>next version of MacOS will be out along with >Windows Longhorn, and it will be another decade of
>playing catch-up with their new technologies.
No, it won't. Longhorn will have a (pseudo) 3D desktop environment? Have a look here and here for Linux projects so far ahead of what Longhorn is offering in the 3D dept that they'd likely make BillG wet his pants.
Longhorn has database capabilities for finding files easily? Linux has had this for years, and now has things likethis, too.
Longhorn has the ability to group users' files for easy access? Linux can too.
Want smart agents, the software for which is GPLed and a ton easier to set up than Microsoft Agent? Here.
For exotic technologies and bleeding-edge applications, Linux is *not* being forced to play catch-up. Microsoft are, and they know it.
>That's what made the first one so good. You >weren't expecting it to be the Star Wars of a new
>generation
That was exactly the problem, as I said earlier. Originally it hadn't been planned on being the "Star Wars of the new generation," but was actually going to try and be something halfway original, and go in its own direction. It became the Star Wars of the new generation for the simple reason that it was thought that a new Star Wars would make lots, and lots, of money.;-)
>every opportunity, and still see the films for
>what they are: weak, derivative, poorly-plotted
>eye-candy with a dash of pretension?
To say I loved the first film in particular would probably be the greatest understatement I've ever made, but of course it's pretentious. I saw that it was pretentious...I think everyone knows that it was pretentious...that was part of the whole point. Some of us actually revel in our shameless wannabeism. *big grin*
Seriously though...I agree with you wholeheartedly about Revolutions, and to a lesser extent about Reloaded. Reloaded had it's moments, but...I've always said that where the series really went wrong was the Animatrix. The reason why I say that is because (a) I actually thought the Second Rennaisance in particular was rather lame, and (b) that and Kid's Story (which I also didn't really like very much) was what they based the second two movies almost in totality on. Reloaded in particular really had very little storyline for anyone paying attention...it was fairly simply a mindless action movie. From that point of view I enjoyed it...After I got over the initial disappointment that lightning wasn't going to strike twice, and that the Wachowskis had pulled a shameless George Lucas impersonation on us.
That to me was the real problem...that the Wachowskis (or whoever was primarily responsible for the writing in the second two films...I assume it was them) very obviously got caught up in a desire to plagiarise Star Wars. Because of that, in Revolutions we had the infuriating Kid filling in for Jar Jar Binks, as probably the most glaring example.
AFAIK, a trilogy was always planned, unlike what I've heard people saying that the second two were an afterthought. The original Matrix wasn't really what I'd call totally mainstream, or it at least didn't seem like it was intended to be. It however caught on with enough people that it was obviously decided that the two sequels had to be crowd pleasers, and for that reason I'm inclined to believe that material that was originally planned for the two sequels (which actually could have been GOOD) was scrapped in favour of making something lame, but which would appeal to the unwashed masses and therefore generate large amounts of money.
That, in a nutshell, is what happened. The writers got dollar signs in their eyes, and sold out.
I wouldn't be so suprised at this author's independent opinions. Microsoft don't need Slate towing the party line when they've got ZDNet acting the prize poodle in as eloquent a manner as they do. As evidence of what I'm talking about, I offer you this recent priceless little gem.
ZDNet regurgitates Microsoft's propoganda more closely than just about any other news service I know of, and you can also read the Halloween Documents to learn about how the Gartner Group have done the same thing.
MS might be on their way out generally, but they still have plenty of Grima Wormtounge equivalents busily trying to convince people otherwise.
I am reminded of the recent fanatical displays of Greeks prostrating themselves over flags in response to their winning of the soccer match.
Patriotism in any form and on behalf of any country is really a form of racism, since it is the purely emotive, erroneous and irrational belief that one's own country or people are inherently superior to all others. This is a complete impossibility, as we are all human beings. Seperate "races" as they have been called, do not exist.
Patriotic fervour is never any kind of verification of the superiority of the group whose behalf it is expressed on. On the contrary, it is proof solely of the overwhelming intellectual *inferiority* of the individual expressing such belief.
>Sometimes I wonder how the anti-ESR zealots >rationalize their actions. Are they jealous because >he's so well known ("my program was much more >difficult to write than fetchmail, why does nobody >quote me"), angry because he has some controversial >opinions on firearms, or what?
I haven't heard of too many Linux users (although I could be very, very wrong there) who would argue with the idea that ESR's commentary is consistently extremely insightful and intelligent, or also that he's done a truly astronomical amount in all sorts of different ways to contribute to Linux, as well as various other projects. The only issue which I ever find myself having with his material, (this might be what annoys other people, I'm unsure) is that in some of his articles he occasionally implies that he believes he's next in line to God.
At first this annoyed the hell out of me, but then I had a long think about it. If I ever read anything of his now where it seems like he's coming across as a bit full of himself, I try to remember that he actually *does* have reason to be, and that I think this is where people's disdain for him would come from, including my own at times...namely, that we look at him and then at ourselves and wish that if only we could be as cool, and lament the fact that we aren't...we're jealous. The man might not be *quite* the 40 foot tall immortal he appears to see himself as being, but he is still, to put it mildly, an absolute freaking legend, and given human nature it's perfectly understandable that some of us get a case of the green-eyed monster over it. I've had to think about this myself, because I had a bad case of ESR envy myself a bit back, and I had to take a good hard look at it. I realised that the issue was that in reality I *really* admired him, to the point where it was causing me to feel inadequate about myself.
But in a nutshell, I think the beef some people might have with him is that he *is* genuinely possessed of almost too much skill for a single human being...and because it's so obvious, he himself can't help being aware of it.
>I was a bit taken aback that the install ran slower >then windows 2k on my celeron 400. >When i say slower, i mean that browsing the web >took longer and programs took longer to load and >execute. Windows took longer to move around the >screen. Menus took longer to "pop up." Basic stuff, >really.
I've got the release of KDE that came with RedHat 9, and I will say that it has gradually been winning me over, lately. Konqueror is a very useful file manager when in twin-pane mode, and Konsole also makes my life a lot easier.
That said, one thing I have noticed is somewhat poor performance on slower machines, and even on my own setup (Celeron 1.7, 512 Mb ram) things can get a bit choppy at times. I would tend to conclude that KDE is built primarily for aesthetics and secondly for functionality, with efficiency being a fair way down on the list of priorities.
I didn't used to like KDE at all I will confess, but I've learned recently that it does have it's place. Resource efficiency however is not what it was designed for, so you really need to have the horses to drive it.
Yes, I know it's disgusting technically, but you can have read/write from both Windows and Linux. I dual boot, and it's the entire reason why only my XP boot drive uses NTFS. The fact that NTFS wasn't Linux readable at all until recently was the entire reason why I didn't like using it. FAT32 might not be as elegant, but for me it gets the job done.
You'd probably also be able to set up a decent FTPD/HTTPD in XP if you really wanted to, and it might surprise you, but mIRC is probably the best Windows shell I think I've ever heard of...There are command line tricks in it to do just about anything, and the programming language in it allows for everything from custom UI to socket manipulation. I've seen it used for FTP, HTTP, SMTP, hardware manipulation, and remote administration before. It takes some doing, and it's a bit ugly sometimes, but it is possible.
Windows is a pain in the tail, I won't deny that, and I'm also not trying to claim that technically it comes anywhere near GNU/Linux...but you'd be surprised how little you can't find a way to do with it if you screw around long enough.
For core system stuff (bash, textutils, etc) or for anything I don't fear having to upgrade very often, I've tended to link static. The other good thing about this is that I can make a static skeleton for one system, copy it to another partition, and it works with a minimum of additional needed screwing around.
As the above post says though, for X or anything GUI, shared/dynamic is the only way to fly. The reason is that GUI stuff generally has an enormous list of dependencies, and so attempting to upgrade with everything static would break down very quickly, because when you upgrade a single lib, you have to recompile everything that is static but that contains the earlier version of that lib.
Shared linking to me for the most part is a pain in the tail in a whole lot of different ways...I agree with that, and it of course was the source of the dreaded Microsoft "DLL Hell" problem. There seem to be ways to minimise it, but at times there doesn't seem to be a way around it.
I got my own feet wet programming wise by writing my own mIRC scripts. The language seems to have got a bit more complex since I was doing it (1997 or so) but I think it's just been a case of adding more capabilities...the basic syntax is the same. Declaration of vars is dead easy, because you don't have to explicitly specify type, etc. There are also tons of examples available online in terms of other scripts.
Probably the way I'd start is first introduce her to IRC in general if she doesn't already know about that, and then after she's used that for a bit, show her that there are some things which she can simplify with a few basic aliases. After that you could possibly move onto popups with embedded vars, and then finally if-then-else/branching.
I'd suggest ircII, but I've seen unbelievably cryptic code in scripts for that...all bunched together.
PHP could be really good, too. I found that very straightforward, and it wasn't frustrating in the way Perl was. Although you'd probably have to teach her about clients and servers and the difference between each before you got her into that.
In other news, extra-dimensional camera footage of ice-skating demons has been captured by numerous individuals over the last 24 hours. In light of this development, the IOC has voted unanimously to nominate Hell as the site of the next Winter Olympics. Film at 11.
Can you spell "hypocrisy", kids? I don't have a problem with piracy at all, myself...but this guy proves the illegitimacy of his own argument. Anybody with a half-way consistent system of ethics does NOT subscribe to the philosophy that the ends justify the means.
If you think piracy is wrong, don't use pirated software. Full stop. Then wonder why (unless you use Linux) you won't be able to afford an operating system, graphics software, (ESPECIALLY 3D software) music...or really a computer at all. Any and all arguments claiming that piracy is morally wrong are based purely on greed. Yes, of course I believe that software developers need to get compensated for their work...but they invariably do. There are so many different possible ways to make money from the sale of software that it hardly bears mention...Hell, if you're really lazy you can make money flogging burnt Knoppix or Slackware CDs and docs if you want...The GPL allows it, and also doesn't put any restrictions on how much you charge for it. The only people seriously beating the "piracy is wrong" drum are those who are crying into their champagne about how they possibly made only $500 billion last financial year instead of 6. Boo hoo, guys...I really feel your pain. It's heartbreaking.
Enter The Matrix was one of the worst games I've played anywayz, and contrary to Joel Silver's likely opinion, I consider myself a fairly hardcore Matrix fan while saying that.
When I'm craving bullet time though, I get into Unreal Tournament (the original) with Bart Jansen's Bullet Time 3.0 mutator, and the Unreal 4 Ever weapon mods. Gameplay wise it's so much better it isn't funny, the BT mutator is compatible with any other mod I might want to load, AND I get to play my own maps. I don't know what excuse the Wachowskis would try and give people for ETM being as shitty as it was, but I wouldn't accept it...because there wasn't one. The Unreal engine was already there...they simply could have licensed that, subclassed the necessary physics mods, added in their own FMV, and that would have been that.
Mod me down if you want, but this is something I've been aware of for a while, which I think desperately needs to be pointed out, especially because this guy isn't the first person to complain about it.
"Since the beginning of the hacker age, programmers of all types have been "unfortunately intolerant and bigoted on technical issues" [8]. So when it comes to devout Open Source programmers, there's a strong tendency to immediately reject all proprietary software and anything to do with non-Open Source programs."
I was in #Linux on the Undernet recently, which is a good case in point. First of all when I tried to enter the channel I was banned on arrival because my nickname contained a | character (the nick without that char was taken) and then on attempting to enter the channel again a few days later I again found myself banned on arrival with no reason given. Even while I was in the channel, the level of elitism and snobbery expressed in a number of people's remarks was sickening...and I can well understand how new users can be put off by it.
While it's true that not everyone in the community is like this, (irc.linuxfromscratch.org has some very helpful and friendly people) Eric Raymond in particular has come across in his material as one of the most deeply narcissistic human beings I have ever heard of. Yes, a lot of his writing is very insightful...but it could have been a lot more so without the attitude. The man desperately needs to get over himself.
I realise that this is a side-effect of the hacker culture in particular...when motivations are based on ego gratification, the egos in question are bound to get rather large. I remember seeing this element in the film Hackers a bit back (and flame me if you like, but I've read enough to know that that film wasn't an entirely baseless portrayal of stereotypes) and thinking it was deeply sad that the entire motivation behind people in the group seemed to be a game of oneupsmanship...who could make themselves look the most "elite" by essentially drawing the largest amount of attention to themselves with computer-related practical jokes. It wasn't about simple "crimes of curiousity" either...A lot of the time it involved doing things which were genuinely obnoxious.
As I said, I'm aware that not everybody in the Linux community is like this...there are a large number of humble, friendly, and patient people doing some fantastic work towards promoting the operating system. But at the same time, there is also a small minority (it always seems to be a small minority) who consider themselves just too freaking cool to want to deal with anyone else, and also the last holdout of human intelligence...when quite simply, they aren't. A Linux user's fecal matter stinks just as much as a Windows user's does, and I believe the fact that there are Linux users who don't realise this to be the single greatest issue holding Linux's mainstream adoption back, more than usability or anything else.
>The problem with Windows is that it's *too* >secure. Yeah, you heard me. Try using a Windows
>box without admin rights. I did, once, never
Interesting. I remember one case a few years ago where I was on an NT net sharing system in a library...in what was supposedly a restricted environment. I wanted to be able to do more with it, so on a hunch I changed Netscape's source viewer from Notepad.exe to Explorer.exe. It worked, explorer started, and I had the run of the whole system.
Also, my fiancee forgot her XP password a few months back. Took me a few hours, but I was able to download a copy of ERD Commander, which not only allows wiping of NT passwords but has a file manager which again, gives you complete access to a system. NT doesn't seem so secure to my mind...but maybe it's just me.
Re:Old story, it's easy with a personal sysadmin
on
A Babe in Tuxland
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· Score: 1
>(though it's kinda cute, my Apple-crazy friend's
>4 year old son is similar), but how Joe Public,
>who has no software engineer friends, finds >setup and maintenance and patching.
Yes, but what you're forgetting is that the entire reason why Joe Public finds computer use difficult is because he either hasn't been brought up with it, or worse, his primary computer-related education has been Windows based.
The father of the 4 year old in this article comes across as a highly intelligent individual himself, who is trying to stimulate, among other things, intellectual development in his daughter. UNIX encourages user intelligence. Windows on the other hand relies on and encourages the premise that the person using it is someone who has trouble drooling properly.
The other thing is, a child's intellectual development is dependent to a large degree on the parents' priorities with regard to raising him or her. Intelligence is more about acquired attitudes
and habits than it is about inherent neurological ability. A child has little chance growing up to be intellectually active if his/her parents are morons themselves...which sadly, seems to be the case the majority of the time.
If the RIAA want to know why CD sales/overall revenue are down, I can tell them.
In a nutshell, contemporary music just plain sucks...and that's putting it very mildly, when I consider what my true feelings towards the state of current mainstream music actually are.
I stopped listening to contemporary radio in 1998, and I'm not going to even think about paying attention to it again until the likes of Britney Spears, Eminem, and Missy Eliott are long gone, although unfortunately that doesn't look like it's going to happen any time soon.
It doesn't have anything whatsoever to do with file trading though...the reason being that if you look through the collections of most of the people I've come across online, 80%-95% of it will be from before 1995 at the latest, which also includes more classical than you'd think. I'm guessing that the biggest risk from mp3s in terms of revenue loss though are undoubtedly faced by those artists from the 80s and earlier who are still alive, who haven't released new material since then, and who still rely on royalty sales of that material. Michael Jackson is the most visible example that comes to mind...although he hasn't released any material for a while now, I suspect his past music would still be quite popular among casual downloaders (people who aren't fanatical about him especially, but who like listening to him as much as any other artist) on P2P. His group of offline true believers would also be fairly small now, especially given the child molestation scandals, and the lack of offline retail sales coupled with his casual popularity on P2P wouldn't be helping him financially.
Other examples of who I'm talking about here would be Pat Benetar, whose music I've seen huge collections of online, and possibly the Rolling Stones, who while being big back in the day would most definitely be an acquired taste now, I'm guessing.
They are who I think mp3s could possibly cause a problem for, though...people with whom mp3 is now their music's primary mode of circulation. For people like Britney, Missy, and Eminem, whose CDs are everywhere, it'd be business as usual.
>As long as there is choice, there will be no
>breakthrough. One more choice won't help either.
Are you insane? Almost the *entire* reason why Windows is as much a security nightmare as it is, is because of it's homogenous nature. Sure, maybe it makes life a lot easier for end users, but have you ever stopped to think how much easier it makes life for virus writers and crackers as well?
Having only one system has it's pros and cons, the same way having choice does...but from where I'm sitting, choice has a lot more advantages. An example...I don't like KDE as an overall environment...it's bloated, buggy, and slow. However, there are some individual K apps which I like, and so I use Fvwm with the Gnome dock and Enlightenment, gtk/gnome libs, and K's libs as well. My RAM-resident windowmanager (Fvwm) is tiny, Enl gives me enough eye candy to satisfy without being too huge itself, and having just the libs from the other two systems means that they get loaded in on a single-app basis only, and thus don't cause instability and bloat.
I can already hear you arguing about how much initial effort that would take to set up...and yes, it does. The effort is spent only once however...and then the system works far better than Windows could ever dream of doing. What you're advocating is that we all accept a single, lowest common denominator, with all of the inherent problems that will bring us. What I prefer is my own setup, and for everyone else to have theirs...that way I can run what I want, and they can do the same.
Freedom requires effort...and the worst thing anyone can do is advocate that everyone be chained to one thing so that they can also be lazy. There is no way around it. If you want a good result with anything, you need to work.
>Oddly enough, Slackware is seeing something of a
>renaissance... stable and secure and with >support contracts available is very attractive
>to a lot of traditional Unix shops who don't >need flash and flair.
Slack rules. It was the first distro I ever used...3.0 from memory. Gives you the best of a lot of different worlds though...a package system based on tarballs. It also had a perfectly good menu system (albeit tty based) very early on.
I think the fact that Slackware was my first distro was one of the main reasons why I was so disenchanted with many of the later, glitzier distributions. If Slack proved anything, it's that a distro doesn't need tinsel and extraneous crap to still be usable and good.
Proving his common sense and general skill once again also, Patrick has opted for GNOME as the wm of choice out of the Big Two, as opposed to the bloated abbheration which is KDE. If I had broadband, and thus wasn't installing my LFS, I already would have got Slack 9.3.
(End shameless pimpage;-))
>unit that can be administrated with minimal >effort. The/bin,/lib,/usr structure has to
>go. Applications locking in to configuration >files across the file-system has to go. It's >simply painful to use, and something like Rox
here
Don't know if you're familiar with doing non-distro installs of Linux, but from what I've been learning from Linux from Scratch, using configure --prefix means you can install a program into whatever directory you want. It's also possible to have as many different versions of the compiler and tools as you want on the same system, in different dirs...you just change --prefix and lib target settings accordingly. I downloaded a text file from tldp.org a bit back as well, about a Linux file system standard...Seems a lot of distro makers are playing it fast and loose with the standard directory structure these days, and it's wreaking havoc with universal compatibility. It is entirely possible to ignore the directory structure completely if you want, though...you can have all sorts of weird and wonderful things.
I'm giving premade distributions a wide berth these days. It's true that I was here singing the praises of Xandros 2.0 a few weeks back...but that was before I found out that gcc didn't work with it out of the box, and the entire system broke hard (I had to reinstall it 3 times before I finally got rid of it) when I tried to install it.
I'm currently working my way through the book Linux From Scratch, and as the host for that I used a massively stripped install of RH 7.3.
I figure if I want emphasis on user-friendliness over stability, security, and configurability, I might as well go back to Windows. I'm not going back to Windows though, because I want those things...a system customised to my machine and my way of doing things, and a system which doesn't break once I've put in the work setting it up. I can't get that from Windows...and I also can't get it from a commercialistic, predigested wants-to-be-Windows Linux distribution. The people out there who are determined to win Windows users over to Linux by making Linux into a clone of Windows should stop and think occasionally about what such a thing could potentially do to Linux.
>- You have an easily available source
>of "known good" binaries if you have a
>suspected intrusion problem.
A rather dangerous assumption to my mind, this one. I've heard of Red Hat releases in particular making it to the shelves while still having at least the odd security flaw. Of course you're not going to have time to go over it with a fine-toothed comb, but if you know how to read code I'd give at least really critical apps a cursory once over. It's better than your system going down or being invaded by some anarchistic 14 year old, anywayz IMHO.
As well as the security/stability issue, one of my main reasons for changing to Linux has been the level of customisability. I suppose we can let overworked corporate sysadmins off the hook for wanting to use predigested distros, particularly if they have to deploy to a lot of machines, (even the most broken distro release is likely to be infintely more secure than the IE+OE knock-out punch;-)) but I'm not sure anyone else wanting to call themselves a respectable Linux user has an excuse.
To me, compiling from source is one of the main reasons for using Linux. The ability to compile exactly for your CPU and particular environment, coupled with the security of knowing that what you're getting is exactly what you think it is, and not something that's going to turn your system into a script kiddie gang's next 0-day ircd.
If you need something that can be deployed on a lot of machines, buy standard hardware that you know Linux supports, (avoid exotic Winmodems, onboard cards etc) prototype from source on one machine, and then mirror it to the rest. To me, a secure, stable, well-configured system is something that cannot and should not be attained in five minutes, and any corporate sysadmin who thinks it should be possible, ought to look for a career change. Just as it's true that in the rest of life there is no such thing as a free lunch, when it comes to security, the emphasis should NOT be on short cuts.
From what I've seen there have been a number of times when Kofi has said something where he's pretty much the only one who cares. Apart from the charity work they do, from everything I've been able to detect, giving extreme left-wing groups like Greenpeace and Amnesty International (and similarly minded extreme left-wing *individuals*, no doubt) the warm fuzzies is pretty much the only reason why the UN exists. Oh, and to provide far-right crackpot militant groups with grist for their world domination conspiracy theory mill, of course.;-)
We need this about as much as a bullet in the head.
Unlike for the offline world, perhaps, the "last, best hope" for the Internet is to leave administering it in the hands of those who actually know what they're doing. The planet isn't *quite* universally dead broke yet, Kofi...You've still got some work to do there before you move on to screwing up the Net.
>I'd personally (and anonymously) like to thank
>Slashdot for providing a link to this article.
>The dos/windows to Linux guide linked to in >IBM's roadmap will help me out quite a bit. I'm
>a Windows/Novell professional and Linux >beginner. I cant wait to learn more about Linux.
No problem. *grin* Welcome aboard, BTW. If you want more help, check out The LinuxDocumentation Project at some point as well, which has an enormous amount of good information about Linux. I would also thoroughly recommend the first Halloween document which has a comparitive analysis of Windows and Linux, written by a man who at the time worked for Microsoft, with commentary from the Open Source Initiative. This document contains a lot of information about Linux's strengths in comparison to Windows, and why Microsoft view it seriously as a competitive threat.
Another very good source of information are Eric Raymond's The Cathedral and The Bazaar, which explains the open source philosophy.
One other source of information which I've found very interesting is the GNU Philosophy pages. As you most probably know, GNU software is a major part of a Linux distribution, and these pages talk about the underlying philosophy of the GNU project.
I hope this helps, and if you benefit from using Linux yourself, remember to tell some friends about it...We need to keep spreading the word.
Slashdot Mirror
>Windows Longhorn, and it will be another decade of
>playing catch-up with their new technologies.
No, it won't. Longhorn will have a (pseudo) 3D desktop environment? Have a look here and here for Linux projects so far ahead of what Longhorn is offering in the 3D dept that they'd likely make BillG wet his pants.
Longhorn has database capabilities for finding files easily? Linux has had this for years, and now has things likethis, too.
Longhorn has the ability to group users' files for easy access? Linux can too.
Want smart agents, the software for which is GPLed and a ton easier to set up than Microsoft Agent? Here.
For exotic technologies and bleeding-edge applications, Linux is *not* being forced to play catch-up. Microsoft are, and they know it.
>weren't expecting it to be the Star Wars of a new
>generation
That was exactly the problem, as I said earlier. Originally it hadn't been planned on being the "Star Wars of the new generation," but was actually going to try and be something halfway original, and go in its own direction. It became the Star Wars of the new generation for the simple reason that it was thought that a new Star Wars would make lots, and lots, of money. ;-)
>what they are: weak, derivative, poorly-plotted
>eye-candy with a dash of pretension?
To say I loved the first film in particular would probably be the greatest understatement I've ever made, but of course it's pretentious. I saw that it was pretentious...I think everyone knows that it was pretentious...that was part of the whole point. Some of us actually revel in our shameless wannabeism. *big grin*
Seriously though...I agree with you wholeheartedly about Revolutions, and to a lesser extent about Reloaded. Reloaded had it's moments, but...I've always said that where the series really went wrong was the Animatrix. The reason why I say that is because (a) I actually thought the Second Rennaisance in particular was rather lame, and (b) that and Kid's Story (which I also didn't really like very much) was what they based the second two movies almost in totality on. Reloaded in particular really had very little storyline for anyone paying attention...it was fairly simply a mindless action movie. From that point of view I enjoyed it...After I got over the initial disappointment that lightning wasn't going to strike twice, and that the Wachowskis had pulled a shameless George Lucas impersonation on us.
That to me was the real problem...that the Wachowskis (or whoever was primarily responsible for the writing in the second two films...I assume it was them) very obviously got caught up in a desire to plagiarise Star Wars. Because of that, in Revolutions we had the infuriating Kid filling in for Jar Jar Binks, as probably the most glaring example.
AFAIK, a trilogy was always planned, unlike what I've heard people saying that the second two were an afterthought. The original Matrix wasn't really what I'd call totally mainstream, or it at least didn't seem like it was intended to be. It however caught on with enough people that it was obviously decided that the two sequels had to be crowd pleasers, and for that reason I'm inclined to believe that material that was originally planned for the two sequels (which actually could have been GOOD) was scrapped in favour of making something lame, but which would appeal to the unwashed masses and therefore generate large amounts of money.
That, in a nutshell, is what happened. The writers got dollar signs in their eyes, and sold out.
ZDNet regurgitates Microsoft's propoganda more closely than just about any other news service I know of, and you can also read the Halloween Documents to learn about how the Gartner Group have done the same thing.
MS might be on their way out generally, but they still have plenty of Grima Wormtounge equivalents busily trying to convince people otherwise.
I am reminded of the recent fanatical displays of Greeks prostrating themselves over flags in response to their winning of the soccer match.
Patriotism in any form and on behalf of any country is really a form of racism, since it is the purely emotive, erroneous and irrational belief that one's own country or people are inherently superior to all others. This is a complete impossibility, as we are all human beings. Seperate "races" as they have been called, do not exist.
Patriotic fervour is never any kind of verification of the superiority of the group whose behalf it is expressed on. On the contrary, it is proof solely of the overwhelming intellectual *inferiority* of the individual expressing such belief.
>Sometimes I wonder how the anti-ESR zealots >rationalize their actions. Are they jealous because >he's so well known ("my program was much more >difficult to write than fetchmail, why does nobody >quote me"), angry because he has some controversial >opinions on firearms, or what?
I haven't heard of too many Linux users (although I could be very, very wrong there) who would argue with the idea that ESR's commentary is consistently extremely insightful and intelligent, or also that he's done a truly astronomical amount in all sorts of different ways to contribute to Linux, as well as various other projects.
The only issue which I ever find myself having with his material, (this might be what annoys other people, I'm unsure) is that in some of his articles he occasionally implies that he believes he's next in line to God.
At first this annoyed the hell out of me, but then I had a long think about it. If I ever read anything of his now where it seems like he's coming across as a bit full of himself, I try to remember that he actually *does* have reason to be, and that I think this is where people's disdain for him would come from, including my own at times...namely, that we look at him and then at ourselves and wish that if only we could be as cool, and lament the fact that we aren't...we're jealous.
The man might not be *quite* the 40 foot tall immortal he appears to see himself as being, but he is still, to put it mildly, an absolute freaking legend, and given human nature it's perfectly understandable that some of us get a case of the green-eyed monster over it. I've had to think about this myself, because I had a bad case of ESR envy myself a bit back, and I had to take a good hard look at it. I realised that the issue was that in reality I *really* admired him, to the point where it was causing me to feel inadequate about myself.
But in a nutshell, I think the beef some people might have with him is that he *is* genuinely possessed of almost too much skill for a single human being...and because it's so obvious, he himself can't help being aware of it.
>I was a bit taken aback that the install ran slower >then windows 2k on my celeron 400.
>When i say slower, i mean that browsing the web >took longer and programs took longer to load and >execute. Windows took longer to move around the >screen. Menus took longer to "pop up." Basic stuff,
>really.
I've got the release of KDE that came with RedHat 9, and I will say that it has gradually been winning me over, lately. Konqueror is a very useful file manager when in twin-pane mode, and Konsole also makes my life a lot easier.
That said, one thing I have noticed is somewhat poor performance on slower machines, and even on my own setup (Celeron 1.7, 512 Mb ram) things can get a bit choppy at times. I would tend to conclude that KDE is built primarily for aesthetics and secondly for functionality, with efficiency being a fair way down on the list of priorities.
If you're sufficiently computer literate that a few less frills won't bother you, I'd recommend Fluxbox, a smaller and lighter window manager which from what I've seen has become rather popular with the LFS crowd in particular. XFce is another possible choice, and personally I've always been a huge fan of Enlightenment. E can be a bit slow initially, though...you'll need to turn off some of the more frivolous additions such as the desktop micro-window and so on, but I used to run that on a Celeron 400 myself and had no problems.
I didn't used to like KDE at all I will confess, but I've learned recently that it does have it's place. Resource efficiency however is not what it was designed for, so you really need to have the horses to drive it.
You'd probably also be able to set up a decent FTPD/HTTPD in XP if you really wanted to, and it might surprise you, but mIRC is probably the best Windows shell I think I've ever heard of...There are command line tricks in it to do just about anything, and the programming language in it allows for everything from custom UI to socket manipulation. I've seen it used for FTP, HTTP, SMTP, hardware manipulation, and remote administration before. It takes some doing, and it's a bit ugly sometimes, but it is possible.
Windows is a pain in the tail, I won't deny that, and I'm also not trying to claim that technically it comes anywhere near GNU/Linux...but you'd be surprised how little you can't find a way to do with it if you screw around long enough.
For core system stuff (bash, textutils, etc) or for anything I don't fear having to upgrade very often, I've tended to link static. The other good thing about this is that I can make a static skeleton for one system, copy it to another partition, and it works with a minimum of additional needed screwing around.
As the above post says though, for X or anything GUI, shared/dynamic is the only way to fly. The reason is that GUI stuff generally has an enormous list of dependencies, and so attempting to upgrade with everything static would break down very quickly, because when you upgrade a single lib, you have to recompile everything that is static but that contains the earlier version of that lib.
Shared linking to me for the most part is a pain in the tail in a whole lot of different ways...I agree with that, and it of course was the source of the dreaded Microsoft "DLL Hell" problem. There seem to be ways to minimise it, but at times there doesn't seem to be a way around it.
Probably the way I'd start is first introduce her to IRC in general if she doesn't already know about that, and then after she's used that for a bit, show her that there are some things which she can simplify with a few basic aliases. After that you could possibly move onto popups with embedded vars, and then finally if-then-else/branching.
I'd suggest ircII, but I've seen unbelievably cryptic code in scripts for that...all bunched together.
PHP could be really good, too. I found that very straightforward, and it wasn't frustrating in the way Perl was. Although you'd probably have to teach her about clients and servers and the difference between each before you got her into that.
In other news, extra-dimensional camera footage of ice-skating demons has been captured by numerous individuals over the last 24 hours. In light of this development, the IOC has voted unanimously to nominate Hell as the site of the next Winter Olympics. Film at 11.
>Let me immidiately say that in no way to I think
>what I was doing was good, right, or moral, but
> it was necessary.
(Emphasis mine)
Can you spell "hypocrisy", kids? I don't have a problem with piracy at all, myself...but this guy proves the illegitimacy of his own argument. Anybody with a half-way consistent system of ethics does NOT subscribe to the philosophy that the ends justify the means.
If you think piracy is wrong, don't use pirated software. Full stop. Then wonder why (unless you use Linux) you won't be able to afford an operating system, graphics software, (ESPECIALLY 3D software) music...or really a computer at all. Any and all arguments claiming that piracy is morally wrong are based purely on greed. Yes, of course I believe that software developers need to get compensated for their work...but they invariably do. There are so many different possible ways to make money from the sale of software that it hardly bears mention...Hell, if you're really lazy you can make money flogging burnt Knoppix or Slackware CDs and docs if you want...The GPL allows it, and also doesn't put any restrictions on how much you charge for it.
The only people seriously beating the "piracy is wrong" drum are those who are crying into their champagne about how they possibly made only $500 billion last financial year instead of 6. Boo hoo, guys...I really feel your pain. It's heartbreaking.
When I'm craving bullet time though, I get into Unreal Tournament (the original) with Bart Jansen's Bullet Time 3.0 mutator, and the Unreal 4 Ever weapon mods. Gameplay wise it's so much better it isn't funny, the BT mutator is compatible with any other mod I might want to load, AND I get to play my own maps. I don't know what excuse the Wachowskis would try and give people for ETM being as shitty as it was, but I wouldn't accept it...because there wasn't one. The Unreal engine was already there...they simply could have licensed that, subclassed the necessary physics mods, added in their own FMV, and that would have been that.
"Since the beginning of the hacker age, programmers of all types have been "unfortunately intolerant and bigoted on technical issues" [8]. So when it comes to devout Open Source programmers, there's a strong tendency to immediately reject all proprietary software and anything to do with non-Open Source programs."
I was in #Linux on the Undernet recently, which is a good case in point. First of all when I tried to enter the channel I was banned on arrival because my nickname contained a | character (the nick without that char was taken) and then on attempting to enter the channel again a few days later I again found myself banned on arrival with no reason given. Even while I was in the channel, the level of elitism and snobbery expressed in a number of people's remarks was sickening...and I can well understand how new users can be put off by it.
While it's true that not everyone in the community is like this, (irc.linuxfromscratch.org has some very helpful and friendly people) Eric Raymond in particular has come across in his material as one of the most deeply narcissistic human beings I have ever heard of. Yes, a lot of his writing is very insightful...but it could have been a lot more so without the attitude. The man desperately needs to get over himself.
I realise that this is a side-effect of the hacker culture in particular...when motivations are based on ego gratification, the egos in question are bound to get rather large. I remember seeing this element in the film Hackers a bit back (and flame me if you like, but I've read enough to know that that film wasn't an entirely baseless portrayal of stereotypes) and thinking it was deeply sad that the entire motivation behind people in the group seemed to be a game of oneupsmanship...who could make themselves look the most "elite" by essentially drawing the largest amount of attention to themselves with computer-related practical jokes. It wasn't about simple "crimes of curiousity" either...A lot of the time it involved doing things which were genuinely obnoxious.
As I said, I'm aware that not everybody in the Linux community is like this...there are a large number of humble, friendly, and patient people doing some fantastic work towards promoting the operating system. But at the same time, there is also a small minority (it always seems to be a small minority) who consider themselves just too freaking cool to want to deal with anyone else, and also the last holdout of human intelligence...when quite simply, they aren't. A Linux user's fecal matter stinks just as much as a Windows user's does, and I believe the fact that there are Linux users who don't realise this to be the single greatest issue holding Linux's mainstream adoption back, more than usability or anything else.
>secure. Yeah, you heard me. Try using a Windows
>box without admin rights. I did, once, never
Interesting. I remember one case a few years ago where I was on an NT net sharing system in a library...in what was supposedly a restricted environment. I wanted to be able to do more with it, so on a hunch I changed Netscape's source viewer from Notepad.exe to Explorer.exe. It worked, explorer started, and I had the run of the whole system.
Also, my fiancee forgot her XP password a few months back. Took me a few hours, but I was able to download a copy of ERD Commander, which not only allows wiping of NT passwords but has a file manager which again, gives you complete access to a system. NT doesn't seem so secure to my mind...but maybe it's just me.
>4 year old son is similar), but how Joe Public,
>who has no software engineer friends, finds
>setup and maintenance and patching.
Yes, but what you're forgetting is that the entire reason why Joe Public finds computer use difficult is because he either hasn't been brought up with it, or worse, his primary computer-related education has been Windows based.
The father of the 4 year old in this article comes across as a highly intelligent individual himself, who is trying to stimulate, among other things, intellectual development in his daughter. UNIX encourages user intelligence. Windows on the other hand relies on and encourages the premise that the person using it is someone who has trouble drooling properly.
The other thing is, a child's intellectual development is dependent to a large degree on the parents' priorities with regard to raising him or her. Intelligence is more about acquired attitudes and habits than it is about inherent neurological ability. A child has little chance growing up to be intellectually active if his/her parents are morons themselves...which sadly, seems to be the case the majority of the time.
In a nutshell, contemporary music just plain sucks...and that's putting it very mildly, when I consider what my true feelings towards the state of current mainstream music actually are.
I stopped listening to contemporary radio in 1998, and I'm not going to even think about paying attention to it again until the likes of Britney Spears, Eminem, and Missy Eliott are long gone, although unfortunately that doesn't look like it's going to happen any time soon.
It doesn't have anything whatsoever to do with file trading though...the reason being that if you look through the collections of most of the people I've come across online, 80%-95% of it will be from before 1995 at the latest, which also includes more classical than you'd think. I'm guessing that the biggest risk from mp3s in terms of revenue loss though are undoubtedly faced by those artists from the 80s and earlier who are still alive, who haven't released new material since then, and who still rely on royalty sales of that material. Michael Jackson is the most visible example that comes to mind...although he hasn't released any material for a while now, I suspect his past music would still be quite popular among casual downloaders (people who aren't fanatical about him especially, but who like listening to him as much as any other artist) on P2P. His group of offline true believers would also be fairly small now, especially given the child molestation scandals, and the lack of offline retail sales coupled with his casual popularity on P2P wouldn't be helping him financially.
Other examples of who I'm talking about here would be Pat Benetar, whose music I've seen huge collections of online, and possibly the Rolling Stones, who while being big back in the day would most definitely be an acquired taste now, I'm guessing.
They are who I think mp3s could possibly cause a problem for, though...people with whom mp3 is now their music's primary mode of circulation. For people like Britney, Missy, and Eminem, whose CDs are everywhere, it'd be business as usual.
>breakthrough. One more choice won't help either.
Are you insane? Almost the *entire* reason why Windows is as much a security nightmare as it is, is because of it's homogenous nature. Sure, maybe it makes life a lot easier for end users, but have you ever stopped to think how much easier it makes life for virus writers and crackers as well?
Having only one system has it's pros and cons, the same way having choice does...but from where I'm sitting, choice has a lot more advantages. An example...I don't like KDE as an overall environment...it's bloated, buggy, and slow. However, there are some individual K apps which I like, and so I use Fvwm with the Gnome dock and Enlightenment, gtk/gnome libs, and K's libs as well. My RAM-resident windowmanager (Fvwm) is tiny, Enl gives me enough eye candy to satisfy without being too huge itself, and having just the libs from the other two systems means that they get loaded in on a single-app basis only, and thus don't cause instability and bloat.
I can already hear you arguing about how much initial effort that would take to set up...and yes, it does. The effort is spent only once however...and then the system works far better than Windows could ever dream of doing. What you're advocating is that we all accept a single, lowest common denominator, with all of the inherent problems that will bring us. What I prefer is my own setup, and for everyone else to have theirs...that way I can run what I want, and they can do the same.
Freedom requires effort...and the worst thing anyone can do is advocate that everyone be chained to one thing so that they can also be lazy. There is no way around it. If you want a good result with anything, you need to work.
>renaissance... stable and secure and with
>support contracts available is very attractive
>to a lot of traditional Unix shops who don't
>need flash and flair.
Slack rules. It was the first distro I ever used...3.0 from memory. Gives you the best of a lot of different worlds though...a package system based on tarballs. It also had a perfectly good menu system (albeit tty based) very early on.
I think the fact that Slackware was my first distro was one of the main reasons why I was so disenchanted with many of the later, glitzier distributions. If Slack proved anything, it's that a distro doesn't need tinsel and extraneous crap to still be usable and good. ;-))
Proving his common sense and general skill once again also, Patrick has opted for GNOME as the wm of choice out of the Big Two, as opposed to the bloated abbheration which is KDE. If I had broadband, and thus wasn't installing my LFS, I already would have got Slack 9.3.
(End shameless pimpage
>effort. The
>go. Applications locking in to configuration
>files across the file-system has to go. It's
>simply painful to use, and something like Rox here
Don't know if you're familiar with doing non-distro installs of Linux, but from what I've been learning from Linux from Scratch, using configure --prefix means you can install a program into whatever directory you want. It's also possible to have as many different versions of the compiler and tools as you want on the same system, in different dirs...you just change --prefix and lib target settings accordingly. I downloaded a text file from tldp.org a bit back as well, about a Linux file system standard...Seems a lot of distro makers are playing it fast and loose with the standard directory structure these days, and it's wreaking havoc with universal compatibility. It is entirely possible to ignore the directory structure completely if you want, though...you can have all sorts of weird and wonderful things.
I'm currently working my way through the book Linux From Scratch, and as the host for that I used a massively stripped install of RH 7.3.
I figure if I want emphasis on user-friendliness over stability, security, and configurability, I might as well go back to Windows. I'm not going back to Windows though, because I want those things...a system customised to my machine and my way of doing things, and a system which doesn't break once I've put in the work setting it up. I can't get that from Windows...and I also can't get it from a commercialistic, predigested wants-to-be-Windows Linux distribution. The people out there who are determined to win Windows users over to Linux by making Linux into a clone of Windows should stop and think occasionally about what such a thing could potentially do to Linux.
>of "known good" binaries if you have a
>suspected intrusion problem.
A rather dangerous assumption to my mind, this one. I've heard of Red Hat releases in particular making it to the shelves while still having at least the odd security flaw. Of course you're not going to have time to go over it with a fine-toothed comb, but if you know how to read code I'd give at least really critical apps a cursory once over. It's better than your system going down or being invaded by some anarchistic 14 year old, anywayz IMHO.
As well as the security/stability issue, one of my main reasons for changing to Linux has been the level of customisability. I suppose we can let overworked corporate sysadmins off the hook for wanting to use predigested distros, particularly if they have to deploy to a lot of machines, (even the most broken distro release is likely to be infintely more secure than the IE+OE knock-out punch ;-)) but I'm not sure anyone else wanting to call themselves a respectable Linux user has an excuse.
To me, compiling from source is one of the main reasons for using Linux. The ability to compile exactly for your CPU and particular environment, coupled with the security of knowing that what you're getting is exactly what you think it is, and not something that's going to turn your system into a script kiddie gang's next 0-day ircd.
If you need something that can be deployed on a lot of machines, buy standard hardware that you know Linux supports, (avoid exotic Winmodems, onboard cards etc) prototype from source on one machine, and then mirror it to the rest. To me, a secure, stable, well-configured system is something that cannot and should not be attained in five minutes, and any corporate sysadmin who thinks it should be possible, ought to look for a career change. Just as it's true that in the rest of life there is no such thing as a free lunch, when it comes to security, the emphasis should NOT be on short cuts.
From what I've seen there have been a number of times when Kofi has said something where he's pretty much the only one who cares. Apart from the charity work they do, from everything I've been able to detect, giving extreme left-wing groups like Greenpeace and Amnesty International (and similarly minded extreme left-wing *individuals*, no doubt) the warm fuzzies is pretty much the only reason why the UN exists. Oh, and to provide far-right crackpot militant groups with grist for their world domination conspiracy theory mill, of course. ;-)
We need this about as much as a bullet in the head.
Unlike for the offline world, perhaps, the "last, best hope" for the Internet is to leave administering it in the hands of those who actually know what they're doing. The planet isn't *quite* universally dead broke yet, Kofi...You've still got some work to do there before you move on to screwing up the Net.
>Slashdot for providing a link to this article.
>The dos/windows to Linux guide linked to in
>IBM's roadmap will help me out quite a bit. I'm
>a Windows/Novell professional and Linux
>beginner. I cant wait to learn more about Linux.
No problem. *grin* Welcome aboard, BTW. If you want more help, check out The LinuxDocumentation Project at some point as well, which has an enormous amount of good information about Linux. I would also thoroughly recommend the first Halloween document which has a comparitive analysis of Windows and Linux, written by a man who at the time worked for Microsoft, with commentary from the Open Source Initiative. This document contains a lot of information about Linux's strengths in comparison to Windows, and why Microsoft view it seriously as a competitive threat.
Another very good source of information are Eric Raymond's The Cathedral and The Bazaar, which explains the open source philosophy.
One other source of information which I've found very interesting is the GNU Philosophy pages. As you most probably know, GNU software is a major part of a Linux distribution, and these pages talk about the underlying philosophy of the GNU project. I hope this helps, and if you benefit from using Linux yourself, remember to tell some friends about it...We need to keep spreading the word.