ignorance and stupidity aren't the same thing. They may quite often go hand in hand, but calling people stupid because they have a lack of knowledge isn't the best way to win friends and influence people. There a lot of things any single person won't know, including you, (I can say this with certainty because the amount of knowledge in the universe is infinite), yet not all people are stupid. They're just ignorant. Teach them, don't call them stupid. Even if they are, it doesn't help anyone to continually tell them so.
The real purpose of these robots would be to get down through the Martian permafrost or the Europan global glacier to investigate the (warmer? wetter? life-infested??) region below...
Scientists actually think there's life in Europe? What do we pay these people for?...
Hmm, and even though these numbers are probably higher than Europe's numbers, they sure don't add up to a million, even altogether (28,575). As a matter of fact, even when added together they can't top the real "accidental death" champion by a long shot:
Motor Vehicles (1999): 42,401
Still going strong. But of course that's not a proper comparison. The accidental firearms deaths comprise the lowest number, below every other category of accidental death (Other, Environmental, Medical, Fire, Drowning, Suffocation, Poisoning, Falls, and Motor Vehicles, in increasing order). Oh, and by the way, homicides involving firearms have been dropping for about a decade, they're down about 90% from 1992. Hard to get that impression from the media, isn't it?
Now, I have no problem with anyone having the opinion that something is bad (firearms, for instance), even though I may vehemently disagree with that opinion. But at the very least if you're going to argue against something, please stick to reality and real numbers to support your opinion.
If we want to ban hate speech because it's damaging to others, we may want to think about that fact that ignorance about fundamental aspects of reality can be far more destructive. People like the parent poster scare me a hell of a lot more than some wacko skinhead group running a website. Hate crimes are bad, but I believe the real root of all of it is ignorance. Ignorance of reality, ignorance of right and wrong, ignorance of the fact that we're all the same, black, brown, red, yellow, pink, white or green. We're all just big "bags of mostly water", trying to eke out an existence on the microscopically thin two-dimensional surface of a sphere, surrounded by empty space. Hate groups are just empty fools, thriving on ignorance.
And if you think the NRA/ILA has to make up numbers just because they're pro-gun, go to their source: National Center for Health Statistics. The same government that usually wants to ban firearms has little reason to deflate firearms statistics, now do they? If you don't even believe them, do your own research, but don't spout irrelevant numbers out of thin air.
Seriously, how can you sue "The Little Pie Company [littlepiecompany.com]" and still claim to have a soul?
King Arthur: "What, that?" "Tim": "Whot?" King Arthur: "It's a bunny rabbit!" "Tim": "But it's the most vicious rabbit you've ever seen! It's got nasty little teethies! Fss, fss." (Makes fang motions with his hand.)... King Arthur: "Brother Maynard, bring out the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch!"
(With apologies to Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail.)
Slashdot posts some screenshots taken from an early beta of a 'who knows when it's released, if ever'-Microsoft Operating System, and what do you think will happen?
a) The server with the images won't receive a lot of hits through Slashdot, since no Linux user is interested in screenshots of a future Microsoft OS ("It's probably V4p0r anyway")
b) The server gets slashdotted 3 minutes after the posting went up, because almost every user visiting the homepage of slashdot is interested in screenshots of a future Microsoft OS.
I guessed a), but... gosh... b) is the right answer. I wonder why though..:)
As a wise man has been quoted as saying: "Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer..."
However, I've only seen one solitary post on this whole page asking the real question: How much of your soul will you have to sell them in order to use the next generation of Windows? Whether it's going to look like OS X or Lycoris doesn't really matter. What matters is:
How many constitutional amendments will the EULA attempt to get the general population to write off, in order to be subjugated by their precious new shiny version of Windows?
How many times a day will the OS tell you that you're trying to do something not permitted by the built-in DRM?
How often will the OS phone home to MS, and what will it tell them?
How many times will you have to re-register your licensed, legal copy of the OS, due to the "War on Piracy", because you wanted to put in a new video card?
How many times each day will the OS treat you like a common criminal?
Those are the questions we need answers to, in order to show people why they don't want to buy it. Where are the leaked copies of the next-generation EULAs? Notably absent, while we focus instead on pretty pictures. Oooh, shiny!
I realize that this is a rather preachy and heavy post, I just felt we needed some perspective. And I'm genuinely interested in seeing whether anyone has knowledge about these things. It will be quite interesting to see whether I get modded up, down, or not at all.
...they can. Anyone can. If they purchase a commercial license for BitKeeper. Then the product belongs to you, fully and completely, and you can do anything you want with it, short of copying and redistributing it, since it will still be a copyrighted work.
I think this is the point everyone seems to be missing. Larry McVoy sells BitKeeper commercially to pay for its development, and possibly to even make a little profit (the philistine!). He doesn't feel like letting people use his product FOR FREE to develop a competing product. But he isn't attempting to dictate what you will do with the product after you buy it.
This is a long way from the kind of insane grabastics we've seen from Microsoft et al, where they ignore the 1st Amendment and try to tell you that you can't talk about their products without their permission (Frontpage, anyone? SQL Server?), and that's with products that you've paid good money for the privilege of owning. (How is that even legal? I never did figure that one out.)
IMNSFHO, Mr. McVoy has a quite reasonable license attached to his commercial product, which he has graciously allowed the Open Source community to use for free. Maybe even because he wants to (wait for it) support Open Source! (DOH! Really?) If you actually take a look at what kind of guy he is, as obviously Linus has, I don't think anyone here (except the true zealots) would think for a moment that Mr. McVoy would try to stick such draconian requirements into the commercial version of the license. All he's saying is, "If you want to work on a replacement for BitKeeper using BitKeeper, at least pay for a license, so I can afford to keep BitKeeper going until you're done developing the replacement." So, to reiterate, every single developer using BitKeeper is free to develop a replacement for BitKeeper, just not with the FREE version. Using the free version of a commercial product is a privilege, not a right. If you want to have rights, buy the damn thing.
I haven't read the article so I won't comment on that, but the people posting here have definitely gone off the deep end, dumping on Mr. McVoy like he's some kind of "Microsoft, Junior" in disguise, while giving no consideration to his character, the character of his company, the professional judgement of Linus Torvalds and company, and the immense benefit the Open Source community is currently receiving from this "evil capitalist bastard" who dared to attach a restriction to the FREE use of his COMMERCIAL product. Geesh.
Disclaimer: None of this has much to do with whether Proprietary software licenses are good or bad. Obviously, they can be quite bad, since abusive companies can abuse them. But this license and these terms aren't unreasonable by any stretch of the imagination, and will probably never become so as long as Larry McVoy is at the helm. Whether such a proprietary license could ever be used in a bad way by a future owner of the company is another matter, as is the question of how far software licenses will hold up in a court of law, be they reasonable or unreasonable. Those are all separate questions.
I send you this post to ask your advice. Have a nice day. All your opinions are belong to Microsoft.
First, there is no difference between the different "releases", because they're all the same release. Just different levels of support, and they decided to give a break to people who upgrade. Although I would have given a better discount to upgraders than to students, but whatever.
Second, you can't download the ISO of Libranet 2.7 anywhere. Libranet are the ones that only offer the previous version free to download (so right now version 2.0 is available on their website and LinuxISO.org for download, but not version 2.7, the latest and spectacularest). They had a beta program for 2.7, but that only went on for a few weeks.
The pricing levels don't bother me as much as the fact that the prices more than doubled since the last version I purchased. Version 1.9.1 cost me $25 and was well worth it. $60 is getting a little steep for what amounts to a somewhat polished Debian install.
That said, Libranet is a great distro for a new Linux user, especially if you're looking to get into Debian and want something that isn't slow as molasses in January on an older system (if you've tried any recent Mandrake up to 8.2, you know what I'm talking about. Ugh. Looking forward to trying 9.0). Libranet sets up a nice, working system from which you can fiddle around and graduate to plain Debian later on if you're inclined that way.
Ask anyone involved in usability - double click makes no sense
Sure, double-clicking on desktop items makes no sense. Unless you are aiming your product at a market filled with about 900 bazillion people who have spent the last 12 years (since Win 3.0, at least) double-clicking the icons on their desktop.
You don't make money by trying to leverage your product to make people do something the "right" way. You make money by giving them a product they can easily slip into using on a daily basis, without being frustrated by a thousand usless quirks^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H "usability enhancements". You make money by giving people a tool that is the most efficient and helpful way to complete their daily tasks. Coming from a Windows/Macintosh computer which they have used just fine for a decade or more, and being faced with icons that act like web links, can drive the average user nuts, even more than bigger problems would.
I have set up numerous versions and flavors of Linux over the last few years, and had major headaches along the way, mainly with setting up X ("hear, hear" everyone says;). But do you know what one of the things was that always irritated me more than anything? The fact that KDE used single-click on the desktop, violating the dynamic set forth by every other popular desktop environment. I have always immediately changed that "feature". It may make sense from someone's POV, but not from mine, and not from the POV of the millions of people who have been using Win/Mac/BeOS/Whatever for as long as they've been using a PC. I've used Win/Mac/BeOS, and in every single one if you click once, it selects, if you double-click, it launches. I've lost count of the number of times I've double-clicked and launched an app twice, or clicked once in an attempt to select, and had it launch instead. Argh.
Another part of this is if you right-click on something that isn't selected, you don't get the proper right-click context menu. (At least this is the behavior in the desktop OS that 90% of the world's population is used to using.) So many of us have developed the habit of click-once-to-select, right-click-to-get-proper-context-menu.
You want to disrupt this ingrained and fairly efficient process, simply because single-clicking follows some sort of "ask anyone" usability rules? People aren't machines, and when you take usability too far it often has the opposite of the desired effect. People have different ways of using the computer, so obviously not all usability rules can apply everywhere, to everyone. Even Micros~1 tried to change the desktop to use single-clicks, and people hated it. Remember "Windows Desktop Update"? That seemed to fall by the wayside rather quickly, and the reasons should be obvious.
The rest of the changes and points you outlined I agree with completely and made perfect sense. So I was kind of surprised by this one. Making KDE use double-clicks on the desktop makes just as much sense as every other change they've made in RH8. They know their target audience and they aren't pulling any punches.
With the availability of high quality digital video cameras and Firewire cards and drives and other gear becoming pretty popular, it's now possible to make professional quality video recordings, capture them to a hard drive, edit them with something like Adobe Premiere, and send the final cut back out to be stored on a digital video cassette, or DVD, or whatever.
Unfortunately, in the middle of this process when you're capturing the video to a hard drive, it takes up *MASSIVE* amounts of disk space. The DV stream is something like 25Mbits/sec. One of my college teachers is into DV production and has been teaching classes on it. He purchased a 160GB Maxtor Firewire drive for his classes, and of course I laughed and told him they'd never fill it up. Since then they've filled both that drive and a couple of 80GB drives several times. Even with all that space there isn't room to store the video long-term, there's just enough room to capture it, edit it and store it back to a regular DV medium like the cassette in your video camera.
Once again the parent poster has fallen into the mental trap of "if I've got no use for this, how could anyone else have a use for it?" We all do this, from time to time, unfortunately.
You're probably thinking mainly of the Hindenburg disaster when talking about something with hydrogen in it exploding. The problem with that is, A) the Hindenburg didn't explode, and B) it is highly unlikely that the fire that did consume the craft was caused by hydrogen being ignited by a spark. I got this from my dad and then later saw a report on it on PBS. Through a quick search on Google, I found the most relevant page I could, here.
The gist of it is that the skin of the Hindenburg was made of fabric and coated with laquers and metal based paints, and the material itself was highly flammable. (The guy on the PBS documentary had a piece of the original fabric and showed how nicely it burned.) That's why the entire surface of the dirigible burned within seconds and it crashed to the ground, and that's also why it burned with a bright orange flame. A hydrogen flame is nearly invisible in daylight; in darkness it's a pale blue. Hydrogen is lighter than air, thus always burns upwards, not in all directions. The long and short of it is that there were many indicators that a few thousand observant engineers and scientists over the decades should have picked up on, that should have told them their assumptions about hydrogen's involvment in that disaster were wrong. But to this day, the Hindenburg "explosion" is used in books and courses to show how "dangerous" hydrogen is. Just goes to show that just because something has been "known" a for a long time, doesn't mean it's correct.
While we were talking about this (dad and I), he also told me about some experiments he'd seen and/or done many years ago with hydrogen. For example, if you have a tank filled with hydrogen and poke a hole in the side, and light the stream of hydrogen that's coming out with a match, guess what happens? No, it doesn't explode. If it's dark, you'll see a blue flame right at the edge of the hole. You'll see it until there isn't any gas left in the bottle. The pressure of the escaping gas is always just enough to keep it from burning back into the bottle. But there's also another reason it doesn't burn back into the bottle and blow up. Say you stick that match into the hole, guess what happens? The hydrogen will put it out. Poof. Not enough oxygen. See, hydrogen is only flammable in the presence of oxygen. And it's only explosive in tightly confined spaces. So inside you're battery's fuel cell, you'd first have to mix it with a certain percentage of oxygen, while it's still sealed, and then somehow introduce a spark, inside the case, aslo while it's still sealed. Good luck.
Anyway, I just wanted to spread some updated information on the Hindenburg, and I've always thought that whole pure-hydrogen-puts-out-a-match thing really interesting.
Actually, all joking aside, it would be really interesting to see some sort of informed daily report on the comparitive influence of Free/Open software in the world. But I guess I'll just have to keep reading Slashdot. . . .
*WHOOSH!* Ha! Missed m-*OW!*
It's conceivable that because we are in a state of War, it might even be considered a treasonous (sp?) act.
Maybe that would apply if we were in a state of war, but we aren't, at least not until an act of congress says we are. Just because some dupe spouts the phrase "War on Terrorism" on TV 30 times a day doesn't mean a state of war exists with anyone. Besides which, who would we declare war on, Terrorland?
Just so this isn't offtopic: I haven't seen anyone actually asking or stating what exactly these people did to during their scanning of these networks. If all they did was use passive scanning techniques to look for holes, I would be scared at that kind of reaction to it. You should all be. (What if you accidently passively scan the wrong netblock during your next security audit?) On the other hand, if they were actively using known exploits to find vulnerabilities, then they definitely deserve to get a smack upside the brain-pan for being ess tee double-O process ID.
Yeah, well when you live in a grass/wood/plywood/tin shack as many people do over there to this day, I suppose it's not too difficult to move the whole shack across town, with a community of people helping.;)
(Note: I know someone from there so I'm not just making generalizations from a "US perspective", that's how it really is in the Philippines. Which seems like all the more reason for them to be working on free alternatives to costly software for running their government and school systems.)
but they are also doing this in the Philippines. The Advanced Science and Technology Institute has put together a somewhat simplified single-cd distro on which they've included such things as OpenOffice. They've been showing it off to the public and getting great response to it. It seems to be targetted toward home users and educational environments. According to the FAQ it's based on Red Hat 7.2. Anyone interested in trying it out can download an ISO here. A snippet from the website (the distro is named Bayanihan Linux):
BAYANIHAN is a Filipino tradition where people in a community help their neighbor in physically moving their house to a different place.
BAYANIHAN embodies the spirit of the Open Source movement. BAYANIHAN connotes people joining in and helping those in need. It also implies a movement from one place to a hopefully better place.
LINUX was added to the final name since the software's basic framework is LINUX. It was built on top of a Red Hat Linux operating system.
XOSL can be installed on a non-DOS dedicated partition without requiring DOS at any step of the process. I've done it.
XOSL is a very nice bootloader. It's not just the fact that it's graphical, it's also the myriad of other features that make it nice. For instance when you go into the partition setup it shows you what partitions are available and can usually identify the OS residing on that partition. Compare that to the LILO text config file where if you're not lucky you have to hand edit and remember which/dev entry corresponds to which partition and which partition contains which OS. You're a moron if you think the average user should be expected to be able to go through that process. With XOSL I can point and click and set up a boot menu with a dozen different operating systems in a few seconds. Plus I can hide partitions, which makes it easy to run multiple copies of WinXX of whatever flavor on the same disk. You can also password protect the setup and each individual partition in the menu can have its own password, or none. Again, all that is done through a point-and-click interface. One of the best features for me was the fact that XOSL doesn't require ANY OS to be installed on the computer in order to be set up and changed.
Questions I always see here, like "What does this have that LILO doesn't have?" are incredibly idiotic. So many of you seem to forget that normal humans need to be able to use computers. Making something easy to use is not necessarily a bad thing. I don't understand why the open source community is so full of people that seem to do nothing but beat down new or different ideas.
What if they have made a real big earthquake with damage and such?
Lord Richter: "Do not be so proud of these children you've instructed; the power of one million bouncing children is insignificant next to the power of the Force..."
Commander of Child-Powered Earthquake Machine: "You don't frighten us with your scientist's ways, Lord Richter. Your sad devotion to that ancient profession has not helped you conjure up new fault lines, or given you clairvoyance enough to--urk! Ack! Ick! Urg!"
Prime Minister Tarkin: "Enough of this! Richter, stop jumping up and down on him!"
Slashdot Mirror
ignorance and stupidity aren't the same thing. They may quite often go hand in hand, but calling people stupid because they have a lack of knowledge isn't the best way to win friends and influence people. There a lot of things any single person won't know, including you, (I can say this with certainty because the amount of knowledge in the universe is infinite), yet not all people are stupid. They're just ignorant. Teach them, don't call them stupid. Even if they are, it doesn't help anyone to continually tell them so.
Scientists actually think there's life in Europe? What do we pay these people for?...
Oh, Europa. Sorry. My bad.
Excuse me?!? Millions of accidental shootings each year? My God, what a stupendously warped view of reality.
a il&ID=127
I couldn't find any readily available statistics for Europe specifically, but here are some numbers from the US:
Firearms deaths (1999):
Suicide: 16,599 (not accidental)
Homicide: 10,828 (not accidental)
Accidental: 824
Hmm, and even though these numbers are probably higher than Europe's numbers, they sure don't add up to a million, even altogether (28,575). As a matter of fact, even when added together they can't top the real "accidental death" champion by a long shot:
Motor Vehicles (1999): 42,401
Still going strong. But of course that's not a proper comparison. The accidental firearms deaths comprise the lowest number, below every other category of accidental death (Other, Environmental, Medical, Fire, Drowning, Suffocation, Poisoning, Falls, and Motor Vehicles, in increasing order). Oh, and by the way, homicides involving firearms have been dropping for about a decade, they're down about 90% from 1992. Hard to get that impression from the media, isn't it?
Now, I have no problem with anyone having the opinion that something is bad (firearms, for instance), even though I may vehemently disagree with that opinion. But at the very least if you're going to argue against something, please stick to reality and real numbers to support your opinion.
If we want to ban hate speech because it's damaging to others, we may want to think about that fact that ignorance about fundamental aspects of reality can be far more destructive. People like the parent poster scare me a hell of a lot more than some wacko skinhead group running a website. Hate crimes are bad, but I believe the real root of all of it is ignorance. Ignorance of reality, ignorance of right and wrong, ignorance of the fact that we're all the same, black, brown, red, yellow, pink, white or green. We're all just big "bags of mostly water", trying to eke out an existence on the microscopically thin two-dimensional surface of a sphere, surrounded by empty space. Hate groups are just empty fools, thriving on ignorance.
Reference for the numbers above: A spreadsheet from here:
http://www.nraila.org/FactSheets.asp?FormMode=Det
And if you think the NRA/ILA has to make up numbers just because they're pro-gun, go to their source: National Center for Health Statistics. The same government that usually wants to ban firearms has little reason to deflate firearms statistics, now do they? If you don't even believe them, do your own research, but don't spout irrelevant numbers out of thin air.
Am I the only one who looked over that bunch of totally dorky looking people, and then went right for the lion--um, I mean the Debian guy?
Who the heck is that anyway? The video wouldn't come up, of course.
Tomorrows headlines will read:
MOON HOAX BOOK HOAX, SAY NAY-SAYERS
How decidedly Bloom County-esque.
Tsk, tsk. Such grammar. What is Slashdot coming to?
Somebody set up us the meteor shower!
King Arthur: "What, that?"
"Tim": "Whot?"
King Arthur: "It's a bunny rabbit!"
"Tim": "But it's the most vicious rabbit you've ever seen! It's got nasty little teethies! Fss, fss." (Makes fang motions with his hand.)
King Arthur: "Brother Maynard, bring out the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch!"
(With apologies to Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail.)
Hey, old-timer, there's a new century a-comin' in, and she's got a full head o' steam. LONG LIVE THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY! Woo-hoo!!
Gotcha.
As a wise man has been quoted as saying: "Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer..."
However, I've only seen one solitary post on this whole page asking the real question: How much of your soul will you have to sell them in order to use the next generation of Windows? Whether it's going to look like OS X or Lycoris doesn't really matter. What matters is:
How many constitutional amendments will the EULA attempt to get the general population to write off, in order to be subjugated by their precious new shiny version of Windows?
How many times a day will the OS tell you that you're trying to do something not permitted by the built-in DRM?
How often will the OS phone home to MS, and what will it tell them?
How many times will you have to re-register your licensed, legal copy of the OS, due to the "War on Piracy", because you wanted to put in a new video card?
How many times each day will the OS treat you like a common criminal?
Those are the questions we need answers to, in order to show people why they don't want to buy it. Where are the leaked copies of the next-generation EULAs? Notably absent, while we focus instead on pretty pictures. Oooh, shiny!
I realize that this is a rather preachy and heavy post, I just felt we needed some perspective. And I'm genuinely interested in seeing whether anyone has knowledge about these things. It will be quite interesting to see whether I get modded up, down, or not at all.
...they can. Anyone can. If they purchase a commercial license for BitKeeper. Then the product belongs to you, fully and completely, and you can do anything you want with it, short of copying and redistributing it, since it will still be a copyrighted work.
I think this is the point everyone seems to be missing. Larry McVoy sells BitKeeper commercially to pay for its development, and possibly to even make a little profit (the philistine!). He doesn't feel like letting people use his product FOR FREE to develop a competing product. But he isn't attempting to dictate what you will do with the product after you buy it.
This is a long way from the kind of insane grabastics we've seen from Microsoft et al, where they ignore the 1st Amendment and try to tell you that you can't talk about their products without their permission (Frontpage, anyone? SQL Server?), and that's with products that you've paid good money for the privilege of owning. (How is that even legal? I never did figure that one out.)
IMNSFHO, Mr. McVoy has a quite reasonable license attached to his commercial product, which he has graciously allowed the Open Source community to use for free. Maybe even because he wants to (wait for it) support Open Source! (DOH! Really?) If you actually take a look at what kind of guy he is, as obviously Linus has, I don't think anyone here (except the true zealots) would think for a moment that Mr. McVoy would try to stick such draconian requirements into the commercial version of the license. All he's saying is, "If you want to work on a replacement for BitKeeper using BitKeeper, at least pay for a license, so I can afford to keep BitKeeper going until you're done developing the replacement." So, to reiterate, every single developer using BitKeeper is free to develop a replacement for BitKeeper, just not with the FREE version. Using the free version of a commercial product is a privilege, not a right. If you want to have rights, buy the damn thing.
I haven't read the article so I won't comment on that, but the people posting here have definitely gone off the deep end, dumping on Mr. McVoy like he's some kind of "Microsoft, Junior" in disguise, while giving no consideration to his character, the character of his company, the professional judgement of Linus Torvalds and company, and the immense benefit the Open Source community is currently receiving from this "evil capitalist bastard" who dared to attach a restriction to the FREE use of his COMMERCIAL product. Geesh.
Disclaimer: None of this has much to do with whether Proprietary software licenses are good or bad. Obviously, they can be quite bad, since abusive companies can abuse them. But this license and these terms aren't unreasonable by any stretch of the imagination, and will probably never become so as long as Larry McVoy is at the helm. Whether such a proprietary license could ever be used in a bad way by a future owner of the company is another matter, as is the question of how far software licenses will hold up in a court of law, be they reasonable or unreasonable. Those are all separate questions.
I send you this post to ask your advice. Have a nice day. All your opinions are belong to Microsoft.
First, there is no difference between the different "releases", because they're all the same release. Just different levels of support, and they decided to give a break to people who upgrade. Although I would have given a better discount to upgraders than to students, but whatever.
Second, you can't download the ISO of Libranet 2.7 anywhere. Libranet are the ones that only offer the previous version free to download (so right now version 2.0 is available on their website and LinuxISO.org for download, but not version 2.7, the latest and spectacularest). They had a beta program for 2.7, but that only went on for a few weeks.
The pricing levels don't bother me as much as the fact that the prices more than doubled since the last version I purchased. Version 1.9.1 cost me $25 and was well worth it. $60 is getting a little steep for what amounts to a somewhat polished Debian install.
That said, Libranet is a great distro for a new Linux user, especially if you're looking to get into Debian and want something that isn't slow as molasses in January on an older system (if you've tried any recent Mandrake up to 8.2, you know what I'm talking about. Ugh. Looking forward to trying 9.0). Libranet sets up a nice, working system from which you can fiddle around and graduate to plain Debian later on if you're inclined that way.
Sure, double-clicking on desktop items makes no sense. Unless you are aiming your product at a market filled with about 900 bazillion people who have spent the last 12 years (since Win 3.0, at least) double-clicking the icons on their desktop.
You don't make money by trying to leverage your product to make people do something the "right" way. You make money by giving them a product they can easily slip into using on a daily basis, without being frustrated by a thousand usless quirks^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H "usability enhancements". You make money by giving people a tool that is the most efficient and helpful way to complete their daily tasks. Coming from a Windows/Macintosh computer which they have used just fine for a decade or more, and being faced with icons that act like web links, can drive the average user nuts, even more than bigger problems would.
I have set up numerous versions and flavors of Linux over the last few years, and had major headaches along the way, mainly with setting up X ("hear, hear" everyone says
Another part of this is if you right-click on something that isn't selected, you don't get the proper right-click context menu. (At least this is the behavior in the desktop OS that 90% of the world's population is used to using.) So many of us have developed the habit of click-once-to-select, right-click-to-get-proper-context-menu.
You want to disrupt this ingrained and fairly efficient process, simply because single-clicking follows some sort of "ask anyone" usability rules? People aren't machines, and when you take usability too far it often has the opposite of the desired effect. People have different ways of using the computer, so obviously not all usability rules can apply everywhere, to everyone. Even Micros~1 tried to change the desktop to use single-clicks, and people hated it. Remember "Windows Desktop Update"? That seemed to fall by the wayside rather quickly, and the reasons should be obvious.
The rest of the changes and points you outlined I agree with completely and made perfect sense. So I was kind of surprised by this one. Making KDE use double-clicks on the desktop makes just as much sense as every other change they've made in RH8. They know their target audience and they aren't pulling any punches.
Heh. Yeah, they should call it something artistic, like "Michaelangelo 3D". That _totally_ doesn't sound like a virus...
wait a minute...
With the availability of high quality digital video cameras and Firewire cards and drives and other gear becoming pretty popular, it's now possible to make professional quality video recordings, capture them to a hard drive, edit them with something like Adobe Premiere, and send the final cut back out to be stored on a digital video cassette, or DVD, or whatever.
Unfortunately, in the middle of this process when you're capturing the video to a hard drive, it takes up *MASSIVE* amounts of disk space. The DV stream is something like 25Mbits/sec. One of my college teachers is into DV production and has been teaching classes on it. He purchased a 160GB Maxtor Firewire drive for his classes, and of course I laughed and told him they'd never fill it up. Since then they've filled both that drive and a couple of 80GB drives several times. Even with all that space there isn't room to store the video long-term, there's just enough room to capture it, edit it and store it back to a regular DV medium like the cassette in your video camera.
Once again the parent poster has fallen into the mental trap of "if I've got no use for this, how could anyone else have a use for it?" We all do this, from time to time, unfortunately.
You're probably thinking mainly of the Hindenburg disaster when talking about something with hydrogen in it exploding. The problem with that is, A) the Hindenburg didn't explode, and B) it is highly unlikely that the fire that did consume the craft was caused by hydrogen being ignited by a spark. I got this from my dad and then later saw a report on it on PBS. Through a quick search on Google, I found the most relevant page I could, here.
The gist of it is that the skin of the Hindenburg was made of fabric and coated with laquers and metal based paints, and the material itself was highly flammable. (The guy on the PBS documentary had a piece of the original fabric and showed how nicely it burned.) That's why the entire surface of the dirigible burned within seconds and it crashed to the ground, and that's also why it burned with a bright orange flame. A hydrogen flame is nearly invisible in daylight; in darkness it's a pale blue. Hydrogen is lighter than air, thus always burns upwards, not in all directions. The long and short of it is that there were many indicators that a few thousand observant engineers and scientists over the decades should have picked up on, that should have told them their assumptions about hydrogen's involvment in that disaster were wrong. But to this day, the Hindenburg "explosion" is used in books and courses to show how "dangerous" hydrogen is. Just goes to show that just because something has been "known" a for a long time, doesn't mean it's correct.
While we were talking about this (dad and I), he also told me about some experiments he'd seen and/or done many years ago with hydrogen. For example, if you have a tank filled with hydrogen and poke a hole in the side, and light the stream of hydrogen that's coming out with a match, guess what happens? No, it doesn't explode. If it's dark, you'll see a blue flame right at the edge of the hole. You'll see it until there isn't any gas left in the bottle. The pressure of the escaping gas is always just enough to keep it from burning back into the bottle. But there's also another reason it doesn't burn back into the bottle and blow up. Say you stick that match into the hole, guess what happens? The hydrogen will put it out. Poof. Not enough oxygen. See, hydrogen is only flammable in the presence of oxygen. And it's only explosive in tightly confined spaces. So inside you're battery's fuel cell, you'd first have to mix it with a certain percentage of oxygen, while it's still sealed, and then somehow introduce a spark, inside the case, aslo while it's still sealed. Good luck.
Anyway, I just wanted to spread some updated information on the Hindenburg, and I've always thought that whole pure-hydrogen-puts-out-a-match thing really interesting.
Actually, all joking aside, it would be really interesting to see some sort of informed daily report on the comparitive influence of Free/Open software in the world. But I guess I'll just have to keep reading Slashdot.
*WHOOSH!* Ha! Missed m-*OW!*
Just so this isn't offtopic: I haven't seen anyone actually asking or stating what exactly these people did to during their scanning of these networks. If all they did was use passive scanning techniques to look for holes, I would be scared at that kind of reaction to it. You should all be. (What if you accidently passively scan the wrong netblock during your next security audit?) On the other hand, if they were actively using known exploits to find vulnerabilities, then they definitely deserve to get a smack upside the brain-pan for being ess tee double-O process ID.
All I want to know is, can we get free passes if we help you out?
Yeah, well when you live in a grass/wood/plywood/tin shack as many people do over there to this day, I suppose it's not too difficult to move the whole shack across town, with a community of people helping. ;)
(Note: I know someone from there so I'm not just making generalizations from a "US perspective", that's how it really is in the Philippines. Which seems like all the more reason for them to be working on free alternatives to costly software for running their government and school systems.)
I wouldn't be so sure about that, the way they are naming some of these new cars...
I hope this means the Chinese *are* going to claim us as a renegade state, so we have an excuse to kick their little chinky-eyed commie asses. Woohoo!
Semper Fi!
XOSL can be installed on a non-DOS dedicated partition without requiring DOS at any step of the process. I've done it.
/dev entry corresponds to which partition and which partition contains which OS. You're a moron if you think the average user should be expected to be able to go through that process. With XOSL I can point and click and set up a boot menu with a dozen different operating systems in a few seconds. Plus I can hide partitions, which makes it easy to run multiple copies of WinXX of whatever flavor on the same disk. You can also password protect the setup and each individual partition in the menu can have its own password, or none. Again, all that is done through a point-and-click interface. One of the best features for me was the fact that XOSL doesn't require ANY OS to be installed on the computer in order to be set up and changed.
XOSL is a very nice bootloader. It's not just the fact that it's graphical, it's also the myriad of other features that make it nice. For instance when you go into the partition setup it shows you what partitions are available and can usually identify the OS residing on that partition. Compare that to the LILO text config file where if you're not lucky you have to hand edit and remember which
Questions I always see here, like "What does this have that LILO doesn't have?" are incredibly idiotic. So many of you seem to forget that normal humans need to be able to use computers. Making something easy to use is not necessarily a bad thing. I don't understand why the open source community is so full of people that seem to do nothing but beat down new or different ideas.
Lord Richter: "Do not be so proud of these children you've instructed; the power of one million bouncing children is insignificant next to the power of the Force..."
Commander of Child-Powered Earthquake Machine: "You don't frighten us with your scientist's ways, Lord Richter. Your sad devotion to that ancient profession has not helped you conjure up new fault lines, or given you clairvoyance enough to--urk! Ack! Ick! Urg!"
Prime Minister Tarkin: "Enough of this! Richter, stop jumping up and down on him!"
Lord Richter: "As you wish..."