OK, what AVERAGE windoze user installs harddrives? Just about 0 (zero). Opening up the case and installing hardware is not an average user task.
If you mean plugging in periphs and having them work then, it isn't easy with windoze either (royal pain in the ass). You add a zip drive and that requires that you install the software/drivers for it. This means MULTIPLE reboots throughout the process because of the obnoxious bullcrap windoze does with "must reboot for changes to take effect". With linux, with a little knowhow, you plug in your new periph, install the drivers (or wait for kudzu to find it...hopefully...on your ONE reboot), and use it without ever rebooting for changes to take effect. They take effect here and now, when you need it. No reboots are needed EVER unless you dick with the kernel, ANOTHER non-average user task, by the way.
Most people I know who are plain ole average users take their computer to someone who knows what they are doing to install ANY new hardware. The only people who really don't need this help, but DO still need to be clued, are Mac users...except, again, with harddrives and RAM, etc. Clueful non-average users are needed for that.
The net is NOT active x, it is http, tcp/ip, etc. It is NOT the plaything of M$. Do not use anything that deigns to restrict or attempts to re-define that the net belongs to M$. Period.
Sun is as broken as IBM is (was? perhaps they're on meds now and OK?). IBM had OS/2, their own superior-to-windoze os back in the 80s-90s. They wouldn't sell you one of their computers with their own frickin' os on it. They INSISTED on selling only windoze systems to the detriment of their own work.
Sun is similar. They have mature java. They have done a lot of work to make it capable of being used to develop their own javaos. Do they? NO! They pull an IBM and shit on their own effort, their own design. Frickin' tards.
What are you talking about? I am talking REALITY. Objective fact, the ONLY thing that matters, the only thing that exists, and you make it into some anti-capitalist, whining, this and that nonsense.
I would advocate that ALL hidden costs become no longer hidden. If you buy a computer, the cost passed on to the consumer should be itemized on the bill: labor charges, software charges (there is no FREE windoze software), support charges, etc. It is called telling the truth rather than allowing companies to lie to the consumer about what they are getting and what it is costing.
It should also stipulate that you pay for software but do not own it. I am sure that most people think that when they buy software, hardware, whatever-ware, books, newspapers, CDs, TVs, etc, they own it. They SHOULD own it but they are not aware that ONE item in the above list is different (magically, some how) from EVERYTHING else. This is largely a M$ fabrication and purchasers should be made aware of this alternate reality too.
This is exactly the type of crap that would drive me to start collecting MP3s and other "illegal" software. I don't generally download or otherwise store music on my computer, that is what my stereo is best at (just like my TV with DVD player is far superior to sitting at my computer to watch movies). Nonetheless, if something like this got through the legislative process, I WOULD start wasting harddrive space for the "undesireable" files.
The fastest way to ge ME to do "illegal" stuff is to take my rights away or make something legal into something illegal for the sake of a corporation's or CEO's income. Get it passed and make the situation worse - for yourself, RIAA.
Naive. You DO pay for windoze when you buy a new PC. The cost of windoze is rolled into the price of the computer. They hide this from you by not itemizing the bill and by preinstalling it and charging for THAT service so that it APPEARS you are getting windoze for "free" with the computer.
It is both good and bad. Good in that it relieves a lot of the resistance to switching to the new (linux) system. Bad in that it threatens to do for linux what Win-OS2 did to OS/2: you don't have to rewrite your software to work with OS/2, it will run on OS/2 better than it will on windoze natively (it did, too, for 16-bit code which was widespread at the time). The result was no one wrote OS/2 software. Why learn and do it via a new/different method when you could just keep writing code the way you always had been and have it still work on OS/2?
What would be more compelling is a GOOD, open, free (or mostly so), and easy API set that works on windoze, macs, and linux. OpenAL and OpenGL are good, but the latter, unfortunately, tends to be updated too slowly while M$ with DirectX adds nice, new, fancy-pants features yearly that make games look greater while OpenGL remains stable, but sticks with capabilities from several years ago.
OpenAL is good on the soundside but the graphics arena, and OpenGL are too slow in improvement. I'm not sure what the solution would be, it is certainly not something that linux-users or BSD-users and developers have much say in. I suppose we could dump OpenGL and create a new open graphics API that works just as well as OpenGL and DirectX, is easy to write for, and is truly cross-platform. You would have to make it compelling for game companies to write with that API (and not insist that they GPL their games - talk about killing a golden-egg laying goose...) rather than DirectX.
Wrong-o Marylou. With KDE, for instance, there is the default behavior but there is also a very EASY means of changing it to whatever app you want to have open up an extension - forever. There is no hindrance.
In any case, why install a full ENVIRONMENT like Gnome or KDE if you don't intend to make use of the environment? Just install a window manager and be done with it. The whole point to Gnome and KDE is an integrated, play-nice-together whole. This is the default but not a difficult thing to change at all. The developers of both environments don't make it difficult to change what app opens what extension by default.
M$ makes it a royal pain in the ass. Gates thinks HE knows what you want to do or SHOULD do and he wont take your opinions to the contrary.
The age is pretty much tied down, give or take a couple billion, to 15 by. There is no longer a disjoint between the apparent age of globular clusters and the otherwise determined age of the universe. It all comes together at about 15 billion. The end.
Kword starts in seconds. Wordperfect for linux starts in seconds. Lyx starts in seconds. Abiword starts in seconds. StarOffice/OpenOffice starts in many, MANY seconds.
Sorry, no excuses. There is no inherent reason that a wordprocessor should take that long to startup, regardless of what libs it uses.
How's the load time for SO 6.0? For OpenOffice it is monstrously slow. I uninstalled it due to this and the fact that it has a tendency to crash...a lot...particularly impress. After a lot of work designing a presentation only to have it crash and actually anihilate my presentation completely...out it went with the rest of the garbage.
I cannot deal with most of my data as you do. Most of my work doesn't involve computers, it involves bacteria, viruses, cells, proteins. Also, the format that these data can be presented in isn't well-adapted to your methods. We either create images ourselves or pay a graphic artist to produce the tables and figures.
Most of the journals that I can submit to will not accept tex. In addition, virtually ALL of my colleagues local and across the nation use either word or wordperfect with EndNote, including my PI. The biological sciences are different than physics or mathematics where I understand that latex is used heavily. This is not the case with biological sciences.
Lyx works for me, barely. I have a lot of hoops to jump through at the end of a writeup to recreate my documents in word or wordperfect format so that the files will be compatible with my colleague's and my boss' requirements.
The energy density of hydrogen compared to gas or kerosene is low. A gallon of jet fuel will take you a lot farther than a gallon of liquid hydrogen. It would certainly be clean burning but you would have to have high-pressure cryogenic tanks to hold the liquid hydrogen, which adds weight, and you'd have to carry a _lot_ of it to go the same distance as a standard kerosene/jp4 jet.
Your plane ticket prices would really shoot through the roof. Only the rich need consider flying.
I am certainly aware that lyx is a frontend to latex, but be realistic. You will NOT get highschool kids, college kids, and all scientist to go back to CLI or having to practically learn a programming language (latex and bibtex) just to write a paper.
I am a scientist whose job it is to do my research and publish it. It is not in my interest or the scientific world's interest for me and all like me to have to quite our research and learn the painstaking scripting/programming language that is Latex. GUIs are an improvement, in many respects, to CLI and arcane programming. You will NEVER get a bunch of highschool kids and college kids to take time away from what is important just to learn how to cryptically create what SHOULD be a fast, simple research paper.
They can do this PAINLESSLY and quickly with MS Word and EndNote. This same painlessness can and SHOULD exist in the linux world. There is no logical reason that it cannot nor should not. No justification. Why should it be soooo easy in windoze but painful and cryptic with linux? No reason. Hell, Lyx is a real bruiser to get used to. I am using it to write up research for publication and, likely, to do my thesis. It is painful exactly because it is so different from ANY wordprocessor that 99% of the universe uses. Instead, simply take Gobe, or Hancom, or StarOffice, or KOffice, and add a citation manager or the capability to plug one in.
STILL it is ONLY Lyx that can handle professional research paper, scientific paper writing. Not a single other suite in existence or planned for linux can do citations or references. None of them even allow for 3rd party apps to deal with this (ala endNote with Word or Wordperfect for Windoze). ONLY Lyx has this capability, only lyx has the pipeline that allows apps like pybliographic or sixpack or kbib (defunct) and a few others to do what EndNote does for windoze users of Office or Wordperfect - add painless citations/attribution to your serious research documents.
All these suites permit are letter writing and other simple crap that doesn't require proper attribution. When will SOMEONE get a clue and actually realize that EVERY highschool kid, EVERY college kid, EVERY scientist MUST cite references in their documents/research papers and that this is NOT a job to be done by hand like the days of the typewriter. Nay, you either HAVE to use Word and EndNote (and the like windoze apps) or Lyx if you use unix/linux. That's it. Sheesh.
I downloaded the beta just minutes ago. Here I was expecting the 50-70 MB file as before, but the file is 118+ MB! I haven't installed it yet - I was going to install it on my laptop to replace the EXTREMELY buggy and EXTREMELY slow OpenOffice (OpenOffice is certainly not broken into individual apps, or if it is, then they have done something horribly wrong. It takes WAY longer than standard StarOffice 5.2 to startup and crashes with every blink of an eye). I don't have the room on my laptop for this monster. I will have to transfer it to my desktop system and give it a shot there.
That's all you have to say about Openoffice? Sheesh. I downloaded and installed the bugger a week ago. I can only conclude that it is STILL one giant superbinary. It takes FOREVER to load, no better than the original SO 5.1 and 5.2. On top of that it is buggy as shit.
I lost count of the number of times it crashed on me when trying to produce a presentation. Openoffice goes down more than a crack-whore.
They should be removed from positions from which their ignorance could do damage to the people as a whole. Perhaps stuck where they belong, as gas station attendants or serving at Burger King.
Are you SURE this is an intellectual parody and not merely another vapid, dumb-as-dirt, idiot movie for teens? You know, like "Dumb and Dumber" or "Joe Dirt" and the like?
I haven't seen it, and quite frankly, it would take a LOT to get me to pay to see it. My gut reaction upon seeing the previews is "Jesus fuckin' Christ! Yet ANOTHER 'Dumb and Dumber' dumbass movie!".
If you want career training, go to a trade school or tech school. This is NOT the same as an education. You don't go to university ONLY to learn to be some geek engineer or accountant, you go to interact and learn about other ideas, other cultures, things you may never consider in your narrow little life otherwise.
Learning a mere trade doesn't train you or encourage you to be a good citizen. Failing to learn history or the philosophies underlying our Western civilization doesn't make you competent to defend the same by word or deed. It doesn't give you the understanding of how to REALLY understand what the Constitution and Bill of Rights really means. It doesn't make you have to accept that there are valid ideas and mores DIFFERENT than you own narrow spiel.
I sure as HELL don't want some ignorant, narrow, insufficiently educated fool to become my Senator or a judge, etc. If you don't get a WELL ROUNDED education, you are merely an ignorant drone.
People, by and large, do NOT seek out interaction and intellectual exploration of ideas contrary to their narrow personal beliefs, be they religious or otherwise. On their own, they merely seek out those who are the same as them and this makes it simple to demonize those with contrary views as "sinners" or "unAmerican" when, in fact, THEY are "unAmerican".
It IS true that those who fail to study and understand history are doomed to repeat it. It is a fact that an ignorant person is a poor citizen in a democracy where the majority does NOT rule. Our society is actually based on the idea of protecting the minorities from the tyranny of the majority. A narrow education merely focused on math or business doesn't make one understand this reality. Merely studying these narrow fields doesn't give one the capacity to understand reality, like the interconnectedness of various ecologies. It leads to voters (not good citizens) with warped ideas of reality, with warped and narrow opinions. There is too much of that already, we need MORE rounding in education, not less.
Sorry, been using it for years. It has gotten easier and easier to install and after having reinstalled and reinstalled winders multiple times on the same dual boot system, linux is no more difficult to install than winders (distro-dependent).
You throw a minor-league insult my way yet do not properly dispute my contention that you do not HAVE to constantly upgrade your linux system to the latest greatest if your system works fine for you NOW. There are people out there still using 2.2.19 kernels (GASP!) rather than the latest 2.4.x versions - and their systems are fine. Building a kernel is also not difficult - a bit more involved than simply doing an "rpm --rebuild" on a src rpm but still not difficult.
My contention stands. You do not HAVE to constantly upgrade your linux system just because there is an update out there (again, disregarding security updates that affect you - if you are not a running a bunch of services, then you are not much of a target and so some security updates do not apply. If you do not want to upgrade your kernel via binary rpm, then build it. Simple. Then you do not need to also upgrade your glibc and a bunch of other libs just to use package x. If package x requires kernel y, then you DO have an option to build kernel y on your system as is, and then install the app x - in many cases too, if the app x binary was built against lib z.2 and you have lib z.1, then you can try building it against lib z.1 from the source rpm.
There is no need to do the knee-jerk spiel about linux being difficult because it is different. Hell, Macs are "hard" then because they are different than winders. It is merely different and requires an adjustment from your winders-encoded preconceptions and weaknesses. You have been trained that OSes should be unstable, that you should have to pay for every minor upgrade, that viruses and worms are a normal aspect of computer use, that your current wordprocessor will magically become useless when the next version (again, with the GRATUITOUS alterations to the doc format) is released. Let go your Taliban mindset. Be free. Relax.
You do not HAVE to upgrade in linux. I do periodically, less often than I used. The only upgrades that should be considered important and a no-pass are security upgrades.
On my home system, I am happy with a working kernel behind my firewall with which my radeon card works well on. I haven't upgraded for a number of kernel cycles because "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". I upgrade this or that for security reasons but that's about it. In any case, you can avoid the lib dependencies if you build your own kernel from source. It is not really difficult. Sure, it may SEEM intimidating the first time but once you do it a couple times (if you do it correctly, you are in no danger of screwing up your system or eliminating your current working kernel - and you can always go back to the working kernel at lilo...). Build it with what you have and it will work.
Windoze, on the other hand, will provide a constant stream of bug-fix, security fixes well after they should have. It is too late to patch for nimba after all the 'doze boxen have been nailed. The damage is done and the next bug is being exploited.
Also, with every single M$ package upgrade you do, you lose backwards compatiblity - for no good, valid reason whatsoever. There is NO reason to constantly dick with the word doc format except to FORCE users to upgrade (PAY$$$$). There is no point - you get the same functions that were working fine on the previous iterations plus a few dickwad things that NO ONE uses. But people get forced to upgrade because their colleagues did - or they bought a new broken system that has the latest version of microsnot crap on it and his/her apps are no longer compatible with yours which is merely the previous iteration. Now YOU feel compelled to upgrade ($$$$) so you can eliminate the problems of opening his/her documents broken with the latest gratuitous.doc alterations.
Linux is FAR easier to deal with in this regard and you do not HAVE to upgrade this or that just because it is the newest version. That is M$-think. You need linux-think. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
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OK, what AVERAGE windoze user installs harddrives? Just about 0 (zero). Opening up the case and installing hardware is not an average user task.
If you mean plugging in periphs and having them work then, it isn't easy with windoze either (royal pain in the ass). You add a zip drive and that requires that you install the software/drivers for it. This means MULTIPLE reboots throughout the process because of the obnoxious bullcrap windoze does with "must reboot for changes to take effect". With linux, with a little knowhow, you plug in your new periph, install the drivers (or wait for kudzu to find it...hopefully...on your ONE reboot), and use it without ever rebooting for changes to take effect. They take effect here and now, when you need it. No reboots are needed EVER unless you dick with the kernel, ANOTHER non-average user task, by the way.
Most people I know who are plain ole average users take their computer to someone who knows what they are doing to install ANY new hardware. The only people who really don't need this help, but DO still need to be clued, are Mac users...except, again, with harddrives and RAM, etc. Clueful non-average users are needed for that.
You suck.
Are you stuck with dhcp and renewed/changing IP addresses or can you get a static IP without too much difficulty?
I'm paying $45/mo for a dynamic IP. It costs, with Qwest, to get a static IP.
Curious...does this include linux games (aka, Loki's, etc)? My initial thought is that *BSD would but I am not certain on this assumption.
Cough! Active X security HOLE cough!
The net is NOT active x, it is http, tcp/ip, etc. It is NOT the plaything of M$. Do not use anything that deigns to restrict or attempts to re-define that the net belongs to M$. Period.
God forbid that chicks would hang around you at all.
Yuck. Cooties.
Sun is as broken as IBM is (was? perhaps they're on meds now and OK?). IBM had OS/2, their own superior-to-windoze os back in the 80s-90s. They wouldn't sell you one of their computers with their own frickin' os on it. They INSISTED on selling only windoze systems to the detriment of their own work.
Sun is similar. They have mature java. They have done a lot of work to make it capable of being used to develop their own javaos. Do they? NO! They pull an IBM and shit on their own effort, their own design. Frickin' tards.
What are you talking about? I am talking REALITY. Objective fact, the ONLY thing that matters, the only thing that exists, and you make it into some anti-capitalist, whining, this and that nonsense.
I would advocate that ALL hidden costs become no longer hidden. If you buy a computer, the cost passed on to the consumer should be itemized on the bill: labor charges, software charges (there is no FREE windoze software), support charges, etc. It is called telling the truth rather than allowing companies to lie to the consumer about what they are getting and what it is costing.
It should also stipulate that you pay for software but do not own it. I am sure that most people think that when they buy software, hardware, whatever-ware, books, newspapers, CDs, TVs, etc, they own it. They SHOULD own it but they are not aware that ONE item in the above list is different (magically, some how) from EVERYTHING else. This is largely a M$ fabrication and purchasers should be made aware of this alternate reality too.
This is exactly the type of crap that would drive me to start collecting MP3s and other "illegal" software. I don't generally download or otherwise store music on my computer, that is what my stereo is best at (just like my TV with DVD player is far superior to sitting at my computer to watch movies). Nonetheless, if something like this got through the legislative process, I WOULD start wasting harddrive space for the "undesireable" files.
The fastest way to ge ME to do "illegal" stuff is to take my rights away or make something legal into something illegal for the sake of a corporation's or CEO's income. Get it passed and make the situation worse - for yourself, RIAA.
Naive. You DO pay for windoze when you buy a new PC. The cost of windoze is rolled into the price of the computer. They hide this from you by not itemizing the bill and by preinstalling it and charging for THAT service so that it APPEARS you are getting windoze for "free" with the computer.
It is both good and bad. Good in that it relieves a lot of the resistance to switching to the new (linux) system. Bad in that it threatens to do for linux what Win-OS2 did to OS/2: you don't have to rewrite your software to work with OS/2, it will run on OS/2 better than it will on windoze natively (it did, too, for 16-bit code which was widespread at the time). The result was no one wrote OS/2 software. Why learn and do it via a new/different method when you could just keep writing code the way you always had been and have it still work on OS/2?
What would be more compelling is a GOOD, open, free (or mostly so), and easy API set that works on windoze, macs, and linux. OpenAL and OpenGL are good, but the latter, unfortunately, tends to be updated too slowly while M$ with DirectX adds nice, new, fancy-pants features yearly that make games look greater while OpenGL remains stable, but sticks with capabilities from several years ago.
OpenAL is good on the soundside but the graphics arena, and OpenGL are too slow in improvement. I'm not sure what the solution would be, it is certainly not something that linux-users or BSD-users and developers have much say in. I suppose we could dump OpenGL and create a new open graphics API that works just as well as OpenGL and DirectX, is easy to write for, and is truly cross-platform. You would have to make it compelling for game companies to write with that API (and not insist that they GPL their games - talk about killing a golden-egg laying goose...) rather than DirectX.
Wrong-o Marylou. With KDE, for instance, there is the default behavior but there is also a very EASY means of changing it to whatever app you want to have open up an extension - forever. There is no hindrance.
In any case, why install a full ENVIRONMENT like Gnome or KDE if you don't intend to make use of the environment? Just install a window manager and be done with it. The whole point to Gnome and KDE is an integrated, play-nice-together whole. This is the default but not a difficult thing to change at all. The developers of both environments don't make it difficult to change what app opens what extension by default.
M$ makes it a royal pain in the ass. Gates thinks HE knows what you want to do or SHOULD do and he wont take your opinions to the contrary.
The age is pretty much tied down, give or take a couple billion, to 15 by. There is no longer a disjoint between the apparent age of globular clusters and the otherwise determined age of the universe. It all comes together at about 15 billion. The end.
Kword starts in seconds. Wordperfect for linux starts in seconds. Lyx starts in seconds. Abiword starts in seconds. StarOffice/OpenOffice starts in many, MANY seconds.
Sorry, no excuses. There is no inherent reason that a wordprocessor should take that long to startup, regardless of what libs it uses.
How's the load time for SO 6.0? For OpenOffice it is monstrously slow. I uninstalled it due to this and the fact that it has a tendency to crash...a lot...particularly impress. After a lot of work designing a presentation only to have it crash and actually anihilate my presentation completely...out it went with the rest of the garbage.
I cannot deal with most of my data as you do. Most of my work doesn't involve computers, it involves bacteria, viruses, cells, proteins. Also, the format that these data can be presented in isn't well-adapted to your methods. We either create images ourselves or pay a graphic artist to produce the tables and figures.
Most of the journals that I can submit to will not accept tex. In addition, virtually ALL of my colleagues local and across the nation use either word or wordperfect with EndNote, including my PI. The biological sciences are different than physics or mathematics where I understand that latex is used heavily. This is not the case with biological sciences.
Lyx works for me, barely. I have a lot of hoops to jump through at the end of a writeup to recreate my documents in word or wordperfect format so that the files will be compatible with my colleague's and my boss' requirements.
The energy density of hydrogen compared to gas or kerosene is low. A gallon of jet fuel will take you a lot farther than a gallon of liquid hydrogen. It would certainly be clean burning but you would have to have high-pressure cryogenic tanks to hold the liquid hydrogen, which adds weight, and you'd have to carry a _lot_ of it to go the same distance as a standard kerosene/jp4 jet.
Your plane ticket prices would really shoot through the roof. Only the rich need consider flying.
I am certainly aware that lyx is a frontend to latex, but be realistic. You will NOT get highschool kids, college kids, and all scientist to go back to CLI or having to practically learn a programming language (latex and bibtex) just to write a paper.
I am a scientist whose job it is to do my research and publish it. It is not in my interest or the scientific world's interest for me and all like me to have to quite our research and learn the painstaking scripting/programming language that is Latex. GUIs are an improvement, in many respects, to CLI and arcane programming. You will NEVER get a bunch of highschool kids and college kids to take time away from what is important just to learn how to cryptically create what SHOULD be a fast, simple research paper.
They can do this PAINLESSLY and quickly with MS Word and EndNote. This same painlessness can and SHOULD exist in the linux world. There is no logical reason that it cannot nor should not. No justification. Why should it be soooo easy in windoze but painful and cryptic with linux? No reason. Hell, Lyx is a real bruiser to get used to. I am using it to write up research for publication and, likely, to do my thesis. It is painful exactly because it is so different from ANY wordprocessor that 99% of the universe uses. Instead, simply take Gobe, or Hancom, or StarOffice, or KOffice, and add a citation manager or the capability to plug one in.
STILL it is ONLY Lyx that can handle professional research paper, scientific paper writing. Not a single other suite in existence or planned for linux can do citations or references. None of them even allow for 3rd party apps to deal with this (ala endNote with Word or Wordperfect for Windoze). ONLY Lyx has this capability, only lyx has the pipeline that allows apps like pybliographic or sixpack or kbib (defunct) and a few others to do what EndNote does for windoze users of Office or Wordperfect - add painless citations/attribution to your serious research documents.
All these suites permit are letter writing and other simple crap that doesn't require proper attribution. When will SOMEONE get a clue and actually realize that EVERY highschool kid, EVERY college kid, EVERY scientist MUST cite references in their documents/research papers and that this is NOT a job to be done by hand like the days of the typewriter. Nay, you either HAVE to use Word and EndNote (and the like windoze apps) or Lyx if you use unix/linux. That's it. Sheesh.
I downloaded the beta just minutes ago. Here I was expecting the 50-70 MB file as before, but the file is 118+ MB! I haven't installed it yet - I was going to install it on my laptop to replace the EXTREMELY buggy and EXTREMELY slow OpenOffice (OpenOffice is certainly not broken into individual apps, or if it is, then they have done something horribly wrong. It takes WAY longer than standard StarOffice 5.2 to startup and crashes with every blink of an eye). I don't have the room on my laptop for this monster. I will have to transfer it to my desktop system and give it a shot there.
HUGE!
That's all you have to say about Openoffice? Sheesh. I downloaded and installed the bugger a week ago. I can only conclude that it is STILL one giant superbinary. It takes FOREVER to load, no better than the original SO 5.1 and 5.2. On top of that it is buggy as shit.
I lost count of the number of times it crashed on me when trying to produce a presentation. Openoffice goes down more than a crack-whore.
They should be removed from positions from which their ignorance could do damage to the people as a whole. Perhaps stuck where they belong, as gas station attendants or serving at Burger King.
Are you SURE this is an intellectual parody and not merely another vapid, dumb-as-dirt, idiot movie for teens? You know, like "Dumb and Dumber" or "Joe Dirt" and the like?
I haven't seen it, and quite frankly, it would take a LOT to get me to pay to see it. My gut reaction upon seeing the previews is "Jesus fuckin' Christ! Yet ANOTHER 'Dumb and Dumber' dumbass movie!".
Is my gut REALLY wrong on this?
If you want career training, go to a trade school or tech school. This is NOT the same as an education. You don't go to university ONLY to learn to be some geek engineer or accountant, you go to interact and learn about other ideas, other cultures, things you may never consider in your narrow little life otherwise.
Learning a mere trade doesn't train you or encourage you to be a good citizen. Failing to learn history or the philosophies underlying our Western civilization doesn't make you competent to defend the same by word or deed. It doesn't give you the understanding of how to REALLY understand what the Constitution and Bill of Rights really means. It doesn't make you have to accept that there are valid ideas and mores DIFFERENT than you own narrow spiel.
I sure as HELL don't want some ignorant, narrow, insufficiently educated fool to become my Senator or a judge, etc. If you don't get a WELL ROUNDED education, you are merely an ignorant drone.
People, by and large, do NOT seek out interaction and intellectual exploration of ideas contrary to their narrow personal beliefs, be they religious or otherwise. On their own, they merely seek out those who are the same as them and this makes it simple to demonize those with contrary views as "sinners" or "unAmerican" when, in fact, THEY are "unAmerican".
It IS true that those who fail to study and understand history are doomed to repeat it. It is a fact that an ignorant person is a poor citizen in a democracy where the majority does NOT rule. Our society is actually based on the idea of protecting the minorities from the tyranny of the majority. A narrow education merely focused on math or business doesn't make one understand this reality. Merely studying these narrow fields doesn't give one the capacity to understand reality, like the interconnectedness of various ecologies. It leads to voters (not good citizens) with warped ideas of reality, with warped and narrow opinions. There is too much of that already, we need MORE rounding in education, not less.
Sorry, been using it for years. It has gotten easier and easier to install and after having reinstalled and reinstalled winders multiple times on the same dual boot system, linux is no more difficult to install than winders (distro-dependent).
You throw a minor-league insult my way yet do not properly dispute my contention that you do not HAVE to constantly upgrade your linux system to the latest greatest if your system works fine for you NOW. There are people out there still using 2.2.19 kernels (GASP!) rather than the latest 2.4.x versions - and their systems are fine. Building a kernel is also not difficult - a bit more involved than simply doing an "rpm --rebuild" on a src rpm but still not difficult.
My contention stands. You do not HAVE to constantly upgrade your linux system just because there is an update out there (again, disregarding security updates that affect you - if you are not a running a bunch of services, then you are not much of a target and so some security updates do not apply. If you do not want to upgrade your kernel via binary rpm, then build it. Simple. Then you do not need to also upgrade your glibc and a bunch of other libs just to use package x. If package x requires kernel y, then you DO have an option to build kernel y on your system as is, and then install the app x - in many cases too, if the app x binary was built against lib z.2 and you have lib z.1, then you can try building it against lib z.1 from the source rpm.
There is no need to do the knee-jerk spiel about linux being difficult because it is different. Hell, Macs are "hard" then because they are different than winders. It is merely different and requires an adjustment from your winders-encoded preconceptions and weaknesses. You have been trained that OSes should be unstable, that you should have to pay for every minor upgrade, that viruses and worms are a normal aspect of computer use, that your current wordprocessor will magically become useless when the next version (again, with the GRATUITOUS alterations to the doc format) is released. Let go your Taliban mindset. Be free. Relax.
You do not HAVE to upgrade in linux. I do periodically, less often than I used. The only upgrades that should be considered important and a no-pass are security upgrades.
On my home system, I am happy with a working kernel behind my firewall with which my radeon card works well on. I haven't upgraded for a number of kernel cycles because "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". I upgrade this or that for security reasons but that's about it. In any case, you can avoid the lib dependencies if you build your own kernel from source. It is not really difficult. Sure, it may SEEM intimidating the first time but once you do it a couple times (if you do it correctly, you are in no danger of screwing up your system or eliminating your current working kernel - and you can always go back to the working kernel at lilo...). Build it with what you have and it will work.
Windoze, on the other hand, will provide a constant stream of bug-fix, security fixes well after they should have. It is too late to patch for nimba after all the 'doze boxen have been nailed. The damage is done and the next bug is being exploited.
Also, with every single M$ package upgrade you do, you lose backwards compatiblity - for no good, valid reason whatsoever. There is NO reason to constantly dick with the word doc format except to FORCE users to upgrade (PAY$$$$). There is no point - you get the same functions that were working fine on the previous iterations plus a few dickwad things that NO ONE uses. But people get forced to upgrade because their colleagues did - or they bought a new broken system that has the latest version of microsnot crap on it and his/her apps are no longer compatible with yours which is merely the previous iteration. Now YOU feel compelled to upgrade ($$$$) so you can eliminate the problems of opening his/her documents broken with the latest gratuitous .doc alterations.
Linux is FAR easier to deal with in this regard and you do not HAVE to upgrade this or that just because it is the newest version. That is M$-think. You need linux-think. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.