As you correctly recognize, clueless users will wreck anything you let them touch.
I have yet to have a clueless user wreck a Mac (and, yes, I've done Mac support) or a UNIX box (Xenix 286, System V, SunOS 4, Solaris, Tru64, etc) just messing around as a normal user (even on OS 9, and that doesn't HAVE abnormal users). I've cleaned up some really amazing messes caused by someone who's stepped over the line into root-land.
The easiest way to put a Windows box into a state where it's an inch from blowing its foot off, by the way, is to install security software.
I've been the network admin for 150-400 software developers, 10-20 secretaries, and a couple of dozne each sales, marketing, executive, and general administrative bods, and maybe a couple hundred consultants, contractors, and customers. Oh, and a teenaged girl.
Bigger sample size, perhaps?
The biggest problems aren't the software developers, by the way, they're the secretaries and other non-technical types, followed by the consultants and contractors. The former are great at doing things that nobody would imagine you might do, like removing folders from C:\Program Files because they never use anything in there. I discovered that part of my daughter's problems had been something similar when I logged in to her Mac one day and found/Applications decimated, and when I asked her she explained that she never used/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app... and on further questioning she had been doing the same thing on Windows.
The older model I have at home, no longer available, has no "Fn" key or fake numeric keypad... which is another think I'd like to see laptop manufacturers give up on. Either way, this keyboard is about the same size as a regular laptop keyboard, yet manages to fit all the critical keys with no two-handed stupidity.
I know it isn't the norm to compliment Windows, but Windows has been solid since 2k (minus Vista).
Well, I spent 20 years as a network administrator, and while the NT-derived Windows has been pretty solid, it's never reached the point where I can say the only time I've had to reboot is to upgrade software, nor have I been able to treat the Windows desktops I've supported as cavalierly as UNIX. And, too, the deep security issues in Win32 haven't been seriously addressed yet.
In my new job attempting to remove Outlook and downgrade it to something that wasn't infested with the Vista cult broke my computer so badly I had to get it reimaged. Not only shouldn't this be rocket science, but I'm metaphorically a rocket scientist and it's still too hard.
I've seen this at home, too: my daughter's Windows 2000 desktop had to be reinstalled every six months because she broke something. She's gone about 3 years on her Mac mini without incident.
Underline that, set it in boldface, carve it in granite, mod parent up, the works...
I really think the main reason people use flash is because it moderately increases the difficulty of reverse-engineering an interface. Chopping up a.swf package can be done, even without a few hundred bucks worth of Adobe software, but it's more work than running "curl -o filename url" a few times. It's obfuscation, pure and simple.
You'd get in trouble for taking an hour every day at 3 o'clock to go running.
Depends on your job and what you're doing. Don't forget a lot of people here are geeks who get paid for 8-5 and may work until 7 or 9 or 11 many days, with no overtime. Taking an hour every day at 3:00 to go running might well be seen as a good sign - you're less likely to lose a programmer to a heart attack.
There was one fellow, well known back then, who deliberately tried to get people he didn't agree with shut up by emailing the sites near the end of their posting path and asking "innocent" questions about whether the company had filed the cost of their Usenet connections as campaign contributions. Given that Usenet at this time was still pretty underground, often run by network admins on spare machines, this had the potential for causing a lot of fuss and of course completely blew the unwritten "Usenet stays on Usenet" rule out of the water. He was completely dumbfounded by the response he got and went on a years-long campaign against the evil Usenet cabal who were allegedly trying to shut HIM up. I don't know if he ever understood what the problem was.
But you are arguing how the world should work vs how it does work.
No, I'm arguing that for most musicians "making a decent living" is a better deal than they're likely to get from the labels. A few exceptions become stars and make a lot of money, but most don't make back their advances and the advances aren't all that hot.
THAT is how the world works. The big names are like lottery winners, they're bait to keep the bulk of musicians buying lottery tickets.
I see a lot of tools to make those Live CDs, but no effort to actually build a usable live CD for ordinary people.
The Fine Article isn't about LiveCD installs, so that's a bit of a red herring. CD drives have so much latency that about the only way I've found a LiveCD really usable as a desktop is if I'm running it in a VM from an ISO image on disk... and while some of these CDs are "liveCDs", they're not being used that way in the article.
So setting that aside, if you want a big old KDE desktop running FreeBSD, look at DesktopBSD.
If you want a small distro, then FreeBSD itself is a small distro. It's not ad friendly as Kubuntu, but if you read the article then neither are many of the tiny Linux distros reviewed... in fact some of them seem a good deal less friendly than FreeBSD which comes with a solid text-mode package manager by default.
That was my point. Going by the article itself, some of these distros seemed to be no-nonsense setups that put you in a decent small environment. That hasn't been my experience with popular Linux distros... they either are trying to be Windows, or they're trying to be Slackware 0.1.
PS: 80MB? Luxury! When I installed my first BSD system of my own, my home server was a PC running System V, I had two 10 or 20 MB hard disks and I sacrificed one to the cause and put 386BSD on it. I couldn't build the whole system, so I went through and patched/usr/src until "make world" worked, and that became Patchkit 23 for 386BSD.:)
The machine I used to put together 386BSD patchkit 23 had 4M RAM. And that felt like all the room in the world! At work we still had some multiuser development boxes with less than a megabyte at the time. I used it as a webserver on the Internet until 1999, when I discovered I would need a minimum of 5MB to install the new version of FreeBSD (though it would still run in less, it needed space for the compressed in-ram root partition). FIVE WHOLE MEGABYTES? INCONCEIVABLE!
Have you installed FreeBSD? The installer doesn't use X11, and you don't even need to install X11... most of my FreeBSD installs don't include X11... they're all servers. BSD is based around a core OS that's pretty much only what eny usable UNIX system is going to need, and everything else, including the desktop, is optional. I don't know if you can still build PicoBSD (a super-stripped derivitive of FreeBSD) on a 2.0 Mo floppy, and it's sure not QNX+Photon... you can't shrink X11 down as small as Photon... but it's pretty tight.
Which is why I think it does fit the profile, and why I'm interested. These distros seem to me to be more like BSD than the typical desktop Linux.
No, really, I'd like to see a comparison, because the basic FreeBSD install without Gnome or KDE is pretty small, and it's what I'm used to, so I'd like to see how he compared it to these supposedly small Linux distros, since I'm doing more Linux in my new job.
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As you correctly recognize, clueless users will wreck anything you let them touch.
I have yet to have a clueless user wreck a Mac (and, yes, I've done Mac support) or a UNIX box (Xenix 286, System V, SunOS 4, Solaris, Tru64, etc) just messing around as a normal user (even on OS 9, and that doesn't HAVE abnormal users). I've cleaned up some really amazing messes caused by someone who's stepped over the line into root-land.
The easiest way to put a Windows box into a state where it's an inch from blowing its foot off, by the way, is to install security software.
I've been the network admin for 150-400 software developers, 10-20 secretaries, and a couple of dozne each sales, marketing, executive, and general administrative bods, and maybe a couple hundred consultants, contractors, and customers. Oh, and a teenaged girl.
/Applications decimated, and when I asked her she explained that she never used /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app... and on further questioning she had been doing the same thing on Windows.
Bigger sample size, perhaps?
The biggest problems aren't the software developers, by the way, they're the secretaries and other non-technical types, followed by the consultants and contractors. The former are great at doing things that nobody would imagine you might do, like removing folders from C:\Program Files because they never use anything in there. I discovered that part of my daughter's problems had been something similar when I logged in to her Mac one day and found
Because there's nothing about Samba in 2008-003.
How do you keep the concentrated beam of light from starting a fire?
Aim it at someone in Sales?
Who even knows what 'nano' means?
Anyone who watches TV. It means "bigger than shuffle".
What about if two consensual adults have cyber-sex in Second Life with child-like characters?
They can lose their accounts, at least, because it's actually against the SL terms of service.
I like the placement of the buttons on my MacBook Pro.
I don't. And to add insult to injury mine's the 17" so there's plenty of room for a full sized keyboard.
This keyboard has what's close to the layout I'd like on a laptop:
http://www.adesso.com/images/big/bigger/MCK-91.jpg
The older model I have at home, no longer available, has no "Fn" key or fake numeric keypad... which is another think I'd like to see laptop manufacturers give up on. Either way, this keyboard is about the same size as a regular laptop keyboard, yet manages to fit all the critical keys with no two-handed stupidity.
I know it isn't the norm to compliment Windows, but Windows has been solid since 2k (minus Vista).
Well, I spent 20 years as a network administrator, and while the NT-derived Windows has been pretty solid, it's never reached the point where I can say the only time I've had to reboot is to upgrade software, nor have I been able to treat the Windows desktops I've supported as cavalierly as UNIX. And, too, the deep security issues in Win32 haven't been seriously addressed yet.
In my new job attempting to remove Outlook and downgrade it to something that wasn't infested with the Vista cult broke my computer so badly I had to get it reimaged. Not only shouldn't this be rocket science, but I'm metaphorically a rocket scientist and it's still too hard.
I've seen this at home, too: my daughter's Windows 2000 desktop had to be reinstalled every six months because she broke something. She's gone about 3 years on her Mac mini without incident.
I'm sure glad FreeBSD got hijacked by someone with class.
(yes, I know you can't hijack a willing aircraft)
This is beyond security theater. This is real damage.
Sounds like it's be a hit at Burning Man.
#8407000E.48454C50
Flash is an overkill for most GUIs on the web
.swf package can be done, even without a few hundred bucks worth of Adobe software, but it's more work than running "curl -o filename url" a few times. It's obfuscation, pure and simple.
Underline that, set it in boldface, carve it in granite, mod parent up, the works...
I really think the main reason people use flash is because it moderately increases the difficulty of reverse-engineering an interface. Chopping up a
All they need to do is virtualise GDI, and run Win32 and Win16 apps in a "Classic" subsystem...
So you have painful and silly updates that break everything without you ever deciding to take the risk?
Whoa, permanent employment for people who can fix broken windows...
You'd get in trouble for taking an hour every day at 3 o'clock to go running.
Depends on your job and what you're doing. Don't forget a lot of people here are geeks who get paid for 8-5 and may work until 7 or 9 or 11 many days, with no overtime. Taking an hour every day at 3:00 to go running might well be seen as a good sign - you're less likely to lose a programmer to a heart attack.
There was one fellow, well known back then, who deliberately tried to get people he didn't agree with shut up by emailing the sites near the end of their posting path and asking "innocent" questions about whether the company had filed the cost of their Usenet connections as campaign contributions. Given that Usenet at this time was still pretty underground, often run by network admins on spare machines, this had the potential for causing a lot of fuss and of course completely blew the unwritten "Usenet stays on Usenet" rule out of the water. He was completely dumbfounded by the response he got and went on a years-long campaign against the evil Usenet cabal who were allegedly trying to shut HIM up. I don't know if he ever understood what the problem was.
I never heard of Radiohead until I read about them here.
The plural of "anecdote" isn't "proof".
But you are arguing how the world should work vs how it does work.
No, I'm arguing that for most musicians "making a decent living" is a better deal than they're likely to get from the labels. A few exceptions become stars and make a lot of money, but most don't make back their advances and the advances aren't all that hot.
THAT is how the world works. The big names are like lottery winners, they're bait to keep the bulk of musicians buying lottery tickets.
I see a lot of tools to make those Live CDs, but no effort to actually build a usable live CD for ordinary people.
/usr/src until "make world" worked, and that became Patchkit 23 for 386BSD. :)
The Fine Article isn't about LiveCD installs, so that's a bit of a red herring. CD drives have so much latency that about the only way I've found a LiveCD really usable as a desktop is if I'm running it in a VM from an ISO image on disk... and while some of these CDs are "liveCDs", they're not being used that way in the article.
So setting that aside, if you want a big old KDE desktop running FreeBSD, look at DesktopBSD.
If you want a small distro, then FreeBSD itself is a small distro. It's not ad friendly as Kubuntu, but if you read the article then neither are many of the tiny Linux distros reviewed... in fact some of them seem a good deal less friendly than FreeBSD which comes with a solid text-mode package manager by default.
That was my point. Going by the article itself, some of these distros seemed to be no-nonsense setups that put you in a decent small environment. That hasn't been my experience with popular Linux distros... they either are trying to be Windows, or they're trying to be Slackware 0.1.
PS: 80MB? Luxury! When I installed my first BSD system of my own, my home server was a PC running System V, I had two 10 or 20 MB hard disks and I sacrificed one to the cause and put 386BSD on it. I couldn't build the whole system, so I went through and patched
So sad, how kernels have bloated. :)
The machine I used to put together 386BSD patchkit 23 had 4M RAM. And that felt like all the room in the world! At work we still had some multiuser development boxes with less than a megabyte at the time. I used it as a webserver on the Internet until 1999, when I discovered I would need a minimum of 5MB to install the new version of FreeBSD (though it would still run in less, it needed space for the compressed in-ram root partition). FIVE WHOLE MEGABYTES? INCONCEIVABLE!
(Don't talk to me about Vista)
Sorry, but the US is not currently a poor economy [...]
Nice flame, but what does it have to do with my comment? Shouldn't that have been at the top level?
I suspect, BTW, that you're reading "poor" as "in poverty", while other people are reading it as "not as good". English is like that.
Have you installed FreeBSD? The installer doesn't use X11, and you don't even need to install X11... most of my FreeBSD installs don't include X11... they're all servers. BSD is based around a core OS that's pretty much only what eny usable UNIX system is going to need, and everything else, including the desktop, is optional. I don't know if you can still build PicoBSD (a super-stripped derivitive of FreeBSD) on a 2.0 Mo floppy, and it's sure not QNX+Photon... you can't shrink X11 down as small as Photon... but it's pretty tight.
Which is why I think it does fit the profile, and why I'm interested. These distros seem to me to be more like BSD than the typical desktop Linux.
I was thinking I could do some work while looking for work, but looking for a job is a full time job.
No, really, I'd like to see a comparison, because the basic FreeBSD install without Gnome or KDE is pretty small, and it's what I'm used to, so I'd like to see how he compared it to these supposedly small Linux distros, since I'm doing more Linux in my new job.
At least the ASUS machine is probably not going to end up a ~$300 box selling for $600. :)