With all the hissy fit that's been going on about the possibilities for rapists to find children to abuse online, is it really a good idea to make it public information how to get a hold of children directly?
Let's hope it uses xdelta3 or similar to achieve quick and efficient binary patches as opposed to downloading whole files. Would be nice to make it painless even for dialup users (or US broadband users) to upgrade.
I remember using a diskette with a FAT editor to change my directory names to combinations of characters that were illegal in FAT, and therefore completely unopenable by normal means. That means my directory stayed until I got back to the computer no matter if the admin found them unless he reformatted the disk...;) Gotta love a system where user level programs have raw access to devices.
Tungsten graphics is usually low resolution, about 0.25 DPI. It's also got high power consumption and therefore heat dissipation, around 25-90W/pixel. If you want colour, triple those numbers. You wouldn't want one of these displays on your workstation, believe me!
Still, it's often used due to it's scaleability; I've seen dozens of companies use them in the major cities, ever since I was a kid.
Slashdot is behind it's times, posting articles of old technologies, well-known in the advertising business!
For those more interested in the technology, each pixel is made out of a usually pear shaped glass bubble. A tungsten spool is inserted, and the air is removed from the bubble causing a vacuum. When electricity is sent through the spool it starts glowing brightly so that light is emitted. The absence of oxygen from the vacuum keeps the tungsten from oxidating, making it last much longer. By variating the current through the spool, you can increase or decrease the brightness of the pixel.
Maybe it's the big corporations that are posting this to make us waste our time with trying to glue propaganda over our boxes instead of freeing Dimitry and battling the DMCA!
Oh and by the way, first post?
On celebrating backwards compatibility
on
Linux Turns 10
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Is it really worth celebrating that two things that were originally intended as quick backwards compatibility HACKS has stayed around this long, spending huge amounts of energy on maintaining backwards compatibility?
The IBM PC never was very well designed to begin with, and neither was UN*X. Still, both technologies keep their life force because they've already become standards.
The IBM PC was designed to make porting easy for already existing x86 CP/M software. Check the documented CP/M backwards compatibility interrupts if you don't believe me. It used commodity parts because time-to-market was the most important issue. CP/M itself wasn't used because of a legal fight between IBM and Digital. (I believe this was mentioned in a documentary film labeled "Triumph of the Nerds".)
The reason that Linus got so much help with creating Linux, was because they wanted it to run already existing UN*X software, quickly.
As any low level coder can attest, the IBM PC as it is today is a kluge on a kludge on a hack. Just the process of making it boot is a tedious job with pitfalls around every corner. It's got an entire 16-bit computer inside that's only used during the first couple of seconds after you turn it on. The CPU is full of instructions that are never ever used by the programs that 99.9% of PC users use.
I'm almost amazed it still works.
Linux on the other hand has been totally redesigned since its hack days. There are still a major limitations with the way it's designed, though. It's a monolithic kernel, an ancient design principle, where everything is running in the same place, intermixed like crazy. The increased modularity of the recent kernels help with some things, letting you add drivers during runtime, but doesn't help much with larger upgrades, or making it easy to develop for. A more modern kernel design such as the Hurd can let a regular user develop and try out larger kernel parts during runtime, whereas with linux a reboot is still required for upgrading most nonessential parts of the kernel. And since it's just one big heap of code, a mistake in one place can make the whole thing crap out. It's a stroke of fortune that Linus has the inhuman ability to maintain such a beast.
And that's just Linux. For UNIX, the main word is Inconsistency. The inconsistencies of the API are quite hair raising, and many of the calls are practically hacks that remained, and never got implemented proper. The security model is laughable, a philosophy that you either are God (root), or you are not. The commandset is just as intuitive as you'd expect, where practically every program has a different way of recieving command line arguments. The X Window System is an add on that is also full of kludges. It eats more and more memory and can never release it. It is optimized for a situation that is hardly ever the case, namely that the applications are running on a remote computer, making every tiny little bit that's going to appear on your screen pass through a bunch of network abstraction layers. That's one of the reasons X on a monster workstation often feels slower than the actually hundreds of times slower machines we were using in the 80's...
Excuse me for hardly even touching the surface on that one, but I started feeling nauseous.
All the while we were focusing our efforts on what was already there, smart new designs came and went, because they weren't backwards compatible.
Great new designs have been researched, which would help the totally different demands of computing today. But still people cling to what they know, and prefer to hang on to what they have no matter how much extra work it'll take in the long run.
Why is this? So we can run software from the 80's? Modern versions of Windows won't. Linux will, but what is the use, seeing that practically everything has been rewritten since anyhow?
The reason not for switching to something new is not to rewrite the software, but that's happening continuously anyhow, so why would that be a problem?
What's holding us back then? To put it in Slashdot terms I think it's FUD. Not the technique, but the feelings themself. Human nature.
We pretty much like it better the older it gets, no matter how many wrinkles and scars it accumulates.
Happy Birthday, PC and Linux.
We love you more each year.
Direct3D in particular, was a late comer to the party and has had to play the catch-up game for the past couple years.
Yes, of course. But what kind of relevance does it have nowadays when it's more feature complete than anything else, has support for more hardware, and has rock solid support for almost everything while OpenGL implementations tend to be shoddy crap?
Another advantage is the cross-platform capabilities, which also means you may be able to do portions of the development work on platforms a little more stable than the regular Windows 9x systems the game will likely be run on.
Don't make me laugh. Windows 2000 Pro and Direct3D is a lot more solid and stable than Linux and accelerated OpenGL... I don't know about you, but on my hardware Win2k hasn't crashed at all except for when I've done something really braindead when coding, like blitting from two threads at once. And that's just NVIDIA's drivers fault, that don't check anything just to get another 0.1 fps.
Now if you're coding on Win9x when there's a really good and compatible poweruser platform available, you're either poor, cheap or stupid.
Also don't forget that there have been large numbers of games using OpenGL... Quake II is a good early example, some later ones include Unreal and Half-Life also used OpenGL engines, and there wasn't any slowdown.
Ever seen how characters are modelled in Quake II? They're basically a couple of cubes with really smart textures on. Looks like crap when you up the resolution. ID Software still had to do really annoying stuff like precalculate how to draw all objects to get the longest chains of polygons, just to get decent speed on it. Roughly half of the geometry data for Q2 are such chains, for example in the player model format.
Remember what people were saying about Unreal when it was released? "Oh! What a beautifulslideshow!" May I mention that they migrated to DirectX in newer versions of the engine and that the OpenGL implementation is half as fast on my NVIDIA machine even though NVIDIA's implementation of OpenGL is considered one of the faster ones?
As for Quake III, no. The Windows implementation runs on DirectX.
[D]river support for DirectX is almost always better than driver support for OpenGL on Microsoft Windows.
For what it's worth, I think Id's commercial success has more to do with having a coherent and enjoyable vision and wise business practices than it does with advancing the state of the art in graphical displays. The pushing of the hardware to new performance levels was a side-effect required because the older techniques weren't able to support the vision. But the vision came first.
Once again you show you plain don't know what your talking about. ID Software was started when they figured out how to do smooth scrolling with the EGA graphics hardware. A performance hack. They couldn't sell the trick to their employer nor anyone else, so they started thinking about what they could do about it. They made the Commander Keen game in their spare time and used the funding to start the company.
The Commander Keen series of games were done in a month or two per game... Not exactly well thought through nor a coherent vision... They sold very well nonetheless. And people were glued to their screens because of the state-of-the-art usage of the hardware really increased the playability.
How do you know? Are you a game artist?
Nope. I'm just a coder. But unless you actually meet the artists and talk to them about what they need to do their job, that's one hell of a crappy company you're coding for.
I'm not talking about some crap derivative game designer who is trying to duplicate "Quake" or "Half-Life" or "Diablo" because he thinks, as you apparently do, that simply duplicating someone else's success will get you a Ferrari, too.
No... But how do you propose to make original games? By using well established, tested techniques that finally after about 5 years on mature platforms have been implemented on every coder's favorite toy OS? And letting hobby programmers that don't care about performance implement it with an API that was originally specced as an easy 3D API for rapid prototyping? OpenGL wasn't designed for performance, nor to make use of relatively new or non-standard functions of hardware, if you think that you should read up... And if you think DirectX is similar to OpenGL you've probably just looked at the highest level API's. Yes, you'd know Direct3D has more than one way of doing things if you'd have had any real experience with it.
Now, what am I saying? I say you can't easily make something that people haven't seen before if you're stuck using interfaces like that. No I don't consider NVIDIA's pet extensions to OpenGL to be desirable either, it's nice when some of your customers can actually run the game...
You can't tell me, because you can't imagine such a person.
Yes I can. In fact they're a lot of fun to associate with. Most of these people rarely get a chance due to financing issues. It's the people sitting on the piles of $$$ that don't want to fund projects that aren't clones of big moneymakers.
It's a sad world, really.
Oh yeah, you're talking about people like Carmack? I'm not. People with that much luck and timing are a lot more rare than those who have the wit and ingenuity.
One of the biggest problems with the gaming industry is that it's more or less saturated these days. It's harder to get into it for a newcomer now than it used to be.
The whole "pushing the hardware to the very limit" BS is a fairly recent phenomenon, and may be the reason that PC games (not just the Linux ones as reported on/., but PC games in general) typically are money-losers.
Now that's one heap of BS.
Let's go back to when computer gaming became mainstream. The 1980's and the C64. What were the most successful games doing then? Pushing the hardware to it's limits. Same thing with it's successor, the Amiga. The same thing also happened with console games.
What about the PC then? Well, in the end of the 80's the PC got some decent graphics hardware. Soon after that some games like Wing Commander came out and pushed the hardware to it's limits. It sold like crazy.
What about the coming of FPS games then? When ID software released Wolfenstein 3D they did things not thought possible with the hardware. Turned in a lot of money. DOOM got them heaps of it after that since they had ditched their distributor and were good at it themselves. Same thing here. Quake a bit later made people drool at the realistic, fast 3d. After this the ID programmers were driving Ferraris...
Oh yes, using the hardware to the max really makes a money loser...
[A] game's graphics depend more on the work of visual artists than on some coder who's always trying to bum a few cycles.
Oh sure, you're right about that. But what do most 3d artists want, to be able to produce better visuals? More polygons, more and higher resolution textures, better effects... And still at a good framerate.
How do you achieve this? You could require the user to buy hardware that's hardly on the market yet. Either that or you could make the user run it on a system that can throughput a decent amount of data, and get a good coder that can really make good use of it...
It's not a big challenge to code under crossplatform newbie APIs like OpenGL... Unless you want to make it run at a decent speed.
Now there is an API that is fairly usable without being Windows-only and complex. Glide. Oh, what do you say? Glide doesn't work on your card? Tough luck, that WAS the standard for years.
DirectX is the best API available, it really makes a difference in what quality of content can be provided. Have a guess of why Linux OpenGL versions of games are usually pretty late compared to DirectX? It's so that top-notch computers can run them fast enough that they can't be called slideshows...
Now as for enjoyable gameplay, that is something you've got to experience first hand. If you watch a review that has screenshots with crappy graphics most people won't buy it, and won't experience the enjoyable gamplay. If it on the other hand is beautiful and slow like hell, then it isn't enjoyable.
If you were Joe Windows User, would you buy the game noone of your friends is playing, that has bad graphics and is slow, or would you buy the Windows-only beautiful, fast and fun game that all your friends are playing?
By the way, the IEEE is well known for pumping up "cutting edge" technologies that never reach their potential. Remember "fuzzy logic"?
Yes, it's currently used for example in japanese train systems, monitoring devices in factories all over the world, and of course in research...
It's not like it's changed the world, but it did find some good applications.
That you don't use something yourself doesn't mean that nobody does.
Windows 9x & Programmable Keyboard Foot Pedals
on
Full Frontal Quickies
·
· Score: 1
It's a perfect match! I just programmed the foot pedal to Ctrl-Alt-Del, glued a picture of Bill Gates on it, and hanged it on the wall. Now every time I get a BSOD I just punch Bill a few times in the face!
I've also been diagnosticiced with Asperger's syndrome, when I was a kid.(The diagnose really went more in the lines of "possibly mild Asperger's syndrome" since the only things they could really verify at that time were that I was below avarage proficient in noticing subtle body language, and had a far above avarage IQ, and unusual interests for my age. I've since come to believe it was correct. But that's not the point.)
I also notice I have several problems in common with you. I can't function properly with preset times. (I'm always about 15 minutes late no matter what I do.) I can't end an interesting project before it's done without some kind of help.
Whenever a teacher expected me to fall in line my productivity always dropped way down. Whenever they tried to find out my quirks and use them, I excelled. And what is really interesting is that those flexible teachers usually got better results with all students, even though it was most noticable with the extremes. Some that were branded as "just plain stupid" by other teachers performed completely avarage, thus not only getting better grades but self esteem too, making the classroom come closer to harmony.
So the point is, basically, not just that we should be treated how we need to be treated, but that the same should go for every person if we want a well functioning society.
Society needs flexibility to harness the power of the people.
(I will make no excuses for eventual grammar-be-bad/speling erors, English isn't my mother tongue.)
As a side note I just expressed obsessive behaviour and lack of time sense writing this comment. 5 hours sleep, and I often sleep as a rock for 8. Yippee, I might be later than usual tomorrow...
The thing needed to install Linux is a will to Learn, and spend Time and Effort to learn. Without that, you won't be anything more than mediocre at anything you attempt in life.
The people saying that Katz is in the wrong place are right. He seems to be a geek of journalistics and humaniora, not computer science. My guess is that what he is really doing here is practicing his journalistic skills and getting his name known. This could get him a good job if he's lucky, meaning he'd get paid better.
Most geeks do have good hygiene. Most geeks do have some degree of social skills. Your flame shows a lack of them though.
Slashdot Mirror
With all the hissy fit that's been going on about the possibilities for rapists to find children to abuse online, is it really a good idea to make it public information how to get a hold of children directly?
Let's hope it uses xdelta3 or similar to achieve quick and efficient binary patches as opposed to downloading whole files.
Would be nice to make it painless even for dialup users (or US broadband users) to upgrade.
I remember using a diskette with a FAT editor to change my directory names to combinations of characters that were illegal in FAT, and therefore completely unopenable by normal means. ;)
That means my directory stayed until I got back to the computer no matter if the admin found them unless he reformatted the disk...
Gotta love a system where user level programs have raw access to devices.
Tungsten graphics is usually low resolution, about 0.25 DPI. It's also got high power consumption and therefore heat dissipation, around 25-90W/pixel. If you want colour, triple those numbers. You wouldn't want one of these displays on your workstation, believe me!
Still, it's often used due to it's scaleability; I've seen dozens of companies use them in the major cities, ever since I was a kid.
Slashdot is behind it's times, posting articles of old technologies, well-known in the advertising business!
For those more interested in the technology, each pixel is made out of a usually pear shaped glass bubble. A tungsten spool is inserted, and the air is removed from the bubble causing a vacuum. When electricity is sent through the spool it starts glowing brightly so that light is emitted. The absence of oxygen from the vacuum keeps the tungsten from oxidating, making it last much longer. By variating the current through the spool, you can increase or decrease the brightness of the pixel.
Maybe it's the big corporations that are posting this to make us waste our time with trying to glue propaganda over our boxes instead of freeing Dimitry and battling the DMCA!
Oh and by the way, first post?
Is it really worth celebrating that two things that were originally intended as quick backwards compatibility HACKS has stayed around this long, spending huge amounts of energy on maintaining backwards compatibility?
The IBM PC never was very well designed to begin with, and neither was UN*X. Still, both technologies keep their life force because they've already become standards.
The IBM PC was designed to make porting easy for already existing x86 CP/M software. Check the documented CP/M backwards compatibility interrupts if you don't believe me. It used commodity parts because time-to-market was the most important issue. CP/M itself wasn't used because of a legal fight between IBM and Digital. (I believe this was mentioned in a documentary film labeled "Triumph of the Nerds".)
The reason that Linus got so much help with creating Linux, was because they wanted it to run already existing UN*X software, quickly.
As any low level coder can attest, the IBM PC as it is today is a kluge on a kludge on a hack. Just the process of making it boot is a tedious job with pitfalls around every corner. It's got an entire 16-bit computer inside that's only used during the first couple of seconds after you turn it on. The CPU is full of instructions that are never ever used by the programs that 99.9% of PC users use.
I'm almost amazed it still works.
Linux on the other hand has been totally redesigned since its hack days. There are still a major limitations with the way it's designed, though. It's a monolithic kernel, an ancient design principle, where everything is running in the same place, intermixed like crazy. The increased modularity of the recent kernels help with some things, letting you add drivers during runtime, but doesn't help much with larger upgrades, or making it easy to develop for. A more modern kernel design such as the Hurd can let a regular user develop and try out larger kernel parts during runtime, whereas with linux a reboot is still required for upgrading most nonessential parts of the kernel. And since it's just one big heap of code, a mistake in one place can make the whole thing crap out. It's a stroke of fortune that Linus has the inhuman ability to maintain such a beast.
And that's just Linux. For UNIX, the main word is Inconsistency. The inconsistencies of the API are quite hair raising, and many of the calls are practically hacks that remained, and never got implemented proper. The security model is laughable, a philosophy that you either are God (root), or you are not. The commandset is just as intuitive as you'd expect, where practically every program has a different way of recieving command line arguments. The X Window System is an add on that is also full of kludges. It eats more and more memory and can never release it. It is optimized for a situation that is hardly ever the case, namely that the applications are running on a remote computer, making every tiny little bit that's going to appear on your screen pass through a bunch of network abstraction layers. That's one of the reasons X on a monster workstation often feels slower than the actually hundreds of times slower machines we were using in the 80's...
Excuse me for hardly even touching the surface on that one, but I started feeling nauseous.
All the while we were focusing our efforts on what was already there, smart new designs came and went, because they weren't backwards compatible.
Great new designs have been researched, which would help the totally different demands of computing today. But still people cling to what they know, and prefer to hang on to what they have no matter how much extra work it'll take in the long run.
Why is this? So we can run software from the 80's? Modern versions of Windows won't. Linux will, but what is the use, seeing that practically everything has been rewritten since anyhow?
The reason not for switching to something new is not to rewrite the software, but that's happening continuously anyhow, so why would that be a problem?
What's holding us back then? To put it in Slashdot terms I think it's FUD. Not the technique, but the feelings themself. Human nature.
We pretty much like it better the older it gets, no matter how many wrinkles and scars it accumulates.
Happy Birthday, PC and Linux.
We love you more each year.
Microsoft Windows 2000 [Version 5.00.2195]
(C) Copyright 1985-2000 Microsoft Corp.
C:\>./configure
'.' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.
C:\>make; make install
'make' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.
C:\>What do you know, I could actually type it!
I don't know about you, but on my hardware Win2k hasn't crashed at all except for when I've done something really braindead when coding, like blitting from two threads at once. And that's just NVIDIA's drivers fault, that don't check anything just to get another 0.1 fps.
Now if you're coding on Win9x when there's a really good and compatible poweruser platform available, you're either poor, cheap or stupid.
- Ever seen how characters are modelled in Quake II? They're basically a couple of cubes with really smart textures on. Looks like crap when you up the resolution. ID Software still had to do really annoying stuff like precalculate how to draw all objects to get the longest chains of polygons, just to get decent speed on it. Roughly half of the geometry data for Q2 are such chains, for example in the player model format.
- Remember what people were saying about Unreal when it was released? "Oh! What a beautiful slideshow!" May I mention that they migrated to DirectX in newer versions of the engine and that the OpenGL implementation is half as fast on my NVIDIA machine even though NVIDIA's implementation of OpenGL is considered one of the faster ones?
- As for Quake III, no. The Windows implementation runs on DirectX.
Amen.The Commander Keen series of games were done in a month or two per game... Not exactly well thought through nor a coherent vision... They sold very well nonetheless. And people were glued to their screens because of the state-of-the-art usage of the hardware really increased the playability.
Nope. I'm just a coder. But unless you actually meet the artists and talk to them about what they need to do their job, that's one hell of a crappy company you're coding for. No... But how do you propose to make original games? By using well established, tested techniques that finally after about 5 years on mature platforms have been implemented on every coder's favorite toy OS? And letting hobby programmers that don't care about performance implement it with an API that was originally specced as an easy 3D API for rapid prototyping? OpenGL wasn't designed for performance, nor to make use of relatively new or non-standard functions of hardware, if you think that you should read up... And if you think DirectX is similar to OpenGL you've probably just looked at the highest level API's. Yes, you'd know Direct3D has more than one way of doing things if you'd have had any real experience with it.
Now, what am I saying? I say you can't easily make something that people haven't seen before if you're stuck using interfaces like that. No I don't consider NVIDIA's pet extensions to OpenGL to be desirable either, it's nice when some of your customers can actually run the game...
Yes I can. In fact they're a lot of fun to associate with. Most of these people rarely get a chance due to financing issues. It's the people sitting on the piles of $$$ that don't want to fund projects that aren't clones of big moneymakers.
It's a sad world, really.
Oh yeah, you're talking about people like Carmack? I'm not. People with that much luck and timing are a lot more rare than those who have the wit and ingenuity.
One of the biggest problems with the gaming industry is that it's more or less saturated these days. It's harder to get into it for a newcomer now than it used to be.
Let's go back to when computer gaming became mainstream. The 1980's and the C64. What were the most successful games doing then? Pushing the hardware to it's limits. Same thing with it's successor, the Amiga. The same thing also happened with console games.
What about the PC then? Well, in the end of the 80's the PC got some decent graphics hardware. Soon after that some games like Wing Commander came out and pushed the hardware to it's limits. It sold like crazy.
What about the coming of FPS games then? When ID software released Wolfenstein 3D they did things not thought possible with the hardware. Turned in a lot of money. DOOM got them heaps of it after that since they had ditched their distributor and were good at it themselves. Same thing here. Quake a bit later made people drool at the realistic, fast 3d. After this the ID programmers were driving Ferraris...
Oh yes, using the hardware to the max really makes a money loser...
Oh sure, you're right about that. But what do most 3d artists want, to be able to produce better visuals? More polygons, more and higher resolution textures, better effects... And still at a good framerate.How do you achieve this? You could require the user to buy hardware that's hardly on the market yet. Either that or you could make the user run it on a system that can throughput a decent amount of data, and get a good coder that can really make good use of it...
It's not a big challenge to code under crossplatform newbie APIs like OpenGL... Unless you want to make it run at a decent speed.
Now there is an API that is fairly usable without being Windows-only and complex. Glide. Oh, what do you say? Glide doesn't work on your card? Tough luck, that WAS the standard for years.
DirectX is the best API available, it really makes a difference in what quality of content can be provided. Have a guess of why Linux OpenGL versions of games are usually pretty late compared to DirectX? It's so that top-notch computers can run them fast enough that they can't be called slideshows...
Now as for enjoyable gameplay, that is something you've got to experience first hand. If you watch a review that has screenshots with crappy graphics most people won't buy it, and won't experience the enjoyable gamplay. If it on the other hand is beautiful and slow like hell, then it isn't enjoyable.
If you were Joe Windows User, would you buy the game noone of your friends is playing, that has bad graphics and is slow, or would you buy the Windows-only beautiful, fast and fun game that all your friends are playing?
Yes, it's currently used for example in japanese train systems, monitoring devices in factories all over the world, and of course in research...
It's not like it's changed the world, but it did find some good applications. That you don't use something yourself doesn't mean that nobody does.
It's a perfect match!
I just programmed the foot pedal to Ctrl-Alt-Del, glued a picture of Bill Gates on it, and hanged it on the wall.
Now every time I get a BSOD I just punch Bill a few times in the face!
The porn industry shares the same feat, marketability decreasing with age.
.jpgs...
(Except for fetish - some people luv'em saggy.)
Now where did i put those
I've also been diagnosticiced with Asperger's syndrome, when I was a kid.(The diagnose really went more in the lines of "possibly mild Asperger's syndrome" since the only things they could really verify at that time were that I was below avarage proficient in noticing subtle body language, and had a far above avarage IQ, and unusual interests for my age. I've since come to believe it was correct. But that's not the point.)
I also notice I have several problems in common with you. I can't function properly with preset times. (I'm always about 15 minutes late no matter what I do.) I can't end an interesting project before it's done without some kind of help.
Whenever a teacher expected me to fall in line my productivity always dropped way down. Whenever they tried to find out my quirks and use them, I excelled. And what is really interesting is that those flexible teachers usually got better results with all students, even though it was most noticable with the extremes. Some that were branded as "just plain stupid" by other teachers performed completely avarage, thus not only getting better grades but self esteem too, making the classroom come closer to harmony.
So the point is, basically, not just that we should be treated how we need to be treated, but that the same should go for every person if we want a well functioning society.
Society needs flexibility to harness the power of the people.
(I will make no excuses for eventual grammar-be-bad/speling erors, English isn't my mother tongue.)
As a side note I just expressed obsessive behaviour and lack of time sense writing this comment. 5 hours sleep, and I often sleep as a rock for 8. Yippee, I might be later than usual tomorrow...
SplitVT fixes that, anything else?
The thing needed to install Linux is a will to Learn, and spend Time and Effort to learn. Without that, you won't be anything more than mediocre at anything you attempt in life.
The people saying that Katz is in the wrong place are right. He seems to be a geek of journalistics and humaniora, not computer science.
My guess is that what he is really doing here is practicing his journalistic skills and getting his name known. This could get him a good job if he's lucky, meaning he'd get paid better.
Most geeks do have good hygiene. Most geeks do have some degree of social skills. Your flame shows a lack of them though.