Well, you should be impressed - after all, it took GNOME and/or KDE sever years and releases to make halfway useable dialogs. And they're still not standardized and therefore confusing.
The rest of your post is of course the same tired bullshit everyone tends to spit out every time this comes up, except that interestingly you didn't use the XEROX PARC as the end of the string. "Clippy"? HAHAHAH!!! You forgot "M$ BOB"!!
This all non-innovative crap "M$" keeps churning out... I just don't understand why KDE and GNOME and everyone else keep copying it (badly) year after year. It's distressing, I know. I mean, they copy the Windows shell, Outlook, Visual Studio,.NET, Office, etc. It's maddening, I tell you!
d00d, I absolutely love your blog. I mean, as if sites like Slashdork weren't enough now we have blogs with 1337 speak and bogus arguments as to why Linux definitely r0xxorz and "Windoze" is "teh sux". "M$"? "Impending doom"? HAHAHAHA!!! Excellent! Did you come up with those yourself? I mean, it's entertaining if nothing else. Oh, and the "my girlfriend" thing? Brilliant!
Well I should get on topic now. What was it I was going to say...? Oh, yes. GRiD invented the tablet PC about 10 years ago or thereabouts. Hope that helps.
And keep polluting that blogosphere! $deity knows we need eye-openers like yours!
Similarily, installing a TrueType font now can be done by dragging it to the font settings window, byt dragging it to the Font view of Nautilus
I know. But FWIW, I could never get this to work. Navigating to fonts:/// and dropping the TTF file(s) in there did absolutely nothing. No errors, no messages, no fonts, no nothing. This is on a clean RH9 "Workstation" full install. Either as root or under my account.
So I ended up doing the su -> copy fonts to/usr/X11R6/lib/fonts/TTF (or thereabouts) -> mkttfontdir (or whatever) ->/sbin/service xfs restart -> etc.
Even then for some reason the fonts wouldn't show up in Gedit or Firefox or anywhere else so I had to reboot. There's one for you - reboot after installing a font. I probably missed a step or something, but that's not the point.
Installing a font (of any type since there's no dumb forced distinction between bitmapped and proportional ones) on Windows essentially comes down to dragging the file to %WINDOWS%\Fonts. That's it.
So like I said. It's those little things that detract from an otherwise excellent OS.
My "two minutes of" laughter while exaggerated (sorry if it wasn't obvious enough for you) only came from Microsoft's claim that their product is better protected from viruses.
Mmmkay.
I use and enjoy Microsoft products. I tried Linux and it just didn't work for what I needed (mainly because of other software I use) so I use XP which I'm very happy with.
That's nice. Especially considering you want a "free" version of Office in order to use it (which will happen when hell freezes over). So you'll pay for *some* software? But not for Office. OK, that's fine. I guess I was right on the money then. I just found it odd that you wanted to share your strategy with everyone else.
Like I said, I was not generalizing. I agree that there is good, but at the same time I recognize that there is a lot of bad. Do you?
There are so many little things that cripple non-expert users in Linux. Just off the top of my head, on RH9/GNOME, inserting a CD-ROM brings up a dialog that reads
Would you like to mount/dev/cdrom?
Or something like that. I mean, c'mon. If I wanted that I'd be running fwwm or something. Do I want to "mount" "/dev/cdrom"? How the hell should I know?? Or even better, try installing a TrueType font on Linux. Oh my god.
If more effort was directed towards these things rather than to making yet-another-theme-for-KDE Linux would be vastly more user-friendly and maybe it would be actually giving Windows a run for its money on the desktop.
Bullshit. I have code that generates MD5 checksums written in C++ (using Crypto++ and using the CryptoAPI), VB (using the CryptoAPI), C# (using the System.Security.Cryptography.MD5 provider) and Python (using md5 on both Windows and Linux) and they all generate exactly the same digest for the same data as the UNIX checksum utility.
If you wrote code to generate the checksum(s) and it's not working then you have a problem between the keyboard and chair, not with the algorithm. That's a standard that is not OS, platform or language specific.
I don't normally like ESR but in this case he has really been outstanding, possibly because he's not particularly afraid of "uber-geeks" shouting him down with insults and "RTFM motherfucker" epitaphs.
I see this every single day. The open source community (as it were) is full of people who want to use and like operating systems like Linux and BSD but are just too fucking afraid of even uttering anything that might reveal their ignorance (and I don't use that word in a negative sense) of whatever it it they're trying to accomplish with their computers.
Slashdot and USENET are full of endless threads about how easy it is to do this-or-that and if you haven't figured it out you must be supremely stupid and lazy. "What, you want it in a fucking silver plate?". Normal people (the ones not buying into open source right now) are petrified at this. They eventually either figure out how to do it ($deity bless Google) or just give up.
Without gross generalizations of course, I can't claim that everyone is this way. But there seems to be a troubling majority of zealots who are just so fantastically out there in their claims that [insert technology here] is so easy to use that even a "brain dead Windoze luser" must be able to figure it out, so they just cannot figure out why everyone hasn't dumped "M$". I mean, it's all so easy and efortless.
Maybe this will indeed be a wake up call for everyone.
I'm always going to go with the free option first. If it does what I need to do, I'm not going to pay for something else. Openoffice is perfectly sufficient for my occasionaly letter writing and the simple spreadsheets I use to manage my montly budget. And it costs me absolutely nothing. Until Microsoft offers a free version of Office XP, I'll use OOo regardless of how "inferior" it may be.
Just to clarify (and in case it sort of slipped by you), you're exactly the type of "consumer" to whom Microsoft has no interest at all in selling Office to. Occasional letter writing and simple spreadsheets can be accomplished using something else (OO, Gnumeric, WordPad, etc) as you so succintly put it, so it's difficult to justify spending $300+ on that. If anything, you're better off just downloading OO and donating $100 to them instead.
On the other hand, if you need what MS Office has then $500 is peanuts. Most people here (I surmise you would fall in that category) have little use for features that are geared towards simple business application development, publishing, collaboration and so on.
So your "two minutes of laughter" and fanboy flag-waving notwithstanding you can rest assured that you're not "sticking it to M$" in any way, shape or form. You're not sticking it to them any more than you're sticking it to Aston Martin because you drive by the dealership every day in your 88' Ford Fiesta and cackle madly while shaking your fist and screaming "I'll never buy that silver Vanquish!!1! HAHAHAHAHA!!! EAT THAT!!!"
The US may be the only military superpower, but they are no longer the dominant economy.
And I don't understand why it's the second time you've gotten a + mod.
The GDP of the United States currently stands at just under 11 trillion dollars. So does the total, combined GDP of all the member states of the EU. Which of course does not include Sweden, Denmark or the UK, (which by the way is the biggest European economy after Germany and France). In the context of what you're talking about, the EU's GDP matters little as US companies (such as Microsoft) do not sell software and services to the EU, they sell them to Germany, France, Spain, etc. The fact that they have a single unified currency is ultimately irrelevant because it represents a problem or advantage only in terms of overall trade. If Windows XP sells for $300 in the US then it sells for E200 in Switzerland and that's the end of that. Furthermore, surely even you can understand that the software market is not the same in Germany as it is in Greece or Portugal?
So, the EU has the same GDP as the US only by aggregation - yet they have roughly 150 million more people and their per-capita cut is about 10 thousand dollars less than the US. To put this in perspective consider that China's GDP is higher than Japan's now (which used to be the second largest economy) but that means little considering China has 10 times more people than Japan.
So it's disingeniuos to claim that the EU is Microsoft's "biggest market" - that would mean that they sell 80% of all their stuff there, because you're conveniently ignoring Asia, Africa, Latin America and the US markets. I'd be willing to bet instead that the US market (consumer + corporate + government) alone probably represents more than 1/2 of Microsoft's total revenue.
I'm not contesting your opinion that it would be "disastrous" for MSFT to pull out of Europe - that's so theoretical it's not even worth discussing. I doubt that they would pull out even if Europe represented just 1% of their revenue.
Other than that, you're absolutely right about whatever point it was that you were trying to make.
Moreover it is in part a result of massification and proprietary lock-in, both of which are actually reversed by free software and open standards.
Tell that to the people who invested in RedHat's desktop products.
Open standards apps are inherently safer, due to open discussion in specification phase.
Apparently not. Hence this article's topic. Or, for example this or this or this or this or this or this or... well, you get the idea. What does "inherent" mean again? Last I looked there were several MB worth of RH advisories in my inbox, and hitting linuxsecurity.com really doesn't make me any happier than hearing about the latest IE exploit. So I suggest you think twice next time you use the word "inherent".
Where a market does exist
You accuse me of using a "phenomenon" (which is indeed a proven fact of how markets work, regardless of what you consider a market to be) to make a point and then you turn around and regale me with an account of some vaporous scheme to wire the third world. That's fantastic
It is free software and open standards that enable alternative platforms to the consumer market
Mmmkay, that was weird. Let me know when you transition 120 million consumer PCs to dumb terminals running "GNU/Linux" and controlled from their ISPs central Brainiac super mainframe.
aptitude covers all apps, and draws from a fundamentally saner development and deployment process to boot.
First, there is a much bigger diversity of Linux implementations and configurations over there, so the actual potentially vulnerable systems are likely to be much less even if Linux indeed takes over the world.
Consolidation of markets dictates that if this indeed happens you'll eventually have one or two "leading" providers. Ten years ago there were 200+ PC clone makers. Today there are four. Your diversity just went out the window, so to speak. Plus, "killer apps" tend to cut down on diversity as well. If anything you have to figure out what version everyone is running.
Second, Linux is enabling a return to hosts and X terminals, where the host is likely to be much better adminstrated than multiple clients.
Um, right. Except in the consumer market.
Third, Linux is more scalable. Less, bigger systems also tend to be better administrated than many small ones.
Um, right. Except in the consumer market.
Fourth, by being a free software implementation of many open standards, GNU/Linux leaves the path open to a bigger OS diversity -- things like the Unices and BSDs. This diversity will also help protecting the Net
See above.
aptitude update; aptitude upgrade. Hey, one can even pay someone else to type these commands
How is this different than automatic updates on Windows. Note that's not a question.
There's a big difference. Every time a F/OSS project's box get's hacked, it's a single machine getting broken into. When there's a windows flaw, the next day there's a worm that compromises MILLIONS of computers.
So let us extrapolate this. Hmmm. Let's say that Linux was the leading consumer desktop OS. And someone found a vulnerability in the kernel, SSH, Apache, whatever. And a distro (like RedHat) that allows me to set IPTables to allow SSH requests. Because, you know, Linux rules now so people write stuff for it and there's this cool app that everyone uses that requires SSH. Or whatever.
Would you say that MILLIONS of computers would be compromised? How would you get your MILLIONS of users to patch their machines quickly so as to avoid Armaggedon?
In June 2001 some "Fluffy Bunny" dude rooted SF.NET, Akamai and (I think) a bunch of SETI servers, all through Apache and SSH. Shocking, I know.
As I recall the intrusion went unnoticed for a long time (at least for SourceForge) and when it was discovered SF threw out a long-winded press release that detailed how the break-in had been "detected immediately" and had not "compromised" anything of value.
So it wouldn't be the first time.
Yep, GNU/Savannah (the "really free" alternative to SF) was rooted along with the rest of the GNU/Infrastructure a few months ago. It was GNU/Terrible.
I'd just as soon not see SF.net hacked. They provide a valuable service and they manage to actually make a living at it. Actually I'd rather not see anything related to FOSS cracked and rooted.
But I do find it hilarious that whenever something like this happens the Slashbots come out of the woodwork to post things like "Oh M$ is teh worse!!1" and promptly get modded up to +5, Insightful. Of course, Linux is perfect and absolutely secure, and the crap posted on linuxsecurity.com is all lies. Blatant lies.
Ah well. The higher you think you are the more it will hurt when you hit the ground.
The thing about real ghost ships, and abandoned cars, etc., is that they either sink or rust or are towed away in the end. Interplanetary space probes generally do not.
No, they do not. I think this explains the Beagle lander thing. It probably ran into the equivalent of a '76 Camaro on cinder blocks - lying in the middle of the street (or in this case, the orbital plane).
The last transmission from the orbiter was a blurred image of a bumber sticker that read "My rover was a JPL Honor Student!".
I can see using this service to search for things near hotels in countries where I vacation, for example. It would be useful if Google included data for common tourist traps and the like, at least in Mexico (closer to home) or Europe/Asia.
Of course I'm sure people who live in said places would also find the service useful. I hope Google expands its support soon.
Ya'll might want to write RMS and ask him not to put out witty editorials with potshots like "nVidious" and so on. Maybe the hardware companies would be more open to creating better drivers and Linux as a platform would actually be a possibility.
I for one wish they'd bring back the HPC format (NEC Mobilon/HP Jornada 6/700 series). They stopped making them in 2000. With today's tech you could have:
640x320 65K color screen
An iPod-style Toshiba microdrive. 4GB oughta do it.
256MB RAM plus whatever ROM you need for the OS and apps. MAKE IT FLASHABLE LIKE THE iPAQ FOR GOD'S SAKE
75% size laptop-like keyboard with tactile feedback. Really, without a goddamn keyboard PDAs are just expensive toys. I chuckle whenever I see some dude trying to take notes in one of those during a meeting.
Built-in wireless. The higher end HP iPAQs already have this.
Sync to PC/Linux/OS X. I mean, c'mon. It's not rocket science.
Mofo battery life (8 hours or so assuming the HDD doesn't spin that much and the screen backlight is used carefully).
Handwriting recognition would be nice regardless of the keyboard - the HWR of the Palm Tungstens coupled with the WinCE interface would be good.
CF, SmartMedia and low-power 16-bit PCMCIA slots. No SD or MemoryStick please.
Decent media player. Goes without saying
Some sort of built-in scroller wheel like the ones on the Blackberry. I'd kill for that.
GSM or some sort phone add-on card... use with headset? Dunno. I wouldn't mind lugging a cellphone still.
All this in a.7lb or so package. 1 inch thick and 8 inches wide. Now that would be shweet. I'd get rid of my laptop in a second.
The Newton was very cool and ahead of its time, but you need a friggin' Mac to use it effectively and that pretty much eliminates 90% of the computer user population.
Linux developers started by envisaging how a "perfect" computer would behave
Linux developers didn't start anything, they just copied Unix.
Windows developers simply built on layer after layer on a system they knew was imperfect, adding extensions willy-nilly as the need arose; effectively, adjusting the limits to match a constantly-evolving state of the art. The result is a compatibility nightmare
I don't know what to say here - have you ever written code for Windows? "Compatibility nightmare"? What do you call having sixteen different distro package formats? Compatibility heaven?
Things often don't work properly together for no obvious reason; the most likely cause is a logic trap triggered by a number of unconnected events occurring in the right order
So what you're saying is that this is a Windows problem. Right? I guess you've never had to deal with some app that can't compile (or run) because you have the wrong version of GTK or QT or lib-whatever-1.0.23.56.123. Never, eh?
Open Source programmers know their work is going to be seen by many pairs of eyes around the world, take care to avoid stupid mistakes
The "given enough eyes all bugs are shallow" parrot line has been disproved enough times I can't believe people are still using it.
Closed-source programmers, believing that nobody will ever see their code, can take bigger liberties with their code.
Sorry, but what a crock of bullshit. Under your logic, all open source developers write perfect code and all commercial software developers write crappy code. Score one for meaningless sweeping generalizations.
By having higher limits to aim for, Linux developers have been less fazed by new developments
Yeah, I love having to recompile all my drivers whenever I upgrade my kernel. Does "Higher aims" mean "we're just coding for the hell of it and we don't give a fuck about what we break"? Maybe that explains a lot.
Newsforge? Let me see... hmmm. This is the same website that printed a little piece by roblimo about how last year's blackout was "possibly" (just a hint, mind you) Microsoft's fault? A claim that was later proved wrong.
Yeah, their investigative skills and journalistic integrity are second to none.
This is just another squirt of gasoline in the flames. Of course it "proves" that this is all a vast conspiracy (just like ESR's incisive analysis of that useless email), so I guess I'll believe anything they say.
He said "It's UNIX with none of the drawbacks". I don't see how that's unclear. "It's a UNIX-like operating system with a useable GUI and creature comforts". Or are you going to nitpick "UNIX" vs. "Unix" now? LOL!
You will deserve your troll moderations for this false assertion. Everybody knows MacOS is not free to download like a GNU/Linux system, nor is the code available for modification. Just because it doesn't matter to you, doesn't mean it doesn't matter to everyone.
Well now. Aren't you the miguided zealot. Let's see if I can help you. "Unix" is a class of OS you can buy from SCO, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and even Sun. Linux is an OS that's based on Unix, but it is not Unix. Otherwise the SCO FUD has some basis, mmm? Also, do you remember what "GNU" means?
The OP compared OS X to Unix. He's right - OS X is derived from the *BSD line, which is in turn also based on Unix, much like Linux is. Do I really have to go through this? Anyway, the fact that you pay for it or that you don't get the source code has no relevance. Indeed, maybe OS X is what Linux wants to be when it grows up.
But ultimately it is certainly valid to compare Linux and OS X because they're both descendants from the same original Unix.
I'm sure that it matters to you that you can't "download" OS X or get the code, but from a technical and historical standpoint it's a perfectly valid comparison. Whether that clashes with your "free-as-in-whatever" world view is another matter.
So next time you plan on calling someone a "troll" think twice before you post. You might end up looking, well, slightly stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, you should be impressed - after all, it took GNOME and/or KDE sever years and releases to make halfway useable dialogs. And they're still not standardized and therefore confusing.
The rest of your post is of course the same tired bullshit everyone tends to spit out every time this comes up, except that interestingly you didn't use the XEROX PARC as the end of the string. "Clippy"? HAHAHAH!!! You forgot "M$ BOB"!!
This all non-innovative crap "M$" keeps churning out... I just don't understand why KDE and GNOME and everyone else keep copying it (badly) year after year. It's distressing, I know. I mean, they copy the Windows shell, Outlook, Visual Studio, .NET, Office, etc. It's maddening, I tell you!
Well I should get on topic now. What was it I was going to say...? Oh, yes. GRiD invented the tablet PC about 10 years ago or thereabouts. Hope that helps.
And keep polluting that blogosphere! $deity knows we need eye-openers like yours!
The breadth of censored content there is simply amazing.
I know. But FWIW, I could never get this to work. Navigating to fonts:/// and dropping the TTF file(s) in there did absolutely nothing. No errors, no messages, no fonts, no nothing. This is on a clean RH9 "Workstation" full install. Either as root or under my account.
So I ended up doing the su -> copy fonts to /usr/X11R6/lib/fonts/TTF (or thereabouts) -> mkttfontdir (or whatever) -> /sbin/service xfs restart -> etc.
Even then for some reason the fonts wouldn't show up in Gedit or Firefox or anywhere else so I had to reboot. There's one for you - reboot after installing a font. I probably missed a step or something, but that's not the point.
Installing a font (of any type since there's no dumb forced distinction between bitmapped and proportional ones) on Windows essentially comes down to dragging the file to %WINDOWS%\Fonts. That's it.
So like I said. It's those little things that detract from an otherwise excellent OS.
Mmmkay.
I use and enjoy Microsoft products. I tried Linux and it just didn't work for what I needed (mainly because of other software I use) so I use XP which I'm very happy with.
That's nice. Especially considering you want a "free" version of Office in order to use it (which will happen when hell freezes over). So you'll pay for *some* software? But not for Office. OK, that's fine. I guess I was right on the money then. I just found it odd that you wanted to share your strategy with everyone else.
But by all means, continue to share [...]
You're welcome.
There are so many little things that cripple non-expert users in Linux. Just off the top of my head, on RH9/GNOME, inserting a CD-ROM brings up a dialog that reads
Or something like that. I mean, c'mon. If I wanted that I'd be running fwwm or something. Do I want to "mount" "/dev/cdrom"? How the hell should I know?? Or even better, try installing a TrueType font on Linux. Oh my god.If more effort was directed towards these things rather than to making yet-another-theme-for-KDE Linux would be vastly more user-friendly and maybe it would be actually giving Windows a run for its money on the desktop.
If you wrote code to generate the checksum(s) and it's not working then you have a problem between the keyboard and chair, not with the algorithm. That's a standard that is not OS, platform or language specific.
I see this every single day. The open source community (as it were) is full of people who want to use and like operating systems like Linux and BSD but are just too fucking afraid of even uttering anything that might reveal their ignorance (and I don't use that word in a negative sense) of whatever it it they're trying to accomplish with their computers.
Slashdot and USENET are full of endless threads about how easy it is to do this-or-that and if you haven't figured it out you must be supremely stupid and lazy. "What, you want it in a fucking silver plate?". Normal people (the ones not buying into open source right now) are petrified at this. They eventually either figure out how to do it ($deity bless Google) or just give up.
Without gross generalizations of course, I can't claim that everyone is this way. But there seems to be a troubling majority of zealots who are just so fantastically out there in their claims that [insert technology here] is so easy to use that even a "brain dead Windoze luser" must be able to figure it out, so they just cannot figure out why everyone hasn't dumped "M$". I mean, it's all so easy and efortless.
Maybe this will indeed be a wake up call for everyone.
Just to clarify (and in case it sort of slipped by you), you're exactly the type of "consumer" to whom Microsoft has no interest at all in selling Office to. Occasional letter writing and simple spreadsheets can be accomplished using something else (OO, Gnumeric, WordPad, etc) as you so succintly put it, so it's difficult to justify spending $300+ on that. If anything, you're better off just downloading OO and donating $100 to them instead.
On the other hand, if you need what MS Office has then $500 is peanuts. Most people here (I surmise you would fall in that category) have little use for features that are geared towards simple business application development, publishing, collaboration and so on.
So your "two minutes of laughter" and fanboy flag-waving notwithstanding you can rest assured that you're not "sticking it to M$" in any way, shape or form. You're not sticking it to them any more than you're sticking it to Aston Martin because you drive by the dealership every day in your 88' Ford Fiesta and cackle madly while shaking your fist and screaming "I'll never buy that silver Vanquish!!1! HAHAHAHAHA!!! EAT THAT!!!"
Other than that, thanks for sharing.
Only 10 years, wow.
And I don't understand why it's the second time you've gotten a + mod.
The GDP of the United States currently stands at just under 11 trillion dollars. So does the total, combined GDP of all the member states of the EU. Which of course does not include Sweden, Denmark or the UK, (which by the way is the biggest European economy after Germany and France). In the context of what you're talking about, the EU's GDP matters little as US companies (such as Microsoft) do not sell software and services to the EU, they sell them to Germany, France, Spain, etc. The fact that they have a single unified currency is ultimately irrelevant because it represents a problem or advantage only in terms of overall trade. If Windows XP sells for $300 in the US then it sells for E200 in Switzerland and that's the end of that. Furthermore, surely even you can understand that the software market is not the same in Germany as it is in Greece or Portugal?
So, the EU has the same GDP as the US only by aggregation - yet they have roughly 150 million more people and their per-capita cut is about 10 thousand dollars less than the US. To put this in perspective consider that China's GDP is higher than Japan's now (which used to be the second largest economy) but that means little considering China has 10 times more people than Japan.
So it's disingeniuos to claim that the EU is Microsoft's "biggest market" - that would mean that they sell 80% of all their stuff there, because you're conveniently ignoring Asia, Africa, Latin America and the US markets. I'd be willing to bet instead that the US market (consumer + corporate + government) alone probably represents more than 1/2 of Microsoft's total revenue.
I'm not contesting your opinion that it would be "disastrous" for MSFT to pull out of Europe - that's so theoretical it's not even worth discussing. I doubt that they would pull out even if Europe represented just 1% of their revenue.
Other than that, you're absolutely right about whatever point it was that you were trying to make.
Tell that to the people who invested in RedHat's desktop products.
Open standards apps are inherently safer, due to open discussion in specification phase.
Apparently not. Hence this article's topic. Or, for example this or this or this or this or this or this or... well, you get the idea. What does "inherent" mean again? Last I looked there were several MB worth of RH advisories in my inbox, and hitting linuxsecurity.com really doesn't make me any happier than hearing about the latest IE exploit. So I suggest you think twice next time you use the word "inherent".
Where a market does exist
You accuse me of using a "phenomenon" (which is indeed a proven fact of how markets work, regardless of what you consider a market to be) to make a point and then you turn around and regale me with an account of some vaporous scheme to wire the third world. That's fantastic
It is free software and open standards that enable alternative platforms to the consumer market
Mmmkay, that was weird. Let me know when you transition 120 million consumer PCs to dumb terminals running "GNU/Linux" and controlled from their ISPs central Brainiac super mainframe.
aptitude covers all apps, and draws from a fundamentally saner development and deployment process to boot.
But of course it does.
Consolidation of markets dictates that if this indeed happens you'll eventually have one or two "leading" providers. Ten years ago there were 200+ PC clone makers. Today there are four. Your diversity just went out the window, so to speak. Plus, "killer apps" tend to cut down on diversity as well. If anything you have to figure out what version everyone is running.
Second, Linux is enabling a return to hosts and X terminals, where the host is likely to be much better adminstrated than multiple clients.
Um, right. Except in the consumer market.
Third, Linux is more scalable. Less, bigger systems also tend to be better administrated than many small ones.
Um, right. Except in the consumer market.
Fourth, by being a free software implementation of many open standards, GNU/Linux leaves the path open to a bigger OS diversity -- things like the Unices and BSDs. This diversity will also help protecting the Net
See above.
aptitude update; aptitude upgrade. Hey, one can even pay someone else to type these commands
How is this different than automatic updates on Windows. Note that's not a question.
I heard someone say that in 1998. I think it was right after I also heard that Linux would take over the desktop market in a year's time.
Yes, you're right. You're absolutely right. 100%, certified right.
So let us extrapolate this. Hmmm. Let's say that Linux was the leading consumer desktop OS. And someone found a vulnerability in the kernel, SSH, Apache, whatever. And a distro (like RedHat) that allows me to set IPTables to allow SSH requests. Because, you know, Linux rules now so people write stuff for it and there's this cool app that everyone uses that requires SSH. Or whatever.
Would you say that MILLIONS of computers would be compromised? How would you get your MILLIONS of users to patch their machines quickly so as to avoid Armaggedon?
Fascinating!
As I recall the intrusion went unnoticed for a long time (at least for SourceForge) and when it was discovered SF threw out a long-winded press release that detailed how the break-in had been "detected immediately" and had not "compromised" anything of value.
So it wouldn't be the first time.
Yep, GNU/Savannah (the "really free" alternative to SF) was rooted along with the rest of the GNU/Infrastructure a few months ago. It was GNU/Terrible.
I'd just as soon not see SF.net hacked. They provide a valuable service and they manage to actually make a living at it. Actually I'd rather not see anything related to FOSS cracked and rooted.
But I do find it hilarious that whenever something like this happens the Slashbots come out of the woodwork to post things like "Oh M$ is teh worse!!1" and promptly get modded up to +5, Insightful. Of course, Linux is perfect and absolutely secure, and the crap posted on linuxsecurity.com is all lies. Blatant lies.
Ah well. The higher you think you are the more it will hurt when you hit the ground.
No, they do not. I think this explains the Beagle lander thing. It probably ran into the equivalent of a '76 Camaro on cinder blocks - lying in the middle of the street (or in this case, the orbital plane).
The last transmission from the orbiter was a blurred image of a bumber sticker that read "My rover was a JPL Honor Student!".
Of course I'm sure people who live in said places would also find the service useful. I hope Google expands its support soon.
Ya'll might want to write RMS and ask him not to put out witty editorials with potshots like "nVidious" and so on. Maybe the hardware companies would be more open to creating better drivers and Linux as a platform would actually be a possibility.
All this in a .7lb or so package. 1 inch thick and 8 inches wide. Now that would be shweet. I'd get rid of my laptop in a second.
The Newton was very cool and ahead of its time, but you need a friggin' Mac to use it effectively and that pretty much eliminates 90% of the computer user population.
Linux developers didn't start anything, they just copied Unix.
Windows developers simply built on layer after layer on a system they knew was imperfect, adding extensions willy-nilly as the need arose; effectively, adjusting the limits to match a constantly-evolving state of the art. The result is a compatibility nightmare
I don't know what to say here - have you ever written code for Windows? "Compatibility nightmare"? What do you call having sixteen different distro package formats? Compatibility heaven?
Things often don't work properly together for no obvious reason; the most likely cause is a logic trap triggered by a number of unconnected events occurring in the right order
So what you're saying is that this is a Windows problem. Right? I guess you've never had to deal with some app that can't compile (or run) because you have the wrong version of GTK or QT or lib-whatever-1.0.23.56.123. Never, eh?
Open Source programmers know their work is going to be seen by many pairs of eyes around the world, take care to avoid stupid mistakes
The "given enough eyes all bugs are shallow" parrot line has been disproved enough times I can't believe people are still using it.
Closed-source programmers, believing that nobody will ever see their code, can take bigger liberties with their code.
Sorry, but what a crock of bullshit. Under your logic, all open source developers write perfect code and all commercial software developers write crappy code. Score one for meaningless sweeping generalizations.
By having higher limits to aim for, Linux developers have been less fazed by new developments
Yeah, I love having to recompile all my drivers whenever I upgrade my kernel. Does "Higher aims" mean "we're just coding for the hell of it and we don't give a fuck about what we break"? Maybe that explains a lot.
Yeah, their investigative skills and journalistic integrity are second to none.
This is just another squirt of gasoline in the flames. Of course it "proves" that this is all a vast conspiracy (just like ESR's incisive analysis of that useless email), so I guess I'll believe anything they say.
I'm sure he was reaching for his pocket when he read your insightful post and stopped. Merciful heaven!
Licensing matters. Deal with it.
I'm sure you meant price, not licensing. That's OK though.
He said "It's UNIX with none of the drawbacks". I don't see how that's unclear. "It's a UNIX-like operating system with a useable GUI and creature comforts". Or are you going to nitpick "UNIX" vs. "Unix" now? LOL!
Well now. Aren't you the miguided zealot. Let's see if I can help you. "Unix" is a class of OS you can buy from SCO, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and even Sun. Linux is an OS that's based on Unix, but it is not Unix. Otherwise the SCO FUD has some basis, mmm? Also, do you remember what "GNU" means?
The OP compared OS X to Unix. He's right - OS X is derived from the *BSD line, which is in turn also based on Unix, much like Linux is. Do I really have to go through this? Anyway, the fact that you pay for it or that you don't get the source code has no relevance. Indeed, maybe OS X is what Linux wants to be when it grows up.
But ultimately it is certainly valid to compare Linux and OS X because they're both descendants from the same original Unix.
I'm sure that it matters to you that you can't "download" OS X or get the code, but from a technical and historical standpoint it's a perfectly valid comparison. Whether that clashes with your "free-as-in-whatever" world view is another matter.
So next time you plan on calling someone a "troll" think twice before you post. You might end up looking, well, slightly stupid.