All of these problems were solved ~5 years ago as Linux really hit the desktop.
A) You should never have to recompile the kernel or break anything by upgrading the kernel in a recent distro. And in the Red Hat product family, since Red Hat 8 (i.e. 8, 9, FC1 through FC4) all you do to install software is double-click on the package icon.
B) In the same lineage of Linux systems just mentioned (i.e. RH8 and later), all administration, from firewall through Apache setup, can be done with graphical configuration tools in the start menu.
C) Both KDE and GNOME (and pretty much all distros use one or the other for a long time now), all applications and the system itself are documented in an extensive help system. The KDE system is somewhat deeper and more comprehensive, but both are much more accessible than MAN pages.
BUT as a final comment: the reason to use Linux never has been, and never will be, for a nicer "desktop" environment than Windows. Desktop environments are inherently limited and there will come a point at which not much more can be done to "improve" them.
The REAL REASON to use Unix/Linux that opens your computing world WIDE OPEN once you master it and lets you accomplish things that you never thought possible more quickly than you can possibly imagine IS the command line environment, documented by the man pages.
So while the Linux world has gone a long way to solving most of the desktop issues (including those you name) and is now providing a very plug-and-play Desktop environment, at least in the major distros like Fedora, I'm almost sorry about that, because it means that 90% of the people trying Linux will never touch the command line, never learn about it, never touch the Unix computing model or realize that computers in general are already much smarter and much more capable that most people in the Windows world realize.
It's like watching people starve to death right before your eyes.
Um, I bought Quake3 for Linux when it was on sale at EBGames and ran it in Red Hat and it was as easy as:
1. Insert CD 2. Double-click on installer icon when file manager window pops up 3. Enter root password when prompted 4. When all is said and done, choose Quake3 from the start menu
From what I can tell, there's only one difference between this and the Windows version that you described, and that's the entering of the root password. And we don't want to do away with that, because it's what makes Linux 90% less susceptible to malware.
Anyway, what distribution and version of Quake3 are you using?
Ease of use? Give me a break. If all you ever do is browse the web and type letters, then maybe. Otherwise, forget it. I work in a Windows house and can't get a Unix/Linux desktop so I bring a Linux laptop from HOME to do my work because even though I CAN cook up my own scripts and applications when absolutely necessary, it's absolutely NOT worth the time it takes when I can just plug my linux laptop into the network and do all of the same stuff using a single command and existing tools.
Need to generate and name twenty thousand files using record numbers from a database as the filename and inserting the content from each record into its respective file as plain text, with visually friendly formatting? In Windows, you get to go to the database team and ask them to write you a TOOL to do it, and they spend the next two days coding it up and adding it to a cluttered menu somewhere, or they get lazy and have the company BUY a tool to do it, and it takes 2 hours to run once you HAVE the tool, prone to crash out the entire time. In Linux, one command line, hit enter, never worry, and 45-50 seconds later, boom, 20,000 pristine files, just like that, correct names, correct content, no complaints, no crap.
Need to do a complex mail merge from said database that looks up the name and email address of each of six hundred people in said database based on a spreadsheet sent to you in email, and that then composes one of ten message bodies for each contact depending on the type of the contact, then queries the database for a collection of files related to that contact, goes out on the network and fetches and attaches each individual file to each email, then sends them all, building a log in the process that's then sent to the network printer? In Windows, guess what, once again you get to go to the development team and ask them to code you a tool, and after spending hours trying to detail exactly what you need it to do you get an estimate in WEEKS for when the tool will be written. Once again, in Unix/Linux... one command line, smash enter, wait ten minutes, done.
Or of course if you don't want to have someone code you up a tool or spend six or seven hours yourself using VBA and sixty kludges, you can do these by hand, one record at a time, one file at a time, one email at a time, and spend the next two months in man hours.
In the Unix world, just about any task is one command away. Yes, you have to master the system before you can compose such commands, but it's much easier than sitting around coding all week, then having to document the tool and how it works and what it does so that you can pass it through IT, or trying to get someone else to sit around and code for you all week, or searching around for the closest existing product (which you never quite find, but you shell out $$$ for the nearest thing and kludge it into working for you).
If you have to do REAL WORK, Unix/Linux is so many light years ahead of Windows, it's laughable, but the paradigm is so completely different that it's tough to explain to any Windows-only person how it's possible that I can make a claim like: "If you would just give me a Unix workstation, I could accomplish any task you lay in front of me, be it network, database, file management, text processing, email, whatever, in one command line, and I'd never need to have the company write, or buy, another piece of software ever again."
But it's the truth. Ask any Unix-head computing professional how many "aftermarket" software items post-OS-install he/she has on his/her desktop, apart from the GNU tools (if they're running an non-Open-Source Unix that comes without them). The answer will be: 1-2, maaaayyyyyyybe 3-4. And any other Unix-head can sit down and use their system like a pro, INSTANTLY. Then ask any Windows computing professional how many aftermarket tools they have on THEIR desktop, and the answer will be 10, 20, 30... the sky's the limit... and some of them costing $$$ (or else all of them unpaid shareware/crippleware), half of them only working h
I was under the impression that there were only one or two different USB2IDE bridge chipsets anyway. The CF readers I've been using for image work (with 2GB CF from digital cameras) were dead cheap, are low power, and I haven't had any problems with them. Is there some objective reason to spend $$$ on a more expensive brand-name reader?
Anyway, $2k for a solid state hard drive is better than the $20k they were going for a few years ago, though I admit I haven't looked into pricing lately. Plus, with 32MB flash cards you're almost to the point where you can talk arbitrarily large solid-state storage. Throw 8 of those things in a case and you have a heat-free, vibration-proof 250GB RAID-0 that could survive in a lot of environments in which hard drives wouldn't.
I'd suspect that the price of a 250GB solid state drive sold as a product is still up there.
Has anyone taken a bunch of the already available monster flash drives and built a PC on them?
I'm thinking 4x USB2 card readers (these are down to like $10 on eBay) each containing 8GB compactflash in a RAID-0 configuration = 32GB solid state storage that might not incur too bad a performance penalty.
With something like a 32GB compactflash, you could potentially create a 120GB RAID-0 with them.
Do CF cards have the reliability factor to act as primary storage? How about USB2 as the interface? I don't know enough about either set of specs to make a judgment.
Some media outlets can edge near to "lying" at times. But the trick is that no successful media outlet does it to the extent that their readers believe that they are lying, because that is bad for sales; the audience must believe that they are being told the truth. Trust is essential in the marketplace.
Do you seriously believe that the journalism and media industries are run without feedback and without serious market research?
You're completely pissing in the wind, you have no idea what you're talking about. No market segment scrutinizes its buying public more than mass media does. Success and readership are measured in multiple ways down to column-inches in print and down to sub-minute increments in television, by hour of the day and day of the week and place in the city and city in the state, and every subdivision and submetric along those axes that you can possibly think of, in spreadsheets, in databases, in real-time observation at the cash register. The media knows what sells, and cash does not lie. The buying public can cry "foul" all it wants, but the media isn't listening, it's watching the dollars and that's all. If the public cries foul while sales are going up, then the public's just masturbating. Like every other industry, the media industry just works to maximize sales and advertiser return. It is the "logic of the marketplace" that people so often cite around here--if it sells, it will be made, and it will gradually push out of business that which doesn't sell as well.
The media conglomerates are not stupid and they are not playing with chump change. They know precisely which words and images sold well and which didn't in every product across every demographic profile. They have to know because the marketplace is incredibly crowded and competitors are measuring all of the very same things and if you don't do a good job selling your audience what it wants, you're done for, because someone else will.
You say bullshit, that people think that whatever is printed is truth, and that truth is what they really want. You've missed the fact that there are two parts to that statement:
People think they're being told the truth. True. And so long as they continue to think that, and it's interesting and it pleases them, you've got a successful product.
The truth is what they really want. No. Absolutely not. If you tell them the flat-out truth that you think they need to hear, you might as well fold up and go home now. This is born out time and time again, story after story, publication after publication. "Just the facts, man" reporting is seen as dry, as troubling, as uninteresting, as unspiritual, as offensive, as difficult, as boring, I can give you a hundred other words. And these things are not in a vacuum. You have to remember what I said before: it's an increasingly crowded marketplace, and more and more companies are willing to "make it more interesting" in their products.
If you print statistics and financials about Katrina while your competitor dedicates the same column inches to a "heartwarming story of reunion and hope," you just lost because yours is (ahem) dry, troubling, uninteresting... by comparison. Nevermind that your information is true across the board, while your competitor's story may be one of only a handful of successes, and as such not very representative. If you print a story about how the Katrina response was limited due to states' rights and the separation and decentralization in the United States' form of government, it's a total yawner if your competitor is convincingly ripping bureaucrats a new one for being maliciously incompetent.
It's just not as simple as "this is an important story, let's detail it completely and truthfully" because you have the same responsibility to shareholders and employees that every other company has and it's just irresponsible from that perspective to print everything that you think is important and true and
No, it's not the same thing. It's not personal at all. It's about everyone pulling together to make sure the publication sells, because otherwise it folds or is pulled and you're out of a job. It's really not about "I want to advance my career and get published as often as possible," instead it takes on an air of "what can I write to do my part to ensure that people will buy this issue?"
I work in "the industry" (media/journalism/publishing) and I can tell you that it's nothing to do with wanting your name in print.
The fact is that this is capitalism, not some grand inquisition for the truth. No paper will flat-out lie because that would ultimately hurt sales, but papers and media outlets do and will push the truth as close as possible to sex, violence, or rock and role in a bid to increase sales.
You can't say "well, my writing will have integrity and I won't sensationalize" because then you simply won't sell while your competitors' editions about the end of the world being caused by radioactive cheerleaders are selling like hotcakes, and soon your paper won't be in business anyway.
The general attitude of our culture has a lot to do with sales, too. The buying public does not like harsh realities. They won't buy truth. They want to be "inspired." They want stories that tell them that they are in control--that if you just "believe" in something, it will happen, or that love conquers anything, or that the affair they're having is okay because 75% of the other people in the country are also having one, etc.
Basically, because we live in a capitalistic economy, copy must sell in order to continue to be written. Fiction and reader-affirmation sells. Truth and harsh facts don't.
...by telling them that you go to university "to get a better job."
The courses you listed are indeed useless for "getting a job" as they are in nearly every undergraduate major at major universities. And, contrary to what most high school students are told, the more elite the university, the less your degree will be helpful to you in just "getting a job."
Universities do not claim, and do not intend, to create workers. They do not provide "job training." They are not designed to find you a place at a company, but rather to give you the skills that you need to establish for yourself a place in the world.
Mere job-seeking and work as "an employee" requires that you limit the authority that you take for yourself and your actions; job seekers must order their universe using the already existing structures of the marketplace and the companies within it, and must order their daily lives and work according to dictates from above, in whatever company the end up working for.
Universities by contrast, in particular the elite ones, develop individuals who transcend marketplace, corporate, authority, and governmental structures. Their goals are to produce amazing people who will someday create those structures for others (i.e. the job-seekers and employees) rather than efficient people to populate them.
Many people are not suited to life outside of the employer-employee relationship. It implies a higher level of initiative, a greater amount of responsibility, a greater amount of culpabilility, greater stress (and possibly uncertainty) in life, and the requirement that you always think globally, flexibly, and adaptably, across a number of fields, criteria, consequences, and fronts, rather than just locally within your current task or field.
Young slashdotters: if you just want "a good job that pays well" with a minimum of other responsibilities, entanglements, or with guarantees about wages, responsibilities, and futures, you should be thinking about trade schools and vocational schools, not university, especially not top universities.
You simply do not go to a top university "to land a better job." Unfortunately, too many students do just that and then find themselves sitting around afterward unqualified for "jobs," unable to find "work" (because they are actively looking within the existing marketplace and corporate infrastructure of society, which universities by and large do not address), and saddled with debt.
For the right segment of the population -- bright, creative, self-directed, wanting to change the world rather than to work in it, willing to be flexible and to forego promises and stability -- university is precisely what the doctor ordered. For the 75% of the population that doesn't care what they do so long as it pays well, gives them a 401(k), health insurance, and the chance to climb the authority "ladder" within a single company, university is a colossal waste of time and money.
Ever have sex with someone of the opposite gender? Were you attracted to them? For whatever reason? And they you?
Yes?
Congratulations, you just participated in the ongoing process of natural selection. You yourself have applied selective pressure in favor of whatever it was that attracted you to him/her, regardless of what the nature of the attraction was or whether you can even spell it out.
Multiply by six billion and you have the human race... evolving.
a) It is often *very* difficult to find (or at least to buy) engine, drive train, and interior parts for cars even less than 10 years old from big marques like Mitsubishi or GM makes. The dealers' solutions? They can offer you a deal on a new vehicle...
b) What universe do *you* live in? Apparently you're not in the US. Take any GSM phone from one carrier to another and you'll find it won't work, and they'll explain it's because it's "incompatible" with the new carrier's network. In technical circles, this is known as being "locked." The illegal solution? Enter a code (for Nokia phones) or hook the phone up to a machine and "unlock" it. The carriers' solutions? Trash your phone and buy THE SAME MODEL YOU HAD BEFORE in many cases, only now "compatible" with your new carriers' network.
The examples are not idiotic, they are very real, and I mention them because they are among the most egregious.
You speak as though somehow 'government' can be separated from 'production base' or 'politics' from 'economics.'
How do you propose to create this separation, since we do not now (nor has any society ever) had it?
You have been fooled by the powers that assure you on the one hand that all that stands in the way of capital utopia is government, while on the other hand capital funds said government and at the same time dictates who will constitute it.
They are one and the same. Social and economic power is also political power, and those who hold any of these will exercise them to the utmost to ensure that they also hold (and exercise to their advantage) the rest.
In this era of population explosion, global resource exploitation, potential global warming, etc., it is insanity to intentionally dictate that easily re-used items be turned into "single-use" consumables that thus fill landfills on one end of the chain while consuming additional resources and energy for the manufacture of identical new items (and packaging, too) at the other end of the chain-- all when the existing item(s)are perfectly fine and completely functional.
This is the insanity of capitalism: we are running out of oil; we are filling the atmosphere with greenhouse gasses as the result of our energy use; we are clear-cutting; we are running out of easily habitable (without extra energy consumption for climate management, water movement, etc.) space; and yet the only measure with which we as a society are concerned is the measure of capital and the individual "freedom" to acquire it (by and large a lie propagated by those who hold it-- how many billionaries are in your family?), even as we consume ourselves into a planetary grave.
It's not just conceptually consumable items like ink cartridges that could easily be re-used; it's even big-ticket items like cell phones and automobiles--millions of them end up in landfills each year while they're still perfectly good, either because they're artificially locked/behavior-controlled or because manufacturers refuse to continue to support them so that they can sell new models to individuals who demand them in part after succumbing to the forces of marketplace psychology in advertising and in part because of the real social (and thus capital) benefits that such appearances (i.e. a new auto; a new cell phone) provide as a result of the marketplace.
The "marketplace" is merely the aggregate of individual greed and it mechanistically ignores problems that any single individual feels to be "bigger than themself" and their own desires. If you let the "marketplace" dictate environmental and social policy, you are asking for a system that (like its component individuals) completely ignores the realities of the very survival of our species in favor of giving everyone a better-tasting cola in the run-up to the planetary apocalypse.
It is time to stop capitalism and corporatism now.
Both times I've been to a movie theater in the last five years the attendees' cash was refunded after mothers had to be thrown out (eventually) due to their screaming kids.
Look back at all of the movie greats, then ask yourself whether they'd get made today in Hollywood. The current market woes are due to lowest common denominator movie-making.
No-one wants to buy a movie unless the "market" includes damn near everyone on the planet. Thus, you end up over and over with single movies which:
- Cannot use dialog above reading level four - Must have at least one nude scene - Must have at least one murder - Must have at least one high school student - Must have at least one octogenarian - Must have jokes - Must have bathroom jokes - Must have drama - Must have melodrama - Must have computers - Must have new-age anti-computer granolaness - Must have a standoff - Must have a car chase - Must have a horse race - Must have a prayer scene or implied act of god - Must be a love story - Must be a murder mystery - Must be a light comedy - Must have room for product placement
Of course, by the time you put all of things in over and over again what you get is an incoherent mess with little room for plot that jerks the audience around like nobody's business, which is a mortal sin because none of them were really that interested in seeing it anyway.
The studio execs need to narrow their audience targeting by choosing one or two of these things for each film (preferably that do not contradict) and including only them.
Better to narrow budgets and targets and make a simpler, more focused, more skillful film that 500,000 people absolutely are dying, DYING to see than a kitchen sink "blockbuster" style film that 30,000,000 people couldn't give less of a damn about but *shrug* they guess they'll go catch a film and kill a Friday night, if they can get together the energy to put socks on and anyway it'll probably just have the same explosions, boobs, scat scenes and recycled mysticism as the last ten films they saw...
I didn't mean to suggest that the whole thing, bottom to top, was a scheme. I mean to suggest that the laptops were going to go to students anyway, and when the IT contractor asked the administrator, "Where do you want me to file the passwords away?" the administrator responded with, "Put them on the backs of the machines and we'll see who..."
Something nearly the same happened when I was contracting for high schools. The DOS machines they used (this was a few years ago) could have been configured to start students into a menu system that was uninterruptable (i.e. turn machine on, get menu of available applications, no alternatives, no way to break out of the menu structure).
Instead, they wanted me to use the AUTOEXEC.BAT batch file to launch the menu system rather than a menuing application started directly on bootup. Why? So that they could watch and see who hit CTRL-C at boot to exit the batch file. Those students were then expelled for "hacking" (even though these machines weren't on a network at all, this was ca. 1992) and they lost their computer priveleges at the high school for the rest of their high school career.
Why? That's a question that was never satisfactorily answered to me. I can tell you that the answer was something along the lines of what I mentioned in my previous post: such students were basically believed to be "too big for their own britches" and it was thus basically one more way to find a few more kids with "no respect for authority" and push them out of the system.
While I was still contracting there, I saw two kids expelled for hitting CTRL-C to dump to DOS and explore the C: drive. Both ended up enrolling at a local private high school, to my knowledge.
Having attended and later worked in an American high school where the mentality was definitely one of suspicion and enforcement (ala prison) rather than education, I'd suspect that these passwords were taped there on purpose to try to catch and then be able to endict nonconforming students, who, the thread of thought would go, are the same ones likely to create disciplinary problems through the introduction of unrest and disobedience.
Heh... Yup, I'm from your generation.:-) I have an HP/Apollo desktop here somewhere (one of the later workstations) that hasn't powered on in years. I also have a stack of SS/10s with dual SM71 CPUs and dual CG6 framebuffers that I can't part with because they cost a year's budget and were SO DAMN AMAZINGLY FAST AND POWERFUL when we got them, and somewhere deep down inside I know they're still the coolest machines on the planet and somehow must still be worth $$$ (even though intellectually I realize that they're worth at best $ and really probably actually just !!??).
I remember thinking the WWW was basically useless for a couple of years at least when all of the content was still on gopher and I was getting UseNet over a UUCP feed. My bang-path was hellgate.utah.edu!onlybbs!yaga!perfekt or something to that effect.
And then of course later on when smarthosts came around and everything was in transition it got all wierd, something like onlybbs%hellgate!yaga!perfekt@hellgate or something like that. It was hard to keep up with the changing standards as everyone went to the DNS system.
I still remember how sad I was once the very last ISP to sell full UUCP feeds in my area stopped. I thought I'd die.:-P
Until I discovered Mosaic and Term and the fact that by then people had started putting content on the WWW.:-) I remember the first page I ever loaded from home was some CS student @hellgate with a page that was basically three band pictures of The Cure and a tracks list from one of their early CDs. I called all my roommates in to Oooh and Aaaah.:-D
How times change.
I still have some casette tapes and 8" floppies in a file cabinet somewhere with some BASIC code I wrote to link some older systems at a local nonprofit to my UUCP feed.
Whew. 2005. I'm sitting here with a dual Athlon running @2GHz with wireless 54mbit net, a gig of RAM, 250GB of hard drive space, and a dedicated 3D processor that can push hundreds of millions of triangles, and the kids think this gear is slow and outdated. I feel old suddenly, like the WWI generation must have felt, knowing that typewriters were still hi-tech while watching punch cards make them oh-so-obsolete.
Yup.:-) @250ns. And if you piggybacked them and clipped some of the power pins, you could turn them into 4464s and fill the boards out with 4x as much memory. Or something like that, it's been a long time.:-)
When I was a CS student in the late '80s and early '90s, we had entire labs full of Sun and HP machines that had no hard drives. They booted off the net and ran entirely in RAM.
Years before that, when I was a kid with a PC, there were RAMdisks in most operating systems at the time that were easy to use, and if you had a fancy schmanzy expansion card with some godawful amount of RAM on it (like 512MB;-) you could run your BBS entirely from an RAMdisk and it was FAST.
Linux still has RAMdisk drivers in it somewhere that lead to something like/dev/r0 or/dev/ram0 or similar, which you can format and mount and use like a hard drive. Or at least, it used to. I haven't checked in a few years, and I never actually built it into my kernel, but OSes like Slack did use it for their boot/root floppies, etc.
In any case, getting back to diskless workstations netbooting... this is a MAJOR win when you have rooms full of hardware. There's no reason each of them needs their own hard drive if every single one of those hard drives will just have the same data and enough RAM to run w/o excessive paging/swapping is cheap. You save on initial cost. You save on power. You save on failures of other hardware due to heat. You save on failures of all those freaking drives. You save on the labor it would take to re-image and replace them. And you save on complexity, since all systems then become essentially interchangeable--just plug it into a network port and go, no need to worry about whether it's been "configured" right or whats on its hard drive (or isn't on its hard drive, as the case may be).
The point is not that you, one person, will be able to hoard all data for yourself (with all people doing the same on their own storage devices) for some abstract sense of self-importance.
The point is that all barriers related to a lack of information will disappear. Anything that anyone knows or has ever known, you can know, too, just like that, instantly, at no cost, from the comfort of your couch. Any song ever written, any novel ever penned, any movie ever filmed, any speech ever given.
Once the network is omnipresent and user interfaces evolve a little bit more, it won't be about having a terabyte in your iPod, it'll be about having thousands of petabytes effectively as an extension of your brain. And because we will all share the same set of petabytes and are all adressable on the same network, what will emerge is a gestalt, a collective of knowledge, understanding, perspective, and opinion that will truly be HyperMedia, or, in other words, "the humamn collective."
Sure, Microsoft may not have invented many of those products you mentioned, but they certainly have taken each and turned them into major players in ways that their original inventors were not able to.
In every listed case above the original product was either better than or equivalent in every way to the one that Microsoft "turned into a major player."
There is ONE reason alone that Microsoft makes markets for products that otherwise most people don't know about, and that's the MS Monopoly. Microsoft takes a good idea that works well but that most people don't have access to and makes (usually a lesser version of) it available to PC users (often without crediting or compensating its creator).
The most vexing aspect of this is that when said good idea (in poor MS form) spreads like wildfire throughout the world by virtue of the MS monopoly, the majority of sheep out there believe that MS invented it (MS not being unhappy about the misconception in the least), and then go about re-writing history. I don't know how many times I've cringed at computer magazines, computer and technology anchors on cable news, hosts of radio call-in computer shows, etc. that OBVIOUSLY bought their first computer with Windows 95 and believe that the information age was invented by Microsoft, and that before whiz-kid Billy G., the poor old-fashioned people in science and academics and business wrote on stone tables and hit each other with clubs way back in the dark '1980s' that pre-date, well, everything.
And of course since Joe Q. Public hears John Q. Radio say that Microsoft invented windowing, mice, desktop publishing, networking, and digital media, and Joe Q. Public has some sort of irrational faith in mass media, from then on you can't tell him anything else, because he won't believe you.
"John Q. Radio and Jack T. Television said that before Microsoft there was no such thing as electricity, so it must be true. What's your source?"
News for young slashdotters: scripting, programming, networks, desktop publishing, the Internet, games, multiuser and online games, databases, spreadsheets, windowing, mice, context menus, widgets, office suites, cutting and pasting, hard drives, floppy drives, removable storage, plug-and-play, and pretty much damn near ANYTHING else you can name, existed WELL before Microsoft introduced them. And in fact, if you do an unbiased comparison between their original incarnations years (and in some cases decades) ago on other platforms and the CURRENT PC versions, you will often be flabbergased to find that the original is better in many, many ways, if a bit out of date.
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All of these problems were solved ~5 years ago as Linux really hit the desktop.
A) You should never have to recompile the kernel or break anything by upgrading the kernel in a recent distro. And in the Red Hat product family, since Red Hat 8 (i.e. 8, 9, FC1 through FC4) all you do to install software is double-click on the package icon.
B) In the same lineage of Linux systems just mentioned (i.e. RH8 and later), all administration, from firewall through Apache setup, can be done with graphical configuration tools in the start menu.
C) Both KDE and GNOME (and pretty much all distros use one or the other for a long time now), all applications and the system itself are documented in an extensive help system. The KDE system is somewhat deeper and more comprehensive, but both are much more accessible than MAN pages.
BUT as a final comment: the reason to use Linux never has been, and never will be, for a nicer "desktop" environment than Windows. Desktop environments are inherently limited and there will come a point at which not much more can be done to "improve" them.
The REAL REASON to use Unix/Linux that opens your computing world WIDE OPEN once you master it and lets you accomplish things that you never thought possible more quickly than you can possibly imagine IS the command line environment, documented by the man pages.
So while the Linux world has gone a long way to solving most of the desktop issues (including those you name) and is now providing a very plug-and-play Desktop environment, at least in the major distros like Fedora, I'm almost sorry about that, because it means that 90% of the people trying Linux will never touch the command line, never learn about it, never touch the Unix computing model or realize that computers in general are already much smarter and much more capable that most people in the Windows world realize.
It's like watching people starve to death right before your eyes.
Um, I bought Quake3 for Linux when it was on sale at EBGames and ran it in Red Hat and it was as easy as:
1. Insert CD
2. Double-click on installer icon when file manager window pops up
3. Enter root password when prompted
4. When all is said and done, choose Quake3 from the start menu
From what I can tell, there's only one difference between this and the Windows version that you described, and that's the entering of the root password. And we don't want to do away with that, because it's what makes Linux 90% less susceptible to malware.
Anyway, what distribution and version of Quake3 are you using?
Ease of use? Give me a break. If all you ever do is browse the web and type letters, then maybe. Otherwise, forget it. I work in a Windows house and can't get a Unix/Linux desktop so I bring a Linux laptop from HOME to do my work because even though I CAN cook up my own scripts and applications when absolutely necessary, it's absolutely NOT worth the time it takes when I can just plug my linux laptop into the network and do all of the same stuff using a single command and existing tools.
Need to generate and name twenty thousand files using record numbers from a database as the filename and inserting the content from each record into its respective file as plain text, with visually friendly formatting? In Windows, you get to go to the database team and ask them to write you a TOOL to do it, and they spend the next two days coding it up and adding it to a cluttered menu somewhere, or they get lazy and have the company BUY a tool to do it, and it takes 2 hours to run once you HAVE the tool, prone to crash out the entire time. In Linux, one command line, hit enter, never worry, and 45-50 seconds later, boom, 20,000 pristine files, just like that, correct names, correct content, no complaints, no crap.
Need to do a complex mail merge from said database that looks up the name and email address of each of six hundred people in said database based on a spreadsheet sent to you in email, and that then composes one of ten message bodies for each contact depending on the type of the contact, then queries the database for a collection of files related to that contact, goes out on the network and fetches and attaches each individual file to each email, then sends them all, building a log in the process that's then sent to the network printer? In Windows, guess what, once again you get to go to the development team and ask them to code you a tool, and after spending hours trying to detail exactly what you need it to do you get an estimate in WEEKS for when the tool will be written. Once again, in Unix/Linux... one command line, smash enter, wait ten minutes, done.
Or of course if you don't want to have someone code you up a tool or spend six or seven hours yourself using VBA and sixty kludges, you can do these by hand, one record at a time, one file at a time, one email at a time, and spend the next two months in man hours.
In the Unix world, just about any task is one command away. Yes, you have to master the system before you can compose such commands, but it's much easier than sitting around coding all week, then having to document the tool and how it works and what it does so that you can pass it through IT, or trying to get someone else to sit around and code for you all week, or searching around for the closest existing product (which you never quite find, but you shell out $$$ for the nearest thing and kludge it into working for you).
If you have to do REAL WORK, Unix/Linux is so many light years ahead of Windows, it's laughable, but the paradigm is so completely different that it's tough to explain to any Windows-only person how it's possible that I can make a claim like: "If you would just give me a Unix workstation, I could accomplish any task you lay in front of me, be it network, database, file management, text processing, email, whatever, in one command line, and I'd never need to have the company write, or buy, another piece of software ever again."
But it's the truth. Ask any Unix-head computing professional how many "aftermarket" software items post-OS-install he/she has on his/her desktop, apart from the GNU tools (if they're running an non-Open-Source Unix that comes without them). The answer will be: 1-2, maaaayyyyyyybe 3-4. And any other Unix-head can sit down and use their system like a pro, INSTANTLY. Then ask any Windows computing professional how many aftermarket tools they have on THEIR desktop, and the answer will be 10, 20, 30... the sky's the limit... and some of them costing $$$ (or else all of them unpaid shareware/crippleware), half of them only working h
Opps. 32GB CF cards I mean. :-P
I was under the impression that there were only one or two different USB2IDE bridge chipsets anyway. The CF readers I've been using for image work (with 2GB CF from digital cameras) were dead cheap, are low power, and I haven't had any problems with them. Is there some objective reason to spend $$$ on a more expensive brand-name reader?
Anyway, $2k for a solid state hard drive is better than the $20k they were going for a few years ago, though I admit I haven't looked into pricing lately. Plus, with 32MB flash cards you're almost to the point where you can talk arbitrarily large solid-state storage. Throw 8 of those things in a case and you have a heat-free, vibration-proof 250GB RAID-0 that could survive in a lot of environments in which hard drives wouldn't.
I'd suspect that the price of a 250GB solid state drive sold as a product is still up there.
Has anyone taken a bunch of the already available monster flash drives and built a PC on them?
I'm thinking 4x USB2 card readers (these are down to like $10 on eBay) each containing 8GB compactflash in a RAID-0 configuration = 32GB solid state storage that might not incur too bad a performance penalty.
With something like a 32GB compactflash, you could potentially create a 120GB RAID-0 with them.
Do CF cards have the reliability factor to act as primary storage? How about USB2 as the interface? I don't know enough about either set of specs to make a judgment.
Some media outlets can edge near to "lying" at times. But the trick is that no successful media outlet does it to the extent that their readers believe that they are lying, because that is bad for sales; the audience must believe that they are being told the truth. Trust is essential in the marketplace.
Do you seriously believe that the journalism and media industries are run without feedback and without serious market research?
You're completely pissing in the wind, you have no idea what you're talking about. No market segment scrutinizes its buying public more than mass media does. Success and readership are measured in multiple ways down to column-inches in print and down to sub-minute increments in television, by hour of the day and day of the week and place in the city and city in the state, and every subdivision and submetric along those axes that you can possibly think of, in spreadsheets, in databases, in real-time observation at the cash register. The media knows what sells, and cash does not lie. The buying public can cry "foul" all it wants, but the media isn't listening, it's watching the dollars and that's all. If the public cries foul while sales are going up, then the public's just masturbating. Like every other industry, the media industry just works to maximize sales and advertiser return. It is the "logic of the marketplace" that people so often cite around here--if it sells, it will be made, and it will gradually push out of business that which doesn't sell as well.
The media conglomerates are not stupid and they are not playing with chump change. They know precisely which words and images sold well and which didn't in every product across every demographic profile. They have to know because the marketplace is incredibly crowded and competitors are measuring all of the very same things and if you don't do a good job selling your audience what it wants, you're done for, because someone else will.
You say bullshit, that people think that whatever is printed is truth, and that truth is what they really want. You've missed the fact that there are two parts to that statement:
People think they're being told the truth. True. And so long as they continue to think that, and it's interesting and it pleases them, you've got a successful product.
The truth is what they really want. No. Absolutely not. If you tell them the flat-out truth that you think they need to hear, you might as well fold up and go home now. This is born out time and time again, story after story, publication after publication. "Just the facts, man" reporting is seen as dry, as troubling, as uninteresting, as unspiritual, as offensive, as difficult, as boring, I can give you a hundred other words. And these things are not in a vacuum. You have to remember what I said before: it's an increasingly crowded marketplace, and more and more companies are willing to "make it more interesting" in their products.
If you print statistics and financials about Katrina while your competitor dedicates the same column inches to a "heartwarming story of reunion and hope," you just lost because yours is (ahem) dry, troubling, uninteresting... by comparison. Nevermind that your information is true across the board, while your competitor's story may be one of only a handful of successes, and as such not very representative. If you print a story about how the Katrina response was limited due to states' rights and the separation and decentralization in the United States' form of government, it's a total yawner if your competitor is convincingly ripping bureaucrats a new one for being maliciously incompetent.
It's just not as simple as "this is an important story, let's detail it completely and truthfully" because you have the same responsibility to shareholders and employees that every other company has and it's just irresponsible from that perspective to print everything that you think is important and true and
No, it's not the same thing. It's not personal at all. It's about everyone pulling together to make sure the publication sells, because otherwise it folds or is pulled and you're out of a job. It's really not about "I want to advance my career and get published as often as possible," instead it takes on an air of "what can I write to do my part to ensure that people will buy this issue?"
I work in "the industry" (media/journalism/publishing) and I can tell you that it's nothing to do with wanting your name in print.
The fact is that this is capitalism, not some grand inquisition for the truth. No paper will flat-out lie because that would ultimately hurt sales, but papers and media outlets do and will push the truth as close as possible to sex, violence, or rock and role in a bid to increase sales.
You can't say "well, my writing will have integrity and I won't sensationalize" because then you simply won't sell while your competitors' editions about the end of the world being caused by radioactive cheerleaders are selling like hotcakes, and soon your paper won't be in business anyway.
The general attitude of our culture has a lot to do with sales, too. The buying public does not like harsh realities. They won't buy truth. They want to be "inspired." They want stories that tell them that they are in control--that if you just "believe" in something, it will happen, or that love conquers anything, or that the affair they're having is okay because 75% of the other people in the country are also having one, etc.
Basically, because we live in a capitalistic economy, copy must sell in order to continue to be written. Fiction and reader-affirmation sells. Truth and harsh facts don't.
...by telling them that you go to university "to get a better job."
The courses you listed are indeed useless for "getting a job" as they are in nearly every undergraduate major at major universities. And, contrary to what most high school students are told, the more elite the university, the less your degree will be helpful to you in just "getting a job."
Universities do not claim, and do not intend, to create workers. They do not provide "job training." They are not designed to find you a place at a company, but rather to give you the skills that you need to establish for yourself a place in the world.
Mere job-seeking and work as "an employee" requires that you limit the authority that you take for yourself and your actions; job seekers must order their universe using the already existing structures of the marketplace and the companies within it, and must order their daily lives and work according to dictates from above, in whatever company the end up working for.
Universities by contrast, in particular the elite ones, develop individuals who transcend marketplace, corporate, authority, and governmental structures. Their goals are to produce amazing people who will someday create those structures for others (i.e. the job-seekers and employees) rather than efficient people to populate them.
Many people are not suited to life outside of the employer-employee relationship. It implies a higher level of initiative, a greater amount of responsibility, a greater amount of culpabilility, greater stress (and possibly uncertainty) in life, and the requirement that you always think globally, flexibly, and adaptably, across a number of fields, criteria, consequences, and fronts, rather than just locally within your current task or field.
Young slashdotters: if you just want "a good job that pays well" with a minimum of other responsibilities, entanglements, or with guarantees about wages, responsibilities, and futures, you should be thinking about trade schools and vocational schools, not university, especially not top universities.
You simply do not go to a top university "to land a better job." Unfortunately, too many students do just that and then find themselves sitting around afterward unqualified for "jobs," unable to find "work" (because they are actively looking within the existing marketplace and corporate infrastructure of society, which universities by and large do not address), and saddled with debt.
For the right segment of the population -- bright, creative, self-directed, wanting to change the world rather than to work in it, willing to be flexible and to forego promises and stability -- university is precisely what the doctor ordered. For the 75% of the population that doesn't care what they do so long as it pays well, gives them a 401(k), health insurance, and the chance to climb the authority "ladder" within a single company, university is a colossal waste of time and money.
Ever have sex with someone of the opposite gender? Were you attracted to them? For whatever reason? And they you?
Yes?
Congratulations, you just participated in the ongoing process of natural selection. You yourself have applied selective pressure in favor of whatever it was that attracted you to him/her, regardless of what the nature of the attraction was or whether you can even spell it out.
Multiply by six billion and you have the human race... evolving.
I live in the real world. How about you?
a) It is often *very* difficult to find (or at least to buy) engine, drive train, and interior parts for cars even less than 10 years old from big marques like Mitsubishi or GM makes. The dealers' solutions? They can offer you a deal on a new vehicle...
b) What universe do *you* live in? Apparently you're not in the US. Take any GSM phone from one carrier to another and you'll find it won't work, and they'll explain it's because it's "incompatible" with the new carrier's network. In technical circles, this is known as being "locked." The illegal solution? Enter a code (for Nokia phones) or hook the phone up to a machine and "unlock" it. The carriers' solutions? Trash your phone and buy THE SAME MODEL YOU HAD BEFORE in many cases, only now "compatible" with your new carriers' network.
The examples are not idiotic, they are very real, and I mention them because they are among the most egregious.
You speak as though somehow 'government' can be separated from 'production base' or 'politics' from 'economics.'
How do you propose to create this separation, since we do not now (nor has any society ever) had it?
You have been fooled by the powers that assure you on the one hand that all that stands in the way of capital utopia is government, while on the other hand capital funds said government and at the same time dictates who will constitute it.
They are one and the same. Social and economic power is also political power, and those who hold any of these will exercise them to the utmost to ensure that they also hold (and exercise to their advantage) the rest.
In this era of population explosion, global resource exploitation, potential global warming, etc., it is insanity to intentionally dictate that easily re-used items be turned into "single-use" consumables that thus fill landfills on one end of the chain while consuming additional resources and energy for the manufacture of identical new items (and packaging, too) at the other end of the chain-- all when the existing item(s)are perfectly fine and completely functional.
This is the insanity of capitalism: we are running out of oil; we are filling the atmosphere with greenhouse gasses as the result of our energy use; we are clear-cutting; we are running out of easily habitable (without extra energy consumption for climate management, water movement, etc.) space; and yet the only measure with which we as a society are concerned is the measure of capital and the individual "freedom" to acquire it (by and large a lie propagated by those who hold it-- how many billionaries are in your family?), even as we consume ourselves into a planetary grave.
It's not just conceptually consumable items like ink cartridges that could easily be re-used; it's even big-ticket items like cell phones and automobiles--millions of them end up in landfills each year while they're still perfectly good, either because they're artificially locked/behavior-controlled or because manufacturers refuse to continue to support them so that they can sell new models to individuals who demand them in part after succumbing to the forces of marketplace psychology in advertising and in part because of the real social (and thus capital) benefits that such appearances (i.e. a new auto; a new cell phone) provide as a result of the marketplace.
The "marketplace" is merely the aggregate of individual greed and it mechanistically ignores problems that any single individual feels to be "bigger than themself" and their own desires. If you let the "marketplace" dictate environmental and social policy, you are asking for a system that (like its component individuals) completely ignores the realities of the very survival of our species in favor of giving everyone a better-tasting cola in the run-up to the planetary apocalypse.
It is time to stop capitalism and corporatism now.
Both times I've been to a movie theater in the last five years the attendees' cash was refunded after mothers had to be thrown out (eventually) due to their screaming kids.
Look back at all of the movie greats, then ask yourself whether they'd get made today in Hollywood. The current market woes are due to lowest common denominator movie-making.
No-one wants to buy a movie unless the "market" includes damn near everyone on the planet. Thus, you end up over and over with single movies which:
- Cannot use dialog above reading level four
- Must have at least one nude scene
- Must have at least one murder
- Must have at least one high school student
- Must have at least one octogenarian
- Must have jokes
- Must have bathroom jokes
- Must have drama
- Must have melodrama
- Must have computers
- Must have new-age anti-computer granolaness
- Must have a standoff
- Must have a car chase
- Must have a horse race
- Must have a prayer scene or implied act of god
- Must be a love story
- Must be a murder mystery
- Must be a light comedy
- Must have room for product placement
Of course, by the time you put all of things in over and over again what you get is an incoherent mess with little room for plot that jerks the audience around like nobody's business, which is a mortal sin because none of them were really that interested in seeing it anyway.
The studio execs need to narrow their audience targeting by choosing one or two of these things for each film (preferably that do not contradict) and including only them.
Better to narrow budgets and targets and make a simpler, more focused, more skillful film that 500,000 people absolutely are dying, DYING to see than a kitchen sink "blockbuster" style film that 30,000,000 people couldn't give less of a damn about but *shrug* they guess they'll go catch a film and kill a Friday night, if they can get together the energy to put socks on and anyway it'll probably just have the same explosions, boobs, scat scenes and recycled mysticism as the last ten films they saw...
For the rest of the educational year. They were free to come back the next year, though they wouldn't have been able to use the computers.
But of course they didn't (and neither would I have).
I didn't mean to suggest that the whole thing, bottom to top, was a scheme. I mean to suggest that the laptops were going to go to students anyway, and when the IT contractor asked the administrator, "Where do you want me to file the passwords away?" the administrator responded with, "Put them on the backs of the machines and we'll see who..."
Something nearly the same happened when I was contracting for high schools. The DOS machines they used (this was a few years ago) could have been configured to start students into a menu system that was uninterruptable (i.e. turn machine on, get menu of available applications, no alternatives, no way to break out of the menu structure).
Instead, they wanted me to use the AUTOEXEC.BAT batch file to launch the menu system rather than a menuing application started directly on bootup. Why? So that they could watch and see who hit CTRL-C at boot to exit the batch file. Those students were then expelled for "hacking" (even though these machines weren't on a network at all, this was ca. 1992) and they lost their computer priveleges at the high school for the rest of their high school career.
Why? That's a question that was never satisfactorily answered to me. I can tell you that the answer was something along the lines of what I mentioned in my previous post: such students were basically believed to be "too big for their own britches" and it was thus basically one more way to find a few more kids with "no respect for authority" and push them out of the system.
While I was still contracting there, I saw two kids expelled for hitting CTRL-C to dump to DOS and explore the C: drive. Both ended up enrolling at a local private high school, to my knowledge.
Having attended and later worked in an American high school where the mentality was definitely one of suspicion and enforcement (ala prison) rather than education, I'd suspect that these passwords were taped there on purpose to try to catch and then be able to endict nonconforming students, who, the thread of thought would go, are the same ones likely to create disciplinary problems through the introduction of unrest and disobedience.
Heh... Yup, I'm from your generation. :-) I have an HP/Apollo desktop here somewhere (one of the later workstations) that hasn't powered on in years. I also have a stack of SS/10s with dual SM71 CPUs and dual CG6 framebuffers that I can't part with because they cost a year's budget and were SO DAMN AMAZINGLY FAST AND POWERFUL when we got them, and somewhere deep down inside I know they're still the coolest machines on the planet and somehow must still be worth $$$ (even though intellectually I realize that they're worth at best $ and really probably actually just !!??).
:-P
:-) I remember the first page I ever loaded from home was some CS student @hellgate with a page that was basically three band pictures of The Cure and a tracks list from one of their early CDs. I called all my roommates in to Oooh and Aaaah. :-D
I remember thinking the WWW was basically useless for a couple of years at least when all of the content was still on gopher and I was getting UseNet over a UUCP feed. My bang-path was hellgate.utah.edu!onlybbs!yaga!perfekt or something to that effect.
And then of course later on when smarthosts came around and everything was in transition it got all wierd, something like onlybbs%hellgate!yaga!perfekt@hellgate or something like that. It was hard to keep up with the changing standards as everyone went to the DNS system.
I still remember how sad I was once the very last ISP to sell full UUCP feeds in my area stopped. I thought I'd die.
Until I discovered Mosaic and Term and the fact that by then people had started putting content on the WWW.
How times change.
I still have some casette tapes and 8" floppies in a file cabinet somewhere with some BASIC code I wrote to link some older systems at a local nonprofit to my UUCP feed.
Whew. 2005. I'm sitting here with a dual Athlon running @2GHz with wireless 54mbit net, a gig of RAM, 250GB of hard drive space, and a dedicated 3D processor that can push hundreds of millions of triangles, and the kids think this gear is slow and outdated. I feel old suddenly, like the WWI generation must have felt, knowing that typewriters were still hi-tech while watching punch cards make them oh-so-obsolete.
Yup. :-) @250ns. And if you piggybacked them and clipped some of the power pins, you could turn them into 4464s and fill the boards out with 4x as much memory. Or something like that, it's been a long time. :-)
The past is receding on me, too, it would seem. I meant 512KB, not 512MB. And it would take 64 DRAM chips!
Ahh, the knowledge that has been lost.
;-) you could run your BBS entirely from an RAMdisk and it was FAST.
/dev/r0 or /dev/ram0 or similar, which you can format and mount and use like a hard drive. Or at least, it used to. I haven't checked in a few years, and I never actually built it into my kernel, but OSes like Slack did use it for their boot/root floppies, etc.
When I was a CS student in the late '80s and early '90s, we had entire labs full of Sun and HP machines that had no hard drives. They booted off the net and ran entirely in RAM.
Years before that, when I was a kid with a PC, there were RAMdisks in most operating systems at the time that were easy to use, and if you had a fancy schmanzy expansion card with some godawful amount of RAM on it (like 512MB
Linux still has RAMdisk drivers in it somewhere that lead to something like
In any case, getting back to diskless workstations netbooting... this is a MAJOR win when you have rooms full of hardware. There's no reason each of them needs their own hard drive if every single one of those hard drives will just have the same data and enough RAM to run w/o excessive paging/swapping is cheap. You save on initial cost. You save on power. You save on failures of other hardware due to heat. You save on failures of all those freaking drives. You save on the labor it would take to re-image and replace them. And you save on complexity, since all systems then become essentially interchangeable--just plug it into a network port and go, no need to worry about whether it's been "configured" right or whats on its hard drive (or isn't on its hard drive, as the case may be).
The point is not that you, one person, will be able to hoard all data for yourself (with all people doing the same on their own storage devices) for some abstract sense of self-importance.
The point is that all barriers related to a lack of information will disappear. Anything that anyone knows or has ever known, you can know, too, just like that, instantly, at no cost, from the comfort of your couch. Any song ever written, any novel ever penned, any movie ever filmed, any speech ever given.
Once the network is omnipresent and user interfaces evolve a little bit more, it won't be about having a terabyte in your iPod, it'll be about having thousands of petabytes effectively as an extension of your brain. And because we will all share the same set of petabytes and are all adressable on the same network, what will emerge is a gestalt, a collective of knowledge, understanding, perspective, and opinion that will truly be HyperMedia, or, in other words, "the humamn collective."
Sure, Microsoft may not have invented many of those products you mentioned, but they certainly have taken each and turned them into major players in ways that their original inventors were not able to.
In every listed case above the original product was either better than or equivalent in every way to the one that Microsoft "turned into a major player."
There is ONE reason alone that Microsoft makes markets for products that otherwise most people don't know about, and that's the MS Monopoly. Microsoft takes a good idea that works well but that most people don't have access to and makes (usually a lesser version of) it available to PC users (often without crediting or compensating its creator).
The most vexing aspect of this is that when said good idea (in poor MS form) spreads like wildfire throughout the world by virtue of the MS monopoly, the majority of sheep out there believe that MS invented it (MS not being unhappy about the misconception in the least), and then go about re-writing history. I don't know how many times I've cringed at computer magazines, computer and technology anchors on cable news, hosts of radio call-in computer shows, etc. that OBVIOUSLY bought their first computer with Windows 95 and believe that the information age was invented by Microsoft, and that before whiz-kid Billy G., the poor old-fashioned people in science and academics and business wrote on stone tables and hit each other with clubs way back in the dark '1980s' that pre-date, well, everything.
And of course since Joe Q. Public hears John Q. Radio say that Microsoft invented windowing, mice, desktop publishing, networking, and digital media, and Joe Q. Public has some sort of irrational faith in mass media, from then on you can't tell him anything else, because he won't believe you.
"John Q. Radio and Jack T. Television said that before Microsoft there was no such thing as electricity, so it must be true. What's your source?"
News for young slashdotters: scripting, programming, networks, desktop publishing, the Internet, games, multiuser and online games, databases, spreadsheets, windowing, mice, context menus, widgets, office suites, cutting and pasting, hard drives, floppy drives, removable storage, plug-and-play, and pretty much damn near ANYTHING else you can name, existed WELL before Microsoft introduced them. And in fact, if you do an unbiased comparison between their original incarnations years (and in some cases decades) ago on other platforms and the CURRENT PC versions, you will often be flabbergased to find that the original is better in many, many ways, if a bit out of date.