... as dozens of comments above.
Xfce on my main box at work (I'm actually typing this on my Mint/Mate laptop): for people who have a real job and just need a functional computer.
This said, most of the time my entire screen contains 3-4 bash shells (and a browser, and possibly Emacs), so ok, perhaps I'm not a typical desktop user.
This. I am actually looking for an alternative for Windows 8 (the first OS that I've ever seen that deliberately impedes your work flow), but my previous Linux experiences have left a bad taste in my mouth. From the perspective of a 20-year Windows user, there are two things that would make Linux much more attractive. First, a Linux equivalent to InstallShield, one which detects and installs dependencies, allows configuration customizations, shows you what it's going to do, asks your approval, and then lets you know what it's doing as proceeding and gives you usable error messages. The second would be a file manager which gives a new user 1) some idea where is an appropriate location to save user files, and 2) some system that shows users what is an executable file, a config file, a library, etc. as easily as a user can tell from the Windows file extensions.
The idea of repositories is nice, but having to figure out what to do with the tarball, rpm, whathaveyou, file, wandering about until you find the install directory, flailing about until you figure out which is the executable, trying to launch it while guessing which switches are appropriate, and then finding that it requires some uninstalled prerequisite file (or worse, a different version of one you have installed), is absurd. I liked what I got working in the couple of Linux installed I've done (except the bog-slow version of Google Earth), but getting to that point was ridiculously more difficult than it should have been.
I have the feeling that what you have in mind is rpm-based repositories as of 2003. Modern deb-based distros (of course Debian, but Mint and Ubuntu too) make software installing/uninstalling as painless as humanly possible. Synaptic is your friend.
Contrary to Slashdot etiquette, I did read TFA. To me, the most extraordinary piece of news is that the BBC (not quite a geek-oriented news source) makes no mention at all of Firefox being FLOSS. This is excellent news. It means becoming mainstream. The Gandhi quote springs to mind.
Here's the reason men like me will buy products like this:
In general, Western women are just a pain in the ass to be around.
IMHO, the views expressed in your post show very clearly why. No woman above the desperation level would want to hang out with a sexist jerk like you.
And before you react to my post as "feminist bullshit", please note that I am a straight male. Actually, I happen to like women.
You probably still think I am a lunatic, but hear me out.
You don't qualify as a lunatic; just as someone who has no idea of what he's talking about. Absolutely no idea. Your post, my friend, is so full of ideas you obviously misunderstood that I won't even attempt to make a list.
What's this 'Enter' key you're talking about? You see, geek jargon like yours is what is keeping linux back. People just want to hit their mouse buttons, not learning arcane key combinations to get the most basic tasks done.
Berlusconi is proof that Italian fascism wasn't defeated in world war 2, it's proponents just got smarter about it. Wear a suit instead of dressing up in uniform and you can get away with anything.
I'm not sure whether this was meant to be inflammatory or not, but there is more than a grain of truth to it. However, to say that Berlusconi is a later reincarnation of Mussolini would be wrong and misleading. It's more accurate to say that the weaknesses of Italian collective mind which made fascism possible are practically the same that made "Berlusconism" possible.
I'm not making this up out of thin air. A fundamental book on what I'm talking about was written as early as 1958: "The Moral Basis of a Backward Society", by Edward C. Banfield.
On the other hand you have the socialist/protectionist model, where the market is severely constrained to fit a social/ideological agenda. This results in high prices, low productivity, high unemployment, and stagnation. On the other hand, it's stable, and there is less fear of living in a cardboard box.
This sounds very much like most Americans' description of Western Europe. Yet, unemployment rate is 7.5% in The Euro area Source: ECB, which is not very different from the US figure (6.1%) Source: St. Louis FED. By the way, the definition of unemployment is quite different (some people who would be considered unemployed by EU standards wouldn't be by US statistical conventions).
If it is essential that a document be rendered identically on different machines, a word processor -- any word processor -- is the wrong tool for the job. If something needs to be viewed only, export to pdf; if it needs to be edited as well, use DTP software.
Until now, the share of linux users as a desktop OS are estimated by most sources to be 2-3%. This has been to little to force hardware manufacturers and software companies to care about linux. Hence, the endless problems in using very new or very exotic devices and so on.
But once this percentage gets over, say 5-6%, linux will start having more traction, and will become more difficult/risky/costly to ignore.
Clearly, it is inconceivable that anything will supplant Windows as the dominant platform in less than 10 years, if only because of the sheer size of the installed base. But if linux is to become dominant in the long run, this is the way it will start, the Dell/Ubuntu offering being only an early example.
Nice troll fucktard. Global warming is real, it is not only man made but is specifically created by the USians. Why don't you think Shrub refuses to sign the Kyoto treaty? The fucktarded USians don't give a fuck about the rest of the world. The only sane ones are similar to Al Gore.
Real? yes
Anthropomorphic? Lets wait until this sunspot cycle dies down to find out Hmm. Suppose we have no time until then. What would you suggest we do, just say "Oops, sorry, you were right after all"?
Why not Kyoto? Maybe because China and India have no obligations under Kyoto So?
Dont care about the reset of the world? Ill put up us aid to poor regions against your rants any day That's not caring. That is charity. Charity reinforces subordination.
Maybe in physics and math TeX is the norm, but nowhere else.
Well, at least economics should be added to the list. Most economics journals are typeset in LaTeX. Some offer you the possibility to send your paper in other formats, but that's just because they do the conversion for you. Working papers are practically all typeset in LaTeX.
And, yes, I am an academic economist (econometrician, to be precise).
Huh? The EU started out as, and effectively remains, an economic organization. How did they "keep the peace". ...
Oh, no, it doesn't. Sadly, I am old enough to remember the days when you had to stop at the border when travelling from Italy to France. Things have changed. A lot.
I do realise that from an American perspective the stereotypes on us Europeans may survive, but a whole generation has now grown with a totally different mindset from what was for centuries.
The Champions League, the Erasmus programme, the Euro. The idea of Germany waging war to France is nowadays as ridiculous as the idea of Maine attacking Delaware.
Like you said - Europe's been at peace for "a fucking long time", but 50 years isn't enouigh to change huma nature, and the nature of humans is to make war.
You seem to have a very low esteem of the human race. In my experience, people make war when they feel there's no other option. The trouble is, it's very easy to do (think Mussolini, Milosevic, Bush).
I was a pegasus user in the early 90's, and I was very happy about it. After I made Linux my primary desktop, one of my biggest disappointments was that I couldn't keep using Pegasus.
Now, I understand the reasons why David Harris decided that opening the source was not an option, and I don't mean to criticise him.
However, IMO the story of Pegasus/Mercury highlights one of the biggest virtues of Free SW (possibly, the biggest in the long run) as opposed to free beer/closed source: the project becomes independent of the people behind it, at least in principle. If David Harris decides to call it a day, well, that's the end of Pegasus. If Linus is run over by a car (god forbid), sure it would be a big blow to linux, but there is no question that linux as a project would continue to thrive.
yea but once you have access to the source, they can come after you for copying their implementation ...
We need proper documentation not source code
That was exactly my point, probably I wasn't clear. What I meant to say is that for working on a project like Wine, you must have two teams. Team A looks at the source and writes docs, team B reads the docs and writes code. Neither team has anything to fear (I think).
This will have no consequences whatsoever on piracy. Those people don't give a toss about source code, all they need is to copy the executables.
This will have consequences on projects like Wine, Samba or ReactOS because some legal mechanism will be in force so that you can't look at the Windows source and rewrite it, let alone cut-n-paste it. What those guys need to do is ensuring any development is clean-room. What I see as conceivable is that someone (the FSF for instance) pays for one licence and the devotes some effort into releasing documents which describe accurately the internals in plain language. Obviously, the people who do this job must not contribute any code to any project.
Don Knuth
Apart from nurturing countless computer scientists with The Art of Computer Programming, he donated TeX to the world, which would be enough by itself to grant the man perennial kudos.
Larry Wall
We probably wouldn't have had the Web as we know it without Perl (we wouldn't have had Perl vs Python flamewars either, though).
Perelman was unemployed for 10 years while he worked on the problem. His last job was in the States in the early 90s, where he saved enough money to live in Russia for the whole time he worked.
What I find particularly interesting is that this guy was able to devote 10 years of his life to solving a problem so complex that there was no intermediate output. The same happened to Wiles, who took 7 years to get hold properly of the Fermat theorem.
Obviously, in both cases it would have been impossible to reach such great results if the authors had had to keep a steady pace of lesser publications. But this is the rule in the academic world: "publish or perish". You must prove yourself "productive" year by year, otherwise you're out.
I've always thought that applying industrial methods of prouctivity measurement to research is utter madness (I am an academic myself). IMO, Perelman's and Wiles' cases show it clearly.
Slashdot Mirror
... as dozens of comments above. Xfce on my main box at work (I'm actually typing this on my Mint/Mate laptop): for people who have a real job and just need a functional computer. This said, most of the time my entire screen contains 3-4 bash shells (and a browser, and possibly Emacs), so ok, perhaps I'm not a typical desktop user.
This. I am actually looking for an alternative for Windows 8 (the first OS that I've ever seen that deliberately impedes your work flow), but my previous Linux experiences have left a bad taste in my mouth. From the perspective of a 20-year Windows user, there are two things that would make Linux much more attractive. First, a Linux equivalent to InstallShield, one which detects and installs dependencies, allows configuration customizations, shows you what it's going to do, asks your approval, and then lets you know what it's doing as proceeding and gives you usable error messages. The second would be a file manager which gives a new user 1) some idea where is an appropriate location to save user files, and 2) some system that shows users what is an executable file, a config file, a library, etc. as easily as a user can tell from the Windows file extensions. The idea of repositories is nice, but having to figure out what to do with the tarball, rpm, whathaveyou, file, wandering about until you find the install directory, flailing about until you figure out which is the executable, trying to launch it while guessing which switches are appropriate, and then finding that it requires some uninstalled prerequisite file (or worse, a different version of one you have installed), is absurd. I liked what I got working in the couple of Linux installed I've done (except the bog-slow version of Google Earth), but getting to that point was ridiculously more difficult than it should have been.
I have the feeling that what you have in mind is rpm-based repositories as of 2003. Modern deb-based distros (of course Debian, but Mint and Ubuntu too) make software installing/uninstalling as painless as humanly possible. Synaptic is your friend.
Contrary to Slashdot etiquette, I did read TFA. To me, the most extraordinary piece of news is that the BBC (not quite a geek-oriented news source) makes no mention at all of Firefox being FLOSS. This is excellent news. It means becoming mainstream. The Gandhi quote springs to mind.
Here's the reason men like me will buy products like this:
In general, Western women are just a pain in the ass to be around.
IMHO, the views expressed in your post show very clearly why. No woman above the desperation level would want to hang out with a sexist jerk like you. And before you react to my post as "feminist bullshit", please note that I am a straight male. Actually, I happen to like women.
You probably still think I am a lunatic, but hear me out.
You don't qualify as a lunatic; just as someone who has no idea of what he's talking about. Absolutely no idea. Your post, my friend, is so full of ideas you obviously misunderstood that I won't even attempt to make a list.
And yes, I do statistics for a living.
of things that may go wrong
What's this 'Enter' key you're talking about? You see, geek jargon like yours is what is keeping linux back. People just want to hit their mouse buttons, not learning arcane key combinations to get the most basic tasks done.
I know I'm being totally OT and unbearably pedantic, but I think your sig should read "moritur", not "monitur".
Berlusconi is proof that Italian fascism wasn't defeated in world war 2, it's proponents just got smarter about it. Wear a suit instead of dressing up in uniform and you can get away with anything.
I'm not sure whether this was meant to be inflammatory or not, but there is more than a grain of truth to it. However, to say that Berlusconi is a later reincarnation of Mussolini would be wrong and misleading. It's more accurate to say that the weaknesses of Italian collective mind which made fascism possible are practically the same that made "Berlusconism" possible.
I'm not making this up out of thin air. A fundamental book on what I'm talking about was written as early as 1958: "The Moral Basis of a Backward Society", by Edward C. Banfield.
Disclaimer: yes, I'm a boring Italian academic.
For once, a computer that deserves the "Vista capable" sticker.
On the other hand you have the socialist/protectionist model, where the market is severely constrained to fit a social/ideological agenda. This results in high prices, low productivity, high unemployment, and stagnation. On the other hand, it's stable, and there is less fear of living in a cardboard box.
This sounds very much like most Americans' description of Western Europe. Yet, unemployment rate is 7.5% in The Euro area Source: ECB, which is not very different from the US figure (6.1%) Source: St. Louis FED. By the way, the definition of unemployment is quite different (some people who would be considered unemployed by EU standards wouldn't be by US statistical conventions).
Or, better still, use TeX in both cases.
*ducks*
...provided we take it in its proper meaning.
Until now, the share of linux users as a desktop OS are estimated by most sources to be 2-3%. This has been to little to force hardware manufacturers and software companies to care about linux. Hence, the endless problems in using very new or very exotic devices and so on.
But once this percentage gets over, say 5-6%, linux will start having more traction, and will become more difficult/risky/costly to ignore.
Clearly, it is inconceivable that anything will supplant Windows as the dominant platform in less than 10 years, if only because of the sheer size of the installed base. But if linux is to become dominant in the long run, this is the way it will start, the Dell/Ubuntu offering being only an early example.
Nice troll fucktard. Global warming is real, it is not only man made but is specifically created by the USians. Why don't you think Shrub refuses to sign the Kyoto treaty? The fucktarded USians don't give a fuck about the rest of the world. The only sane ones are similar to Al Gore.
Real? yes
Anthropomorphic? Lets wait until this sunspot cycle dies down to find out Hmm. Suppose we have no time until then. What would you suggest we do, just say "Oops, sorry, you were right after all"? Why not Kyoto? Maybe because China and India have no obligations under Kyoto So? Dont care about the reset of the world? Ill put up us aid to poor regions against your rants any day That's not caring. That is charity. Charity reinforces subordination.
Well, at least economics should be added to the list. Most economics journals are typeset in LaTeX. Some offer you the possibility to send your paper in other formats, but that's just because they do the conversion for you. Working papers are practically all typeset in LaTeX.
And, yes, I am an academic economist (econometrician, to be precise).
Where's the Gandhi quote?
Huh? The EU started out as, and effectively remains, an economic organization. How did they "keep the peace".
Oh, no, it doesn't. Sadly, I am old enough to remember the days when you had to stop at the border when travelling from Italy to France. Things have changed. A lot.
I do realise that from an American perspective the stereotypes on us Europeans may survive, but a whole generation has now grown with a totally different mindset from what was for centuries.
The Champions League, the Erasmus programme, the Euro. The idea of Germany waging war to France is nowadays as ridiculous as the idea of Maine attacking Delaware.
Like you said - Europe's been at peace for "a fucking long time", but 50 years isn't enouigh to change huma nature, and the nature of humans is to make war.
You seem to have a very low esteem of the human race. In my experience, people make war when they feel there's no other option. The trouble is, it's very easy to do (think Mussolini, Milosevic, Bush).
Yes.
But in 1999, when I made the switch, wine was not what it is today.
I was a pegasus user in the early 90's, and I was very happy about it. After I made Linux my primary desktop, one of my biggest disappointments was that I couldn't keep using Pegasus.
Now, I understand the reasons why David Harris decided that opening the source was not an option, and I don't mean to criticise him.
However, IMO the story of Pegasus/Mercury highlights one of the biggest virtues of Free SW (possibly, the biggest in the long run) as opposed to free beer/closed source: the project becomes independent of the people behind it, at least in principle. If David Harris decides to call it a day, well, that's the end of Pegasus. If Linus is run over by a car (god forbid), sure it would be a big blow to linux, but there is no question that linux as a project would continue to thrive.
yea but once you have access to the source, they can come after you for copying their implementation
We need proper documentation not source code
That was exactly my point, probably I wasn't clear. What I meant to say is that for working on a project like Wine, you must have two teams. Team A looks at the source and writes docs, team B reads the docs and writes code. Neither team has anything to fear (I think).
This will have consequences on projects like Wine, Samba or ReactOS because some legal mechanism will be in force so that you can't look at the Windows source and rewrite it, let alone cut-n-paste it. What those guys need to do is ensuring any development is clean-room. What I see as conceivable is that someone (the FSF for instance) pays for one licence and the devotes some effort into releasing documents which describe accurately the internals in plain language. Obviously, the people who do this job must not contribute any code to any project.
An attitude like yours explains the extraordinary popularity of America around the world.
Congratulations.
Larry Wall We probably wouldn't have had the Web as we know it without Perl (we wouldn't have had Perl vs Python flamewars either, though).
What I find particularly interesting is that this guy was able to devote 10 years of his life to solving a problem so complex that there was no intermediate output. The same happened to Wiles, who took 7 years to get hold properly of the Fermat theorem.
Obviously, in both cases it would have been impossible to reach such great results if the authors had had to keep a steady pace of lesser publications. But this is the rule in the academic world: "publish or perish". You must prove yourself "productive" year by year, otherwise you're out.
I've always thought that applying industrial methods of prouctivity measurement to research is utter madness (I am an academic myself). IMO, Perelman's and Wiles' cases show it clearly.
Not quite. See here.