottom end PC's sold with Linux badly installed which only worstened the reputation, and Lindows was another example.
I am no Linux evangalist but sometimes the subject crops up (eg with the guys at work) and I actually try to avoid mentioning that it costs nothing, because the immediate reaction of most people is that they suddenly change their attititude from interested to dismissive - "You only get what you pay for!" is the typical remark. In fact I have never found that particular meme to be true in any area.
The angle I came at to Linux was recognising it was a Unix system, something I had always held in some awe compared with the DOS I was obliged to grow up with. I used to think "If only my PC was powerful enough to run Unix instead of this Windows-on-DOS crap"; well, now it is.
Bucky24 wrote : Unless you're saying that Microsoft would modify Windows so that no unapproved software could run.
Wow, we are getting the message through at last!!!
Secure boot is outside the Windows scenario already. As I understand it, it is a BIOS matter. During booting, the BIOS will interrogate whatever is in the HDD Master Boot Record (or its new equivalent) for a password and will only hand over control to whatever is there if the correct password is given. That response could be from Windows 8, or, equally, some future Linux, BSD, Solaris or whatever. So it is not just a Windows matter.
So by requiring Secure Boot for Windows 8 certification, MS are already "dictat[ing] what OEMs do or don't with their PCs outside a Windows scenario" as you put it, because it does affect other OS's if MS do not also require that the end user also has the power to disable it to allow another OS to be installed or booted . But in the Windows 8 certification there is no such requirement - that is the concern.
As for voting with your vallet [sic], forget it; with respect, your wallet is puny, even if added to mine. We will be drowned under a wave of Coolaid being swallowed by ordinary Windows users who will believe this is for their own good, and that we should think so too. They would not understand this issue even if you spent a thousand years explaining it to them.