Most autistics *do* tend to have our own internal/mental reality, and it of course goes without saying that we're the God of that, and so sometimes it gets difficult for us to get used to the idea that just because we are internally, that doesn't mean that we can be Christopher Robin in the outside world/consensus reality as well.
I use eglibc, and I like it better. For instance, when I was a bit distressed to discover that glibc shipped with scripts which require bash or ksh (not a good fit for a TINY embedded system), I went and looked. The dependencies there could be EASILY removed with no significant harm done -- and the scripts would work. One of them took me all of twenty minutes to clean up to make it functional with any POSIX shell.
Yes, but now we will go from a bash reliant libc, to a libc which will be impossible to port to any other distribution or platform because of the degree to which Debian will change it, in order for it to be compatible with that system. If I have to choose between bash or the Debian dev team as barriers to entry for libc portability, I'll take bash in spades.;)
In my experience Glibc is a bloated, flakey, temperamental mess, at least as far as trying to compile it from source is concerned. Admittedly, the recent version used in Linux From Scratch gave me probably the single smoothest compile of it I've ever had.
There were times in the past, however, that were nowhere near as trouble-free; especially when the LFS people made the horrible mistake of using Glibc builds from Red Hat's CVS. It would need patch after patch, and 3-4 times stopped dead partway through the compile for reasons that hadn't been documented (or apparently foreseen) by the LFS people, meaning I'd have to Google the errors and pray to God that someone had uploaded diffs somewhere.
Debian isn't exactly my favourite distribution, to be totally honest; but although they seem to be even more offensive than I myself manage to be most of the time, (which is no mean feat, I might add;)) this may perhaps be their first internal fork which is actually based on logical sense.
A new libc is something which Linux has needed for quite some time now, and getting one is only going to be a blessing for all concerned. It would be nice if said new libc were also BSD licensed; but one can't have everything, I suppose.;)
I understand that; I was more talking about what lands on the hard drive after setup rather than what gets loaded into ram while the livecd is actually active. I'm not going to be wanting to do compiling while I've only got a ramdisk to work with, believe me.;)
Mind you, you're correct of course that for new users, having Gnome as the first thing they see is more important than certain other things being on the disk.
I've actually been working on a system of my own, more as a learning exercise than anything else, as part of messing around with Linux From Scratch, and part of that has meant debating what I want X to contain on a LiveCD. Truthfully, I think terms of my own use, I want to go more the minimalistic route. That of course is one of the fantastic things about Linux; if we don't like what someone else is doing, we can always do our own thing instead.
If you knew how to use DPKG, you wouldn't have this problem.
Assuming that it is the case that I'm ignorant, thanks for the informative, useful reply, there.
True, because the desktop environment should mount those for you when you try to access the device in the GUI. However, with your/etc/fstab issues -- Are you sure you're adding them correctly? Because they automatically mount here and I didn't have to do anything special with them.
They do now. My point was that they weren't added by the setup routine. I don't mind doing such things manually myself so much; but Ubuntu bills itself as a distro that anyone can use, and most Windows immigrants are presumably going to look for certain Windows files (media files mostly) presumably before they do just about anything else. If they can't find them, guess what's likely to happen to the Ubuntu install?;)
Mind you, I don't understand for the life of me why becoming mainstream is such an apparent desperate need for Linux anyway; but that of course is an entirely different can of worms.
Build essential is just the basic building tools, what you're asking for is provided normally in "build-common" - just like Debian.
That isn't the point. A toolchain ought to be part of a default install anyway, in any case other than a boot disk. Binary packaging is the only thing that has changed that. Saving space doesn't work as an argument, either; a bare Linux From Scratch install (which *does* include the toolchain) is around 100Mb. I don't know of anyone who using a hard disk smaller than 40 Gb or so these days.
The bandwidth excuse for subpackaging and related evil practices doesn't hold water either; the Linux kernel these days is 60 Mb compressed, which is a bare 40 Mb smaller than the above figure.
One thing Linux can do that OSX and Windows can't do, is give the end user freedom to do as pleased with the OS, make source code available for modding, adding/removing functions, etc.
This was the main reason for Linux to come about in the first place.
UNIX (and yes, kids, Linux is a UNIX, or at least a UNIX clone, despite the amount that most people who use it seem to wish it wasn't) was originally developed as a system to allow mechanical automation at a phone company.
If that doesn't sound like a system which was designed with Homer Simpson and pretty GUIs in mind, there's a reason for that; namely, that it wasn't.
Ubuntu is trying to force Linux as an underlying operating system to do a very large number of things which it simply wasn't designed to do; or more specifically, let me put that in another way.
Ubuntu is trying to force Linux to do things which Windows does, by mimicking Windows' methodology, when perhaps what Ubuntu's developers don't realise is that Windows was an example of exceptionally bad engineering and computer science in the first place.
UNIX can be made to work as an end-user system. However, it has to be done intelligently. It can only be done if the system's fundamental nature is taken into account. The Ubuntu developers don't do that, and the Debian developers don't do it either.
FreeBSD is proof that end-user UNIX (in other words, UNIX that is actually allowed to be itself, and isn't turned into some warped, Frankenstein-esque Windows hybrid, complete with many of Windows' attendant problems) actually is viable. might be a little more work to initially set up than the "user friendly," Windows crowd might want, but it works perfectly acceptably as a client system after that, and ports is also the only package management system I've ever used which I consider genuinely reliable.
Ubuntu is not UNIX, and Debian isn't either. Both take an underlying system which was, by itself, exceptionally well designed, and turn it into roadkill. Truthfully, the bottom line here is that most of the people developing Linux are themselves Windows immigrants, who wouldn't truly know good coding or design practice if it fell out of the sky, landed on top of them, and started viciously biting them on the face.
The fact that people want a system like Ubuntu, is actually an extension of the overall instant gratification culture. Get a copy of Morgan Spurlock's film, "Super Size Me," and then realise that Ubuntu is McLinux. It's Linux's answer to McDonald's, and has a similar nutritional effect on both the computer and the mind of the individuals who use it.
I don't know how much of what Mark Shuttleworth says, he actually means.
I think he says a lot of things, at times at least, primarily with the goal of keeping either the FSF or the Debian people happy, when that possibly isn't how he himself really feels.
Why do I think this? Simple. I've been using Ubuntu for nearly three weeks now. Despite what Shuttleworth might say here about Linux being its' own system, Ubuntu is the anti-Linux. It is trying harder and more desperately to be a "Free-as-in-Stallman," direct clone of Windows, than any other distribution I've ever seen, and the results, on balance, are utterly disastrous.
(Background: my first exposure to UNIX in general was FreeBSD in 1995 on an ISP's dialup shell; I installed Slackware maybe two years later, played with Red Hat when it first came out a year or two after that, have compiled Linux From Scratch, and have had Debian and Mandrake installed at various times as well)
In that time, I've seen that it has very serious problems. It's probably the least stable, and definitely the least transparent and discoverable, Linux distribution that I've ever used. It is completely non-standard; absolutely nothing is where I expect it to be, at all. Ubuntu's tagline for long-time Linux users could be the same as that of the new Star Trek movie; "Everything You Know Is Wrong.";)
Sysvinit is unhappily married with a new system called Upstart. There is a truly eldritch kernel compilation framework; modprobe.conf does not apply at all. Cups and Bluetooth are installed on systems irrespective of whether you have those devices or not, and if you don't and want to save space, stiff cheddar. If you try and remove them, apt will remove the rest of the system with them. The whole thing is packed to the rafters with Byzantine Debian voodoo; it's an absolute nightmare.
I've had ALSA crashing and becoming corrupt entirely randomly, requiring a complete reinstall. I had a weird crash a few days ago which rendered my nvidia drivers completely inoperable for playing games, but for some inexplicable reason 3D still works just fine for Compiz. The command "mount -a" doesn't work, and Windows partitions aren't automatically added to/etc/fstab, so after I add them, I either have to mount them individually or reboot.
The package "build-essential" doesn't install anywhere near everything that is needed for a Linux From Scratch build; I had to compile texinfo and its' deps, and ncurses from source, since things still wouldn't work even after I installed the apt-get packages.
Go into the Ubuntu support channel on Freenode as well; I was there yesterday, and it is an absolute madhouse. The place is packed, and there are people firing questions at the ops faster than they could ever hope to answer them. The single biggest complaint people have, is that hardware of various kinds randomly and intermittently simply stops working.
My advice to anyone considering using Ubuntu as a distribution? Don't. It is, without a doubt, the single worst, most broken, wreck of a distro that I've ever used; and believe me when I say that after my stint with Debian, that's really saying something.
If you want user-friendly, get Fedora Core. If you want a distro that, in my own mind, lets Linux be itself, get Slackware or Arch. Stay well away from Ubuntu and Debian both; for me anyway, they're just not worth the pain and suffering.
Not trying to start a "who is better than who" war here but OverDose has probably the best tech out there, plus its based on Q2 code, not Q3.
Quake 2 was (IMHO anyway) the weakest product id have released. That's not to say that it was bad necessarily, by any means, but there really wasn't a lot about it that I was able to like, in comparison with id's other games.
I thought XreaL looked good, and the single main reason why, was because of what the blog had about being able to render a scene at 145 FPS, when another modified Q3 engine could only do so at 22 FPS.
The reason why I find that interesting is because there's a particular collaborative 3D project out there which you might have heard of, called Open Croquet. Croquet is a great project with a lot of potential, but one thing they don't really have right now is map editing software with the ability to produce zones that really look good.
Because of that, I've wanted to see Croquet possibly incorporate something at least reasonably close to Radiant or a version of UnrealED, but at the same time there are problems with that, not only with BSP stuff being a little too static for what Croquet wants, but also because of terrible FPS inefficiency at times. If Croquet could get a renderer for BSP/Radiant maps with truly good FPS, and the ability to port from one map to another without prohibitive load times, it would probably go a long way towards making that project a lot more popular.
Why on earth would Microsoft still care about Linux at this point?
Sure, you might still have the usual suspects running Ubuntu and/or Debian...but any opportunity Linux might have had to become genuinely mainstream is long gone (three years or so ago) by now.
Microsoft being worried about OSX genuinely makes sense, but them being scared of Ubuntu makes absolutely no sense at all.
OSX has taken care of every single problem that Linux was designed to solve. It is user-friendly UNIX, and has Open Group certification, and managed to do it while almost completely avoiding any association with the FSF, which means it doesn't damage the credibility of anyone who uses it.
OSX might not be free in either a monetary or ideological sense, no...but nobody who matters cares about that.
Linux is, therefore, now a solution to a problem that no longer exists.
Does this mean that most Americans simply vote they way they always have, regardless of what's happening around them?
No. It means your country's electoral process is rigged. There is no way in Hell that that was a tied election, in any way shape or form, whatsoever. Bush lost both of the elections which put him in power, and anyone with a brain was able to see it.
It's just that the Republican Party (and it's supporters) are so tenacious and gifted when it comes to electoral fraud, that the 3% who appeared to have changed their vote, are simply another 3% of the Democratic vote that was actually able to get through in order to be legitimately counted. Every possible dirty trick that can be used by the GOP to invalidate potential Democratic votes is used; from telling people the wrong day for the election, (as I read about being tried in a previous thread here) to making sure that absentee/disabled votes get diverted to/dev/null, to creating intimidation and holdups in voting queues. I've been reading about all of it happening.
The Republican Party needs to be destroyed, and another opposition party created which has both oversight and strict ethical rules for the conducting of elections.
I get the impression that a few free dinners is all it talks to bribe a lot of these people. A large number of middle managers are so lost in their jobs they will take guidance from anywhere.
"I know this steak doesn't exist. That when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy, and delicious. But in five years, do you know what I've learned? Ignorance is bliss."
If someone important in the IT department at my company said something as grossly fucking stupid as that, then one of two things would happen. I'd either get him fired, or I'd quit and go work for a company that hires qualified people.
That's not completely justified. Of course there is QA, digital signing and such, but although it is rare, compromises are not entirely unknown.
It does still pay to be somewhat cautious, especially with binaries.
Instead, show them Firefox, Compiz/Beryl, or KDE with SuperKarumba.
The advice to try and argue with them on the basis of facts, any kind of technical merit, or worst of all, the FSF's value system, is blatantly autistic, and utterly doomed to failure.
Microsoft does never and has never appealed to people on the basis of technical or philosophical merit. Microsoft has always appealed to people purely on the basis of aesthetics and base superficiality. With a neurotypical audience, that is the only thing that works, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
Find something open source that is bright, flashy, and shiny, and show them that. Get one of the videos on YouTube showing off Beryl with loud, dramatic techno music. That will probably work well.
Trying to tell normal people about freedom in the FSF's context will simply make them think you're a freak, and will thus do the opposite of what you're attempting.
DS9 was fantastic. I agree that it was probably the best series of the lot. I loved Voyager as well, but the reason I think why I was able to love it is because I saw it for what it could have been as well, not purely for what it actually was.
Enterprise IMHO was an abomination that never should have existed. It was post-9/11 Star Trek; as far as I was concerned, I could never watch a single episode of it without seeing an image of the towers falling silently in the background. That attitude permeated every frame of the series, I thought.
The other thing that bothered me about Enterprise was watching Scott Bakula systematically dismantling his career as an actor, piece by piece; I had loved his work in Quantum Leap, and it was genuinely heartbreaking. Jonathan Archer was a studied impersonation of George W. Bush. He was rock stupid, and horrifically arrogant to boot. I never saw a scenario where he didn't need a plan explained to him less than three times...he was an absolute drooling moron.
Trip Tucker was even worse; American ethnocentricity and xenophobia at its' most disgusting. The idea of him in a relationship with a Vulcan woman was repugnant, and an insult to the very concept of that species.
Like I said...that series should not have been made.
I never said I didn't love First Contact. I did. I cried like a baby during Cochrane's initial meeting with the Vulcans.
Part of the reason why I cried to such an extent though is because I also saw First Contact for what it was...a final look back at what the franchise was fundamentally about, before the end; it was its' life flashing before its' eyes, so to speak.
That's why I think it should be allowed to stay buried. Truthfully they shouldn't have made any more films after that. It was a beautiful way to end the franchise, or would have been.
The ship looks way too modern to be anything like something which is actually meant to be *older* technology than what we saw in the 60s. The casting is also terrible; the actors don't look anything like the originals at all.
Star Trek is dead. It died with First Contact. People need to accept that and move on, as do the profiteers responsible for this turkey.
If it's not even as good as Linux, then it must be bad. That's one of Linux's major faults, and probably the most cited reason for not using Linux.
I don't actually blame Linux for lack of said hardware support, personally. I blame hardware manufacturers for making closed hardware that is barely functional outside Windows.
There's a reason why USB in particular is barely supported by anyone outside Windows; it's because, contrary to the name, in software terms it ain't universal.
Linux' window of mainstream opportunity opened in probably late 1998, and closed in around 2006.
The analogy here that I could make is a piece of fruit growing on a tree. It steadily ripens, fattens, and grows too heavy to remain attached to the branch supporting it.
Eventually there are only two directions to go in; for someone to come along, pick the fruit, and take it off to where it can be properly prepared and used, or to fall to the ground and rot.
Guess which outcome happened here? Those elements of mainstream society that were interested waited, and waited, and waited for Linux's conventional user/developer base to get their shit together, grow up, stop with the constant infighting, show some sign of being able to play with the grownups, and more importantly, develop a genuinely viable, saleable product.
It never happened, and the world only has so much of an attention span. The lion's share of the blame for that can also be very safely laid at the feet of the FSF and their spiritual kin, IMHO.
The closest we've got is Ubuntu, a perpetually "not-quite-there-yet," system whose approach to making Linux easy is to use has largely been to attempt to turn it into a single-use (or close to) appliance. Even worse where normal people are concerned, the organisation that sponsors it is non-commercial.
I haven't been to this site in several months, and apparently not much has changed. People are still caught in cognitive dissonance where Linux is concerned.
They want it to become popular, but only among people who think in exactly the same way they do. They want it to become popular, but there will be blood and Hell's fury to pay if it so much as remotely looks as though that is going to involve making money.
The simple fact is, I've stopped caring about Linux, and so have most other people. You've had your chance, guys.
Want user friendly UNIX? Mac OSX. Want a free UNIX, which is only marginally less user friendly than Ubuntu, and about on the same level with most other Linux distros? FreeBSD.
With both of the above alternatives available, I can't see any reason for using Linux on the desktop at all. The other wonderful thing about using either of the above is that it means that I can also bypass the freak show that is Linux's user community and the plague of the FSF, as well.
Linux's modularity and potential small size mean it might still have a place for embedded devices, but even there, if you don't mind less initial user friendliness, there's NetBSD...and with NetBSD not only do you have arguably greater portability, you've also got a more liberal license, and the above mentioned social benefits, as well.
Anyone I come across who doesn't know about Linux and who is planning to try it, is going to get told about the above alternatives, and then urged not to bother. It's just not worth the pain and suffering.
People didn't choose. They were forced to choose. They had little options, when most computers come with M$ and webdesigners make their sites to follow IE's broken (and not open) standards.
No...they weren't actually forced to do anything. What they could have chosen to do is exercise some fscking self-responsibility...tho that's an unpopular option, I know. I've used Firefox ever since the first version of it, and for the most part used Netscape/Mozilla before that. I used IE 4 in particular...but deliberately, consciously, and because I liked it. No other reason. I was using Netscape before IE 4, and I went back to using Mozilla not long after the release of IE 5. I'm using Firefox right now.
IE being installed by default means that Microsoft are betting on the majority being buck passing, mindless lemmings...and of course, where human beings are concerned, that's always a very safe bet. In no way are you forced to use IE at all, however...all it means is that in order to use something else, you need to exercise an actually very small amount of personal initiative.
to make threads on the WoW forums demanding that a statue of Chuck Norris be erected at the centre of the Crossroads in the Barrens...I felt that it was only appropriate to commemorate Chuck's contributions to the culture of that zone, and WoW in general.
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Personally, I call it Hundred Acre Wood Syndrome.
Most autistics *do* tend to have our own internal/mental reality, and it of course goes without saying that we're the God of that, and so sometimes it gets difficult for us to get used to the idea that just because we are internally, that doesn't mean that we can be Christopher Robin in the outside world/consensus reality as well.
I use eglibc, and I like it better. For instance, when I was a bit distressed to discover that glibc shipped with scripts which require bash or ksh (not a good fit for a TINY embedded system), I went and looked. The dependencies there could be EASILY removed with no significant harm done -- and the scripts would work. One of them took me all of twenty minutes to clean up to make it functional with any POSIX shell.
Yes, but now we will go from a bash reliant libc, to a libc which will be impossible to port to any other distribution or platform because of the degree to which Debian will change it, in order for it to be compatible with that system. If I have to choose between bash or the Debian dev team as barriers to entry for libc portability, I'll take bash in spades. ;)
In my experience Glibc is a bloated, flakey, temperamental mess, at least as far as trying to compile it from source is concerned. Admittedly, the recent version used in Linux From Scratch gave me probably the single smoothest compile of it I've ever had.
There were times in the past, however, that were nowhere near as trouble-free; especially when the LFS people made the horrible mistake of using Glibc builds from Red Hat's CVS. It would need patch after patch, and 3-4 times stopped dead partway through the compile for reasons that hadn't been documented (or apparently foreseen) by the LFS people, meaning I'd have to Google the errors and pray to God that someone had uploaded diffs somewhere.
Debian isn't exactly my favourite distribution, to be totally honest; but although they seem to be even more offensive than I myself manage to be most of the time, (which is no mean feat, I might add ;)) this may perhaps be their first internal fork which is actually based on logical sense.
A new libc is something which Linux has needed for quite some time now, and getting one is only going to be a blessing for all concerned. It would be nice if said new libc were also BSD licensed; but one can't have everything, I suppose. ;)
>It's to do with fitting it all on a regular CD
I understand that; I was more talking about what lands on the hard drive after setup rather than what gets loaded into ram while the livecd is actually active. I'm not going to be wanting to do compiling while I've only got a ramdisk to work with, believe me. ;)
Mind you, you're correct of course that for new users, having Gnome as the first thing they see is more important than certain other things being on the disk.
I've actually been working on a system of my own, more as a learning exercise than anything else, as part of messing around with Linux From Scratch, and part of that has meant debating what I want X to contain on a LiveCD. Truthfully, I think terms of my own use, I want to go more the minimalistic route. That of course is one of the fantastic things about Linux; if we don't like what someone else is doing, we can always do our own thing instead.
If you knew how to use DPKG, you wouldn't have this problem.
Assuming that it is the case that I'm ignorant, thanks for the informative, useful reply, there.
True, because the desktop environment should mount those for you when you try to access the device in the GUI. However, with your /etc/fstab issues -- Are you sure you're adding them correctly? Because they automatically mount here and I didn't have to do anything special with them.
They do now. My point was that they weren't added by the setup routine. I don't mind doing such things manually myself so much; but Ubuntu bills itself as a distro that anyone can use, and most Windows immigrants are presumably going to look for certain Windows files (media files mostly) presumably before they do just about anything else. If they can't find them, guess what's likely to happen to the Ubuntu install? ;)
Mind you, I don't understand for the life of me why becoming mainstream is such an apparent desperate need for Linux anyway; but that of course is an entirely different can of worms.
Build essential is just the basic building tools, what you're asking for is provided normally in "build-common" - just like Debian.
That isn't the point. A toolchain ought to be part of a default install anyway, in any case other than a boot disk. Binary packaging is the only thing that has changed that. Saving space doesn't work as an argument, either; a bare Linux From Scratch install (which *does* include the toolchain) is around 100Mb. I don't know of anyone who using a hard disk smaller than 40 Gb or so these days.
The bandwidth excuse for subpackaging and related evil practices doesn't hold water either; the Linux kernel these days is 60 Mb compressed, which is a bare 40 Mb smaller than the above figure.
One thing Linux can do that OSX and Windows can't do, is give the end user freedom to do as pleased with the OS, make source code available for modding, adding/removing functions, etc.
This was the main reason for Linux to come about in the first place.
We can go back even further. Read this.
UNIX (and yes, kids, Linux is a UNIX, or at least a UNIX clone, despite the amount that most people who use it seem to wish it wasn't) was originally developed as a system to allow mechanical automation at a phone company.
If that doesn't sound like a system which was designed with Homer Simpson and pretty GUIs in mind, there's a reason for that; namely, that it wasn't.
Ubuntu is trying to force Linux as an underlying operating system to do a very large number of things which it simply wasn't designed to do; or more specifically, let me put that in another way.
Ubuntu is trying to force Linux to do things which Windows does, by mimicking Windows' methodology, when perhaps what Ubuntu's developers don't realise is that Windows was an example of exceptionally bad engineering and computer science in the first place.
UNIX can be made to work as an end-user system. However, it has to be done intelligently. It can only be done if the system's fundamental nature is taken into account. The Ubuntu developers don't do that, and the Debian developers don't do it either.
FreeBSD is proof that end-user UNIX (in other words, UNIX that is actually allowed to be itself, and isn't turned into some warped, Frankenstein-esque Windows hybrid, complete with many of Windows' attendant problems) actually is viable. might be a little more work to initially set up than the "user friendly," Windows crowd might want, but it works perfectly acceptably as a client system after that, and ports is also the only package management system I've ever used which I consider genuinely reliable.
Ubuntu is not UNIX, and Debian isn't either. Both take an underlying system which was, by itself, exceptionally well designed, and turn it into roadkill. Truthfully, the bottom line here is that most of the people developing Linux are themselves Windows immigrants, who wouldn't truly know good coding or design practice if it fell out of the sky, landed on top of them, and started viciously biting them on the face.
The fact that people want a system like Ubuntu, is actually an extension of the overall instant gratification culture. Get a copy of Morgan Spurlock's film, "Super Size Me," and then realise that Ubuntu is McLinux. It's Linux's answer to McDonald's, and has a similar nutritional effect on both the computer and the mind of the individuals who use it.
Personally, I'm not a huge fan of junk food.
I don't know how much of what Mark Shuttleworth says, he actually means.
I think he says a lot of things, at times at least, primarily with the goal of keeping either the FSF or the Debian people happy, when that possibly isn't how he himself really feels.
Why do I think this? Simple. I've been using Ubuntu for nearly three weeks now. Despite what Shuttleworth might say here about Linux being its' own system, Ubuntu is the anti-Linux. It is trying harder and more desperately to be a "Free-as-in-Stallman," direct clone of Windows, than any other distribution I've ever seen, and the results, on balance, are utterly disastrous.
(Background: my first exposure to UNIX in general was FreeBSD in 1995 on an ISP's dialup shell; I installed Slackware maybe two years later, played with Red Hat when it first came out a year or two after that, have compiled Linux From Scratch, and have had Debian and Mandrake installed at various times as well)
In that time, I've seen that it has very serious problems. It's probably the least stable, and definitely the least transparent and discoverable, Linux distribution that I've ever used. It is completely non-standard; absolutely nothing is where I expect it to be, at all. Ubuntu's tagline for long-time Linux users could be the same as that of the new Star Trek movie; "Everything You Know Is Wrong." ;)
Sysvinit is unhappily married with a new system called Upstart. There is a truly eldritch kernel compilation framework; modprobe.conf does not apply at all. Cups and Bluetooth are installed on systems irrespective of whether you have those devices or not, and if you don't and want to save space, stiff cheddar. If you try and remove them, apt will remove the rest of the system with them. The whole thing is packed to the rafters with Byzantine Debian voodoo; it's an absolute nightmare.
I've had ALSA crashing and becoming corrupt entirely randomly, requiring a complete reinstall. I had a weird crash a few days ago which rendered my nvidia drivers completely inoperable for playing games, but for some inexplicable reason 3D still works just fine for Compiz. The command "mount -a" doesn't work, and Windows partitions aren't automatically added to /etc/fstab, so after I add them, I either have to mount them individually or reboot.
The package "build-essential" doesn't install anywhere near everything that is needed for a Linux From Scratch build; I had to compile texinfo and its' deps, and ncurses from source, since things still wouldn't work even after I installed the apt-get packages.
Go into the Ubuntu support channel on Freenode as well; I was there yesterday, and it is an absolute madhouse. The place is packed, and there are people firing questions at the ops faster than they could ever hope to answer them. The single biggest complaint people have, is that hardware of various kinds randomly and intermittently simply stops working.
My advice to anyone considering using Ubuntu as a distribution? Don't. It is, without a doubt, the single worst, most broken, wreck of a distro that I've ever used; and believe me when I say that after my stint with Debian, that's really saying something.
If you want user-friendly, get Fedora Core. If you want a distro that, in my own mind, lets Linux be itself, get Slackware or Arch. Stay well away from Ubuntu and Debian both; for me anyway, they're just not worth the pain and suffering.
Not trying to start a "who is better than who" war here but OverDose has probably the best tech out there, plus its based on Q2 code, not Q3.
Quake 2 was (IMHO anyway) the weakest product id have released. That's not to say that it was bad necessarily, by any means, but there really wasn't a lot about it that I was able to like, in comparison with id's other games.
I thought XreaL looked good, and the single main reason why, was because of what the blog had about being able to render a scene at 145 FPS, when another modified Q3 engine could only do so at 22 FPS.
The reason why I find that interesting is because there's a particular collaborative 3D project out there which you might have heard of, called Open Croquet. Croquet is a great project with a lot of potential, but one thing they don't really have right now is map editing software with the ability to produce zones that really look good.
Because of that, I've wanted to see Croquet possibly incorporate something at least reasonably close to Radiant or a version of UnrealED, but at the same time there are problems with that, not only with BSP stuff being a little too static for what Croquet wants, but also because of terrible FPS inefficiency at times. If Croquet could get a renderer for BSP/Radiant maps with truly good FPS, and the ability to port from one map to another without prohibitive load times, it would probably go a long way towards making that project a lot more popular.
Because the GNU utils tend to be more usable than their BSD counterparts.
Can you elaborate?
Why on earth would Microsoft still care about Linux at this point?
Sure, you might still have the usual suspects running Ubuntu and/or Debian...but any opportunity Linux might have had to become genuinely mainstream is long gone (three years or so ago) by now.
Microsoft being worried about OSX genuinely makes sense, but them being scared of Ubuntu makes absolutely no sense at all.
OSX has taken care of every single problem that Linux was designed to solve. It is user-friendly UNIX, and has Open Group certification, and managed to do it while almost completely avoiding any association with the FSF, which means it doesn't damage the credibility of anyone who uses it.
OSX might not be free in either a monetary or ideological sense, no...but nobody who matters cares about that.
Linux is, therefore, now a solution to a problem that no longer exists.
There are woolly mammoths in the latest World of Warcraft expansion. They're huge, fierce, and scary looking.
Does this mean that most Americans simply vote they way they always have, regardless of what's happening around them?
No. It means your country's electoral process is rigged. There is no way in Hell that that was a tied election, in any way shape or form, whatsoever. Bush lost both of the elections which put him in power, and anyone with a brain was able to see it.
It's just that the Republican Party (and it's supporters) are so tenacious and gifted when it comes to electoral fraud, that the 3% who appeared to have changed their vote, are simply another 3% of the Democratic vote that was actually able to get through in order to be legitimately counted. Every possible dirty trick that can be used by the GOP to invalidate potential Democratic votes is used; from telling people the wrong day for the election, (as I read about being tried in a previous thread here) to making sure that absentee/disabled votes get diverted to /dev/null, to creating intimidation and holdups in voting queues. I've been reading about all of it happening.
The Republican Party needs to be destroyed, and another opposition party created which has both oversight and strict ethical rules for the conducting of elections.
I get the impression that a few free dinners is all it talks to bribe a lot of these people. A large number of middle managers are so lost in their jobs they will take guidance from anywhere.
"I know this steak doesn't exist. That when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy, and delicious. But in five years, do you know what I've learned? Ignorance is bliss."
"Then we have a deal, Mr. Reagan."
If someone important in the IT department at my company said something as grossly fucking stupid as that, then one of two things would happen. I'd either get him fired, or I'd quit and go work for a company that hires qualified people.
That's not completely justified. Of course there is QA, digital signing and such, but although it is rare, compromises are not entirely unknown.
It does still pay to be somewhat cautious, especially with binaries.
Instead, show them Firefox, Compiz/Beryl, or KDE with SuperKarumba.
The advice to try and argue with them on the basis of facts, any kind of technical merit, or worst of all, the FSF's value system, is blatantly autistic, and utterly doomed to failure.
Microsoft does never and has never appealed to people on the basis of technical or philosophical merit. Microsoft has always appealed to people purely on the basis of aesthetics and base superficiality. With a neurotypical audience, that is the only thing that works, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
Find something open source that is bright, flashy, and shiny, and show them that. Get one of the videos on YouTube showing off Beryl with loud, dramatic techno music. That will probably work well.
Trying to tell normal people about freedom in the FSF's context will simply make them think you're a freak, and will thus do the opposite of what you're attempting.
DS9 was fantastic. I agree that it was probably the best series of the lot. I loved Voyager as well, but the reason I think why I was able to love it is because I saw it for what it could have been as well, not purely for what it actually was.
Enterprise IMHO was an abomination that never should have existed. It was post-9/11 Star Trek; as far as I was concerned, I could never watch a single episode of it without seeing an image of the towers falling silently in the background. That attitude permeated every frame of the series, I thought.
The other thing that bothered me about Enterprise was watching Scott Bakula systematically dismantling his career as an actor, piece by piece; I had loved his work in Quantum Leap, and it was genuinely heartbreaking. Jonathan Archer was a studied impersonation of George W. Bush. He was rock stupid, and horrifically arrogant to boot. I never saw a scenario where he didn't need a plan explained to him less than three times...he was an absolute drooling moron.
Trip Tucker was even worse; American ethnocentricity and xenophobia at its' most disgusting. The idea of him in a relationship with a Vulcan woman was repugnant, and an insult to the very concept of that species.
Like I said...that series should not have been made.
I never said I didn't love First Contact. I did. I cried like a baby during Cochrane's initial meeting with the Vulcans.
Part of the reason why I cried to such an extent though is because I also saw First Contact for what it was...a final look back at what the franchise was fundamentally about, before the end; it was its' life flashing before its' eyes, so to speak.
That's why I think it should be allowed to stay buried. Truthfully they shouldn't have made any more films after that. It was a beautiful way to end the franchise, or would have been.
The ship looks way too modern to be anything like something which is actually meant to be *older* technology than what we saw in the 60s. The casting is also terrible; the actors don't look anything like the originals at all.
Star Trek is dead. It died with First Contact. People need to accept that and move on, as do the profiteers responsible for this turkey.
If it's not even as good as Linux, then it must be bad. That's one of Linux's major faults, and probably the most cited reason for not using Linux.
I don't actually blame Linux for lack of said hardware support, personally. I blame hardware manufacturers for making closed hardware that is barely functional outside Windows.
There's a reason why USB in particular is barely supported by anyone outside Windows; it's because, contrary to the name, in software terms it ain't universal.
...the first 5-10 comments on any BSD related post always consist of trolls, FUD, and other rubbish.
Fuck you, Linux "community."
Linux' window of mainstream opportunity opened in probably late 1998, and closed in around 2006.
The analogy here that I could make is a piece of fruit growing on a tree. It steadily ripens, fattens, and grows too heavy to remain attached to the branch supporting it.
Eventually there are only two directions to go in; for someone to come along, pick the fruit, and take it off to where it can be properly prepared and used, or to fall to the ground and rot.
Guess which outcome happened here? Those elements of mainstream society that were interested waited, and waited, and waited for Linux's conventional user/developer base to get their shit together, grow up, stop with the constant infighting, show some sign of being able to play with the grownups, and more importantly, develop a genuinely viable, saleable product.
It never happened, and the world only has so much of an attention span. The lion's share of the blame for that can also be very safely laid at the feet of the FSF and their spiritual kin, IMHO.
The closest we've got is Ubuntu, a perpetually "not-quite-there-yet," system whose approach to making Linux easy is to use has largely been to attempt to turn it into a single-use (or close to) appliance. Even worse where normal people are concerned, the organisation that sponsors it is non-commercial.
I haven't been to this site in several months, and apparently not much has changed. People are still caught in cognitive dissonance where Linux is concerned.
They want it to become popular, but only among people who think in exactly the same way they do. They want it to become popular, but there will be blood and Hell's fury to pay if it so much as remotely looks as though that is going to involve making money.
The simple fact is, I've stopped caring about Linux, and so have most other people. You've had your chance, guys.
You blew it.
Want user friendly UNIX? Mac OSX.
Want a free UNIX, which is only marginally less user friendly than Ubuntu, and about on the same level with most other Linux distros? FreeBSD.
With both of the above alternatives available, I can't see any reason for using Linux on the desktop at all. The other wonderful thing about using either of the above is that it means that I can also bypass the freak show that is Linux's user community and the plague of the FSF, as well.
Linux's modularity and potential small size mean it might still have a place for embedded devices, but even there, if you don't mind less initial user friendliness, there's NetBSD...and with NetBSD not only do you have arguably greater portability, you've also got a more liberal license, and the above mentioned social benefits, as well.
Anyone I come across who doesn't know about Linux and who is planning to try it, is going to get told about the above alternatives, and then urged not to bother. It's just not worth the pain and suffering.
I remember the saying from my IRC days.
;-)
"The Warez must flow."
People didn't choose. They were forced to choose. They had little options, when most computers come with M$ and webdesigners make their sites to follow IE's broken (and not open) standards.
No...they weren't actually forced to do anything. What they could have chosen to do is exercise some fscking self-responsibility...tho that's an unpopular option, I know. I've used Firefox ever since the first version of it, and for the most part used Netscape/Mozilla before that. I used IE 4 in particular...but deliberately, consciously, and because I liked it. No other reason. I was using Netscape before IE 4, and I went back to using Mozilla not long after the release of IE 5. I'm using Firefox right now.
IE being installed by default means that Microsoft are betting on the majority being buck passing, mindless lemmings...and of course, where human beings are concerned, that's always a very safe bet. In no way are you forced to use IE at all, however...all it means is that in order to use something else, you need to exercise an actually very small amount of personal initiative.
to make threads on the WoW forums demanding that a statue of Chuck Norris be erected at the centre of the Crossroads in the Barrens...I felt that it was only appropriate to commemorate Chuck's contributions to the culture of that zone, and WoW in general.
Blizzard deleted both threads, unanswered.
For shame, Blizz...you should know better.