And KDE's pick of a non-FOSS toolkit to build on was a grave error that could have done enormous damage.
Its' lack of Stallman's approval has enormously harmed KDE's degree of uptake and use, yes.
I continue to pray for the end of the Free Software Foundation. If Stallman and its' other members truly wanted to help their fellow man at this point, they would voluntarily dissolve the organisation, and withdraw into anonymity.
Although I don't normally use the Big Two, when I have, the only positive experiences I've ever had, have been with KDE.
Despite its' bloat, the system is absolutely gorgeous visually, and to my mind has been ahead of XP in that department almost since its' inception. Konqueror is also the single most versatile and powerful file manager that I've ever used. Local file management and remote web browsing in two panes of the same window are awesome, but it is still more versatile than IE as well, in terms of the number of different modes, and the integration with Konsole that it allows.
Although it isn't much, KDE is also closer in design terms to the UNIX philosophy as well; the different parts are more cleanly encapsulated than GNOME, and it's more self-contained, as well.
It isn't the more popular of the two major DEs, presumably due to not being Stallman-approved for the entirety of its' history...but it is overwhelmingly the better one.
"Anyone can try out the Unreal Development Kit powered by Unreal Engine 3"...as long as your on windows
Very few people are going to seriously try and do 2D texturing on any other platform anyway, although I know 3D work is possible on FOSS, via Blender.
Nobody who is Linux-only, is that way because of Windows' expense. Pirated Windows is available pretty much anywhere, and for all Microsoft's noise to the contrary, that is exactly how they like it.
Nobody who uses FreeBSD is FreeBSD-only, either. It is pure FSF cultism that causes Linux users to want to be single platform.
Refraining from dual booting because it's somehow "impure," is just dumb zealotry. The Gimp is good for quick jobs and some post stuff, but it's still not Photoshop. Photoshop itself isn't the only good art package available for Windows, either.
I switched to Debian because it solves all of the problems I still to this day have with other distributions. Including some of the ones you listed as plus points for Mandriva which most everyone else considers sub par still (Namely, packages)
I've had apt delete half a running system on two occasions when trying to uninstall OpenOffice in particular; it is tied in for some reason with almost the entire rest of the system. Apt/dpkg is particularly bad for having false dependencies associated with packages, although rpm is generally not immune to that problem either.
DKMS I find to be a complete mess; I've never been able to get a kernel compile to work on any Debian-based system; I always get tangled up in the jungle of perl scripts when I've tried doing it by the book. I should probably have just done it manually.
The init system I found almost incomprehensible, coming from a background primarily of Slackware and LFS; although I eventually figured that out.
The fourth thing was that with virtually every application I tried to install that had dotfiles, there seemed to be two; one which was hardwired in by Debian in the location the application was expecting, and another which Debian had allocated for the actual user to fill in themselves, to then somehow be appended to the hardwired conf at run time.
I was left with a general impression that if there was any single element of the system which the Debian developers could possibly change or render non-standard, they would, and often for no clearly logical reason that I could discern, other than simply because they could. It was horribly over-engineered, and I felt, excessively complex, at pretty much every level.
I felt that this was partly because of Debian's close ideological ties to the FSF as well; given how the acronym stands for, "GNU is Not UNIX," I tend to suspect that the Debian developers have taken that as license to believe that they can do better than UNIX, when in my experience, they never do.
I'm currently running Arch at the moment, and the contrast could not possibly be greater. Arch is very minimalistic; there's the bare minimum of machinery necessary to provide a minor degree of automation, but apart from that, it's very close to Linux From Scratch.
But don't worry, one day you'll grow up, get out of your momma's basement and be enlightened (in more ways than one) as you see the whole wide world open to you, filled with people who don't give a fuck about the problems you have with your computer. One day.
Ah, the other half of Slashdot's population have woken up. Morning.;)
You know, one of my other posts in this thread was at 5, Insightful over night. It's the way it normally happens. My perspective resonates with the few other people here with a brain in their heads, for a couple of hours; and then in the morning there's the arrival of what I'll charitably refer to as, "the blue pill demographic."
Enjoy your 8-16 hours stuck in a 4 foot cubicle. I might even think of you at some point during the day; right before I roll over and go back to sleep.;)
I know you wouldn't. None of Debian's fanboys do. That is exactly the problem.
It isn't the distro itself; technical issues are always fixable. The really incurable thing about Debian is its' user/developer base, who continue insisting that it is glorious in the face of all evidence to the contrary.
It's been said about alcoholics, drug addicts, and gamblers. The only way to help someone with a problem, is if they are willing to get to a point where they admit that a problem genuinely exists.
If they're not willing to do that, there is no hope for them.
My experience with Mandrake was probably three years or so ago now. It was right before the name change, if memory serves.
I had an old CD from a magazine cover from a few months before that; same old story. I needed an LFS host, and at the time was on 56k dialup, so downloading anything was out of the question. I was extremely ambivalent about using Mandrake, because at the time, it had the reputation as the resident "user friendly," distro; but as they say, any port in a storm. I closed my eyes, held my nose, and dived in.
I was extremely, and pleasantly, surprised. Hardware got detected from memory, with the exception of the winmodem, but I didn't blame Linux for that; at the time I was having to jerry rig/compile half a kernel binary to get it to co-operate. The environment was KDE with a nice, blue, very European theme.
Sure, it was still a bit of a fixer-upper; LFS needed a couple of extra things installed and mildly fiddled with before it would build, but given the integrity of binary only distros these days, that's fairly standard. Some of the rpm spec files made baby Jesus cry, as well.
What amazed me, was that for a supposed newb distro, it was as flexible as it was. I could install things if I wanted to, and get away with compiling from source, which was extremely rare for rpm-based distros, at least back then. (I haven't used rpm in probably 3.5 years) I was also able to change things via the config files I was used to from Slackware as well, without too much work.
Based on that experience at least (although I'm assuming some things have changed now) I feel quite positive towards Mandriva. It still isn't a distro that I would *go out of my way* to get, (my preferred environments are either FreeBSD or Arch; although then again, that was three years ago; in fairness I probably should take the new release out for a spin before judging) but I'm not knocking it, either.
Convenience distros can actually be good in a jam if the fundamental design is not *too* bad. I also used to crap on rpm a lot, but it is better than I used to give it credit for, and I have an American sysadmin friend who swears it's come miles since I last used it. For anything where I wanted to carry a cd around full of binaries to slam onto a system *fast,* then as long as the spec files are written well, rpm is good.
If you're a novice and want something convenient, but not as broken as Ubuntu, or if you're a veteran but need something quick and dirty, and don't mind wiping off a bit of said dirt, Mandriva could be just the ticket.
Mandriva is still the best desktop linux distro out there. Ubuntu is made of fail because it loves Gnomes.
The Ubuntu using moderators are really stretching, here. How exactly is this Offtopic?
Canonical are the collective village idiot of the entire FOSS community. Whichever members of the Lloyd Christmas demographic who use it and get mod points here, can mod it down as much as they want. They won't change the fact, and the fact is this:-
Ubuntu and Debian are both unmitigated garbage. I just installed Arch this morning. The install took three hours, and had none of the problems which I had constantly for six weeks with Ubuntu Intrepid.
Sound? Just works, with ALSA. Considering how bad my experience was with Intrepid, I was amazed.
Video? Nvidia drivers; just worked.
X? I could install whichever window manager I wanted at the outset, which means I wasn't left with struggling to either live with or somehow uninstall the rancid fecal matter that is GNOME.
No kernel panics. No flickering. No sound dropping out. It just works.
Mandriva was a good distro too, last time I used it.
I'm fed up with Ubuntu users. If it was just your obscenity of a distribution that was a problem, I could cope with simply not using it. That isn't my biggest issue, however.
You insist on lying and engaging in denial about everything that is wrong with it, and suppressing complaint about said problems in any way you can. I know how this post is immediately headed for -1, and the reason given doesn't matter at all, does it?
Go ahead; do it. Bury what I'm saying here, and what EVERYONE else, other than you, is saying about Shuttleworth's miscarriage of a distribution. Ubuntu is falling apart. Karmic was supposed to be a fix for Jaunty, and now it's giving everyone hell to the same degree.
You can't bury the truth. You can either keep burying your heads in the sand until Canonical go under, and Mark Shuttleworth ends up potentially worth nothing more than the shirt on his back, or you can actually start trying to change things.
If there's one thing GNOME isn't designed for, it's underpowered hardware.
Could still be entirely useful, though. Scrub the existing OS, and put either Damn Small Linux or NetBSD on it, with blackbox/ratpoison, screen, vim, and cplay/xine for multimedia. It'd make a nice upgrade to my current laptop, actually.
Good for email, web browsing, office work, a bit of shell scripting, note taking and the usual laptop stuff, and low end multimedia. Depending on the video card, 1.8 Ghz will also play WoW, if somewhat limply; but you'd want Linux rather than NetBSD for that.
Drop the price by $200-$300 as well, and then we could talk. $700 US (prolly $600 AUD) is too much for a machine with these specs. I can buy a new desktop for $1100 or so.
Theo is operating from a very different perspective.
There is always a tradeoff between what non-technical end users demand on the one hand, (interface simplicity, and thus implementation complexity) and actual technical quality (stability, security, technical correctness; implementation simplicity, and thus interface complexity) on the other. Linux and OpenBSD exist on different sides of that tradeoff.
The difference between Linux and OpenBSD can be summed up by saying that Linux has native support for Adobe Flash, whereas OpenBSD has readable source code. Which of those two characteristics is more important, is a decision for the individual user.
That does not *excuse* Theo's attitude, no...but it does, to some extent, *explain* it.
I've noticed that X unfortunately gets a lot of metaphorical rotten vegetables thrown at it from Linux users; even people who apparently are fans of Linux in every other respect.
In my own opinion, however, X qualifies as one of the greatest pieces of software ever written. Put it in perspective, here; the system has been in continual use and evolution since 1984. That's 25 years this year. Granted, its' configuration process in particular has needed radical reform, and fortunately it has recently got it.
I don't understand why people criticise its' stability, either; for me it has always been rock solid, particularly on FreeBSD.
I'm also not really surprised that Chrome might run faster under X than under Windows or the Mac. If there's one thing that's always been true of UNIX in general, it's that the system doesn't include unnecessary frills. When you're wanting to be optimised for speed in particular, that can only be a good thing.
Why would it have to be quickly if they have a time machine?;-)
Because apart from anything else, a time machine is never going to change anything in the past of your own timeline.
Skynet probably didn't (and probably couldn't have) know that, but the best it could have accomplished by sending its' two Terminators back, was to create another timeline where it won. It had already lost in the timeline that the robots were sent back from.
I don't believe that time travel would or could work by going into the past of a single timeline. Instead, the scenario is like Sliders; you're actually going into another universe, (one of the closest neighbouring ones to your own, in quantum/probabilistic terms) but just at a point in its' progression which corresponds with a certain number of years in the past.
So it most likely would resemble your own past sufficiently closely that, for the most part, you could mistake it for your own actual past; even though it wouldn't be.
Now would you describe standards patented with "reasonable and non-discriminatory" royalties as open or closed or "a bit to the less-open side of the openness continuum"? Because that category of standards is a superset of "RAND and royalty-free" and thus not guaranteed to work well with GPL'ed software..
The ideal scenario with software patents, is one where they don't exist at all. I don't always agree with the FSF, as anyone who has read me on here for any length of time will know, but in trying to erradicate software patents, I think they're doing the right thing.
I am more of a supporter of the BSD license (non-discriminatory freedom of use + attribution + copyright + disclaimer) personally, but patents are no more desirable in association with that license than it is with the GPL.
In specific terms, my own definition of openness, is whatever allows the work in question to replicate/propogate itself.
So for a computer program, that primarily means source code. However, it can often mean specific elements of documentation as well. If you've got a program which uses conf files, generally speaking, downstream uses are going to need documentation of the conf file format before they can use it.
In the case of protocols, it means available, readable, implementable specifications.
When I made reference to a leftist stereotype at the start of my post, my point was that press writers often refer to software ecosystems. The point of FOSS licenses is to allow said ecosystem to continue to propogate itself. (Or at least that was the point with the GPL)
To a large extent, it's self-sustaining now, although it is still important, I think, to ensure that whatever corporate or legal fine print that exists, doesn't exist primarily for the purposes of ensuring that said propogation can't happen.
This, however, is also why the "non-discriminatory," element of the FOSS definition is so important.
If FOSS is going to continue to propogate successfully, it has to do so via positive and peaceful means. This isn't because of any high minded idealism; it's because software companies and paradigms are subject to the same evolutionary laws that biological organisms are.
That means that violent confrontation, opposition, and resistance, are ultimately not the means by which FOSS can successfully predominate. The focus instead has to be on absorbtion, subsumption, and osmosis. Watch Fern Gully on YouTube sometime, and observe how the devas there ultimately dealt with Hexus, the pollution spirit.
They didn't destroy him/it, because to do so not only would have been impossible, but also self-destructive. Destruction is self-sustaining and replicating, in the same way that construction/creation is.
They simply caused plants to grow up around him to the point where he was encased between them, and couldn't move.
(Before modding this post as Offtopic, please read it to the end. It is relevant; you just need to read the whole thing in order to see how it is)
Just in the last 24 hours, on another forum site that I read regularly, I know a guy who has private messaged me about migrating to FreeBSD.
He has done that because, in the past, he was using either Windows, or certain Linux distributions which were heavily GUI oriented and which, for various reasons, had a much less transparent and orthogonal design. He was having a lot of problems with those systems, in terms of both hardware driver and application stability.
He has started, as I mentioned, using FreeBSD, but despite X, he is also now using primarily text-based applications as well. One of his messages to me about this expressed his degree of happiness at having found such a greater level of reliability, speed, and flexibility, and thanking me for gradually causing him to become interested in FreeBSD.
My point, quite simply, is this. Openness, and openness as it specifically applies to UNIX design philosophy, has visible, tangible, practical benefits, and ultimately sells itself.
Corporations and government institutions can say whatever they want; we don't need to worry about it one way or the other. There is a certain demographic of users, who are increasingly becoming more and more derisive of every element of the practice of open source methodolgy, as well. Compilation from source, and use of text-based applications are considered by that group, to be anachronisms from the 1970s.
The point is, that when the proverbial crunch comes, FOSS proves itself, and suddenly the laughing stops; to generally be replaced by mute awe. Whether it's backpackers setting up an emergency c3 system in southeast Asia with gnuSense after the latest tsunami, Helios continuing, day in and day out, to build free PCs with Mint for underpriveleged kids, or a corporate sysadmin with a lone OpenBSD box, who along with his boss, watches Puffy dive into a phone booth and save the day when the local intranet has gone feet first, and business is threatening to grind to a halt entirely.
So if the EU's government have somehow been living in caves for the last two decades, it's not something any of us really need to get upset about. Let them voice whatever skepticism, or even outright condemnation they want.
If they want to find out the actual truth for themselves, however, the web and FTP sites are there, and they can replicate the benefits that other people have derived from FOSS UNIX, for themselves.
If you're wondering about T3, that actually took place in a different future, after T2 moved judgment day. (Which means that Skynet was right about time travel being a threat to it, as the Skynet from the first two movies is essentially dead, or rather never existed.)
I do. I went and saw Surrogates with a cousin last month. It was fun. I'll be going and seeing Avatar next month with him as well, most likely.
It's a shame that the cinemas where you live sound as though they're bad quality.
Where I am, we have cinema chains, and it's only very small, old, independent suburban cinemas which can be questionable. Most of them have heating, good lights, a good sound system, and great climate control, as well.
Then, of course, the Village cinemas here have Gold Class. They have adjustable seats where you can practically lie down, and you can get waited on with various types of food, as well. Depending on whether or not I've got enough money, I might go to one of them for Avatar, perhaps.
The one complaint I have is that even in the normal cinemas, the food is ridiculously expensive. A large Coke costs $5 AUD; it's insane.
It's true that there aren't a lot of movies now that I really want to see; less than there used to be, unfortunately. However, I still enjoy going to the cinema, and the fact that I go more rarely now, actually just makes it that much more of a treat when I do.
Even if I download the torrent of a movie, (I did with The Dark Knight) I will go and see it at least once, and I went and saw The Dark Knight multiple times, so the movie companies don't lose money from me at least.
I also recommend making sure that you wait a week or two before you go to a film you want to see, as well; especially the really popular ones. I think Avatar is probably going to draw big crowds. I would never go and see a film on opening night.
I like a fairly empty cinema for a movie; where I have my choice of being able to sit wherever I want, and where I don't have to put up with mobile phones, or talking, or kids throwing food around, etc. The way I get that, is to let the crowds go through first for about 10 days or so.
Then I can go in and have the type of experience I want, and it is enjoyable.
Just to add a further minor, speculative point to this...
The only real reason why Connor's Resistance is able to beat Skynet in the T1/T2 scenario, is because in that scenario, Skynet remains the sole sentient, or close to sentient AI on the face of the planet.
In The Matrix, of course, by contrast, there was a scenario where the acorporeal AIs begin to outnumber the humans very rapidly.
We see a scenario like that beginning to develop in SCC, however, with Cromartie and Weaver. It becomes obvious that some of the more advanced Terminators are developing their own goals. Once a scenario like that were to develop, the humans' chances of maintaining containment of the AIs (and thus, still having a chance to destroy them completely) would drop to almost nil.
For every Web site you shut down; for every IRC server you pay to have DDoSed; for every eMule node you raid; five more will spring up in their place.
You can pollute the edonkey net with malware; we'll move to IRC. You can kill public websites; we'll make private, invite-only underground darknets, that you can't see, find, or regulate.
The society that you are trying to prevent the formation of is, in good part, already here. We will continue working to establish it, for the ultimate benefit and enrichment of all; ironically even you yourselves in the end.
The end of scarcity is inevitable. You can attempt to stand in the way, you can slow it down, marginally...but you will not stop it.
I would prefer it to die, considering that since the second movie, what have we gotten? If it were not for a certain actresses connection to another cult fave who would have put up with the series? That was jump shark city.
James Cameron's canon ended with T2. Although it's not shown in the film, at the end of the T2 novel, Connor and the Resistance succeed in beating Skynet.
Sarah dies in that novel as well. She was with John almost up until the end of the war; it was only at about the second last engagement with the Machines, where she is killed on a supply run.
Cameron refused to be involved with T4; he made the comment that he'd said everything he wanted to say by the end of T2.
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And, I'm not saying that just because I happen to be a Republican...
This is true. Obama getting the Nobel Peace Prize was an absolute farce, and you could tell that he knew that himself.
I don't view Obama as a monster, but he is no saviour, and no Messiah either.
And KDE's pick of a non-FOSS toolkit to build on was a grave error that could have done enormous damage.
Its' lack of Stallman's approval has enormously harmed KDE's degree of uptake and use, yes.
I continue to pray for the end of the Free Software Foundation. If Stallman and its' other members truly wanted to help their fellow man at this point, they would voluntarily dissolve the organisation, and withdraw into anonymity.
Although I don't normally use the Big Two, when I have, the only positive experiences I've ever had, have been with KDE.
Despite its' bloat, the system is absolutely gorgeous visually, and to my mind has been ahead of XP in that department almost since its' inception. Konqueror is also the single most versatile and powerful file manager that I've ever used. Local file management and remote web browsing in two panes of the same window are awesome, but it is still more versatile than IE as well, in terms of the number of different modes, and the integration with Konsole that it allows.
Although it isn't much, KDE is also closer in design terms to the UNIX philosophy as well; the different parts are more cleanly encapsulated than GNOME, and it's more self-contained, as well.
It isn't the more popular of the two major DEs, presumably due to not being Stallman-approved for the entirety of its' history...but it is overwhelmingly the better one.
"Anyone can try out the Unreal Development Kit powered by Unreal Engine 3" ...as long as your on windows
Very few people are going to seriously try and do 2D texturing on any other platform anyway, although I know 3D work is possible on FOSS, via Blender.
Nobody who is Linux-only, is that way because of Windows' expense. Pirated Windows is available pretty much anywhere, and for all Microsoft's noise to the contrary, that is exactly how they like it.
Nobody who uses FreeBSD is FreeBSD-only, either. It is pure FSF cultism that causes Linux users to want to be single platform.
Refraining from dual booting because it's somehow "impure," is just dumb zealotry. The Gimp is good for quick jobs and some post stuff, but it's still not Photoshop. Photoshop itself isn't the only good art package available for Windows, either.
I switched to Debian because it solves all of the problems I still to this day have with other distributions. Including some of the ones you listed as plus points for Mandriva which most everyone else considers sub par still (Namely, packages)
I've had apt delete half a running system on two occasions when trying to uninstall OpenOffice in particular; it is tied in for some reason with almost the entire rest of the system. Apt/dpkg is particularly bad for having false dependencies associated with packages, although rpm is generally not immune to that problem either.
DKMS I find to be a complete mess; I've never been able to get a kernel compile to work on any Debian-based system; I always get tangled up in the jungle of perl scripts when I've tried doing it by the book. I should probably have just done it manually.
The init system I found almost incomprehensible, coming from a background primarily of Slackware and LFS; although I eventually figured that out.
The fourth thing was that with virtually every application I tried to install that had dotfiles, there seemed to be two; one which was hardwired in by Debian in the location the application was expecting, and another which Debian had allocated for the actual user to fill in themselves, to then somehow be appended to the hardwired conf at run time.
I was left with a general impression that if there was any single element of the system which the Debian developers could possibly change or render non-standard, they would, and often for no clearly logical reason that I could discern, other than simply because they could. It was horribly over-engineered, and I felt, excessively complex, at pretty much every level.
I felt that this was partly because of Debian's close ideological ties to the FSF as well; given how the acronym stands for, "GNU is Not UNIX," I tend to suspect that the Debian developers have taken that as license to believe that they can do better than UNIX, when in my experience, they never do.
I'm currently running Arch at the moment, and the contrast could not possibly be greater. Arch is very minimalistic; there's the bare minimum of machinery necessary to provide a minor degree of automation, but apart from that, it's very close to Linux From Scratch.
30% Insightful, (all overnight)
30% Flamebait, (since the Ubuntu users woke up)
10% Troll.
Are you really the majority, Debian/Ubuntu users?
Or are you simply the ones with the mod points?
But don't worry, one day you'll grow up, get out of your momma's basement and be enlightened (in more ways than one) as you see the whole wide world open to you, filled with people who don't give a fuck about the problems you have with your computer. One day.
Ah, the other half of Slashdot's population have woken up. Morning. ;)
You know, one of my other posts in this thread was at 5, Insightful over night. It's the way it normally happens. My perspective resonates with the few other people here with a brain in their heads, for a couple of hours; and then in the morning there's the arrival of what I'll charitably refer to as, "the blue pill demographic."
Enjoy your 8-16 hours stuck in a 4 foot cubicle. I might even think of you at some point during the day; right before I roll over and go back to sleep. ;)
I wouldn't describe Debian as unmitigated garbage
I know you wouldn't. None of Debian's fanboys do. That is exactly the problem.
It isn't the distro itself; technical issues are always fixable. The really incurable thing about Debian is its' user/developer base, who continue insisting that it is glorious in the face of all evidence to the contrary.
It's been said about alcoholics, drug addicts, and gamblers. The only way to help someone with a problem, is if they are willing to get to a point where they admit that a problem genuinely exists.
If they're not willing to do that, there is no hope for them.
My experience with Mandrake was probably three years or so ago now. It was right before the name change, if memory serves.
I had an old CD from a magazine cover from a few months before that; same old story. I needed an LFS host, and at the time was on 56k dialup, so downloading anything was out of the question. I was extremely ambivalent about using Mandrake, because at the time, it had the reputation as the resident "user friendly," distro; but as they say, any port in a storm. I closed my eyes, held my nose, and dived in.
I was extremely, and pleasantly, surprised. Hardware got detected from memory, with the exception of the winmodem, but I didn't blame Linux for that; at the time I was having to jerry rig/compile half a kernel binary to get it to co-operate. The environment was KDE with a nice, blue, very European theme.
Sure, it was still a bit of a fixer-upper; LFS needed a couple of extra things installed and mildly fiddled with before it would build, but given the integrity of binary only distros these days, that's fairly standard. Some of the rpm spec files made baby Jesus cry, as well.
What amazed me, was that for a supposed newb distro, it was as flexible as it was. I could install things if I wanted to, and get away with compiling from source, which was extremely rare for rpm-based distros, at least back then. (I haven't used rpm in probably 3.5 years) I was also able to change things via the config files I was used to from Slackware as well, without too much work.
Based on that experience at least (although I'm assuming some things have changed now) I feel quite positive towards Mandriva. It still isn't a distro that I would *go out of my way* to get, (my preferred environments are either FreeBSD or Arch; although then again, that was three years ago; in fairness I probably should take the new release out for a spin before judging) but I'm not knocking it, either.
Convenience distros can actually be good in a jam if the fundamental design is not *too* bad. I also used to crap on rpm a lot, but it is better than I used to give it credit for, and I have an American sysadmin friend who swears it's come miles since I last used it. For anything where I wanted to carry a cd around full of binaries to slam onto a system *fast,* then as long as the spec files are written well, rpm is good.
If you're a novice and want something convenient, but not as broken as Ubuntu, or if you're a veteran but need something quick and dirty, and don't mind wiping off a bit of said dirt, Mandriva could be just the ticket.
Mandriva is still the best desktop linux distro out there. Ubuntu is made of fail because it loves Gnomes.
The Ubuntu using moderators are really stretching, here. How exactly is this Offtopic?
Canonical are the collective village idiot of the entire FOSS community. Whichever members of the Lloyd Christmas demographic who use it and get mod points here, can mod it down as much as they want. They won't change the fact, and the fact is this:-
Ubuntu and Debian are both unmitigated garbage. I just installed Arch this morning. The install took three hours, and had none of the problems which I had constantly for six weeks with Ubuntu Intrepid.
Sound? Just works, with ALSA. Considering how bad my experience was with Intrepid, I was amazed.
Video? Nvidia drivers; just worked.
X? I could install whichever window manager I wanted at the outset, which means I wasn't left with struggling to either live with or somehow uninstall the rancid fecal matter that is GNOME.
No kernel panics. No flickering. No sound dropping out. It just works.
Mandriva was a good distro too, last time I used it.
I'm fed up with Ubuntu users. If it was just your obscenity of a distribution that was a problem, I could cope with simply not using it. That isn't my biggest issue, however.
You insist on lying and engaging in denial about everything that is wrong with it, and suppressing complaint about said problems in any way you can. I know how this post is immediately headed for -1, and the reason given doesn't matter at all, does it?
Go ahead; do it. Bury what I'm saying here, and what EVERY ONE else, other than you, is saying about Shuttleworth's miscarriage of a distribution. Ubuntu is falling apart. Karmic was supposed to be a fix for Jaunty, and now it's giving everyone hell to the same degree.
You can't bury the truth. You can either keep burying your heads in the sand until Canonical go under, and Mark Shuttleworth ends up potentially worth nothing more than the shirt on his back, or you can actually start trying to change things.
If there's one thing GNOME isn't designed for, it's underpowered hardware.
Could still be entirely useful, though. Scrub the existing OS, and put either Damn Small Linux or NetBSD on it, with blackbox/ratpoison, screen, vim, and cplay/xine for multimedia. It'd make a nice upgrade to my current laptop, actually.
Good for email, web browsing, office work, a bit of shell scripting, note taking and the usual laptop stuff, and low end multimedia. Depending on the video card, 1.8 Ghz will also play WoW, if somewhat limply; but you'd want Linux rather than NetBSD for that.
Drop the price by $200-$300 as well, and then we could talk. $700 US (prolly $600 AUD) is too much for a machine with these specs. I can buy a new desktop for $1100 or so.
Didn't the first film indicate that Skynet had a Russian counterpart too?
Rasputin never became self-aware; it never went close to Skynet's level.
Theo is operating from a very different perspective.
There is always a tradeoff between what non-technical end users demand on the one hand, (interface simplicity, and thus implementation complexity) and actual technical quality (stability, security, technical correctness; implementation simplicity, and thus interface complexity) on the other. Linux and OpenBSD exist on different sides of that tradeoff.
The difference between Linux and OpenBSD can be summed up by saying that Linux has native support for Adobe Flash, whereas OpenBSD has readable source code. Which of those two characteristics is more important, is a decision for the individual user.
That does not *excuse* Theo's attitude, no...but it does, to some extent, *explain* it.
I've noticed that X unfortunately gets a lot of metaphorical rotten vegetables thrown at it from Linux users; even people who apparently are fans of Linux in every other respect.
In my own opinion, however, X qualifies as one of the greatest pieces of software ever written. Put it in perspective, here; the system has been in continual use and evolution since 1984. That's 25 years this year. Granted, its' configuration process in particular has needed radical reform, and fortunately it has recently got it.
I don't understand why people criticise its' stability, either; for me it has always been rock solid, particularly on FreeBSD.
I'm also not really surprised that Chrome might run faster under X than under Windows or the Mac. If there's one thing that's always been true of UNIX in general, it's that the system doesn't include unnecessary frills. When you're wanting to be optimised for speed in particular, that can only be a good thing.
I love X.
Why would it have to be quickly if they have a time machine? ;-)
Because apart from anything else, a time machine is never going to change anything in the past of your own timeline.
Skynet probably didn't (and probably couldn't have) know that, but the best it could have accomplished by sending its' two Terminators back, was to create another timeline where it won. It had already lost in the timeline that the robots were sent back from.
I don't believe that time travel would or could work by going into the past of a single timeline. Instead, the scenario is like Sliders; you're actually going into another universe, (one of the closest neighbouring ones to your own, in quantum/probabilistic terms) but just at a point in its' progression which corresponds with a certain number of years in the past.
So it most likely would resemble your own past sufficiently closely that, for the most part, you could mistake it for your own actual past; even though it wouldn't be.
Now would you describe standards patented with "reasonable and non-discriminatory" royalties as open or closed or "a bit to the less-open side of the openness continuum"? Because that category of standards is a superset of "RAND and royalty-free" and thus not guaranteed to work well with GPL'ed software..
The ideal scenario with software patents, is one where they don't exist at all. I don't always agree with the FSF, as anyone who has read me on here for any length of time will know, but in trying to erradicate software patents, I think they're doing the right thing.
I am more of a supporter of the BSD license (non-discriminatory freedom of use + attribution + copyright + disclaimer) personally, but patents are no more desirable in association with that license than it is with the GPL.
In specific terms, my own definition of openness, is whatever allows the work in question to replicate/propogate itself.
So for a computer program, that primarily means source code. However, it can often mean specific elements of documentation as well. If you've got a program which uses conf files, generally speaking, downstream uses are going to need documentation of the conf file format before they can use it.
In the case of protocols, it means available, readable, implementable specifications.
When I made reference to a leftist stereotype at the start of my post, my point was that press writers often refer to software ecosystems. The point of FOSS licenses is to allow said ecosystem to continue to propogate itself. (Or at least that was the point with the GPL)
To a large extent, it's self-sustaining now, although it is still important, I think, to ensure that whatever corporate or legal fine print that exists, doesn't exist primarily for the purposes of ensuring that said propogation can't happen.
This, however, is also why the "non-discriminatory," element of the FOSS definition is so important.
If FOSS is going to continue to propogate successfully, it has to do so via positive and peaceful means. This isn't because of any high minded idealism; it's because software companies and paradigms are subject to the same evolutionary laws that biological organisms are.
That means that violent confrontation, opposition, and resistance, are ultimately not the means by which FOSS can successfully predominate. The focus instead has to be on absorbtion, subsumption, and osmosis. Watch Fern Gully on YouTube sometime, and observe how the devas there ultimately dealt with Hexus, the pollution spirit.
They didn't destroy him/it, because to do so not only would have been impossible, but also self-destructive. Destruction is self-sustaining and replicating, in the same way that construction/creation is.
They simply caused plants to grow up around him to the point where he was encased between them, and couldn't move.
That, ultimately, is what we have to do.
(Before modding this post as Offtopic, please read it to the end. It is relevant; you just need to read the whole thing in order to see how it is)
Just in the last 24 hours, on another forum site that I read regularly, I know a guy who has private messaged me about migrating to FreeBSD.
He has done that because, in the past, he was using either Windows, or certain Linux distributions which were heavily GUI oriented and which, for various reasons, had a much less transparent and orthogonal design. He was having a lot of problems with those systems, in terms of both hardware driver and application stability.
He has started, as I mentioned, using FreeBSD, but despite X, he is also now using primarily text-based applications as well. One of his messages to me about this expressed his degree of happiness at having found such a greater level of reliability, speed, and flexibility, and thanking me for gradually causing him to become interested in FreeBSD.
My point, quite simply, is this. Openness, and openness as it specifically applies to UNIX design philosophy, has visible, tangible, practical benefits, and ultimately sells itself.
Corporations and government institutions can say whatever they want; we don't need to worry about it one way or the other. There is a certain demographic of users, who are increasingly becoming more and more derisive of every element of the practice of open source methodolgy, as well. Compilation from source, and use of text-based applications are considered by that group, to be anachronisms from the 1970s.
The point is, that when the proverbial crunch comes, FOSS proves itself, and suddenly the laughing stops; to generally be replaced by mute awe. Whether it's backpackers setting up an emergency c3 system in southeast Asia with gnuSense after the latest tsunami, Helios continuing, day in and day out, to build free PCs with Mint for underpriveleged kids, or a corporate sysadmin with a lone OpenBSD box, who along with his boss, watches Puffy dive into a phone booth and save the day when the local intranet has gone feet first, and business is threatening to grind to a halt entirely.
So if the EU's government have somehow been living in caves for the last two decades, it's not something any of us really need to get upset about. Let them voice whatever skepticism, or even outright condemnation they want.
If they want to find out the actual truth for themselves, however, the web and FTP sites are there, and they can replicate the benefits that other people have derived from FOSS UNIX, for themselves.
I was going to say...I hope IBM have ensured that Deep Blue will be prevented from attending the auction. ;)
Dude, 1995 called ...
Yep. We're all alike. ;)
If you're wondering about T3, that actually took place in a different future, after T2 moved judgment day. (Which means that Skynet was right about time travel being a threat to it, as the Skynet from the first two movies is essentially dead, or rather never existed.)
I know. Good explanation, though. :)
No one wants to go to the theater anymore.
I do. I went and saw Surrogates with a cousin last month. It was fun. I'll be going and seeing Avatar next month with him as well, most likely.
It's a shame that the cinemas where you live sound as though they're bad quality.
Where I am, we have cinema chains, and it's only very small, old, independent suburban cinemas which can be questionable. Most of them have heating, good lights, a good sound system, and great climate control, as well.
Then, of course, the Village cinemas here have Gold Class. They have adjustable seats where you can practically lie down, and you can get waited on with various types of food, as well. Depending on whether or not I've got enough money, I might go to one of them for Avatar, perhaps.
The one complaint I have is that even in the normal cinemas, the food is ridiculously expensive. A large Coke costs $5 AUD; it's insane.
It's true that there aren't a lot of movies now that I really want to see; less than there used to be, unfortunately. However, I still enjoy going to the cinema, and the fact that I go more rarely now, actually just makes it that much more of a treat when I do.
Even if I download the torrent of a movie, (I did with The Dark Knight) I will go and see it at least once, and I went and saw The Dark Knight multiple times, so the movie companies don't lose money from me at least.
I also recommend making sure that you wait a week or two before you go to a film you want to see, as well; especially the really popular ones. I think Avatar is probably going to draw big crowds. I would never go and see a film on opening night.
I like a fairly empty cinema for a movie; where I have my choice of being able to sit wherever I want, and where I don't have to put up with mobile phones, or talking, or kids throwing food around, etc. The way I get that, is to let the crowds go through first for about 10 days or so.
Then I can go in and have the type of experience I want, and it is enjoyable.
Just to add a further minor, speculative point to this...
The only real reason why Connor's Resistance is able to beat Skynet in the T1/T2 scenario, is because in that scenario, Skynet remains the sole sentient, or close to sentient AI on the face of the planet.
In The Matrix, of course, by contrast, there was a scenario where the acorporeal AIs begin to outnumber the humans very rapidly.
We see a scenario like that beginning to develop in SCC, however, with Cromartie and Weaver. It becomes obvious that some of the more advanced Terminators are developing their own goals. Once a scenario like that were to develop, the humans' chances of maintaining containment of the AIs (and thus, still having a chance to destroy them completely) would drop to almost nil.
Keep trying, suits.
For every Web site you shut down; for every IRC server you pay to have DDoSed; for every eMule node you raid; five more will spring up in their place.
You can pollute the edonkey net with malware; we'll move to IRC. You can kill public websites; we'll make private, invite-only underground darknets, that you can't see, find, or regulate.
The society that you are trying to prevent the formation of is, in good part, already here. We will continue working to establish it, for the ultimate benefit and enrichment of all; ironically even you yourselves in the end.
The end of scarcity is inevitable. You can attempt to stand in the way, you can slow it down, marginally...but you will not stop it.
I would prefer it to die, considering that since the second movie, what have we gotten? If it were not for a certain actresses connection to another cult fave who would have put up with the series? That was jump shark city.
James Cameron's canon ended with T2. Although it's not shown in the film, at the end of the T2 novel, Connor and the Resistance succeed in beating Skynet.
Sarah dies in that novel as well. She was with John almost up until the end of the war; it was only at about the second last engagement with the Machines, where she is killed on a supply run.
Cameron refused to be involved with T4; he made the comment that he'd said everything he wanted to say by the end of T2.