The main thing that keeps me from using Linux at the moment is speed (Red Hat 9.0 is dog slow if you use Celeron 1.0 and 256 ram) and too large font/icon size (resoultion 1152x864).
Try a distro that's optimized for more modern processors (like Mandrake, or use Gentoo so you can compile everything with optimizations yourself), and use a lighter, faster window manager. IceWM, which another responder suggested, is good if you want to stick with something that has a task bar and start button; otherwise, give WindowMaker or XFce a try.
More likely, MS will happily pay the licensing fees (which is chump change to them) that developers of free software can't pay. It is, unfortunately, in Microsoft's interest to let the patent silliness continue.
Make fvwm95 the default on mass-market Linux distros and you'll score big points with the Windows crowd (and with Linux users like myself who happen to think the Windows GUI is better than anything native to Unix).
Really? Fvwm95 was the default window manager way back in Red Hat 5.2, and I don't recall it causing any mass conversions. In fact, it just so happens that RedHat 5.2 was my first Linux distro, and I hated fvwm95. It popped up looking like Windows95, so I told myself "Hey, this should be easy." And then I found that even though it looked like Windows, it didn't work like Windows, so I found it frustrating.
I ended up downloading and compiling QT + KDE (which were in their 1.x versions back then). Kinda funny, really--as a complete newbie I had no trouble getting KDE compiled and installed, while in fvwm95 I had trouble figuring out how to do simple things like moving a window when the titlebar was off the screen (I had a crappy monitor at the time and X wouldn't run in any resolution higher than 640x480).
Especially now, KDE seems to be what newbies coming over from Windows are most comfortable with (perhaps Gnome as well). For those who have old computers that might run KDE/Gnome too slowly, and who want something with a Windows-like start menu and task bar, I would recommend IceWM over fvwm95.
Considering there are lot more "women over 18" than there are "boys aged 6 to 17", this doesn't seem too surprising. While women don't seem to have as big a presence in FPS and RTS games, most women I know who frequently use computers like spending lots of time with things like Snood or Tetris. And my mom spends most of her free time (i.e. pretty much all day) playing Poker on-line.
Regarding average playing time per week--am I the only one who cringes every time I see "How many hours per week do you play video games?" on a survey? I usually end up pulling some kind of average out of my ass, because a) I don't exactly keep logs of game-playing time, and b) how much time I spend playing games per week varies widely, depending on how much free time I have and whether or not I have a game I'm currently hooked on. I don't think I'm all that unique regarding either of those points, so I'm always a bit skeptical of "People spend x hours per week playing video games" statements.
And before you go telling me about how I should try to convert everyone to the better way again, I tried that already for two bloody years and ended up just becoming anti social because I only converted 1 out of every 4 people. So go with the IM medium flow and have friends or be an elitist fuck and don't have friends. Your choice.
So you're saying that you, too, were an "elitist fuck" for those two years?
Bag-checkers aren't as common in the US as this thread is making it sound, either. I've lived in six different States in the US and it is only now that I live in New York that I've finally seen some of what I assume people are calling bag-checkers. And even here I only see them in a few stores, and they usually just hole-punch my receipt or something without actually checking my bags.
It's very difficult to make an ethical argument about _anything_ without relying on interpretations of religious texts.
I disagree. Ethics/laws/regulations/whatever that restrict people from unjustly harming others are very easy to justify without religion. They serve the needs of society. A society where murder and theft are allowed with no repercussions very quickly falls into disorder and chaos, which few people want. It is very apparent to most people, no matter what their religion is (or whether they believe any religion), that such things are not okay.
It is thus no surprise to see that things such as murder and theft are pretty much universally outlawed by almost all societies, regardless of religion. It is also no surprise to see that such laws are not widely debated in the U.S.--no one is screaming to legalize murder.
Regulations against homosexuality, on the other hand, are quite obviously based on the popular interpretations of the texts of Judeo-Christian religions. Ask a Buddhist, Pagan, Native American, or atheist what they think of homosexuality and you'll usually get a "WTF is the problem? It doesn't hurt anyone" type of answer. Ask a fundamentalist Christian and you get Bible quotes.
So, there's still some hope. The code to GAIM is freely availeable for Microsoft to audit, so theres at least a small chance they will certify it as not being a "security risk".
Ah, but microsoft considers the GPL a virus, remember? Microsoft probably considers letting a GPL'd program (i.e. a virus) access their messenger to be the biggest security threat of all! (That explains why they don't have any energy left to do much about the closed-source viruses that rape their software (or, more accurately, users of their software).)
It's quite important to note that the primary argument against allowing gay marriage is religious. It is very difficult to make an argument against the ethicality of homosexuality without relying on interpretations of religious texts.
Thus, any legal restrictions against homosexuality should be considered unconstitutional, thanks to the First Amendment. (Likewise, those ancient sodomy laws that everyone ignores, not to mention restriction of alcohol sales on Sundays, should be stricken down for their blatant unconstitutionality as well.)
This is where interviews are important. If the job is below your degree and there's any suspicion that the job would bore you, then you can probably nullify that suspicion by showing your enthusiasm for the job in the interview.
That's not always entirely true. Counterexample: As an aspiring Clinical Psychologist, I absolutely must earn a PhD (or PsyD). You are not even legally allowed to call yourself a Psychologist if you don't have a doctorate degree.
That sounds similar to the PetsWarehouse situation discussed on Slashdot here and later here.
The Slander/Libel laws don't even have to be broadened... all you have to do is sue people who can't afford the time and money to defend themselves in court, thus forcing them to settle.
Also, if you look at international gross, ID4 actually grossed more than all the Star Wars pictures except for Phantom Menace. How such a stupid movie gets the third highest gross of all time is beyond me.
Because it has "Star Wars" in the title. Lucas could release a movie called "Star Wars: This One Really Sucks Ass" or "Star Wars: The Jar Jar Saga" and hordes of Star Wars fan sheep (including plenty who read this site--you know who you are) would be lined up to watch it.
Every time Debian or apt gets mentioned, Person A complains about the whole "RPM hell" thing and how nice apt-get in Debian is. And every time that happens, Person B comes along and berates Person A for not knowing that apt (and other things that serve similar purposes) can be used with rpms as well as debs.
In all those cases, Person B is quite correct, of course, but perhaps we should be pondering this question: "Why exactly do people persist in associating dependency problems with RedHat and nice easy apt-assisted package installations with Debian?"
I suspect that Person A's misunderstanding is usually quite justified. Apt-get (or at least _some_ dependency-handling front-end for dpkg) is an immediate reality for all Debian users, which they encounter quite soon after Debian is initially installed. They don't have to look deep into documentation, or see it discussed on-line, in order to discover apt-get. After installation they have nothing more to do (aside from perhaps trivial tweaks to/etc/apt/sources.list) before they have free access to thousands of apt-gettable packages.
Now, I'll admit I haven't used RedHat in a while, so maybe things have changed (though that seems doubtful if people still have the rpm hell complaints), but I remember the default way of doing things was using rpm directly. I did play with Mandrake 9 a bit, and though I thought it was a pretty decent user-friendly distribution with a great installation, how to make use of urpmi wasn't nearly as immediately obvious to me as how to make use of apt-get was back when I first tried Debian. (Or portage when I first tried Gentoo, for that matter.)
So, I am imagining that the typical RedHat user (newbie RedHat users, especially) start out with the rpm command and dependency difficulties, and only later (if at all) learn about things like up2date, apt for rpm, etc. And then there are hoops to jump through to make use of them, since they aren't the default/typical way of doing things. And does RedHat provide thousands of rpms, always up to date (er, "up2date"), for free? If it's something users have to pay for, well, that's another hoop to jump through.
Taking that into account, I think the Person A we see in every remotely Debian (or Gentoo) related thread is quite justified in his misunderstanding. He's not talking about what can theoretically be done, or what he can configure his system to do--he's speaking from the immediate, practical reality that he faces after installing the different distributions.
P.S. the people that modded you as a troll are retards. You may be over-stating your case a bit, but hardly trolling.
Hey, I work with Mentally Retarded/Developmentally Disabled individuals, and I take offense to you insulting them by comparing them to the idiot who moderated the parent post as a troll!:P
because sick people tend to either die or better, and either way not need the medications anymore.
You seem to be forgetting chronic medical conditions that require people to take medication for the rest of their lives.
I would certainly agree, however, that there are an awful lot of expensive solutions for problems that hardly exist or could be dealt with in healthier, no-side-effects ways. "Are you shy? Then you might have SOCIAL ANXIETY DISORDER, but that's okay because we have a drug for that now!"
I'm not sure if the machines are completely worthless, or if they can do something, but it certainly isn't a lie detector, it's more a "reaction sensor" if anything.
Polygraphs are very unreliable--even the courts know this and pay little attention to them, and we all know how stupid the legal system can be.
They measure arousal. That's it. If you want to cheat a polygraph, you have two simple options:
1. Master calming yourself down so that you show very little arousal whether you're lying or telling the truth.
2. Psych yourself up so that you show a lot of arousal no matter what. (This option is probably better for those who can't stop themselves from being nervous.)
From a quick glance at her website, and a read through her blog, I don't see her making any claims to be a "geek" or a Linux user/advocate. It's kind of disappointing that the Slashdot blurb makes it sound like she is using those qualities (in lieu of more politically important issues) to promote herself, and so many of the questions here focus on that. Even the blurb, though, says that she "knows how to run Linux"--not that she uses it as her primary system, or even that she uses it at all.
So when does the time taken to compile the app with extra optimizations exceed the time you save on tasks performed in that app?
Does it matter when you're letting stuff compile overnight, or while you're at work/school/whatever? Or in the background during times when you're doing something that isn't CPU-intensive?
I mean, it's not like Gentoo users sit in front of their computers twiddling their thumbs, just waiting for a compile to finish before they can move on with their lives.
Speaking as someone who used Debian ("unstable") for years and switched to Gentoo a few months ago....
First of all, Gentoo has definitely improved since you tried it. It has worked quite well for me, and I can't recall anything failing to compile. I imagine that if something as significant as gcc were broken, the problem would probably be rectified rather quickly. I worry more about fringe programs that few people are using.
Anyway, my answer to your question of whether Gentoo is like the "unstable" branch of Debian would have to be "yes and no".
It's like the unstable branch in the sense that the newest versions of software are easily available to you soon after they are released. It's also like the unstable branch in the sense that you can try out that new software before it has undergone weeks or months of testing with the rest of the system, and like Debian unstable it is best for the geekier crowd who can deal with unexpected problems here and there (I'm being somewhat hypothetical here, because I haven't really had any such problems in Gentoo).
It's also like Debian unstable in the sense that it's actually usually more stable than the released versions of many of the rpm-based distros. (Though it's been a while since I last used Mandrake or RedHat, so perhaps they have improved their stability as well?)
It's unlike Debian unstable in the sense that you have more power to fix the problems that may come up (at least problems that can be blamed on the distro and not on the software itself). I felt kind of helpless with Debian unstable when dpkg would choke on a deb. You can't do much (that I know of) to edit an already packaged deb, and getting the src deb to try to find the problem seems like kind of a daunting task for a non-Debian-developer.
In Gentoo, if there's a problem in an ebuild and you don't want to wait for it to get fixed... well, you have all of the ebuilds right there on your hard drive under/usr/portage. Ebuilds are fairly straight-forward; it doesn't take too long to learn how they work so that you can make simple edits, or even create your own. Also, ebuilds for old versions usually hang around for a while, so if a program is working fine for you and then there's a bug in a new version, you can downgrade easily.
One of the features I like is that you can put your own ebuilds in/usr/local/portage, and they will be handled gracefully by emerge. And/usr/local/portage takes precedence over the stuff in/usr/portage, so you can use it to replace existing ebuilds in a way that won't be overwritten next time you "emerge sync".
Slashdot Mirror
The main thing that keeps me from using Linux at the moment is speed (Red Hat 9.0 is dog slow if you use Celeron 1.0 and 256 ram) and too large font/icon size (resoultion 1152x864).
Try a distro that's optimized for more modern processors (like Mandrake, or use Gentoo so you can compile everything with optimizations yourself), and use a lighter, faster window manager. IceWM, which another responder suggested, is good if you want to stick with something that has a task bar and start button; otherwise, give WindowMaker or XFce a try.
More likely, MS will happily pay the licensing fees (which is chump change to them) that developers of free software can't pay. It is, unfortunately, in Microsoft's interest to let the patent silliness continue.
Make fvwm95 the default on mass-market Linux distros and you'll score big points with the Windows crowd (and with Linux users like myself who happen to think the Windows GUI is better than anything native to Unix).
Really? Fvwm95 was the default window manager way back in Red Hat 5.2, and I don't recall it causing any mass conversions. In fact, it just so happens that RedHat 5.2 was my first Linux distro, and I hated fvwm95. It popped up looking like Windows95, so I told myself "Hey, this should be easy." And then I found that even though it looked like Windows, it didn't work like Windows, so I found it frustrating.
I ended up downloading and compiling QT + KDE (which were in their 1.x versions back then). Kinda funny, really--as a complete newbie I had no trouble getting KDE compiled and installed, while in fvwm95 I had trouble figuring out how to do simple things like moving a window when the titlebar was off the screen (I had a crappy monitor at the time and X wouldn't run in any resolution higher than 640x480).
Especially now, KDE seems to be what newbies coming over from Windows are most comfortable with (perhaps Gnome as well). For those who have old computers that might run KDE/Gnome too slowly, and who want something with a Windows-like start menu and task bar, I would recommend IceWM over fvwm95.
If you're familiar with Despair, Inc.'s products (take a look at their posters), it's pretty obvious that it's a joke.
:-( frownie trademarked, that doesn't mean they can charge people for using it.)
(Though I think they do officially have the
Considering there are lot more "women over 18" than there are "boys aged 6 to 17", this doesn't seem too surprising. While women don't seem to have as big a presence in FPS and RTS games, most women I know who frequently use computers like spending lots of time with things like Snood or Tetris. And my mom spends most of her free time (i.e. pretty much all day) playing Poker on-line.
Regarding average playing time per week--am I the only one who cringes every time I see "How many hours per week do you play video games?" on a survey? I usually end up pulling some kind of average out of my ass, because a) I don't exactly keep logs of game-playing time, and b) how much time I spend playing games per week varies widely, depending on how much free time I have and whether or not I have a game I'm currently hooked on. I don't think I'm all that unique regarding either of those points, so I'm always a bit skeptical of "People spend x hours per week playing video games" statements.
No one will have any money left over to pay your licensing fees after paying Despair, Inc. to use their trademarked Frownies(tm). :-(
:-( $10, d'oh!)
(Oh crap, I owe another $5 now!
And before you go telling me about how I should try to convert everyone to the better way again, I tried that already for two bloody years and ended up just becoming anti social because I only converted 1 out of every 4 people. So go with the IM medium flow and have friends or be an elitist fuck and don't have friends. Your choice.
So you're saying that you, too, were an "elitist fuck" for those two years?
Bag-checkers aren't as common in the US as this thread is making it sound, either. I've lived in six different States in the US and it is only now that I live in New York that I've finally seen some of what I assume people are calling bag-checkers. And even here I only see them in a few stores, and they usually just hole-punch my receipt or something without actually checking my bags.
It's very difficult to make an ethical argument about _anything_ without relying on interpretations of religious texts.
I disagree. Ethics/laws/regulations/whatever that restrict people from unjustly harming others are very easy to justify without religion. They serve the needs of society. A society where murder and theft are allowed with no repercussions very quickly falls into disorder and chaos, which few people want. It is very apparent to most people, no matter what their religion is (or whether they believe any religion), that such things are not okay.
It is thus no surprise to see that things such as murder and theft are pretty much universally outlawed by almost all societies, regardless of religion. It is also no surprise to see that such laws are not widely debated in the U.S.--no one is screaming to legalize murder.
Regulations against homosexuality, on the other hand, are quite obviously based on the popular interpretations of the texts of Judeo-Christian religions. Ask a Buddhist, Pagan, Native American, or atheist what they think of homosexuality and you'll usually get a "WTF is the problem? It doesn't hurt anyone" type of answer. Ask a fundamentalist Christian and you get Bible quotes.
So, there's still some hope. The code to GAIM is freely availeable for Microsoft to audit, so theres at least a small chance they will certify it as not being a "security risk".
Ah, but microsoft considers the GPL a virus, remember? Microsoft probably considers letting a GPL'd program (i.e. a virus) access their messenger to be the biggest security threat of all! (That explains why they don't have any energy left to do much about the closed-source viruses that rape their software (or, more accurately, users of their software).)
It's quite important to note that the primary argument against allowing gay marriage is religious. It is very difficult to make an argument against the ethicality of homosexuality without relying on interpretations of religious texts.
Thus, any legal restrictions against homosexuality should be considered unconstitutional, thanks to the First Amendment. (Likewise, those ancient sodomy laws that everyone ignores, not to mention restriction of alcohol sales on Sundays, should be stricken down for their blatant unconstitutionality as well.)
This is where interviews are important. If the job is below your degree and there's any suspicion that the job would bore you, then you can probably nullify that suspicion by showing your enthusiasm for the job in the interview.
Advanced degrees are for purely academic fields.
That's not always entirely true. Counterexample: As an aspiring Clinical Psychologist, I absolutely must earn a PhD (or PsyD). You are not even legally allowed to call yourself a Psychologist if you don't have a doctorate degree.
That sounds similar to the PetsWarehouse situation discussed on Slashdot here and later here.
The Slander/Libel laws don't even have to be broadened... all you have to do is sue people who can't afford the time and money to defend themselves in court, thus forcing them to settle.
Also, if you look at international gross, ID4 actually grossed more than all the Star Wars pictures except for Phantom Menace. How such a stupid movie gets the third highest gross of all time is beyond me.
Because it has "Star Wars" in the title. Lucas could release a movie called "Star Wars: This One Really Sucks Ass" or "Star Wars: The Jar Jar Saga" and hordes of Star Wars fan sheep (including plenty who read this site--you know who you are) would be lined up to watch it.
Every time Debian or apt gets mentioned, Person A complains about the whole "RPM hell" thing and how nice apt-get in Debian is. And every time that happens, Person B comes along and berates Person A for not knowing that apt (and other things that serve similar purposes) can be used with rpms as well as debs.
/etc/apt/sources.list) before they have free access to thousands of apt-gettable packages.
In all those cases, Person B is quite correct, of course, but perhaps we should be pondering this question: "Why exactly do people persist in associating dependency problems with RedHat and nice easy apt-assisted package installations with Debian?"
I suspect that Person A's misunderstanding is usually quite justified. Apt-get (or at least _some_ dependency-handling front-end for dpkg) is an immediate reality for all Debian users, which they encounter quite soon after Debian is initially installed. They don't have to look deep into documentation, or see it discussed on-line, in order to discover apt-get. After installation they have nothing more to do (aside from perhaps trivial tweaks to
Now, I'll admit I haven't used RedHat in a while, so maybe things have changed (though that seems doubtful if people still have the rpm hell complaints), but I remember the default way of doing things was using rpm directly. I did play with Mandrake 9 a bit, and though I thought it was a pretty decent user-friendly distribution with a great installation, how to make use of urpmi wasn't nearly as immediately obvious to me as how to make use of apt-get was back when I first tried Debian. (Or portage when I first tried Gentoo, for that matter.)
So, I am imagining that the typical RedHat user (newbie RedHat users, especially) start out with the rpm command and dependency difficulties, and only later (if at all) learn about things like up2date, apt for rpm, etc. And then there are hoops to jump through to make use of them, since they aren't the default/typical way of doing things. And does RedHat provide thousands of rpms, always up to date (er, "up2date"), for free? If it's something users have to pay for, well, that's another hoop to jump through.
Taking that into account, I think the Person A we see in every remotely Debian (or Gentoo) related thread is quite justified in his misunderstanding. He's not talking about what can theoretically be done, or what he can configure his system to do--he's speaking from the immediate, practical reality that he faces after installing the different distributions.
I can just picture the next headline at The Onion:
Iran Sends Weapons Inspectors to US to Search for Weapons of Mass Destruction
P.S. the people that modded you as a troll are retards. You may be over-stating your case a bit, but hardly trolling.
:P
Hey, I work with Mentally Retarded/Developmentally Disabled individuals, and I take offense to you insulting them by comparing them to the idiot who moderated the parent post as a troll!
because sick people tend to either die or better, and either way not need the medications anymore.
You seem to be forgetting chronic medical conditions that require people to take medication for the rest of their lives.
I would certainly agree, however, that there are an awful lot of expensive solutions for problems that hardly exist or could be dealt with in healthier, no-side-effects ways. "Are you shy? Then you might have SOCIAL ANXIETY DISORDER, but that's okay because we have a drug for that now!"
I'm not sure if the machines are completely worthless, or if they can do something, but it certainly isn't a lie detector, it's more a "reaction sensor" if anything.
Polygraphs are very unreliable--even the courts know this and pay little attention to them, and we all know how stupid the legal system can be.
They measure arousal. That's it. If you want to cheat a polygraph, you have two simple options:
1. Master calming yourself down so that you show very little arousal whether you're lying or telling the truth.
2. Psych yourself up so that you show a lot of arousal no matter what. (This option is probably better for those who can't stop themselves from being nervous.)
I can just imagine the ancient food advertisement: "Got Crotch?"
From a quick glance at her website, and a read through her blog, I don't see her making any claims to be a "geek" or a Linux user/advocate. It's kind of disappointing that the Slashdot blurb makes it sound like she is using those qualities (in lieu of more politically important issues) to promote herself, and so many of the questions here focus on that. Even the blurb, though, says that she "knows how to run Linux"--not that she uses it as her primary system, or even that she uses it at all.
9/11 showed me that America is a hateful place.
Minor but important correction: Earth is a hateful place.
So when does the time taken to compile the app with extra optimizations exceed the time you save on tasks performed in that app?
Does it matter when you're letting stuff compile overnight, or while you're at work/school/whatever? Or in the background during times when you're doing something that isn't CPU-intensive?
I mean, it's not like Gentoo users sit in front of their computers twiddling their thumbs, just waiting for a compile to finish before they can move on with their lives.
Speaking as someone who used Debian ("unstable") for years and switched to Gentoo a few months ago....
/usr/portage. Ebuilds are fairly straight-forward; it doesn't take too long to learn how they work so that you can make simple edits, or even create your own. Also, ebuilds for old versions usually hang around for a while, so if a program is working fine for you and then there's a bug in a new version, you can downgrade easily.
/usr/local/portage, and they will be handled gracefully by emerge. And /usr/local/portage takes precedence over the stuff in /usr/portage, so you can use it to replace existing ebuilds in a way that won't be overwritten next time you "emerge sync".
First of all, Gentoo has definitely improved since you tried it. It has worked quite well for me, and I can't recall anything failing to compile. I imagine that if something as significant as gcc were broken, the problem would probably be rectified rather quickly. I worry more about fringe programs that few people are using.
Anyway, my answer to your question of whether Gentoo is like the "unstable" branch of Debian would have to be "yes and no".
It's like the unstable branch in the sense that the newest versions of software are easily available to you soon after they are released. It's also like the unstable branch in the sense that you can try out that new software before it has undergone weeks or months of testing with the rest of the system, and like Debian unstable it is best for the geekier crowd who can deal with unexpected problems here and there (I'm being somewhat hypothetical here, because I haven't really had any such problems in Gentoo).
It's also like Debian unstable in the sense that it's actually usually more stable than the released versions of many of the rpm-based distros. (Though it's been a while since I last used Mandrake or RedHat, so perhaps they have improved their stability as well?)
It's unlike Debian unstable in the sense that you have more power to fix the problems that may come up (at least problems that can be blamed on the distro and not on the software itself). I felt kind of helpless with Debian unstable when dpkg would choke on a deb. You can't do much (that I know of) to edit an already packaged deb, and getting the src deb to try to find the problem seems like kind of a daunting task for a non-Debian-developer.
In Gentoo, if there's a problem in an ebuild and you don't want to wait for it to get fixed... well, you have all of the ebuilds right there on your hard drive under
One of the features I like is that you can put your own ebuilds in
In Gentoo you are really never helpless.