What the hell? My wife just went to go get me coffee, and she's fresh out of the shower. I just had a magnificent set of breasts next to my head. I'm guessing that most people here have access to a naked member of their preferred gender, or are in between partners. More over, we see our kids naked, deal with changing on boats or while camping with friends... nakedness, even erotic photos, aren't exactly the most notable things in the world. Pretty much everybody gets naked.
Can we please just act like adults, realize the photos were part of tracking down evidence, and not act like a women without clothes on is an exceptional thing? Who the hell cares? The police used them to identify the possessor of the stolen goods. What's next? Giggling after you shake an oncologist's hands because he's touched lots of boobs?
Why use a different kernel for the server and desktop versions? Even Microsoft came to their senses on that one and started just using the NT kernel for desktops and servers.
Oh, to live in a universe in which somebody interviewed the developer and he were to answer that in the first reply. And bunnies flowed hot and cold from the tap.
Half of this already exists. Now, down to the basement with welding equipment, large diameter pipe and some more test subjects...
You seem confused. The project releases a matching server that does use Linux as the kernel. The desktop OS does not. It's based on AtheOS, a new OS from scratch with a fair amount of application support built up over the years for a minor OS.
I've used KDE since the beginning, but used ion3 for many years (long after he abandoned development). I'm currently using kwin with very custom rules, but I dabbled in, and really should look at i3 again. It's capable of being easily configured exactly like my ion3 configuration, only with a much cleaner codebase.
Actually, I rather like the point that X is to Wayland as http: is to file: for the web. It's a silly comparison, however.
Personally, I like the philosophy behind Wayland, as it does a nice repartition of the problem that better fits. I use remote X all the time and assume I will continue to use remote applications when Wayland is popular. Modern X toolkits use techniques that are a poor match for remote X anyway (mostly rendering to bitmaps internally and then outputting them via X). Things are changing regardless of what protocol we use for remote user interfaces. It's not a healthy thing to stick with technology due to nostalgia, and considering that there is nothing yet to compare X to in a Wayland solution for remote interfaces (or, for real world use, for *local* interfaces), it seems remarkably premature to declare X a winner.
I'm happy to see what develops and then make a choice. X is neat, I've used it for a long time, but I'm not going to ignore the *possibility* that something better might come along out of bizarre loyalty.
Until there are actual mature implementations of both methods, why choose a camp?
It's more named about Percival Lowell, the founder of the observatory. Thus the overlaid PL that is the symbol and the fact that the god the (then) planet was named for started with P and L.
And of course, there was also the fact that Percival Lowell was the owner and trainer of the dog that acted in all those Mickey Mouse films as "Pluto".
Actually, I rather like it. It's a bit of a conversation starter. Slashdot is not a legal forum or intended to be some kind of debate society. It's an opinionated forum. Perhaps it's just not to your taste?
Everyone only drives on the same side because of government regulated road rules
I'm pretty sure that the Pope dictated left way back in the early middle ages, but in the colonies and later the United States, wagons tended to the right long before there were any laws on the books. The community decided that informally long before it was enforced by law.
It might surprise you that in many cities, pedestrians are on the sidewalks despite there being no laws keeping them there (and for that matter, despite jaywalking laws in other cities, people still cross in the middle of the road).
And they are pretty explicit about it. They are open in what they share, and how they do what they do.
I'm impressed that they allow you to download your own content and then delete it off their system -- *and* are upfront about how the second order information is not guaranteed to be deleted. Given how indexing and audit trails work, I can see this as reasonable, and probably necessary (especially the logs).
It's not the allowing of the removal that's impressive to me; it is their open admission of the limitations of that deletion. It's not spun to be perfect, it's presented as it really is. I'm not saying that they are perfect or always will be, but right now, they are a pretty good example of how I want a company that I host my information with to behave.
And of course, as you say, they have some pretty compelling business reasons to keep it that way.
Why the *hell* have they not rolled Google + out to Apps users yet? We're the freaking power users of your services, Google! Seriously... slap a beta and warning on it and just do it already.
There better be some very nice reason for the delay -- probably one I won't use, but helpful for some App admins -- like control over circles or auditable circles (for places like finance companies that need records).
I know one champion Scrabble player is Sal Piro, who is also the president of the Rocky Horror Fan Club. He's a neat guy, in the Guinness Book of World Records for having seen the same movie the most number of times.
No, Star Wars is popular among geeks -- formerly cinema geeks, and now often the trendy rise-of-internet-chic types. Nerds, as in people who are in actual engineering, math and hard sciences, tend to go for Star Trek. No idea why, but it seems to have always been that way (at least as a general rule of thumb, with many individual exceptions either way).
My wife, a quantum chemist, periodically sternly reminds anybody who makes a Star Wars reference in our home, "This is a Star TREK household".
You didnt misunderstand, the phoronoix "article" is misleading.... as often.;.
Seems pretty straightforward to me:
"Application development will not be pausing as we do this: releases every six months of application improvements will continue based on the 4.x codebase. When Frameworks gets to the point where it is ready for serious banging on, then we will start repurposing our highlight applications to the new codebase," Seigo wrote. "We don't want application development to be held up by the library development, and we don't want the library development to create much, if any, need for 'porting' application code. We want 'just recompile and test' to be the common case, with whatever changes do become necessary to be of the simple and even automatable sort.
"If this sounds rather different from how we approached 4.0, that's because it is. The requirements, needs and context for this release are utterly different. We're after evolutionary improvement and broadening our developer ecosystem, and our plans therefore need to, and in our opinion do, reflect that," Seigo added.
KDE 5, then, will not be the paradigm-shifting platform that happened with KDE 4, a move that caused many Linux desktop fans to throw up their hands and complain that KDE 4 should never have been released in its initial state. Criticism of the KDE 4 desktop still exists (this is, after all, the Linux fanbase we're talking about), but it has moved well past the "immature" and "too much change" arguments that once plagued the inboxes of KDE developers.
Qt has a -platform commandline arg to choose between X and Wayland. It can also be set globally. It is reasonable (given historical choices with regard to Qt and KDE) that KDE may well choose that same option as well.
Lots of fearmongering, and now you are greatly afeared. Might want to wait to see what develops rather than reflexively prognosticate doom.
Another greybeard here, been using *nix since before X existed (no, not before X11 existed... I'm talking about X).
Almost everything else has improved and gotten easier. Even things like vi are now all "walk you through" when you fire them up. And they just work.
X doesn't work on my MacBook Pro 13" 7,1 attached to an external monitor... the Nvidia driver doesn't work unless I drop in Option "RegistryDwords" "PowerMizerEnable=0x1; PerfLevelSrc=0x2222; PowerMizerDefaultAC=0x1" into the xorg.conf, and even then it doesn't do xrandr and has rendering peculiarities across two screens, and the open source driver, nouveau, doesn't even see the Mini DisplayPort at all. A choice of a black screen or an undetected screen unless I edit the X config. And I can repeat similar cases across various computers over the last decade... going back to when you *did* have to write your own X configuration files.
So, yeah... it hasn't exactly hit the "mature stage" yet, and that's with at least three massive overhauls/rewrites between four different organizations (MIT, Open Group, XFree86 and x.org). Maybe more... that's off the top of my head.
I'm using remote X right now (doing some work on a headless server I'm switching from 500GB to 7TB, and cleaning the cruft out of the filesystem along the way), but as far as I can see, Wayland is an orthogonal layer to X. It renders bitmaps, compositing them onto a display. Most GUI toolkits these days, including the big two, Gtk+ to Qt, tend to render to bitmaps and then just let X do what Wayland focuses on anyway. As a result, the performance gains of X over a network are disappearing in modern applications. There is no reason Wayland + remote protocol couldn't do about the same as X... if you're talking modern applications written with toolkits with fancy widgets.
And if you say "but I will use X appropriate applications", see the arguments elsewhere in this discussion about how *all* apps have to be network transparent, and having just some apps be especially written for network transparency is a losing proposition.
I love X as a system. When you get it working, it is awesome to be able to ssh -X and get your work done. I see my wife more often because she can get into her computing cluster at work and run her molecular dynamics software remotely and just let the cluster churn away, generating her data. I am using it right now to connect to a computer in my closet with no monitors attached.
That said, those *tasks* are why it is good... not X itself. If something else can do it, and do it better, then I'm happy to switch. If it can do it, and do it better for 99% of my tasks, I'm still happy.
Qt currently supports X and Wayland... although you have to restart the application currently to select a new render mode. It's not impossible that KDE will do the same.
Currently running unison-gtk over ssh -X to pick and choose files to move over on a headless server that's getting a massive harddrive upgrade. It has uses at times, but 99.something% of the time it would be nice to see the stack simplified. Especially if I can haul out the network options when needed.
I remember many years ago, the same complaint was made about using Z80 chips in embedded applications. Why use a multipurpose processor with all kinds of non-optimal features that aren't specifically directed toward running whatever other machine this thing will be stuck in?
Honestly, this is just the same kind of evolution. A base environment to make it easier to work with. Actually, the price point for this is where Z80s were well after that argument ended. It was kind of goofy when network ports were being integrated onto motherboards. To a certain extent, this is the same direction: now the OS is part of the system.
Personally, I spent many happy weekends at a certain movie that started at midnight on Saturdays. I met friends who I am, decades later, friends with, and we've been in each other's wedding parties, lost in wars, and otherwise followed the lives of.
As the active admin of the world's largest English language community wiki (Davis Wiki), we're keen on inclusiveness and will go to great lengths to educate and bring in any real individual. That means a lot of forgiveness, understanding and real world outreach... which is now part of our culture. It's a harder path, but it seems to have worked out quite nicely.
The problem is, Wikipedia has established their culture. And it's based on facts and rules, not emotion and people, which are the things that attract humans to activities. Mechanisms like increasing empathy by calling somebody up and listening to them is tool that work extraordinarily well... and just wouldn't operate in the rules based, often adversarial culture of Wikipedia. It works for Davis Wiki because there are thousands of people already aligned along finding common ground and solutions by any method necessary, even if it's unique.
It also helps that there's no authority for content -- if you dispute something, *you* have to work it out. As human beings. Together. There are no rules regarding content (other than the IRS provided no-commercial activity because we're a non-profit), and there's no admin who has final authority on content, so you really need to actually come to a resolution that will hold. In fact, there are no hard and fast rules at all, which prevents "rules lawyers" from pointing at them or incessant quibbling about their wording or shades of meaning. It's just a shared project to document Davis, California, and the community at hand works things out using very established traditions (which, when they work well, can be as powerful as rules).
Developing strong traditions and a culture of editors rather than rules is tough, but I think it results in a far better situation. True, you encounter the same problems over and over, which would be fixed by a first set of rules, but those rules would in turn create second order problems... and so on, until you have too many to follow (which is part of Wikipedia's current problems).
Last week we drove to Pennsylvania and spent time with friends, at a wedding. We then spent time with other friends playing mini-golf and chatting. We played a couple flash games and commented about indie game development. Monday we spent time in DC, including visiting the National Cryptologic Museum (and checking into the NSA on Foursquare). Later that night, we swapped books and killed a couple beers while talking about quilting and Roman cuisine. We spent Tuesday wandering through the back hills of West Virginia with friends, out of any cell coverage and quite happy (some of those towns not only don't show up on Wikipedia, they don't even appear on Google other than a Flicker photo by a biker who snapped a photo as he rode through!). Wednesday, my wife and I drove all day to Tennessee (back home), stopping and getting fireworks and otherwise enjoying the trip. I'm about to head out and go play a tabletop roleplaying game.
I'm enjoying my life quite nicely without seeing movies. We did go and catch Captain America on Saturday night. It was good -- but certainly not the highlight, focus or anywhere near necessary to have had a blast for the last week. I'm pretty sure I and my friends are enjoying culture without the MPAA being involved. Or the TSA, for that matter.
I believe you misunderstood the statement. The problem being described are those parents who support their children cheating in school or encourage them to feel that they don't actually have to accomplish anything -- that they are intrinsically special regardless of their actions -- and don't require basic chores, hygiene or manners of their kids. The ones who offer "blind support", regardless of the child's actions. Think of the Olsen family from Little House on the Prairie, or if you're younger, the Cartmans from South Park. It's not exactly new, although the word "spoiled" seems to be out of vogue, and "entitled" is the new term.
Always being there to help your child is not the same thing as smiling as your teenager forges your checks to cash for heroin, swings a baseball bat into the side of your wife's head (which you both cover for) and otherwise slowly destroys the entire family. Which is not an invented situation, but rather one I bore witness to.
Love does not mean always agreeing to everything and perpetually giving anything requested. It means doing your best to support someone *appropriately*, and sometimes that means saying "no", or pointing out a dumb or dangerous act. With children, sometimes it even means making them cry and scream as they stomp out that they hate you and that you're the worst father in the world.
As my wife puts it: your children aren't your friends or pets or siblings. They are your children, and a parent confusing that important relationship with any other is either behaving grotesquely ignorant or selfish.
You couldn't have run Linux or any other UNIX-like OS on the sort of PC hardware that was around thirty years ago when MS-DOS was created.
You mean like Microsoft's other OS of the time, Xenix? It was the most installed Unix-like of the era, if the rumors I recall were correct, thanks to it running on low end personal computer hardware.
Alas, like Apple's DOS dominating the Apple ][ and crowding out the P-System or CP/M alternatives (the latter with the Microsoft Z80 SoftCard was great!), MS-DOS was cheap and "good enough" for the IBM-PC and clones. Plus there was the whole standards war between Berkeley flavor and System V, which gave us the great compromise of POSIX... but it took years.
Slashdot Mirror
What the hell? My wife just went to go get me coffee, and she's fresh out of the shower. I just had a magnificent set of breasts next to my head. I'm guessing that most people here have access to a naked member of their preferred gender, or are in between partners. More over, we see our kids naked, deal with changing on boats or while camping with friends... nakedness, even erotic photos, aren't exactly the most notable things in the world. Pretty much everybody gets naked.
Can we please just act like adults, realize the photos were part of tracking down evidence, and not act like a women without clothes on is an exceptional thing? Who the hell cares? The police used them to identify the possessor of the stolen goods. What's next? Giggling after you shake an oncologist's hands because he's touched lots of boobs?
Why use a different kernel for the server and desktop versions? Even Microsoft came to their senses on that one and started just using the NT kernel for desktops and servers.
Oh, to live in a universe in which somebody interviewed the developer and he were to answer that in the first reply. And bunnies flowed hot and cold from the tap.
Half of this already exists. Now, down to the basement with welding equipment, large diameter pipe and some more test subjects...
You seem confused. The project releases a matching server that does use Linux as the kernel. The desktop OS does not. It's based on AtheOS, a new OS from scratch with a fair amount of application support built up over the years for a minor OS.
Check out http://i3wm.org/
I've used KDE since the beginning, but used ion3 for many years (long after he abandoned development). I'm currently using kwin with very custom rules, but I dabbled in, and really should look at i3 again. It's capable of being easily configured exactly like my ion3 configuration, only with a much cleaner codebase.
Actually, I rather like the point that X is to Wayland as http: is to file: for the web. It's a silly comparison, however.
Personally, I like the philosophy behind Wayland, as it does a nice repartition of the problem that better fits. I use remote X all the time and assume I will continue to use remote applications when Wayland is popular. Modern X toolkits use techniques that are a poor match for remote X anyway (mostly rendering to bitmaps internally and then outputting them via X). Things are changing regardless of what protocol we use for remote user interfaces. It's not a healthy thing to stick with technology due to nostalgia, and considering that there is nothing yet to compare X to in a Wayland solution for remote interfaces (or, for real world use, for *local* interfaces), it seems remarkably premature to declare X a winner.
I'm happy to see what develops and then make a choice. X is neat, I've used it for a long time, but I'm not going to ignore the *possibility* that something better might come along out of bizarre loyalty.
Until there are actual mature implementations of both methods, why choose a camp?
It's more named about Percival Lowell, the founder of the observatory. Thus the overlaid PL that is the symbol and the fact that the god the (then) planet was named for started with P and L.
And of course, there was also the fact that Percival Lowell was the owner and trainer of the dog that acted in all those Mickey Mouse films as "Pluto".
You mean you haven't read his story accepting the role of Editor-in-Chief and promising to expand the scope of the site?
Actually, I rather like it. It's a bit of a conversation starter. Slashdot is not a legal forum or intended to be some kind of debate society. It's an opinionated forum. Perhaps it's just not to your taste?
Everyone only drives on the same side because of government regulated road rules
I'm pretty sure that the Pope dictated left way back in the early middle ages, but in the colonies and later the United States, wagons tended to the right long before there were any laws on the books. The community decided that informally long before it was enforced by law.
It might surprise you that in many cities, pedestrians are on the sidewalks despite there being no laws keeping them there (and for that matter, despite jaywalking laws in other cities, people still cross in the middle of the road).
And they are pretty explicit about it. They are open in what they share, and how they do what they do.
I'm impressed that they allow you to download your own content and then delete it off their system -- *and* are upfront about how the second order information is not guaranteed to be deleted. Given how indexing and audit trails work, I can see this as reasonable, and probably necessary (especially the logs).
It's not the allowing of the removal that's impressive to me; it is their open admission of the limitations of that deletion. It's not spun to be perfect, it's presented as it really is. I'm not saying that they are perfect or always will be, but right now, they are a pretty good example of how I want a company that I host my information with to behave.
And of course, as you say, they have some pretty compelling business reasons to keep it that way.
Arughgafflemrawvorwwww!!!
Why the *hell* have they not rolled Google + out to Apps users yet? We're the freaking power users of your services, Google! Seriously... slap a beta and warning on it and just do it already.
There better be some very nice reason for the delay -- probably one I won't use, but helpful for some App admins -- like control over circles or auditable circles (for places like finance companies that need records).
I know one champion Scrabble player is Sal Piro, who is also the president of the Rocky Horror Fan Club. He's a neat guy, in the Guinness Book of World Records for having seen the same movie the most number of times.
There's a certain mindset there.
You mean like we currently do with Horseshoe crabs, catching them in huge masses, draining their blood and then returning them to the sea?
No, Star Wars is popular among geeks -- formerly cinema geeks, and now often the trendy rise-of-internet-chic types. Nerds, as in people who are in actual engineering, math and hard sciences, tend to go for Star Trek. No idea why, but it seems to have always been that way (at least as a general rule of thumb, with many individual exceptions either way).
My wife, a quantum chemist, periodically sternly reminds anybody who makes a Star Wars reference in our home, "This is a Star TREK household".
You didnt misunderstand, the phoronoix "article" is misleading. ... as often .;.
Seems pretty straightforward to me:
"Application development will not be pausing as we do this: releases every six months of application improvements will continue based on the 4.x codebase. When Frameworks gets to the point where it is ready for serious banging on, then we will start repurposing our highlight applications to the new codebase," Seigo wrote. "We don't want application development to be held up by the library development, and we don't want the library development to create much, if any, need for 'porting' application code. We want 'just recompile and test' to be the common case, with whatever changes do become necessary to be of the simple and even automatable sort.
"If this sounds rather different from how we approached 4.0, that's because it is. The requirements, needs and context for this release are utterly different. We're after evolutionary improvement and broadening our developer ecosystem, and our plans therefore need to, and in our opinion do, reflect that," Seigo added.
KDE 5, then, will not be the paradigm-shifting platform that happened with KDE 4, a move that caused many Linux desktop fans to throw up their hands and complain that KDE 4 should never have been released in its initial state. Criticism of the KDE 4 desktop still exists (this is, after all, the Linux fanbase we're talking about), but it has moved well past the "immature" and "too much change" arguments that once plagued the inboxes of KDE developers.
Qt has a -platform commandline arg to choose between X and Wayland. It can also be set globally. It is reasonable (given historical choices with regard to Qt and KDE) that KDE may well choose that same option as well.
Lots of fearmongering, and now you are greatly afeared. Might want to wait to see what develops rather than reflexively prognosticate doom.
Another greybeard here, been using *nix since before X existed (no, not before X11 existed... I'm talking about X).
Almost everything else has improved and gotten easier. Even things like vi are now all "walk you through" when you fire them up. And they just work.
X doesn't work on my MacBook Pro 13" 7,1 attached to an external monitor... the Nvidia driver doesn't work unless I drop in Option "RegistryDwords" "PowerMizerEnable=0x1; PerfLevelSrc=0x2222; PowerMizerDefaultAC=0x1" into the xorg.conf, and even then it doesn't do xrandr and has rendering peculiarities across two screens, and the open source driver, nouveau, doesn't even see the Mini DisplayPort at all. A choice of a black screen or an undetected screen unless I edit the X config. And I can repeat similar cases across various computers over the last decade... going back to when you *did* have to write your own X configuration files.
So, yeah... it hasn't exactly hit the "mature stage" yet, and that's with at least three massive overhauls/rewrites between four different organizations (MIT, Open Group, XFree86 and x.org). Maybe more... that's off the top of my head.
I'm using remote X right now (doing some work on a headless server I'm switching from 500GB to 7TB, and cleaning the cruft out of the filesystem along the way), but as far as I can see, Wayland is an orthogonal layer to X. It renders bitmaps, compositing them onto a display. Most GUI toolkits these days, including the big two, Gtk+ to Qt, tend to render to bitmaps and then just let X do what Wayland focuses on anyway. As a result, the performance gains of X over a network are disappearing in modern applications. There is no reason Wayland + remote protocol couldn't do about the same as X... if you're talking modern applications written with toolkits with fancy widgets.
And if you say "but I will use X appropriate applications", see the arguments elsewhere in this discussion about how *all* apps have to be network transparent, and having just some apps be especially written for network transparency is a losing proposition.
I love X as a system. When you get it working, it is awesome to be able to ssh -X and get your work done. I see my wife more often because she can get into her computing cluster at work and run her molecular dynamics software remotely and just let the cluster churn away, generating her data. I am using it right now to connect to a computer in my closet with no monitors attached.
That said, those *tasks* are why it is good... not X itself. If something else can do it, and do it better, then I'm happy to switch. If it can do it, and do it better for 99% of my tasks, I'm still happy.
Qt currently supports X and Wayland... although you have to restart the application currently to select a new render mode. It's not impossible that KDE will do the same.
Currently running unison-gtk over ssh -X to pick and choose files to move over on a headless server that's getting a massive harddrive upgrade. It has uses at times, but 99.something% of the time it would be nice to see the stack simplified. Especially if I can haul out the network options when needed.
I remember many years ago, the same complaint was made about using Z80 chips in embedded applications. Why use a multipurpose processor with all kinds of non-optimal features that aren't specifically directed toward running whatever other machine this thing will be stuck in?
Honestly, this is just the same kind of evolution. A base environment to make it easier to work with. Actually, the price point for this is where Z80s were well after that argument ended. It was kind of goofy when network ports were being integrated onto motherboards. To a certain extent, this is the same direction: now the OS is part of the system.
Personally, I spent many happy weekends at a certain movie that started at midnight on Saturdays. I met friends who I am, decades later, friends with, and we've been in each other's wedding parties, lost in wars, and otherwise followed the lives of.
As the active admin of the world's largest English language community wiki (Davis Wiki), we're keen on inclusiveness and will go to great lengths to educate and bring in any real individual. That means a lot of forgiveness, understanding and real world outreach... which is now part of our culture. It's a harder path, but it seems to have worked out quite nicely.
The problem is, Wikipedia has established their culture. And it's based on facts and rules, not emotion and people, which are the things that attract humans to activities. Mechanisms like increasing empathy by calling somebody up and listening to them is tool that work extraordinarily well... and just wouldn't operate in the rules based, often adversarial culture of Wikipedia. It works for Davis Wiki because there are thousands of people already aligned along finding common ground and solutions by any method necessary, even if it's unique.
It also helps that there's no authority for content -- if you dispute something, *you* have to work it out. As human beings. Together. There are no rules regarding content (other than the IRS provided no-commercial activity because we're a non-profit), and there's no admin who has final authority on content, so you really need to actually come to a resolution that will hold. In fact, there are no hard and fast rules at all, which prevents "rules lawyers" from pointing at them or incessant quibbling about their wording or shades of meaning. It's just a shared project to document Davis, California, and the community at hand works things out using very established traditions (which, when they work well, can be as powerful as rules).
Developing strong traditions and a culture of editors rather than rules is tough, but I think it results in a far better situation. True, you encounter the same problems over and over, which would be fixed by a first set of rules, but those rules would in turn create second order problems... and so on, until you have too many to follow (which is part of Wikipedia's current problems).
I can see why people are returning them.
I just can't figure out how more of them are being returned than were sold. That's a cool trick.
Last week we drove to Pennsylvania and spent time with friends, at a wedding. We then spent time with other friends playing mini-golf and chatting. We played a couple flash games and commented about indie game development. Monday we spent time in DC, including visiting the National Cryptologic Museum (and checking into the NSA on Foursquare). Later that night, we swapped books and killed a couple beers while talking about quilting and Roman cuisine. We spent Tuesday wandering through the back hills of West Virginia with friends, out of any cell coverage and quite happy (some of those towns not only don't show up on Wikipedia, they don't even appear on Google other than a Flicker photo by a biker who snapped a photo as he rode through!). Wednesday, my wife and I drove all day to Tennessee (back home), stopping and getting fireworks and otherwise enjoying the trip. I'm about to head out and go play a tabletop roleplaying game.
I'm enjoying my life quite nicely without seeing movies. We did go and catch Captain America on Saturday night. It was good -- but certainly not the highlight, focus or anywhere near necessary to have had a blast for the last week. I'm pretty sure I and my friends are enjoying culture without the MPAA being involved. Or the TSA, for that matter.
I believe you misunderstood the statement. The problem being described are those parents who support their children cheating in school or encourage them to feel that they don't actually have to accomplish anything -- that they are intrinsically special regardless of their actions -- and don't require basic chores, hygiene or manners of their kids. The ones who offer "blind support", regardless of the child's actions. Think of the Olsen family from Little House on the Prairie, or if you're younger, the Cartmans from South Park. It's not exactly new, although the word "spoiled" seems to be out of vogue, and "entitled" is the new term.
Always being there to help your child is not the same thing as smiling as your teenager forges your checks to cash for heroin, swings a baseball bat into the side of your wife's head (which you both cover for) and otherwise slowly destroys the entire family. Which is not an invented situation, but rather one I bore witness to.
Love does not mean always agreeing to everything and perpetually giving anything requested. It means doing your best to support someone *appropriately*, and sometimes that means saying "no", or pointing out a dumb or dangerous act. With children, sometimes it even means making them cry and scream as they stomp out that they hate you and that you're the worst father in the world.
As my wife puts it: your children aren't your friends or pets or siblings. They are your children, and a parent confusing that important relationship with any other is either behaving grotesquely ignorant or selfish.
You couldn't have run Linux or any other UNIX-like OS on the sort of PC hardware that was around thirty years ago when MS-DOS was created.
You mean like Microsoft's other OS of the time, Xenix? It was the most installed Unix-like of the era, if the rumors I recall were correct, thanks to it running on low end personal computer hardware.
Alas, like Apple's DOS dominating the Apple ][ and crowding out the P-System or CP/M alternatives (the latter with the Microsoft Z80 SoftCard was great!), MS-DOS was cheap and "good enough" for the IBM-PC and clones. Plus there was the whole standards war between Berkeley flavor and System V, which gave us the great compromise of POSIX... but it took years.