You had an 8088? Why back in the day, we didn't have no fancy 8088s! We had our fingers! And tin cans and string! And we were glad to have them, too! Sure, it took forever to get the latest pr0n...
What's the point of getting the latest pr0n if your fingers are busy doing something else?
Actually, I think that comment is well grounded in recent evnets. Exampl:, a recently proposed law would let media companies break into computers which are believed to be involved in trading copyrighted materials.
Compare that to the way HP treated some white-hat hackers who tried to get them to fix an old HP-UX vulnerability.
What does this tell us? Wealthy corporate hacker = good, average joe white hat = bad. I'm pretty sure that's the sort of thing the poster was getting at.
Isn't America the land of the free? As in freedom not free code! Restrictions are just bad.
That argument is a bit too simplistic.
Restrictions by themselves do not decrease our freedom. If there wasn't a restriction (a law) against assault, for example, then people would actually be _less_ free. How could you exercise your freedom of speech when you're in constant fear of being beaten up just because you spoke your mind?
You often have to take on restrictions (i.e. give up one freedom) to get another kind of freedom. For example, by taking on new work responsibilities, you can often get more money to buy stuff, travel, etc. The debate over "open source only" laws is very much like this. Should government agencies be required to use certain types of software (giving up on freedom of choice) to make it more likely that its constituents have access to the resources which they are entitled to (gaining the freedom of guaranteed access). What is it worth to guarantee that access to government information isn't restricted to those who can afford $300 or so for some proprietary office suite?
To be fair, the "open formats" argument has a strong alternative solution to this problem as well. But there are other arguments for "open source only" laws. The security issue is one. How do you know that those closed-source companies aren't accessing privileged information without telling you? Also, some companies' EULAs exempt them from all responsibility when their software fails. What if their software fails and the company isn't willing or able to help out? At least with open source, a government agency is in control of its own fate.
I don't have a problem with it. Strip mining is here today because the alternative is far too expensive. If you want to live in a technologically progressive society get used to us humans changing the enviroment to suit our needs without any real concern for other living things. Its been like this for a long time and the only option is regressing to huts and eating roots, no thank you.
Don't blow a gasket, Charlie. We're still just talking about diamonds. Nobody is suggesting the total rejection of modern technology. What we're talking about is priorities. Diamonds are acquired through strip mining. Here's the question: Is it worth supporting strip mining to get your hands on a diamond? Strip mining has real consequences, and diamonds aren't exactly necessities.
On that note, may I point out that if humans spend too much time "changing the enviroment to suit our needs without any real concern for other living things", we're going to run out of food, building materials, and other resources. Strip mining a wilderness sounds good right now, but what about when we run low on trees and that wilderness has died out? So don't take too simplistic a view of technology. Just because we can strip mine doesn't mean that it's a good idea, especially when we're strip mining to get diamonds for wedding rings (definately an unnecessary luxury!) We've got to think farther ahead than that.
So running your computer 24 hours a day would take approximately as much power as running your central A/C for maybe 20-30 mins/day.
A/C certainly does use more power than a computer, and is a well-known problem. Why are there blackouts on hot days? Air conditioning. Period.
Aside from A/C, though, none of those other items you mention would be run for anywhere near 24 hours a day. Lights don't need to be on during much of the day, or late at night. If you have kids at home for the summer, then maybe the TV runs 12 hours a day or so. But even then, 32" is huge. For comparison, my 21" TV only consumes 112W. As for those cooking appliances... I guess it depends on the meal being cooked, on the family size, etc. My oven is on approximately 30 minutes a week:)
That's why I'm surprised you left out water heaters and refrigerators! Those suckers are on 24/7, and both use a whole lot of power.
On a related note, I got DSL in my apartment a while ago and set up a Pentium Pro system as a web server. I turned it off about a month later when I saw my electric bill. Turning that one computer (no monitor) off cut my bill by about 40%! (Obviously, my power consumption is relatively low the rest of the time. Also, this was February/March, not the Summer. Then again, I'm in SoCal, so the weather was mild...) What this shows is that some people really could benefit from lower computer-related power consumption.
Considering that their trademark is just about the only thing they own (they give away everything else under the GPL)
I would assume they own their own office equipment (computers, furniture, pencils, etc.)
Then again, what if they didn't? Perhaps all their equipment is on a "rental" system. Their office space likewise. And of course they only keep their employees as long as they pay them month-to-month. It's amazing how fluid (or dare I say "virtual"?) a software company can be compared to, say, an auto manufacturer.
Yet RedHat does have a product, and that product is actually earning them some revenue (not enough, but still...) Yet they're just as much a company as a supermarket or a chain of restaurants despite the fact they don't own any tangible property.
I think part of the problem is that the black lines have faded too much. I can hardly even see them anymore. They must have been painted a while ago. Maybe we need to hire somebody to repaint them?
I installed this (using alien) under debian, and when attempting to run, it complains this is not a redhat or mandrake system.
Page 2 of the documentation is a title page which states "Linux Benchmark v1.0.0 (Red Hat and Mandrake Linux)". That pretty much says it all.
Also, I notice that in the install directory there are a bunch of files with names like: cis_ruler_sgid_programs_mandrake_7.1. Files with names like this for RedHat 6.1-7.2 and Mandrake 7.1-8.1 are in this directoy. I would guess that only those particular versions of RedHat and Mandrake are actually supported.
But the real bloat comes in coding all of the potential panics anywhere they might occur.
Perhaps they should just translate some already-existing characters into morse code. Isn't there usually a text error message associated with the kernel panic? If not that, how about the name of the function which caused the panic?
Even if they've never ever been in a car nor tried to get a license, even if they don't have their Social Security and Selective Service cards (admittedly non-photo, but that's/something/ with a name on it), they should at least be able to get a passport or other form of ID without much effort. Hell, US passports are valid for ten years...
I believe there are processing fees for passports. According to the forms here, it would appear to be $60 (a $45 fee and another $15 fee). That could be a small problem for a homeless person. Not to mention the cost of getting the passport photos (usually around $5).
Also, I assume you need _some_ proof of identity to get a passport. That DS-11 form says you need a certified birth certificate. This may be beyond a homeless person's ability to acquire.
What makes you think it would have been any less capable at it than Windows 98?
From the level of knowledge this guy displays, I'd guess he probably figures that since KDE didn't exist back then*, then Linux wasn't good for anything but running web servers at the time.
(Realistically, of course, Linux circa 1998 would be just fine, though it might not scale well if one kernel had to control more than 2 CPUs:)
if PayPal went under, many sellers and buyers would have more difficulty making transactions.
Mostly the sellers, I'd bet. Most buyers would be quite happy if they could pay by check, or better yet, by credit card directly. There's more protection for the buyer, and no unnecessary middlemen (like PayPal). Presumably the problem is on the sellers' end. Most of them probably aren't set up to take credit cards, and I'm guessing that it's relatively hard to keep track of payments by check. That's why so many sellers only accept PayPal and/or BillPoint.
The Harry Potter series as a whole is an allegory of a series of works by Foucault.
You mean Foucault the philosopher who writes about how social institutions are just power structures used as a means of social control? Not likely.
That Flintstones bit was weird enough, but this is just silly (Assuming that I understand you correctly -- the grammar in the sentence I quoted is horrid!) If you actually believe this (which I doubt) then let's hear some details.
1) A standard hardware acceleration layer for 2D and 3D cards, something we can ask the NVidia people to add to their drivers and code equivalents for other cards.
The problem with this is that then misbehaving 2D and 3D programs can mess with your kernel. There's already a "standard hardware acceleration layer" for 3D called DRI, the Direct Rendering Infrastructure (I'm guessing you know that, but some people may not). I personally have hard locked-up my system and even corrupted my hard drive by compiling and testing buggy code against the DRI-accelerated version of Mesa. I'm not even sure I was running as root at the time! (If you allow non-root users to use DRI for 3D graphics by seting "Mode 0666" in the "DRI" section of XF86config-4, can't they do the same kind of damage?) For this reason, I would argue that kernel-level graphics acceleration is kind of dangerous. Perhaps coding DRI differently could prevent these problems, I don't know (possibly at the cost of performance?)
For 3D, I think that having kernel-level acceleration is inevitable. You just can't get good performance even on the fastest video cards without some sort of kernel-level rendering interface. Even the non-DRI nVidia drivers use a kernel module (And sure enough, I've hard locked-up my Linux box using both DRI-based drivers and nVidia's drivers, for different video cards.) Even "good" performance is, of course, not really sufficient. Fancier and more detailed 3D rendering is going to push video cards to the limit for years to come. So for now, we're going to need all the performance we can get, even if that means risky kernel-level 3D-acceleration.
For 2D, on the other hand, who needs the extra performance? Everything 2D that I do is already more than fast enough even without kernel-level acceleration. I say just let X be the 2D standard for Linux. It's already becoming the de-facto standard, as SVGAlib, GGI and other 2D rendering libraries seem to be getting used less and less. And even if it's not as fast as it could be, X must be safer than using the kernel framebuffer or some other kernel-level 2D.
What features are still in demand from them, considering they can play damn near any sound that we can possibly hear already, and do it directionally?
24-bit video cards can also display anything you can see, but that doesn't mean that there aren't new features to be added.
In the long run, it wouldn't surprise me to see sound cards becoming the primary processor for lots of audio-related functions. There's already spatial-audio calculations (EAX/A3D), much like 3d-accelleration in video. Some sound cards also accellerate mp3 decoding. I wouldn't be surprised if this became more common, and perhaps extended to other audio formats. After that... how about a sound card which has on-chip speech recognition, or at least support for some related processes (speech-recognition acceleration)?
I think by "consistent" the author meant that different programs install in the same way. There are several different "InstallShield"-type programs for Windows. Furthermore, there are differences between the ways that different programs install. Some programs install in Program Files, others make a directory right off C:, and a few install in other places (C:\windows, for example). Even among the these groups you have variants. For exapmle, some programs install in a directory named for the program while other programs install in a directory named for the vendor. There are even some variations on this (stuff like C:\Program Files\Corel\Office\programname).
A lot of this could be fixed, of course, if vendors stuck to some standard, like "Install in C:\Program Files\programname". But the same could be said for RPM as well.
Let's come back to this discussion in a couple of years. And we'll see if you were right to laugh. I hope so. I don't believe it.
I think that you're entirely right about returning to the discussion in a few years. Yet it's quotes like this that make me wonder why so many people are calling this article FUD. The reality right now is that there are thousands of Windows viruses, and about a dozen Linux ones (none of which spread very well on Linux). Making fun of how Windows users suffer from viruses may be short-sighted, but it's not FUD -- Windows users do suffer from viruses far more than Linux users, and anti-virus software is a necessity on a Windows machine (but not on a Linux one). That's just reality (assuming we're all in the year 2002, anyway). As you said, in a few years Linux may have a virus problem, but that implies that it doesn't right now, which is basically correct.
That's called elitism, and it actually alienates people. If you want to make a joke about something then you don't talk down at others.
And yet the Britney Spears fans make fun of Christina Aguilera fans ("How can you like her? She sucks!") That so-called "elitist" humor may keep groups of people apart, but it also brings people within groups closer together.
Let's take this a bit further. Here's an idea: Let's ban black comedians! Too many of them tell jokes that only blacks get, often at the expense of whites! This elitism must stop now!
Obviously, I'm being sarcastic. But my point remains. Groups of different people (e.g. Windows and Linux users) are different. There are plenty of Linux users who make fun of Windows users, and vice-versa. There's not "elitism" involved, just regular old inter-group competition. It's natural and normal.
There are plenty of other ways to joke about Linux and viruses than to stereotype a group (Windows' users) as having a low IQ. Perhaps the reason people claim Linux is a religion or for fanatics is because they are alienated by crap like this.
Sure, and there's absolutely nothing like this coming from the Windows or Mac communities, or anywhere else (linuxsucks, *cough*, *cough*.) So why aren't "people" aliented by all the Linux-bashing Windows users? Oh yeah, I forgot, only Linux users are jerks who alienate people, while the linuxsucks people and the like are... ?
I'm not claiming that the article isn't rude, by the way. Although some of it is not (the "cool viruses" bit for example), other parts obviously are (though the article does not accuse Windows users of having low IQs! It says that Simile.D will only infect your Linux box if you have a sub-100 IQ -- please read the story more carefully!)
What I want to know is, why is this article considered to be an example of Linux fanaticism when some Windows users are throwing the same crap back at Linux? Why are "Linux users" in general accused of being fanatics, rather than "some Linux users" or "some Linux, Mac and Windows users"? Why do some people assume that every Linux user is trying to draw people into the emacs vs. vi "war" (like the poster I originally replied to)? I could care less about the emacs/vi thing -- although I have traded some light barbs about this with a co-worker (very tongue-in-cheek), and I'm pretty sure it actually made us better friends.
Anyway, my point is that some people complain about how Linux users stereotype Windows users, while simultaneously arguing the "Linux fanatics" stereotype. The poster I originally replied to, for one. It's really irritating.
Slashdot Mirror
The 280 lb gecko they used for the experiment simply asked for more donuts when questioned about the validity of the scientists claims.
Unfortunately, the experiment abruptly ended when scientists discovered that the laboratory's plaster ceiling could only support 200 pounds...
You had an 8088? Why back in the day, we didn't have no fancy 8088s! We had our fingers! And tin cans and string! And we were glad to have them, too! Sure, it took forever to get the latest pr0n...
;)
What's the point of getting the latest pr0n if your fingers are busy doing something else?
(Not to mention your tin cans. Sheesh!
In a way nVidia themselves have been shielded from this madness by not producing boards themselves. Its probably one of the reasons they still exist.
Doesn't ATI produce their own boards? Not _exclusively_, of course...
Because only the poor can be criminals.
That's insightful?
Actually, I think that comment is well grounded in recent evnets. Exampl:, a recently proposed law would let media companies break into computers which are believed to be involved in trading copyrighted materials.
Compare that to the way HP treated some white-hat hackers who tried to get them to fix an old HP-UX vulnerability.
What does this tell us? Wealthy corporate hacker = good, average joe white hat = bad. I'm pretty sure that's the sort of thing the poster was getting at.
For instance. Webcam32 Crack [google.com]
.de spoofed pr0n pages. Someone figured it out.
[snip]
The point is, the first THREE PAGES are
"Five minutes later, 'webcam32' became the most popular search term in Google history..."
Isn't America the land of the free? As in freedom not free code! Restrictions are just bad.
That argument is a bit too simplistic.
Restrictions by themselves do not decrease our freedom. If there wasn't a restriction (a law) against assault, for example, then people would actually be _less_ free. How could you exercise your freedom of speech when you're in constant fear of being beaten up just because you spoke your mind?
You often have to take on restrictions (i.e. give up one freedom) to get another kind of freedom. For example, by taking on new work responsibilities, you can often get more money to buy stuff, travel, etc. The debate over "open source only" laws is very much like this. Should government agencies be required to use certain types of software (giving up on freedom of choice) to make it more likely that its constituents have access to the resources which they are entitled to (gaining the freedom of guaranteed access). What is it worth to guarantee that access to government information isn't restricted to those who can afford $300 or so for some proprietary office suite?
To be fair, the "open formats" argument has a strong alternative solution to this problem as well. But there are other arguments for "open source only" laws. The security issue is one. How do you know that those closed-source companies aren't accessing privileged information without telling you? Also, some companies' EULAs exempt them from all responsibility when their software fails. What if their software fails and the company isn't willing or able to help out? At least with open source, a government agency is in control of its own fate.
I don't have a problem with it. Strip mining is here today because the alternative is far too expensive. If you want to live in a technologically progressive society get used to us humans changing the enviroment to suit our needs without any real concern for other living things. Its been like this for a long time and the only option is regressing to huts and eating roots, no thank you.
Don't blow a gasket, Charlie. We're still just talking about diamonds. Nobody is suggesting the total rejection of modern technology. What we're talking about is priorities. Diamonds are acquired through strip mining. Here's the question: Is it worth supporting strip mining to get your hands on a diamond? Strip mining has real consequences, and diamonds aren't exactly necessities.
On that note, may I point out that if humans spend too much time "changing the enviroment to suit our needs without any real concern for other living things", we're going to run out of food, building materials, and other resources. Strip mining a wilderness sounds good right now, but what about when we run low on trees and that wilderness has died out? So don't take too simplistic a view of technology. Just because we can strip mine doesn't mean that it's a good idea, especially when we're strip mining to get diamonds for wedding rings (definately an unnecessary luxury!) We've got to think farther ahead than that.
This car I'm selling you is available with either a)a warranty or b)access to the engine. Since it's my choice, I'm giving you access to the engine.
Compared to a license which gives no warranty and no access to the engine, that's an improvement.
So running your computer 24 hours a day would take approximately as much power as running your central A/C for maybe 20-30 mins/day.
:)
A/C certainly does use more power than a computer, and is a well-known problem. Why are there blackouts on hot days? Air conditioning. Period.
Aside from A/C, though, none of those other items you mention would be run for anywhere near 24 hours a day. Lights don't need to be on during much of the day, or late at night. If you have kids at home for the summer, then maybe the TV runs 12 hours a day or so. But even then, 32" is huge. For comparison, my 21" TV only consumes 112W. As for those cooking appliances... I guess it depends on the meal being cooked, on the family size, etc. My oven is on approximately 30 minutes a week
That's why I'm surprised you left out water heaters and refrigerators! Those suckers are on 24/7, and both use a whole lot of power.
On a related note, I got DSL in my apartment a while ago and set up a Pentium Pro system as a web server. I turned it off about a month later when I saw my electric bill. Turning that one computer (no monitor) off cut my bill by about 40%! (Obviously, my power consumption is relatively low the rest of the time. Also, this was February/March, not the Summer. Then again, I'm in SoCal, so the weather was mild...) What this shows is that some people really could benefit from lower computer-related power consumption.
Considering that their trademark is just about the only thing they own (they give away everything else under the GPL)
I would assume they own their own office equipment (computers, furniture, pencils, etc.)
Then again, what if they didn't? Perhaps all their equipment is on a "rental" system. Their office space likewise. And of course they only keep their employees as long as they pay them month-to-month. It's amazing how fluid (or dare I say "virtual"?) a software company can be compared to, say, an auto manufacturer.
Yet RedHat does have a product, and that product is actually earning them some revenue (not enough, but still...) Yet they're just as much a company as a supermarket or a chain of restaurants despite the fact they don't own any tangible property.
Weird.
Hint: Black line=new state!
I think part of the problem is that the black lines have faded too much. I can hardly even see them anymore. They must have been painted a while ago. Maybe we need to hire somebody to repaint them?
First off, c'mon RI is so small anyways, just let them have a little more land.
"It's not the size, it's how you use it."
-- The new state motto of Rhode Island.
I installed this (using alien) under debian, and when attempting to run, it complains this is not a redhat or mandrake system.
Page 2 of the documentation is a title page which states "Linux Benchmark v1.0.0 (Red Hat and Mandrake Linux)". That pretty much says it all.
Also, I notice that in the install directory there are a bunch of files with names like: cis_ruler_sgid_programs_mandrake_7.1. Files with names like this for RedHat 6.1-7.2 and Mandrake 7.1-8.1 are in this directoy. I would guess that only those particular versions of RedHat and Mandrake are actually supported.
But the real bloat comes in coding all of the potential panics anywhere they might occur.
Perhaps they should just translate some already-existing characters into morse code. Isn't there usually a text error message associated with the kernel panic? If not that, how about the name of the function which caused the panic?
You paid $80 to save about 20 seconds recording a cd? Is your time really worth $14,400/hr?
:)
Well, what if his office catches fire and he needs to back-up his data quickly?
Seriously, though, think about it:
If he burns one CD a day, then in a year that $80 has saved him a couple of hours of work...
If he burns 100 CDs a day (his job is to back up eBay, or perhaps a large computer lab) then it's really, really worth it...
And if he backs up one CD at the end of the day and gets off work 20 seconds quicker because of it... that is absolutely priceless.
Even if they've never ever been in a car nor tried to get a license, even if they don't have their Social Security and Selective Service cards (admittedly non-photo, but that's /something/ with a name on it), they should at least be able to get a passport or other form of ID without much effort. Hell, US passports are valid for ten years...
I believe there are processing fees for passports. According to the forms here, it would appear to be $60 (a $45 fee and another $15 fee). That could be a small problem for a homeless person. Not to mention the cost of getting the passport photos (usually around $5).
Also, I assume you need _some_ proof of identity to get a passport. That DS-11 form says you need a certified birth certificate. This may be beyond a homeless person's ability to acquire.
What makes you think it would have been any less capable at it than Windows 98?
:)
From the level of knowledge this guy displays, I'd guess he probably figures that since KDE didn't exist back then*, then Linux wasn't good for anything but running web servers at the time.
(Realistically, of course, Linux circa 1998 would be just fine, though it might not scale well if one kernel had to control more than 2 CPUs
*Yes, I know that it actually did.
if PayPal went under, many sellers and buyers would have more difficulty making transactions.
Mostly the sellers, I'd bet. Most buyers would be quite happy if they could pay by check, or better yet, by credit card directly. There's more protection for the buyer, and no unnecessary middlemen (like PayPal). Presumably the problem is on the sellers' end. Most of them probably aren't set up to take credit cards, and I'm guessing that it's relatively hard to keep track of payments by check. That's why so many sellers only accept PayPal and/or BillPoint.
The Harry Potter series as a whole is an allegory of a series of works by Foucault.
You mean Foucault the philosopher who writes about how social institutions are just power structures used as a means of social control? Not likely.
That Flintstones bit was weird enough, but this is just silly (Assuming that I understand you correctly -- the grammar in the sentence I quoted is horrid!) If you actually believe this (which I doubt) then let's hear some details.
And since when did they start sending moderators into space anyway? :)
Strangely enough, this proposal was very popular with the SlashDot crowd, and seeing as how it's a (congressional) election year and all...
1) A standard hardware acceleration layer for 2D and 3D cards, something we can ask the NVidia people to add to their drivers and code equivalents for other cards.
The problem with this is that then misbehaving 2D and 3D programs can mess with your kernel. There's already a "standard hardware acceleration layer" for 3D called DRI, the Direct Rendering Infrastructure (I'm guessing you know that, but some people may not). I personally have hard locked-up my system and even corrupted my hard drive by compiling and testing buggy code against the DRI-accelerated version of Mesa. I'm not even sure I was running as root at the time! (If you allow non-root users to use DRI for 3D graphics by seting "Mode 0666" in the "DRI" section of XF86config-4, can't they do the same kind of damage?) For this reason, I would argue that kernel-level graphics acceleration is kind of dangerous. Perhaps coding DRI differently could prevent these problems, I don't know (possibly at the cost of performance?)
For 3D, I think that having kernel-level acceleration is inevitable. You just can't get good performance even on the fastest video cards without some sort of kernel-level rendering interface. Even the non-DRI nVidia drivers use a kernel module (And sure enough, I've hard locked-up my Linux box using both DRI-based drivers and nVidia's drivers, for different video cards.) Even "good" performance is, of course, not really sufficient. Fancier and more detailed 3D rendering is going to push video cards to the limit for years to come. So for now, we're going to need all the performance we can get, even if that means risky kernel-level 3D-acceleration.
For 2D, on the other hand, who needs the extra performance? Everything 2D that I do is already more than fast enough even without kernel-level acceleration. I say just let X be the 2D standard for Linux. It's already becoming the de-facto standard, as SVGAlib, GGI and other 2D rendering libraries seem to be getting used less and less. And even if it's not as fast as it could be, X must be safer than using the kernel framebuffer or some other kernel-level 2D.
What features are still in demand from them, considering they can play damn near any sound that we can possibly hear already, and do it directionally?
24-bit video cards can also display anything you can see, but that doesn't mean that there aren't new features to be added.
In the long run, it wouldn't surprise me to see sound cards becoming the primary processor for lots of audio-related functions. There's already spatial-audio calculations (EAX/A3D), much like 3d-accelleration in video. Some sound cards also accellerate mp3 decoding. I wouldn't be surprised if this became more common, and perhaps extended to other audio formats. After that... how about a sound card which has on-chip speech recognition, or at least support for some related processes (speech-recognition acceleration)?
C) it is very easy and consistent
I think by "consistent" the author meant that different programs install in the same way. There are several different "InstallShield"-type programs for Windows. Furthermore, there are differences between the ways that different programs install. Some programs install in Program Files, others make a directory right off C:, and a few install in other places (C:\windows, for example). Even among the these groups you have variants. For exapmle, some programs install in a directory named for the program while other programs install in a directory named for the vendor. There are even some variations on this (stuff like C:\Program Files\Corel\Office\programname).
A lot of this could be fixed, of course, if vendors stuck to some standard, like "Install in C:\Program Files\programname". But the same could be said for RPM as well.
Let's come back to this discussion in a couple of years. And we'll see if you were right to laugh. I hope so. I don't believe it.
I think that you're entirely right about returning to the discussion in a few years. Yet it's quotes like this that make me wonder why so many people are calling this article FUD. The reality right now is that there are thousands of Windows viruses, and about a dozen Linux ones (none of which spread very well on Linux). Making fun of how Windows users suffer from viruses may be short-sighted, but it's not FUD -- Windows users do suffer from viruses far more than Linux users, and anti-virus software is a necessity on a Windows machine (but not on a Linux one). That's just reality (assuming we're all in the year 2002, anyway). As you said, in a few years Linux may have a virus problem, but that implies that it doesn't right now, which is basically correct.
That's called elitism, and it actually alienates people. If you want to make a joke about something then you don't talk down at others.
And yet the Britney Spears fans make fun of Christina Aguilera fans ("How can you like her? She sucks!") That so-called "elitist" humor may keep groups of people apart, but it also brings people within groups closer together.
Let's take this a bit further. Here's an idea: Let's ban black comedians! Too many of them tell jokes that only blacks get, often at the expense of whites! This elitism must stop now!
Obviously, I'm being sarcastic. But my point remains. Groups of different people (e.g. Windows and Linux users) are different. There are plenty of Linux users who make fun of Windows users, and vice-versa. There's not "elitism" involved, just regular old inter-group competition. It's natural and normal.
There are plenty of other ways to joke about Linux and viruses than to stereotype a group (Windows' users) as having a low IQ. Perhaps the reason people claim Linux is a religion or for fanatics is because they are alienated by crap like this.
Sure, and there's absolutely nothing like this coming from the Windows or Mac communities, or anywhere else (linuxsucks, *cough*, *cough*.) So why aren't "people" aliented by all the Linux-bashing Windows users? Oh yeah, I forgot, only Linux users are jerks who alienate people, while the linuxsucks people and the like are... ?
I'm not claiming that the article isn't rude, by the way. Although some of it is not (the "cool viruses" bit for example), other parts obviously are (though the article does not accuse Windows users of having low IQs! It says that Simile.D will only infect your Linux box if you have a sub-100 IQ -- please read the story more carefully!)
What I want to know is, why is this article considered to be an example of Linux fanaticism when some Windows users are throwing the same crap back at Linux? Why are "Linux users" in general accused of being fanatics, rather than "some Linux users" or "some Linux, Mac and Windows users"? Why do some people assume that every Linux user is trying to draw people into the emacs vs. vi "war" (like the poster I originally replied to)? I could care less about the emacs/vi thing -- although I have traded some light barbs about this with a co-worker (very tongue-in-cheek), and I'm pretty sure it actually made us better friends.
Anyway, my point is that some people complain about how Linux users stereotype Windows users, while simultaneously arguing the "Linux fanatics" stereotype. The poster I originally replied to, for one. It's really irritating.