I know this is going to seem like trolling, but humour me here. What is it, that people honestly see in this distribution?
I used both Jaunty and Intrepid; Jaunty for probably two months. I've been using Linux for 15 years now, and I honestly feel that Ubuntu was, without any hyperbole, the single worst Linux distribution that I've ever seen. I absolutely hated it.
Why? Sound (ALSA) dropping out randomly and continually, kernel panics from nVidia drivers, and the completely non-orthagonal design, with Gnome being hard-welded to the rest of the system, were the three main reasons. I don't like Gnome at all, and when I tried to remove it, rapidly found that I couldn't. I generally use Ratpoison in either Linux or FreeBSD.
Then there's the horrid mess that is upstart, and the usual Debian tendency to change absolutely everything they can, purely for the hell of it, such that even basic things like setting up an fstab for the most part doesn't work. Hard drives get mounted some other way, that I wasn't able to find. Add to that, the "quiet splash," options in GRUB, which remove the ability to debug a faulty installation, leading to the infamous "black screen of death." I honestly felt that the overall design was seriously less transparent than Windows; and if I started really trying to change things, the entire system very rapidly started to fall apart.
Are people really so superficial, that a nice shiny Gnome theme (for the first few minutes before the system dies, at least) is the only thing that is considered important?
Yes, but I also feel that this was the most polished implementation, for some reason. If I had mod points, this one would get Funny, and the rest would get Redundant.
...is just how little I apparently think about sex, relative to the general population. There is a period of roughly once every 24 hours where the subject comes up, for the most part, and that is it. If I go outside, and happen to run into some women, it might be more than that, but on days when I stay in, it genuinely doesn't.
But of course. It's always done for the protection of someone's safety.
"Finally, dear Julius, you will remember what I frequently said and wrote in Mein Kampf: "The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people." I explained that as long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation. It is truly heartwarming to see how well this lesson has been learned by the American government. In the name of children, incursions into the private lives of American citizens have been made that we Nazis would have gazed at with open-mouthed admiration. Does it matter that our bodies failed as long as our spirit still triumphs?"
This is an adaptation of Bush's "free speech zones," plain and simple. The parents are probably the only real reason why they don't simply shoot these kids instead; Kali knows, it's what governments would prefer to do with us.
As he gave his presentation to the ALS masses, one eye was always on Tove and their newborn daughter. Obviously two very luck people.
Self-actualisation is the term you're looking for. Luck never has as much to do with it as most people think.
There are certain variables which can work in a person's favour, of course, yes; but they simply make it easier, not impossible. Linus is a man of greater courage than most of us, so as said, he attracted a similar woman.
Really, they both deserve to get a peace prize, since neither of them would be where they are today without the other. I would suggest that it be given to Stallman/Linus as an entity, rather than to either of them individually. Then, Linus can drop Stallman's name off of his medal.
Stallman doesn't deserve this at all. He is a cult leader, and every time a member of the trade press is issued death threats by his cultists as a result of writing critical articles about Linux, his influence is directly to blame. The FSF have done more to incite conflict and cause division among Linux users, as well as alienating people from potentially using Linux, than anyone else.
I'm sick of seeing Stallman being brought up every time Linus is. Linus did some actual programming work, has been continually maintaining the kernel for close to two decades, and most importantly, is still doing so today.
Stallman, on the other hand, derives most of the credit he takes, from code that other people have written, (and who are generally never heard about, such as Roland McGrath as one example) and a certain amount of his own work, none of which was written more recently than probably 25 years ago at the latest.
He is also, and I will emphasise this again, demonstrably a cult leader, and ultimately of no greater moral worth than L. Ron. Hubbard, the founder of the Church of Scientology. If you believe otherwise, I can only conclude that it is simply because you've fallen under his sway. Exerting influence on people, is, after all, the primary activity that cult leaders excel at.
If Linus is ever awarded the Nobel Peace Prize he'd have to hand it over to his wife who, if I recall correctly, was once a black belt karate champion in Finland. There's no doubt in my mind who keeps the peace in that family.
Kickboxing, more specifically.
It's also perhaps less demeaning, in gender terms, to say that a great person of either gender, will often end up attracting an equally great person from the other. To me it's entirely logical that Linus would end up with someone as accomplished as Tove as a partner.
The social heirarchy is entirely Darwinian in both origin and function. Linus and Tove, quite simply, are most likely two people who are at the same developmental level, and hence, they're together.
I used The Gimp to whip up a new desktop wallpaper recently. My copy of Photoshop had expired, and I didn't know what else to do.
I was pleasantly surprised; the package is still a little bare compared with Photoshop, but it's come a very long way, and was fully capable of doing everything I wanted.
As graphics packages, I view the differences between the Gimp and Photoshop, as being analogous to the differences between vim and Emacs, with vim being analogous with the Gimp in this case.
Sure, Photoshop has a little more stuff, but truthfully, you don't always want everything but the kitchen sink. Sometimes you just want to do something quick, and The Gimp has most of the filters you'll generally need, anyway. In that sense it adheres well with the UNIX design philosophy; it's the 90% solution. For the other 10%, I'll find another solution, which for me probably won't involve Photoshop, because the amount of FOSS I have access to now, means I'm a lot less willing to pirate software than I used to be. If we want companies to abide by our licenses, we need to abide by theirs.
If Ubuntu is rejecting the Gimp, that shouldn't upset anyone in the slightest. Personally, I rejected Ubuntu six months ago, and haven't looked back. It is an over-engineered, bloated, brittle obscenity of a distribution, which is designed to pander to the voluntarily intellectually disabled, lowest common denominator.
Get Arch, FreeBSD, or (*gasp*) Windows, and leave Ubuntu in the cybernetic rubbish bin where it belongs. Trust me; you'll be glad you did.
"Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat:
Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it."
-- Matthew 7:13,14
Enlightenment as a window manager, is similar to the Amiga, in the sense that it is yet another example of the road less travelled, and yet more proof of the truth that the mainstream choice is nearly always, also the very worst.
Graphically it is beautiful, and always has been. In terms of resource use, it is far more efficient than it has any logical right to be, given its' degree of aesthetic beauty.
It is a shining example of the timeless, divinely sanctioned, and tragically (but unsurprisingly) rarely followed UNIX design philosophy, and as proof of such, also naturally uses the BSD license.
There are some people, who I wish it was possible for us to render exempt from physical death; such is the extent to which we as a species need them. UNIX's initial authors are such men, and Raster is another. However passionately I may experience negative emotions towards some things, I experience equal passion of a positive form towards others.
You like the idea of companies using their monopoly to impose standards. You are a power worshipper. You don't care what the standards are or whether others can compete. You are a person who knows his place and wants everyone else to know theirs. One software provider for all.
In my own personal case, every one of these assumptions is completely false. These assumptions are also being made, unsurprisingly, by an Anonymous Coward.
Next.
"As a group, Linux users are among the most toxic, hateful..." I confess you are worthy of the hate. Look to yourself.
How ironic. You've given me an example of precisely the attitude I was referring to.
I honestly had no idea that government was capable of thinking this far outside the box. This is cause for either great optimism, or equal fear, depending on your perspective.
...what might happen if we could run a copy of The Sims on a truly massive supercomputer. It would need to be somewhat customised for that particular machine/environment, of course, but I think it could be interesting.
There were times when I did see something close to genuinely emergent behaviour in the Sims 2, or more specifically, emergent combinations of pre-existing routines. You need to set things up for them in a way which is somewhat out of the box, and definitely not in line with real world human architectural or aesthetic norms, but it can happen.
Makes me think; if we could run the Sims, or the bots from some currently existing FPS, parallel on a sufficiently large scale, we might eventually start seeing some very interesting results come from it, at least within the contexts of said games.
Everyone wins, except, of course, the people who use the computers.
No, computer users win, too.
I've just recently largely gone back to XP from a combination of using Arch Linux, and FreeBSD since May. Every time I try and use Linux long term, I inevitably end up going back to Windows, purely due to the amount of sheer misery it causes me. Why?
a) The "community." This is the single biggest issue. As a group, Linux users are among the most toxic, hateful, myopic, delusional, generally vile human beings on the face of the planet. Stallman's cult, and the people defending it, gets really old after a while. The persistent, ongoing hatred of Microsoft is also as pathetic as it is toxic, especially when it mostly consists of arguments which were relevant in 1999, but really aren't now at all.
The icing on the cake here, is the scenario where the FSF's boosters refuse to accept the fact that the only basis for their belief system is pure, raw Stallmanite mind control. The FSF's perspective isn't based on anything logical, or anything that the neurotypical population remotely cares about.
b) Stability. I bet you'd never expect the time to come when a Microsoft OS could claim to be better than Linux in this department, did you? The time has come. PulseAudio (as but one example) is a disaster, and I also had other programs (such as Xine) crashing under Linux when they didn't under FreeBSD.
c) The need to endlessly screw around with things in order to get them to work. This isn't exactly the same as the stability argument above, but it's close. I realised a couple of days ago, that with Linux or FreeBSD, there's an instinctive expectation with me, for something to crash once or twice, and for me to have to tweak it somehow, before it will work without a problem. In Windows, that is never the case. Everything just works.
Those are the three areas where Linux needs fixing. The cult, the lack of stability, and the need for gratuitous over-configuration. Of the three, the cult is the only one which I fear actually isn't fixable at all.
I can hope that within my lifetime, the same truth will be rediscovered in mainstream terms, where the command line is concerned, as well.
I may be accused of suffering from an inverse form of the chronological snobbery fallacy. (the appeal to antiquity)
However, the reality is that, when used as a criteria for determining the quality of something, the appeal to antiquity far more commonly holds true than its' reversal. In most cases, there genuinely is no school like the old school.
As the x86 architecture has already eloquently proven to us, (and Windows to a degree as well, given that the customer perception was that Windows was free, due to the CPU tax) competitive fitness in the marketplace is determined purely by price.
Technological/engineering quality does not enter into the equation at all; if it did, we'd all be using MIPS or ARM processors, and the x86 would be dead.
From the market point of view, it doesn't matter in the slightest that these disks might be more reliable, or last much longer than conventional DVDs. The cheapest solution always wins, and usually, the cheapest solution is also the worst technological solution, not the best.
I would love to own one of these burners, and also several of these DVDs, because I'm one of the few very rare individuals who values technical excellence more than superficiality. However, the economic problem is still a very practical one for me, sadly; I'm on a pension.
Hence, I might really want stone DVDs, but if I can only afford conventional ones, conventional are what I will buy.
Microsoft realise (or at least make it look like they do) that working with Linux, rather than against it, is better for business. Film at 11.
If you have a brain, you're already using Emacs as an IDE. Yes, I know that statement will get refuted by the GUI hordes; the same enlightened thinkers who actually believe that C++ and XML are Good Things, and who are afflicted with that logical fallacy known as an appeal to modernity ("that crap is so 1970s!") where UNIX in general is concerned. That's why I said, "If you have a brain."
As for version control, I'm not sure, (my CVS on Sourceforge is good enough for me when I have need of such) but from what little I've read, it seems that SVN is what the cool kids are using these days.
Seriously; if maintaining your level of faith in the compassion, empathy, and fundamental decency of the human species is something you care about, don't ever visit 4chan.
That site is very little more than a showcase of the very worst, morally, psychologically, and emotionally, that humanity is capable of.
Not if the government regulates competitors out of existence. What exists today in no way resembles a free market.
This is true.
People who think that pure capitalism actually exists in contemporary society, need to read Ludwig von Mises, and then compare what he advocates, with the way things really are.
The amount of apologies being made for corporations in these threads is frightening. People actually defend corporate economic and social rape of the population, and attack those who complain about it.
A more beneficial response for everyone, including the apologists themselves, might be to come together in order to bring about said corporations' end.
If you don't like it, they will be happy to disconnect you.
Let them disconnect you, then. From what other people in this thread are saying, there are other providers who will treat you far better than Verizon will.
Stop sending the company the message that its' behaviour is acceptable, by continuing to give it money. Start exercising personal responsibility and conscious choice.
I've already seen the XML based, opaque mess that is Google Wave.
In an ideal world, corporations would not be able to have any say whatsoever in the development of collectively used protocols or languages. The suits are already destroying HTML.
Destroying things for the sake of money, is the only thing that suits know how to do. If you want to actually create something, and create something which is genuinely beneficial and positive in nature, the profit motive has to be removed from the equation.
People also need to stop believing the lies that they are told, that the profit motive is a necessary part of the process. It isn't. We see software development occurring on a daily basis, that the profit motive has absolutely nothing to do with. We also saw communication systems (in terms of the bulletin boards) being developed in the past, which were entirely non-commercial in motive and intent, as well.
Before you develop stars in your eyes about worthless things like Google Wave, try realising that none of the functionality it offers, is genuinely new at all. It is simply an obfuscated hybrid of a number of pre-existing protocols, which work far more effectively on an individual basis.
Instead of the idea advocated here, try using a text-based browser (such as links) for specific tasks, which bypasses all of the advertising, and massively reduces the amount of necessary bandwidth used.
The cartels rely on the fact that 95% of the public who see this story, will have one of two reactions.
a) They won't care. It will simply be irrelevant background noise. "It doesn't interfere with my ability to get up, get coffee, go to a meaningless job for 16 hours, come home, eat, sleep, and then repeat, does it? In that case, it's not my problem. I've got other things to worry about."
b) They will have swallowed the cartels' PR kool aid, and will make the assumption that the cartels are in the right, simply because the cartels say so.
The only way that the cartels are going to be prevented from continuing to rape ordinarily people, in the various ways that they do, is if the majority of human beings a) start viewing it as their problem, and make a decision that it is unacceptable, and b) realise that the entire manner in which the cartels try to frame the issue is a lie, based on self-destructive greed, and is therefore to be discarded entirely.
The few people who will read this on Slashdot, and feel outraged by it, represent a number of people which the cartels can very safely ignore. It has to be the majority, and it has to be the will of the majority that the cartels are entirely smashed.
Slashdot Mirror
I know this is going to seem like trolling, but humour me here. What is it, that people honestly see in this distribution?
I used both Jaunty and Intrepid; Jaunty for probably two months. I've been using Linux for 15 years now, and I honestly feel that Ubuntu was, without any hyperbole, the single worst Linux distribution that I've ever seen. I absolutely hated it.
Why? Sound (ALSA) dropping out randomly and continually, kernel panics from nVidia drivers, and the completely non-orthagonal design, with Gnome being hard-welded to the rest of the system, were the three main reasons. I don't like Gnome at all, and when I tried to remove it, rapidly found that I couldn't. I generally use Ratpoison in either Linux or FreeBSD.
Then there's the horrid mess that is upstart, and the usual Debian tendency to change absolutely everything they can, purely for the hell of it, such that even basic things like setting up an fstab for the most part doesn't work. Hard drives get mounted some other way, that I wasn't able to find. Add to that, the "quiet splash," options in GRUB, which remove the ability to debug a faulty installation, leading to the infamous "black screen of death." I honestly felt that the overall design was seriously less transparent than Windows; and if I started really trying to change things, the entire system very rapidly started to fall apart.
Are people really so superficial, that a nice shiny Gnome theme (for the first few minutes before the system dies, at least) is the only thing that is considered important?
Yes, but I also feel that this was the most polished implementation, for some reason. If I had mod points, this one would get Funny, and the rest would get Redundant.
...is just how little I apparently think about sex, relative to the general population. There is a period of roughly once every 24 hours where the subject comes up, for the most part, and that is it. If I go outside, and happen to run into some women, it might be more than that, but on days when I stay in, it genuinely doesn't.
I guess I'm just really abnormal.
But of course. It's always done for the protection of someone's safety.
"Finally, dear Julius, you will remember what I frequently said and wrote in Mein Kampf: "The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people." I explained that as long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation. It is truly heartwarming to see how well this lesson has been learned by the American government. In the name of children, incursions into the private lives of American citizens have been made that we Nazis would have gazed at with open-mouthed admiration. Does it matter that our bodies failed as long as our spirit still triumphs?"
-- Posthumous Letter from Adolf Hitler to Julius Streicher.
This is an adaptation of Bush's "free speech zones," plain and simple. The parents are probably the only real reason why they don't simply shoot these kids instead; Kali knows, it's what governments would prefer to do with us.
As he gave his presentation to the ALS masses, one eye was always on Tove and their newborn daughter. Obviously two very luck people.
Self-actualisation is the term you're looking for. Luck never has as much to do with it as most people think.
There are certain variables which can work in a person's favour, of course, yes; but they simply make it easier, not impossible. Linus is a man of greater courage than most of us, so as said, he attracted a similar woman.
Really, they both deserve to get a peace prize, since neither of them would be where they are today without the other. I would suggest that it be given to Stallman/Linus as an entity, rather than to either of them individually. Then, Linus can drop Stallman's name off of his medal.
Stallman doesn't deserve this at all. He is a cult leader, and every time a member of the trade press is issued death threats by his cultists as a result of writing critical articles about Linux, his influence is directly to blame. The FSF have done more to incite conflict and cause division among Linux users, as well as alienating people from potentially using Linux, than anyone else.
I'm sick of seeing Stallman being brought up every time Linus is. Linus did some actual programming work, has been continually maintaining the kernel for close to two decades, and most importantly, is still doing so today.
Stallman, on the other hand, derives most of the credit he takes, from code that other people have written, (and who are generally never heard about, such as Roland McGrath as one example) and a certain amount of his own work, none of which was written more recently than probably 25 years ago at the latest.
He is also, and I will emphasise this again, demonstrably a cult leader, and ultimately of no greater moral worth than L. Ron. Hubbard, the founder of the Church of Scientology. If you believe otherwise, I can only conclude that it is simply because you've fallen under his sway. Exerting influence on people, is, after all, the primary activity that cult leaders excel at.
If Linus is ever awarded the Nobel Peace Prize he'd have to hand it over to his wife who, if I recall correctly, was once a black belt karate champion in Finland. There's no doubt in my mind who keeps the peace in that family.
Kickboxing, more specifically.
It's also perhaps less demeaning, in gender terms, to say that a great person of either gender, will often end up attracting an equally great person from the other. To me it's entirely logical that Linus would end up with someone as accomplished as Tove as a partner.
The social heirarchy is entirely Darwinian in both origin and function. Linus and Tove, quite simply, are most likely two people who are at the same developmental level, and hence, they're together.
Instead you'd do CentOS 5 or Ubuntu LTS.
CentOS maybe, but instead of Ubuntu, a smart admin who doesn't want hardware problems in particular is going to use Arch.
Ubuntu is not stable.
I used The Gimp to whip up a new desktop wallpaper recently. My copy of Photoshop had expired, and I didn't know what else to do.
I was pleasantly surprised; the package is still a little bare compared with Photoshop, but it's come a very long way, and was fully capable of doing everything I wanted.
As graphics packages, I view the differences between the Gimp and Photoshop, as being analogous to the differences between vim and Emacs, with vim being analogous with the Gimp in this case.
Sure, Photoshop has a little more stuff, but truthfully, you don't always want everything but the kitchen sink. Sometimes you just want to do something quick, and The Gimp has most of the filters you'll generally need, anyway. In that sense it adheres well with the UNIX design philosophy; it's the 90% solution. For the other 10%, I'll find another solution, which for me probably won't involve Photoshop, because the amount of FOSS I have access to now, means I'm a lot less willing to pirate software than I used to be. If we want companies to abide by our licenses, we need to abide by theirs.
If Ubuntu is rejecting the Gimp, that shouldn't upset anyone in the slightest. Personally, I rejected Ubuntu six months ago, and haven't looked back. It is an over-engineered, bloated, brittle obscenity of a distribution, which is designed to pander to the voluntarily intellectually disabled, lowest common denominator.
Get Arch, FreeBSD, or (*gasp*) Windows, and leave Ubuntu in the cybernetic rubbish bin where it belongs. Trust me; you'll be glad you did.
Ever tried FreeBSD? :)
"Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat:
Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it."
-- Matthew 7:13,14
Enlightenment as a window manager, is similar to the Amiga, in the sense that it is yet another example of the road less travelled, and yet more proof of the truth that the mainstream choice is nearly always, also the very worst.
Graphically it is beautiful, and always has been. In terms of resource use, it is far more efficient than it has any logical right to be, given its' degree of aesthetic beauty.
It is a shining example of the timeless, divinely sanctioned, and tragically (but unsurprisingly) rarely followed UNIX design philosophy, and as proof of such, also naturally uses the BSD license.
There are some people, who I wish it was possible for us to render exempt from physical death; such is the extent to which we as a species need them. UNIX's initial authors are such men, and Raster is another. However passionately I may experience negative emotions towards some things, I experience equal passion of a positive form towards others.
You like the idea of companies using their monopoly to impose standards. You are a power worshipper. You don't care what the standards are or whether others can compete. You are a person who knows his place and wants everyone else to know theirs. One software provider for all.
In my own personal case, every one of these assumptions is completely false. These assumptions are also being made, unsurprisingly, by an Anonymous Coward.
Next.
"As a group, Linux users are among the most toxic, hateful..." I confess you are worthy of the hate. Look to yourself.
How ironic. You've given me an example of precisely the attitude I was referring to.
"Fascinating."
I honestly had no idea that government was capable of thinking this far outside the box. This is cause for either great optimism, or equal fear, depending on your perspective.
...what might happen if we could run a copy of The Sims on a truly massive supercomputer. It would need to be somewhat customised for that particular machine/environment, of course, but I think it could be interesting.
There were times when I did see something close to genuinely emergent behaviour in the Sims 2, or more specifically, emergent combinations of pre-existing routines. You need to set things up for them in a way which is somewhat out of the box, and definitely not in line with real world human architectural or aesthetic norms, but it can happen.
Makes me think; if we could run the Sims, or the bots from some currently existing FPS, parallel on a sufficiently large scale, we might eventually start seeing some very interesting results come from it, at least within the contexts of said games.
Everyone wins, except, of course, the people who use the computers.
No, computer users win, too.
I've just recently largely gone back to XP from a combination of using Arch Linux, and FreeBSD since May. Every time I try and use Linux long term, I inevitably end up going back to Windows, purely due to the amount of sheer misery it causes me. Why?
a) The "community." This is the single biggest issue. As a group, Linux users are among the most toxic, hateful, myopic, delusional, generally vile human beings on the face of the planet. Stallman's cult, and the people defending it, gets really old after a while. The persistent, ongoing hatred of Microsoft is also as pathetic as it is toxic, especially when it mostly consists of arguments which were relevant in 1999, but really aren't now at all.
The icing on the cake here, is the scenario where the FSF's boosters refuse to accept the fact that the only basis for their belief system is pure, raw Stallmanite mind control. The FSF's perspective isn't based on anything logical, or anything that the neurotypical population remotely cares about.
b) Stability. I bet you'd never expect the time to come when a Microsoft OS could claim to be better than Linux in this department, did you? The time has come. PulseAudio (as but one example) is a disaster, and I also had other programs (such as Xine) crashing under Linux when they didn't under FreeBSD.
c) The need to endlessly screw around with things in order to get them to work. This isn't exactly the same as the stability argument above, but it's close. I realised a couple of days ago, that with Linux or FreeBSD, there's an instinctive expectation with me, for something to crash once or twice, and for me to have to tweak it somehow, before it will work without a problem. In Windows, that is never the case. Everything just works.
Those are the three areas where Linux needs fixing. The cult, the lack of stability, and the need for gratuitous over-configuration. Of the three, the cult is the only one which I fear actually isn't fixable at all.
As long as said porn features either Gianna Michaels, Faith Nelson, or Linsey Dawn McKenzie, that's fine.
I would have advocated porn featuring any of those two women, for inclusion on the Voyager Golden Record, quite seriously.
If I had mod points, +1, Funny; although probably also -1, Politically Incorrect. ;)
Also, for the record I'm wondering; is Godwin's Law technically invoked, here?
We go back to stone tablets. Wow.
Yes. It is a truism, that modernity only very rarely, (if at all) produces truly superior technologies.
A similar realisation was made with XML not long ago, too.
I can hope that within my lifetime, the same truth will be rediscovered in mainstream terms, where the command line is concerned, as well.
I may be accused of suffering from an inverse form of the chronological snobbery fallacy. (the appeal to antiquity)
However, the reality is that, when used as a criteria for determining the quality of something, the appeal to antiquity far more commonly holds true than its' reversal. In most cases, there genuinely is no school like the old school.
As the x86 architecture has already eloquently proven to us, (and Windows to a degree as well, given that the customer perception was that Windows was free, due to the CPU tax) competitive fitness in the marketplace is determined purely by price.
Technological/engineering quality does not enter into the equation at all; if it did, we'd all be using MIPS or ARM processors, and the x86 would be dead.
From the market point of view, it doesn't matter in the slightest that these disks might be more reliable, or last much longer than conventional DVDs. The cheapest solution always wins, and usually, the cheapest solution is also the worst technological solution, not the best.
I would love to own one of these burners, and also several of these DVDs, because I'm one of the few very rare individuals who values technical excellence more than superficiality. However, the economic problem is still a very practical one for me, sadly; I'm on a pension.
Hence, I might really want stone DVDs, but if I can only afford conventional ones, conventional are what I will buy.
Microsoft realise (or at least make it look like they do) that working with Linux, rather than against it, is better for business. Film at 11.
If you have a brain, you're already using Emacs as an IDE. Yes, I know that statement will get refuted by the GUI hordes; the same enlightened thinkers who actually believe that C++ and XML are Good Things, and who are afflicted with that logical fallacy known as an appeal to modernity ("that crap is so 1970s!") where UNIX in general is concerned. That's why I said, "If you have a brain."
As for version control, I'm not sure, (my CVS on Sourceforge is good enough for me when I have need of such) but from what little I've read, it seems that SVN is what the cool kids are using these days.
Mod parent +5,000, Insightful.
Seriously; if maintaining your level of faith in the compassion, empathy, and fundamental decency of the human species is something you care about, don't ever visit 4chan.
That site is very little more than a showcase of the very worst, morally, psychologically, and emotionally, that humanity is capable of.
Not if the government regulates competitors out of existence. What exists today in no way resembles a free market.
This is true.
People who think that pure capitalism actually exists in contemporary society, need to read Ludwig von Mises, and then compare what he advocates, with the way things really are.
The amount of apologies being made for corporations in these threads is frightening. People actually defend corporate economic and social rape of the population, and attack those who complain about it.
A more beneficial response for everyone, including the apologists themselves, might be to come together in order to bring about said corporations' end.
If you don't like it, they will be happy to disconnect you.
Let them disconnect you, then. From what other people in this thread are saying, there are other providers who will treat you far better than Verizon will.
Stop sending the company the message that its' behaviour is acceptable, by continuing to give it money. Start exercising personal responsibility and conscious choice.
I've already seen the XML based, opaque mess that is Google Wave.
In an ideal world, corporations would not be able to have any say whatsoever in the development of collectively used protocols or languages. The suits are already destroying HTML.
Destroying things for the sake of money, is the only thing that suits know how to do. If you want to actually create something, and create something which is genuinely beneficial and positive in nature, the profit motive has to be removed from the equation.
People also need to stop believing the lies that they are told, that the profit motive is a necessary part of the process. It isn't. We see software development occurring on a daily basis, that the profit motive has absolutely nothing to do with. We also saw communication systems (in terms of the bulletin boards) being developed in the past, which were entirely non-commercial in motive and intent, as well.
Before you develop stars in your eyes about worthless things like Google Wave, try realising that none of the functionality it offers, is genuinely new at all. It is simply an obfuscated hybrid of a number of pre-existing protocols, which work far more effectively on an individual basis.
Instead of the idea advocated here, try using a text-based browser (such as links) for specific tasks, which bypasses all of the advertising, and massively reduces the amount of necessary bandwidth used.
Instead of Google Wave, use IRC.
The cartels rely on the fact that 95% of the public who see this story, will have one of two reactions.
a) They won't care. It will simply be irrelevant background noise. "It doesn't interfere with my ability to get up, get coffee, go to a meaningless job for 16 hours, come home, eat, sleep, and then repeat, does it? In that case, it's not my problem. I've got other things to worry about."
b) They will have swallowed the cartels' PR kool aid, and will make the assumption that the cartels are in the right, simply because the cartels say so.
The only way that the cartels are going to be prevented from continuing to rape ordinarily people, in the various ways that they do, is if the majority of human beings a) start viewing it as their problem, and make a decision that it is unacceptable, and b) realise that the entire manner in which the cartels try to frame the issue is a lie, based on self-destructive greed, and is therefore to be discarded entirely.
The few people who will read this on Slashdot, and feel outraged by it, represent a number of people which the cartels can very safely ignore. It has to be the majority, and it has to be the will of the majority that the cartels are entirely smashed.