The major benefit for me was that Gentoo was the first distro I'd used that gave me the slightest clue about what the operating system was doing, and how the software worked.
I'd tried RedHat, Mandrake, and a few other distros that set everything up for me so I could "just use it." The problem was that in just using it, I had no idea what I was trying to use. I would go looking for software to do x, y, or z, and I'd either find nothing that seemed to do the job, or a jillion different apps that all did the job differently, and I didn't know why to pick one over the other. Add to that the sense of being at the wheel of an out-of-control car every time I wanted to make a change to a.conf file, and my Linux experience was pretty frustrating.
Gentoo was a brilliant introduction into how to install a Linux-based OS. It started me off easy -- here's the command line, here are the commands to install the system, here are the.confs you can tinker with and what they do. It gave me flexability while keeping the results trim. The USE flag is the most amazing option I've ever seen.
Installing Gentoo was more like playing with LEGOs than installing a system, and when I got done with it, I had a computer that I knew, really *knew*. I knew all the init.d services and what they did. I knew what module was controlling what hardware in my kernel *and* how to fix it if it didn't detect properly. I knew all the apps installed, even by their weird names and locations, and I knew what they were there for. I knew it because I built it that way. And I never had to hunt down a dependency or resolve a version conflict. NOT ONCE. Redhat and Mandrake just installed this mysterious Linux Stuff and threw the computer back at me when done. Gentoo got my hands dirty with building it up, but didn't make me jump through hoops to do it.
The benefit was teaching me what my computer was doing when I used it.
*THAT* is how I wanted my computer to run. And it does. Thanks, Gentoo team!
Haggling ain't haggling if it only goes one way. To whom am I supposed to present my counter-offer, the cashier?
Not that I can present a counter-offer right now, but on the other hand, I don't have to worry about prices in the grocery store jumping around based on my credit rating.
As a representative of your machine overlords, I can personally testify that humans, combined with a source of fusion, have provided an infinitely-renewable source for all our power needs.
What they are doing here is taking the futures markets and orienting them around terrorism. Great idea! Anyone who remembers the mysterious short selling on airline stocks before 9/11 knows that some strange trades always occur in the name of greed.
Actually, they had the system in place well before before 9/11. I made the trifecta on the two WTO towers and the Pentagon, and am happily living in the Bahamas on the payout. My friend put down the White House to show, but I thought it was a too much of a longshot.
From CNet: Powell and his allies at the FCC have offered two major justifications for relaxing ownership restrictions.
At the time of last month's vote, Powell said the United States needs "modern rules that take into account the explosion of new media outlets" and are not tied to a "bygone black-and-white era." Technology offers a wealth of media alternatives--such as the Internet, 802.11 wireless networks, XM and Sirius satellite radio, DirecTV, hundreds of cable channels, low-power FM radio--that were not available a generation ago, the argument goes.
While it's true that these options may (or may not) have existed a generation ago, it is my considered opinion that most of them are on the fringe, expensive to break into and maintain, and have yet to prove themselves viable. Why should big-biz media interests be allowed to further control the media that is already established and has a wide audience, while the independent interests would be force to assume take all the risk to develop new channels? Especially when those new channels would probably get swept up (by another FCC gazelle-style roll over) by the big-biz outlets once they were established as viable?
Great. Now you're discriminting against the illiterate. Or against people with short-term memory dysfunction. Or against non-English speakers. Or against people with dog-o-phobia. Or.. Or.. Or..
Maybe mithril behaves like a non-Newtonian fluid, and hardens on impact?
Thinking on it, that's a neat idea! Perhaps the nano-stuff could be configured so that it uses the energy of impact to restructure itself into a configuration with the hardness of diamond, and when the engery disappates, it goes back into a looser, more flexible form.
Or maybe not.
Hoity Toity blah blah blah
on
Isn't It Ironic?
·
· Score: 1, Flamebait
Honestly, what a pedantic load of crap. Bad Old American GibberSpeak must be stamped out, by George, eh what!
The English quibble about it like they invented the language or something. Chill out, dudes. GMFTatsujin
On the other hand, there will hopefully be lots of new Linux and Mac people online.
I bought NWN when it first came out, and was so unimpressed by the story in the solo game that I didn't even bother with multiplayer. Then a friend of mine started talking about the game a few weeks ago, and how he had found a sweet little server that he was having lots of fun in, meeting folks to play with and so on. We've been playing like crack addicts ever since. And we've never lacked enough people around to party up with and go bust some heads.
Plus it's nice that there always a slot open on the server. Go figure. GMFTatsujin
From the article: An unconscious decision is ideal, from the platform vendorâ(TM)s perspective. When ISVs support a Microsoft platform without even realizing that they have made a decision, and rejected any alternatives, then we have truly won that platform battle.
The truth - the almost sinister truth - of that statement grips me at my soul.
The trick is that folks think they're making a choice to purchase a merely single item, be it a CD, and DVD, a software package, a computer, a vehicle, or a politician (with a vote or literally with a breifcase of money). The reson this is a trick is that by making that choice, the purchaser endorses the entire chain of policies and events that bring that product to the shelf. You're literally saying, "whatever happened to get this product in my hot little hands, it's okay by me because the price is right.
Until I read that line above, I hadn't thought of the entire hegemony that lurked behind a price sticker with the kind of laser precision that the author used to word it. And I always thought I was a reasonably self-aware guy. HOLY SHIT. His side won, and I didn't even realize I was in a battle.
I'm making that line my sig. Nothing woke me up with quite the same jolt that it did. Maybe I'm just dumber than I thought I am. Is it just me?
From the CNET site: The government is subsidizing the cost of the hardware, and will also provide service and support for the notebook.
"White House tech support, this is George. Before we get started, can I have your social security number please?... Oh, I'm sorry sir, that's a driver problem. Let me transfer you to the Judicial Branch."
And there would only ever be nine people on the phone at a time.
Rock out. That is precisely *twice* the specs of the laptop I'm running Gentoo on now. This would be a sweet little upgrade for next to nothing (as far as laptops go).
I'd be very interested to see what the peripheral options for this box are. For example:
* Wireless networking capability? * PCMCIA slots? Media card slots? * Docking station? * Battery type and life?
Another nice spec to have would be the internals. Since they're putting linux on it, I suppose we can all assume that they are using compatable hardware:) I guess the question is, exactly how cheap are the bits inside, and are the drivers open?
The net result, I imagine, is that businesses that can afford to will simply move their warehouses to Nevada or some other state that lets them offer better deals to their customers.
So, what, we're going to hear a giant sucking sound from the east?
Slashdot Mirror
The major benefit for me was that Gentoo was the first distro I'd used that gave me the slightest clue about what the operating system was doing, and how the software worked.
.conf file, and my Linux experience was pretty frustrating.
.confs you can tinker with and what they do. It gave me flexability while keeping the results trim. The USE flag is the most amazing option I've ever seen.
I'd tried RedHat, Mandrake, and a few other distros that set everything up for me so I could "just use it." The problem was that in just using it, I had no idea what I was trying to use. I would go looking for software to do x, y, or z, and I'd either find nothing that seemed to do the job, or a jillion different apps that all did the job differently, and I didn't know why to pick one over the other. Add to that the sense of being at the wheel of an out-of-control car every time I wanted to make a change to a
Gentoo was a brilliant introduction into how to install a Linux-based OS. It started me off easy -- here's the command line, here are the commands to install the system, here are the
Installing Gentoo was more like playing with LEGOs than installing a system, and when I got done with it, I had a computer that I knew, really *knew*. I knew all the init.d services and what they did. I knew what module was controlling what hardware in my kernel *and* how to fix it if it didn't detect properly. I knew all the apps installed, even by their weird names and locations, and I knew what they were there for. I knew it because I built it that way. And I never had to hunt down a dependency or resolve a version conflict. NOT ONCE. Redhat and Mandrake just installed this mysterious Linux Stuff and threw the computer back at me when done. Gentoo got my hands dirty with building it up, but didn't make me jump through hoops to do it.
The benefit was teaching me what my computer was doing when I used it.
*THAT* is how I wanted my computer to run. And it does. Thanks, Gentoo team!
GMFTatsujin
A man, a plan, a canal, Panama!
It's also a doctor AND a floor wax.
Yes... But now we can cost-target how much your lawyer will screw you out of!
Mod parent up. Thank you for making that point!
Haggling ain't haggling if it only goes one way. To whom am I supposed to present my counter-offer, the cashier?
Not that I can present a counter-offer right now, but on the other hand, I don't have to worry about prices in the grocery store jumping around based on my credit rating.
As a representative of your machine overlords, I can personally testify that humans, combined with a source of fusion, have provided an infinitely-renewable source for all our power needs.
That, and PowerAde. Drink up!
That's not a Mac, it's a Banana Jr.
What they are doing here is taking the futures markets and orienting them around terrorism. Great idea! Anyone who remembers the mysterious short selling on airline stocks before 9/11 knows that some strange trades always occur in the name of greed.
Actually, they had the system in place well before before 9/11. I made the trifecta on the two WTO towers and the Pentagon, and am happily living in the Bahamas on the payout. My friend put down the White House to show, but I thought it was a too much of a longshot.
From CNet: Powell and his allies at the FCC have offered two major justifications for relaxing ownership restrictions.
At the time of last month's vote, Powell said the United States needs "modern rules that take into account the explosion of new media outlets" and are not tied to a "bygone black-and-white era." Technology offers a wealth of media alternatives--such as the Internet, 802.11 wireless networks, XM and Sirius satellite radio, DirecTV, hundreds of cable channels, low-power FM radio--that were not available a generation ago, the argument goes.
While it's true that these options may (or may not) have existed a generation ago, it is my considered opinion that most of them are on the fringe, expensive to break into and maintain, and have yet to prove themselves viable. Why should big-biz media interests be allowed to further control the media that is already established and has a wide audience, while the independent interests would be force to assume take all the risk to develop new channels? Especially when those new channels would probably get swept up (by another FCC gazelle-style roll over) by the big-biz outlets once they were established as viable?
Go House. I'm surprizingly proud.
GMFTatsujin
Damn. I wish I'd thought of that :)
The only thing that works correctly in Windows ME has finally been discovered.
It's the thing Leonard Nimoy and Orson Welles were after in the Transformers movie.
Zero *is* fewer than ten.
Great. Now you're discriminting against the illiterate. Or against people with short-term memory dysfunction. Or against non-English speakers. Or against people with dog-o-phobia. Or.. Or.. Or..
Maybe mithril behaves like a non-Newtonian fluid, and hardens on impact?
Thinking on it, that's a neat idea! Perhaps the nano-stuff could be configured so that it uses the energy of impact to restructure itself into a configuration with the hardness of diamond, and when the engery disappates, it goes back into a looser, more flexible form.
Or maybe not.
Honestly, what a pedantic load of crap. Bad Old American GibberSpeak must be stamped out, by George, eh what!
The English quibble about it like they invented the language or something. Chill out, dudes.
GMFTatsujin
12. CowboyNeal
On the other hand, there will hopefully be lots of new Linux and Mac people online.
I bought NWN when it first came out, and was so unimpressed by the story in the solo game that I didn't even bother with multiplayer. Then a friend of mine started talking about the game a few weeks ago, and how he had found a sweet little server that he was having lots of fun in, meeting folks to play with and so on. We've been playing like crack addicts ever since. And we've never lacked enough people around to party up with and go bust some heads.
Plus it's nice that there always a slot open on the server. Go figure.
GMFTatsujin
From the article: An unconscious decision is ideal, from the platform vendorâ(TM)s perspective. When ISVs support a Microsoft platform without even realizing that they have made a decision, and rejected any alternatives, then we have truly won that platform battle.
The truth - the almost sinister truth - of that statement grips me at my soul.
The trick is that folks think they're making a choice to purchase a merely single item, be it a CD, and DVD, a software package, a computer, a vehicle, or a politician (with a vote or literally with a breifcase of money). The reson this is a trick is that by making that choice, the purchaser endorses the entire chain of policies and events that bring that product to the shelf. You're literally saying, "whatever happened to get this product in my hot little hands, it's okay by me because the price is right.
Until I read that line above, I hadn't thought of the entire hegemony that lurked behind a price sticker with the kind of laser precision that the author used to word it. And I always thought I was a reasonably self-aware guy. HOLY SHIT. His side won, and I didn't even realize I was in a battle.
I'm making that line my sig. Nothing woke me up with quite the same jolt that it did. Maybe I'm just dumber than I thought I am. Is it just me?
GMFTatsujin
you'd better get used to a felony rap sheet and a large, tattooed boyfriend named Slash.
And his hussy girlfriend, Dot.
Thank goodness I don't have to looks at banner ads of arbitrary hieght and width! Thank you, standards!
From the CNET site: The government is subsidizing the cost of the hardware, and will also provide service and support for the notebook.
... Oh, I'm sorry sir, that's a driver problem. Let me transfer you to the Judicial Branch."
"White House tech support, this is George. Before we get started, can I have your social security number please?
And there would only ever be nine people on the phone at a time.
For the REST of their LIVES.
Talk about IT hell.
GMFTatsujin
Rock out. That is precisely *twice* the specs of the laptop I'm running Gentoo on now. This would be a sweet little upgrade for next to nothing (as far as laptops go).
:) I guess the question is, exactly how cheap are the bits inside, and are the drivers open?
I'd be very interested to see what the peripheral options for this box are. For example:
* Wireless networking capability?
* PCMCIA slots? Media card slots?
* Docking station?
* Battery type and life?
Another nice spec to have would be the internals. Since they're putting linux on it, I suppose we can all assume that they are using compatable hardware
GMFTatsujin
Hell, this is a company that is responding to customer complaints. they also posted a removal of the boot sector 'feature' pretty damn quick.
Yes, but screw them for thinking the boot sector was theirs to play with in the first place.
At worst, the boot sector belongs to the OS. At best, it belongs to ME. It ain't your computer, Intuit. Step off.
The net result, I imagine, is that businesses that can afford to will simply move their warehouses to Nevada or some other state that lets them offer better deals to their customers.
So, what, we're going to hear a giant sucking sound from the east?
So, add this to the list of things I'm not supposed to tell anyone:
* My Social Security number
* My mother's maiden name
* My date of birth
* My password(s)
* The names of any pet I've had before.
Hey -- does this mean I'm going to have to hunt down my past roommates and have them sign a non-disclosure agreement?
GMFTatsuin