STEAM'S COMING TO LINUX!!!!!111 IT'S CONFIRMED!!!!!!!111!1
Modding AC down was a disservice. This happened and they went all Fox News over it. Though it was sort of a reasonable thing to expect given the evidence they gathered (a reference to Linux in a beta client, if I recall correctly), this shows why it's a good idea not to be overly aggressive in your guesswork when you're dealing with news.
Well, Linux is getting better. We got to the point where everything you ask for is covered by one distro or another. I have an anectode, though, regarding Win 7. I ran into a curious problem. My RAM sticks wouldn't run at 1333MHz on Windows unless I boosted them from 1.49V to 1.53V. On Linux they'd work flawlessly without the need for the extra 0.4V. Now I'm not really that savvy to even try to guess what the hell went wrong there, but that's a weird example of Linux actually supporting hardware better than Windows.
So why is Ubuntu more popular than Fedora? Is there some specific reason I don't see?
Yes. Fedora is so bloated by default that it's the slowest, most RAM-hogging distro I've ever seen. Fedora 15 "KDE spin" used 2.2Gb os RAM at startup on my computer (that's double what Win 7 uses and more than four times what my current Debian + KDE setup does). And the damn thing took about a minute and a half to boot. Then, after an update, this time increased to about three minutes or so. Granted, this is mostly configurable, but why bother filtering crap you don't want when you can use Debian or Arch and only install crap you want to begin with? Fedora's also too buggy since it relies on cutting edge stuff. I had three PCs. KDE would sistematically crash on one of them, the oldest (circa 2005), and throw all kinds of minor error dialogs on the other (circa 2009). Only my third machine managed to work with it, and I use "work" loosely. So that's been my experience with Fedora and, from what I've gathered, it wasn't all that uncommon. You may have been lucky. Maybe you never reboot or have SSDs and RAM to spare. Maybe you use integrated video drivers or something well supported. I don't know. If you're happy with it, by all means keep it, but I'm afraid if you give Arch, Debian or Mint a chance for a longer period of time, you might not look back.
Then came Ubuntu. It was up to date and came with apt-get.
Come over to sid. It's "unstable" in terms that it changes a lot.
Be careful, though. If you don't already know, because of a recent Xorg ABI change, proprietary video drivers are kaput. Only Stable is currently not broken in that sense. You can usually just run stable and get a few select packages from testing or unstable, though. Or use backports.
Well, that's closer to the heart of the issue. Yes, it's basically Windows 95, an interface that has been slowly improved for over 15 years. Anything new is obviously going to be not as polished. Not even the frequently hailed as masters of usability got Aqua right on their first try. It's been around since 2000 and got a lot better over the years. So there's two factors: people get used to working in a certain environment and that environment also gets used to working with people. When Gnome 3 or Unity comes along, we have to start all over on both sides. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but time has to be given so that those UIs will mature. Maybe they'll have less configuration options, maybe they'll be riddled with bugs, but they can get substantially better with time. Look at KDE4, that finally got it sort of together now, on 4.6, three years after their first release. So it's too early to judge Unity and Shell, bad though they may seem, because it's kind of unfair to pit rough versus finely lapidated stones.
On a side note, I haven't used Shell, but Unity has a few nifty ideas. Listing installed programs alongside repo stuff is useful and a good sort of cloud integration. When they get that damn left panel right (adjust lag, allow for direct customization, let me move it etc), things are going to get a lot better.
The extensions do make Gnome Shell look a lot more like Gnome 2, meaning a menu and taskbar. And, frankly, it seems good to me. I doubt they will be able to make the Shell more customizable, which is a shame, but what I like is Mint's attitude of not wanting to alienate its user base. At least someone out there is being wise and/or listening to complaints.
I had the same difficulty with the FS. It's intimidating. To be honest, though, that's a problem created by our Windows training. The correlation I took too long to make was that C:>\Windows+C:\Program Files ~=/, meaning a bunch of stuff a casual user shouldn't mess with. C:> roughly translates to/home/$user. Once I got used to Linux, it seemed to make much more sense. Programs are installed "everywhere" (though it often happens in Windows too, and we have the added bonus of not having to deal with the system registry), but you do have a package manager that handles everything for you and lists all the installed files in case you want to mess around yourself (at least synaptic does). So the FS is actually a plus for me in Linux/Unix, though at first it certainly wasn't. Plus, once I started using Win 7 recently, I had trouble finding my personal folder (I'm forgetful like that), so the difficulty happens both ways.
In regards to the book, I don't think it would be that useful. Linux tends to shift a lot and a lot of distros do things differently (see lib64, ia32-libs for an example), so you'd do a massive amount of research only to release an obsolete piece of work. It's a sisyphean task, really, and that's also why most commercial software makers won't touch Linux with a 10-foot pole.
My Athlon 64 has 1.5GB of RAM, was bought in 2005 and still runs great. And it runs Wheezy, not some old crap like Windows 98 (cue some Fedora fan saying "but Debian is old crap"). Since the Phenom II/Core2, computers have grown too powerful for our simple, daily needs like viewing Wikipedia or Youtube videos. Also, my PC is far more powerful than Atom netbooks and runs circles around any ARM phone or tablet. Since everyone seems to be designing OSs with them in mind now, I'd say my old hunk of junk is pretty safe for the foreseeable future.
If your country has data caps, it is part of the third world. Believe no different way of distinguishing between first and third world. If it's a recent change, then welcome to our side of the fence. We watch 240p Youtube videos.
Oh my god, four thousand years?? Your life must be horrible!
Seriously, I pirated them before because here they never showed them at all because it would take an infinite amount of time for them to reach us. Four thousand years is nothing.
(Posting from the event horizon of a black hole)
Hey, me too. Aren't you just disgusted at the current Ansible rates? I can only download 10Gb before they downgrade me to slower-than-light. I'd say this is worse for piracy than any of those judicial measures.
Hey, thanks for the tip. It'll help a lot. All I can do for you in return is share my experience with KDE4: it wasn't really functional in its earlier iterations, but now it's very good. It does require tuning since the default settings suck and Dolphin is still way behind Nautilus, but other than that, it's an improvement over even Gnome 2.
Windows 7's UI is surprisingly good, isn't it? It's my second favorite, though, the first one being KDE. Navigating the menus in it is clunkier, but I don't do that anymore, since both feature highly practical search boxes and a list of favorites. KDE wins only by a hair, though, mostly because items pinned to Windows 7's taskbar can only be opened once, so that I have to go elsewhere to run a new instance of the program when I want it.
I don't get this endless "more power to the government" vs "less power to the government" debate. People should focus on what the right powers should be, not on what adds or subtracts from an unquantifiable total. And if we're going to point out a single source for the problem, then it isn't Wall St. and it isn't Washington. It's money. In a land where money is king (and it always is anywhere, since it, like the joker in a deck of cards, is anything you want it to be, anytime you wish to use it), whoever has a lot of it eventually gets to create or steer the rules and regulations. The Washington - Wall St. interaction is a symptom, and the one causing the most discomfort. As for where the protest should be, that I don't think I could easily answer. Both places are good enough, I guess, but Wall St. is profiting a lot more openly from all the mess, so it's probably better.
If it's a small group with a single demand, marching against a specific law or against an arrest, sure. But when you're essentially protesting against the economic status quo, how specific can you get? You're showing discontent with the staggering financial inequality, with the use of taxes to support private institutions, with what those institutions represent, being economic leeches that create only virtual wealth, with sold politicians that aren't looking out for you like they should. Maybe you can relate to only one of those points, maybe to all, maybe to some other that I have missed. There's no simple, short way to sum up the sentiment other than "fuck Wall Street". And I can relate to that. I think an overwhelming majority of people can, and such social and political unrest has to manifest itself to keep the folks in charge on their toes, else the current system will never end nor work.
As for politicians trying to own or harness political movements, that cannot be stopped. That's simply what they do. Not only political movements, but also religions, feelings, philosophies and whatever they can turn into support by getting people to relate to them. That's the most fundamental flaw of the representative system we share and why politicians lie.
I'm so tired of seeing this argument. Politically voting with your wallet almost never works, precisely because of what you have already noticed: not enough people will do it. Mostly because they don't care, but even if every single person bothered to become moral buyers 100% of the time, it still wouldn't work. You have a very limited amount of time to concern yourself with researching everything you buy, so while you're avoiding Sony products because of the PS3 Other OS debacle and Apple for their excessive and anticompetitive litigation, what about orange juice? Do you buy it from a company that pay their employees a decent salary? One that itself buys oranges from a farm that does not hire illegal immigrants so they won't be able to complain about work conditions? Do they use renewable energy if possible or just go with the cheapest? Are the oranges they use genetically modified and patented? Is the package fully recyclable, in practice? There' a plethora of things you should care about and if every purchase of every item requires interviewing and investigating eight or nine different companies, you'll quickly die of thirst before you're able to buy the damned orange juice before even finding out if the thing is actually made from real oranges.
And then there's the second highly impractical part of voting with your wallet: there aren't that many parties to choose from. The Onion puts it better than I do, with an article that's probably supposed to be funny but ended up being too truthful: "The nerve of you people. Treating a longtime patron with so little respect, like I'm just another walking dollar sign. If that's what passes for customer service around here, you sadly leave me with no choice but to have the exact same experience at another giant soulless multinational corporation somewhere else. Maybe one that knows how to rob its customers of a fraction less dignity." Here's the full article, if you want an excuse to start drinking early today: http://www.theonion.com/articles/well-i-guess-ill-just-take-my-business-to-another,21357/
Most of the terms that spark heated, vitriolic and socially pervasive arguments aren't. Communism, abortion, religion, freedom, privacy, left-wing etc. I guess it's because they have been so throughly defined so many times by so many different people that using the word in an honest conversation actually isn't that helpful. If you mention socialism, you have to specify which kind to such a degree that you might as well just describe what you mean from scratch.
Rowan Atkinson actually said something very interesting about it (he was, at the time, talking about the right to mock religion):
"It all points to the promotion of the idea that there should be a right not to be offended. But in my view the right to offend is far more important than any right not to be offended. The right to ridicule is far more important to society than any right not to be ridiculed because one in my view represents openness - and the other represents oppression." ( http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1478381/Atkinson-defends-right-to-offend.html )
Going to jail for being unfunny and/or crass is a little extreme (and impractical - we'd need more land that we can spare to house the entirety of 4chan and a plethora of talk show hosts). Also, why should we be able to mock Michael Jackson's death but not a random passerby's? It doesn't cause anyone close to him less grief just because he was a public figure. Which, by the way, anyone who appears in the news once or has a Facebook profile/shrine seems to be, to varying extents, in the web 2.0. Ask Antoine Dodson (or Natasha MacBryde herself, if you happen to have an Ouija board).
Slashdot Mirror
Which is great for FSM supporters and for anyone worried about the climate change.
Yes. It's usually this one:
You have the right to do as we tell you.
When celebrities start suing .xxx domain owners he'll find out...
Yeah, real funny, smartass. Turns out I had already warned that fucker about PUTTING HIS CRAP ON MY SHELF! FUCK!
You, sir, are a gentleman and a scholar. This was very enlightening. I'll have to apologise to Windows as soon as I boot it again.
STEAM'S COMING TO LINUX!!!!!111 IT'S CONFIRMED!!!!!!!111!1
Modding AC down was a disservice. This happened and they went all Fox News over it. Though it was sort of a reasonable thing to expect given the evidence they gathered (a reference to Linux in a beta client, if I recall correctly), this shows why it's a good idea not to be overly aggressive in your guesswork when you're dealing with news.
Well, Linux is getting better. We got to the point where everything you ask for is covered by one distro or another. I have an anectode, though, regarding Win 7. I ran into a curious problem. My RAM sticks wouldn't run at 1333MHz on Windows unless I boosted them from 1.49V to 1.53V. On Linux they'd work flawlessly without the need for the extra 0.4V. Now I'm not really that savvy to even try to guess what the hell went wrong there, but that's a weird example of Linux actually supporting hardware better than Windows.
So why is Ubuntu more popular than Fedora? Is there some specific reason I don't see?
Yes. Fedora is so bloated by default that it's the slowest, most RAM-hogging distro I've ever seen. Fedora 15 "KDE spin" used 2.2Gb os RAM at startup on my computer (that's double what Win 7 uses and more than four times what my current Debian + KDE setup does). And the damn thing took about a minute and a half to boot. Then, after an update, this time increased to about three minutes or so. Granted, this is mostly configurable, but why bother filtering crap you don't want when you can use Debian or Arch and only install crap you want to begin with? Fedora's also too buggy since it relies on cutting edge stuff. I had three PCs. KDE would sistematically crash on one of them, the oldest (circa 2005), and throw all kinds of minor error dialogs on the other (circa 2009). Only my third machine managed to work with it, and I use "work" loosely. So that's been my experience with Fedora and, from what I've gathered, it wasn't all that uncommon. You may have been lucky. Maybe you never reboot or have SSDs and RAM to spare. Maybe you use integrated video drivers or something well supported. I don't know. If you're happy with it, by all means keep it, but I'm afraid if you give Arch, Debian or Mint a chance for a longer period of time, you might not look back.
Deb Stable was years behind everything else.
Then came Ubuntu. It was up to date and came with apt-get.
Come over to sid. It's "unstable" in terms that it changes a lot.
Be careful, though. If you don't already know, because of a recent Xorg ABI change, proprietary video drivers are kaput. Only Stable is currently not broken in that sense. You can usually just run stable and get a few select packages from testing or unstable, though. Or use backports.
iOS
mouse
There's your problem.
Well, that's closer to the heart of the issue. Yes, it's basically Windows 95, an interface that has been slowly improved for over 15 years. Anything new is obviously going to be not as polished. Not even the frequently hailed as masters of usability got Aqua right on their first try. It's been around since 2000 and got a lot better over the years. So there's two factors: people get used to working in a certain environment and that environment also gets used to working with people. When Gnome 3 or Unity comes along, we have to start all over on both sides. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but time has to be given so that those UIs will mature. Maybe they'll have less configuration options, maybe they'll be riddled with bugs, but they can get substantially better with time. Look at KDE4, that finally got it sort of together now, on 4.6, three years after their first release. So it's too early to judge Unity and Shell, bad though they may seem, because it's kind of unfair to pit rough versus finely lapidated stones.
On a side note, I haven't used Shell, but Unity has a few nifty ideas. Listing installed programs alongside repo stuff is useful and a good sort of cloud integration. When they get that damn left panel right (adjust lag, allow for direct customization, let me move it etc), things are going to get a lot better.
The extensions do make Gnome Shell look a lot more like Gnome 2, meaning a menu and taskbar. And, frankly, it seems good to me. I doubt they will be able to make the Shell more customizable, which is a shame, but what I like is Mint's attitude of not wanting to alienate its user base. At least someone out there is being wise and/or listening to complaints.
I had the same difficulty with the FS. It's intimidating. To be honest, though, that's a problem created by our Windows training. The correlation I took too long to make was that C:>\Windows+C:\Program Files ~= /, meaning a bunch of stuff a casual user shouldn't mess with. C:> roughly translates to /home/$user. Once I got used to Linux, it seemed to make much more sense. Programs are installed "everywhere" (though it often happens in Windows too, and we have the added bonus of not having to deal with the system registry), but you do have a package manager that handles everything for you and lists all the installed files in case you want to mess around yourself (at least synaptic does). So the FS is actually a plus for me in Linux/Unix, though at first it certainly wasn't. Plus, once I started using Win 7 recently, I had trouble finding my personal folder (I'm forgetful like that), so the difficulty happens both ways.
In regards to the book, I don't think it would be that useful. Linux tends to shift a lot and a lot of distros do things differently (see lib64, ia32-libs for an example), so you'd do a massive amount of research only to release an obsolete piece of work. It's a sisyphean task, really, and that's also why most commercial software makers won't touch Linux with a 10-foot pole.
My Athlon 64 has 1.5GB of RAM, was bought in 2005 and still runs great. And it runs Wheezy, not some old crap like Windows 98 (cue some Fedora fan saying "but Debian is old crap"). Since the Phenom II/Core2, computers have grown too powerful for our simple, daily needs like viewing Wikipedia or Youtube videos. Also, my PC is far more powerful than Atom netbooks and runs circles around any ARM phone or tablet. Since everyone seems to be designing OSs with them in mind now, I'd say my old hunk of junk is pretty safe for the foreseeable future.
If your country has data caps, it is part of the third world. Believe no different way of distinguishing between first and third world. If it's a recent change, then welcome to our side of the fence. We watch 240p Youtube videos.
Oh my god, four thousand years?? Your life must be horrible!
Seriously, I pirated them before because here they never showed them at all because it would take an infinite amount of time for them to reach us. Four thousand years is nothing.
(Posting from the event horizon of a black hole)
Hey, me too. Aren't you just disgusted at the current Ansible rates? I can only download 10Gb before they downgrade me to slower-than-light. I'd say this is worse for piracy than any of those judicial measures.
Why don't they just call themselves "DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS"? I heard the ones that do are pretty well-off.
Hey, thanks for the tip. It'll help a lot. All I can do for you in return is share my experience with KDE4: it wasn't really functional in its earlier iterations, but now it's very good. It does require tuning since the default settings suck and Dolphin is still way behind Nautilus, but other than that, it's an improvement over even Gnome 2.
Windows 7's UI is surprisingly good, isn't it? It's my second favorite, though, the first one being KDE. Navigating the menus in it is clunkier, but I don't do that anymore, since both feature highly practical search boxes and a list of favorites. KDE wins only by a hair, though, mostly because items pinned to Windows 7's taskbar can only be opened once, so that I have to go elsewhere to run a new instance of the program when I want it.
I don't get this endless "more power to the government" vs "less power to the government" debate. People should focus on what the right powers should be, not on what adds or subtracts from an unquantifiable total. And if we're going to point out a single source for the problem, then it isn't Wall St. and it isn't Washington. It's money. In a land where money is king (and it always is anywhere, since it, like the joker in a deck of cards, is anything you want it to be, anytime you wish to use it), whoever has a lot of it eventually gets to create or steer the rules and regulations. The Washington - Wall St. interaction is a symptom, and the one causing the most discomfort. As for where the protest should be, that I don't think I could easily answer. Both places are good enough, I guess, but Wall St. is profiting a lot more openly from all the mess, so it's probably better.
If it's a small group with a single demand, marching against a specific law or against an arrest, sure. But when you're essentially protesting against the economic status quo, how specific can you get? You're showing discontent with the staggering financial inequality, with the use of taxes to support private institutions, with what those institutions represent, being economic leeches that create only virtual wealth, with sold politicians that aren't looking out for you like they should. Maybe you can relate to only one of those points, maybe to all, maybe to some other that I have missed. There's no simple, short way to sum up the sentiment other than "fuck Wall Street". And I can relate to that. I think an overwhelming majority of people can, and such social and political unrest has to manifest itself to keep the folks in charge on their toes, else the current system will never end nor work.
As for politicians trying to own or harness political movements, that cannot be stopped. That's simply what they do. Not only political movements, but also religions, feelings, philosophies and whatever they can turn into support by getting people to relate to them. That's the most fundamental flaw of the representative system we share and why politicians lie.
An enourmous group showing dissatisfaction can be very powerful, even if such dissatisfaction isn't outlined or even homogeneous.
I'm so tired of seeing this argument. Politically voting with your wallet almost never works, precisely because of what you have already noticed: not enough people will do it. Mostly because they don't care, but even if every single person bothered to become moral buyers 100% of the time, it still wouldn't work. You have a very limited amount of time to concern yourself with researching everything you buy, so while you're avoiding Sony products because of the PS3 Other OS debacle and Apple for their excessive and anticompetitive litigation, what about orange juice? Do you buy it from a company that pay their employees a decent salary? One that itself buys oranges from a farm that does not hire illegal immigrants so they won't be able to complain about work conditions? Do they use renewable energy if possible or just go with the cheapest? Are the oranges they use genetically modified and patented? Is the package fully recyclable, in practice? There' a plethora of things you should care about and if every purchase of every item requires interviewing and investigating eight or nine different companies, you'll quickly die of thirst before you're able to buy the damned orange juice before even finding out if the thing is actually made from real oranges.
And then there's the second highly impractical part of voting with your wallet: there aren't that many parties to choose from. The Onion puts it better than I do, with an article that's probably supposed to be funny but ended up being too truthful: "The nerve of you people. Treating a longtime patron with so little respect, like I'm just another walking dollar sign. If that's what passes for customer service around here, you sadly leave me with no choice but to have the exact same experience at another giant soulless multinational corporation somewhere else. Maybe one that knows how to rob its customers of a fraction less dignity." Here's the full article, if you want an excuse to start drinking early today: http://www.theonion.com/articles/well-i-guess-ill-just-take-my-business-to-another,21357/
Most of the terms that spark heated, vitriolic and socially pervasive arguments aren't. Communism, abortion, religion, freedom, privacy, left-wing etc. I guess it's because they have been so throughly defined so many times by so many different people that using the word in an honest conversation actually isn't that helpful. If you mention socialism, you have to specify which kind to such a degree that you might as well just describe what you mean from scratch.
Rowan Atkinson actually said something very interesting about it (he was, at the time, talking about the right to mock religion):
"It all points to the promotion of the idea that there should be a right not to be offended. But in my view the right to offend is far more important than any right not to be offended. The right to ridicule is far more important to society than any right not to be ridiculed because one in my view represents openness - and the other represents oppression." ( http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1478381/Atkinson-defends-right-to-offend.html )
Going to jail for being unfunny and/or crass is a little extreme (and impractical - we'd need more land that we can spare to house the entirety of 4chan and a plethora of talk show hosts). Also, why should we be able to mock Michael Jackson's death but not a random passerby's? It doesn't cause anyone close to him less grief just because he was a public figure. Which, by the way, anyone who appears in the news once or has a Facebook profile/shrine seems to be, to varying extents, in the web 2.0. Ask Antoine Dodson (or Natasha MacBryde herself, if you happen to have an Ouija board).