Indeed, this is the only thing I mind about indentation in Python: it makes it hard to cut-and-paste code. Fortunately, Emacs has rectangle mode which I find very helpful in indenting a bunch of lines together all at once (C-x t SPACE SPACE SPACE SPACE ENTER to move them all 4 spaces forward, for example).
Hmm, that seems a round-about way to do things. I presume you never happened to run into some of the nice features in Emacs python-mode, specifically python-shift-left and python-shift-right which will move the selected region left or right one python indent (that is, as many spaces as you have set for your block indentation in python-mode). Usually these are bound to "C-c <" and "C-c >" which lets you easily select a region (such as a pasted block) and move it to the correct indent level very quickly.
As others have pointed out, and you have quietly ignored, the effort being described in Australia is about significant reduction, not elimination. Indeed, I expect the bill probably even has provisions for continued use of incandescents for a variety of purposes (for instance in ovens and fridges). So really, I don't think they'll be the least bit bothered if there is a "black market" or "gray market" in incandescent bulbs - the result they desire: a significant reduction in use of incadescents; will have been achieved. That is, it will indeed likely work just like CFCs. Sure there is till a CFC black market, but use of CFCs has been so dramatically reduced that a small black market doesn't matter - the goal has been achieved. This is, of course, the difference between ideological and pragmatic approaches. From an ideological standpoint (apparently the only one you understand) this Australian measure and the CFC ban could be conisdered failures. From a pragmatic viewpoint, however, the CFC ban worked just fine, and the Australian measures likely will too.
What distro are they going to use? As many as financially feasible?
I expect they'll just pick one, two at most. If you aren't happy with the options provided... well you're no worse off than getting the computer with Windows on it are you. People can clamour all they want, I don't see how it makes much difference.
How do I know it's been set up correctly?
How do you know Windows has been set up properly? If it hasn't been set up to your very personal and exacting standards then feel free to reinstall. You'll have the minor bonus that all the hardware in the machine has drivers and can be made to work with Linux, which is a damn good start really. Having Linux pre-installed isn't preventing you from installing Linux the way you want.
Do we really want to let people loose on Linux who can't [be bothered to] install it themselves?
Yeah, sure we do. I would be quite happy to just buy a computer and not have to jump through the hoops of setting up Linux on it, let alone the trouble of worrying about the hardware configuration when I order it to make sure it will work properly under Linux. That means I am someone who can't be bothered to install Linux myself (providing someone else is willing to do all the work for me), and I've been using Linux on the desktop almost exclusively for 7 years or more. What I really want is something that just works. That means I might buy and Apple, but if someone can offer me a working out of the box Linux machine, well I would certainly consider that too.
I use Linux more or less exclusively, but I'd never buy a machine with it preinstalled.
I have used Linux more or less exclusively for many years, and I'd gladly buy a machine with it pre-installed. Sure it could, in theory, be a horribly botched install, but then at worst I can just re-install and have less work than I would had I bought a machine with Windows on it because at least I know all the hardware will work. Then again the install could quite likely not be botched, and then I can just unpack the box and have a nice working Linux box. That's definitely a good thing - I am not interested in spending long time tweaking everything to be just so anymore, I want things to work without fuss.
So sure, there are people like you who aren't in the target market for pre-installed Linux. On the other hand there are peopel like me who very much are in the target market. How many people are there like me? I don't really know. Apparently, however, Dell's request service found a lot of people who were willing to claim that they were interested in pre-installed Linux. Stop pretending that everyone is like you, and that your ideas are the only possible views.
You know 65,000 years is nothing on a planetary scale.
Two things should be mentioned here. The first is that the OP missed a zero. It is 650,000 years. Secondly, while that may be very small in comparison to the earth's history of some 6.5 billion years, it is quite a lot in comparison to the history of modern humans (only around 200,000 years). Sure things have been different in the past, but then the world was a dramatically different place in the past. What we should concern ourselves with is the environment that the current flora and fauna of the planet are adapted to - because if it changes too fast then some of those species won't manage to adapt to cope swiftly enough. Worse still 650,000 years is a positively massive amount of time compared to human history as settled farming species (around 10,000 years). Shifting climate bands can have a significant impact on where feasible growing areas are, and shifting massive farming infrastructure is not a trivial thing.
I think the important point is that the OLPC project "allows countries to optionally establish a license period". I agree that it is hardly ideal, but it is being offered as an option because some countries demanded a feature of this kind. Other countries aren't quite so silly and won't enable the option. I think realistically one of the greatest theft deterrents for the XO machines is that they are seriously targetted towards young children. Sure there are geeks on Slashdot who would love to get their hands on one anyway - it is a linux machine after all, and anyone with sufficient nouse could make it do some fun and interesting stuff. That makes for a fairly small market however. It's not like you can grab one of these things and install Windows on it to have a laptop. If you steal one of these things you'll either have a machine with an unfamiliar interface designed for children and very little software that is particularly useful outside of an educational setting. You'll have to know what you're doing to get anything more out of it than that... and if you know what you're doing then you're more than likely in a position to cheaply and much more easily get and set up a laptop for your needs.
I think you'll find that the XO machines prove to not be terribly attractive targets for theives because they are so target specific - I don't think many people other than kids (and shameless geeks such as hang out here) are going to be able to do much useful with them, and if it isn't going to be very useful, why steal it?
I think, ultimately, this issue will resolve itself. That is, as desktop Linux starts to gain a little critical mass (likely via office wide installations) there will be more pressure on distros to work together and increasingly only a very small handful of distros will be recognised as options for the desktop. That doesn't mean the other distros will die - they'll just continue to have the same size userbase as they do now while the 2 or 3 popular desktop distros grow significantly. The result will be 2 or 3 desktop versions of Linux that are widely recognised and popular enough that third party software works with them etc. - no different, in many ways, from the "Win98, Win2k and WinXP" range you get now: for many apps one install will work across all three, and for some you'll have separate options.
Essentially it's just a matter of popularity. If Linux does get more popular on the desktop it will be in only a few forms. As it gets more attention and more people expect and ask for things to work with one of the few popular options there will be more and more pressure on developers to make sure things work resulting in a little more compatability, and better workarounds otherwise. The downside, of course, is that any such development will be slow and painful because it will necessarily happen slowly. Something like Autopackage was a great attempt to try and provide some grease for the wheels to make things easier. It was a great project, and worked well - thanks for all your hard work on it. I'm sorry that apparently it didn't gain the attention and adoption that it deserved. I think that failure has set back desktop Linux adoption many many years.
Enron is not gone because they broke the law and got obliterated for it, Enron is gone because the reality that they actually had no money overtook their fiction and they collapsed into overnight bankruptcy. Legal recourse against Enron only really began after it was long gone, and was against the company's directors.
Actually--and i will split hairs here to make a fine point--there is evidence of alternate species, but there is no evidence that they have come or gone. The "coming and going" part is a theory that passes Science's threshhold of reasonable doubt, and is accepted omn that basis. But it would be prudent to note that this is where Science begins to diverge from other disciplines, and that, ultimately, it is based on opinion, not evidence.
You are really making a stretch there. Speciation has definitely been observed. Here is an article listing a bunch of observed speciation cases, and here's a list of a few more. It's all referenced so you can follow it up to original sources if you don't happen to like talk.origins. That pretty much covers the fact that there is clear evidence of species "coming" - as in new species arising. As to whether species have "gone" - I think the burden of proof for that is falling squarely on you: there are plenty of species tht have been identified as extinct, both species that had been previously observed and documented while alive (such as the dodo, among many others), and those determined via fossil or other archaeological records (for instance the moa of New Zealand, which are known by actual bones, not fossils). To claim that these species have not "gone" is to claim that they are still around somewhere. I think the odds (due to lack of observation despite concerted efforts to find them, and in the case of, for instance, larger dinosaurs, their lack of ability to hide very effectively) have to come down pretty strongly in favour of the fact that they are no longer around, and thus have "gone".
Re:Becuase People don't know what they want!
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Why Software is Hard
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Now imagine if every single weld was a unique, custom job that had never been done before, and if any of them are imprefect, the car crashes.
Right, because there are absolutely no "standard recipes" in software. There just isn't anything you could describe as a "Cookbook" providing standard solutions to common problems that make up the basic nuts, bolts and welds of a lot of software.
There is a clear and obvious difference between the Clay Millennium prozes and the offers of bounties from Exxon-Mobil. You see the Clay Mathematics Institute really doesn't cre what the answer is - they have a list of problems they would like resolved, but they're not fussy as to the answer. They'll give you the $1 million if you provide a proof that P=NP, and they'll give you the $1 million if you can prove that P/=NP. They'd be very happy to shell out $1 million for a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis, and they would be disappointed but still shell out the $1 million for a proof that the Riemann Hypothesis is false. They have $1 million set aside for the Poincare conjecture, but most people expect Perelman to turn that down. They would have still been willing to offer him $1 million if he had proved that that Poincare conjecture is false. They don't care what the result is, they just want an answer to the question.
On the other hand Exxon-Mobil is offering money for any paper that offers a dissenting view to the IPCC report. The result, that it dissents, is what is important. What the particular topic that the paper is discussing, be it solar variation, proxy data reconstruction methods, climate model analysis, or otherwise is, apparently, irrelevant to Exxon-Mobil. They want a particular result. Thus, they are the converse of the Clay Mathematics Institute: They don't care what the question being answered is, they just want a particular result.
As far as I can tell the difference couldn't be more stark.
Well, threatening climatologists with decertification doesn't invalidate their findings either, but it sure as hell means they are being forcibly "motivated".
They were contemplating decertifying weather presenters who took it upon themselves to make clearly uninformed comments. They weren't talking about decertifying people who were doing science, they were talking about decertifying people who were (a) uninformed and (b) misrepresenting information to the public. That you can't tell the difference between weather presenters and climatologists is definitely of concern however.
Let's catch a few of these standard arguments that keep getting trotted out:
Tying a trend to warmer temperatures based on older data from the early 1900's is suspect at best. Good, reliable, accurate scientific equipment that measures the temperature wasn't readily available until recently (late 1900's).
It is true that equipment from earlier in the century was not as accurate. It should be noted, however, that we aren't basing our understanding of historical temperature off just one reading, but rather off many thousands of temperature measurements from around the globe. Averaging across all these measurements (which won't have consistent bias in any particular direction) allows for an accuracy that is greater than any individual temperature measuring apparatus. Feel free to read the studies on uncertainty estimates for historical temperatures. Also note that we aren't just asing trneds off historical records recorded since 1850 or so, but also against historical reconstructions based on proxy data from a wide variety of sources (tree rings, corals, glaciers, ice cores, etc.)
Apparently, the Earth magnetic field has decreased by 10% in the last 150 years...I believe it's possible that more of the Sun's radiation is penetrating the Earth's magnetosphere due to it being weaker. If more radiation hits the Earth, shouldn't that also increase the overall temperature of the Earth and can global warming be attributed to this?
Can global warming be attributed to this you ask? Well, it's a matter of sitting down and runnign the numbers. Luckily people have - it's not like people aren't bothering to measure and track the amount of solar radiation that actually reaches the surface of the earth. We can then calculate how much that might contribute to warming. The IPCC, in the Third Assessment Report, put it at about 30% of observed warming. They also concluded that the warming of the last 50 years cannot be explained without considering anthropogenic effects - that is, solar explanations alone are not enough. The FAR is almost out, and it seems like the likelihood of anthropogeic causes mattering have gone from 66% in the TAR to 90% for the FAR. I'd say that means the answer is "no, global warming can't be attributed to this because the numbers don't add up".
Erlang-style concurrency: This is a ton of little threads that communicate solely through message passing, no shared state. On the plus side, it's got a working implementation that you can use today. On the down side (and this is my personal opinion), I'm not sure you really need the "functional" part of Erlang to use it (I think you just need threads that share nothing, and if you did that in a more conventional OO language it'd be fine)
It's CSP style concurrency you're after there, and indeed it can be done in conventional OO languages. A simple example would be JCSP which is a CSP style threading library for Java. A better example would be SCOOP for Eiffel which integrates a CSP style concurrency model very naturally into an OO model. It's worth looking into because it makes concurrent programming seem easy (just declare any objects that can run independently of one another as separate... and that's pretty much it, the compiler handles the rest), but gets it right at the same time, all while keeping everything very much in the standard OO model that many programmers are familiar with. The downside is that SCOOP is still experimental - there are now working prototypes that use a preprocessor, but it isn't yet integrated into the Eiffel compiler. Were SCOOP for Java or C++ instead of the rather more niche Eiffel I suspect you'd be looking at your "winner". At the very least a polished version of SCOOP integrated into the compiler could make Eiffel a more popular language.
This argument about viruses has absolutely no basis since if an OS is not widely used, it simply isn't an attractive commercial target for virus/adware writers. I wish Linux/OSX cheerleaders would not use this point in listing the merits of a system beause nobody can convince me that if everyone used Linux or everyone used OSX to the degree that Windows dominates the market (and especially the novice computer user market with respect to Linux) this argument would neccessarily hold up.
Sure, but by the same token Windows users shouldn't use the argument that Windows has way more off the shelf software and games available for it, and much better hardware support, because if Linux was as popular as Windows you can bet it would have just as much (or more) off the shelf software and games available for it, and would have just as few issues with hardware (because every hardware manufacturer would be sure to include Linux drivers and a point and click system to install them).
The simple reality is that things are the way they are, and that means Windows has an advantage in available software and hardware compatability, but Linux has the lead in security. Were the relative popularity reversed the advantages would likely be reversed.
The only major strongpoint I can see for OpenOffice is its MS Office compatibility; both in file formats, and in general similarity for users (particularly feature-wise). To be honest for many uses KOffice is more than adequate, much lighter, and much faster. Likewise, while GNOME doesn't have an equivalent "office" package, Abiword, Gnumeric, Inkscape, Glom, and Evolution make a fairly nice set.
anyone know if this does: 1) resizes the windows partition so you can still access it from debian? 2) scans windows for your settings and replicates similar ones in debian? Anything else, and why not just use the damn CD?
I was curious about this too. The site itself doesn't carry much information, but the related Ubuntu project has more detail. The idea is that the linux disk image gets saved as a file (in C:\ubuntu apparently) which gets loopmounted and booted into via grub4dos. Thus Windows gets to stay exactly as it is, and there isn't even any disk repartitioning done - linux just sits as a disk image file on the C:\ drive. The Ubuntu project also talk about gleaning some info from the Windows registry for installation - though it only mentions locale and timezone data (presumably more can be managed).
It is, at least, quite different from a CD install in that your Windows install (presuming this works the same as the Ubuntu version) remains untouched (aside from getting a new directory and a couple of extra files) with no risk of data loss via repartioning etc. Certainly an interesting idea.
And did you ever act like you knew everything? That other people were "stupid" compared to you, and did you ever treat them as such, even unknowingly? Do you think that the people who DIDN'T excel at academics would just take this in stride?
I think the point is that we should deal with such things by teaching kids not to do that to each other rather than letting them abuse each other and hurt each other until they become sufficiently damaged to either crack or no longer care. I don't see how condining that sort of behaviour helps anyone. Sure, you'll never stamp it out completely, but that doesn't mean that actually standing up and telling kids that it is wrong and that they shouldn't be doing it, and providing punishment when they do indulge in it, isn't worth doing.
And don't say "fewer attacks and/or security exposures on this OS as compared to Windows", because right now all non-Windows platforms are benefiting from "security through minority".
While its certainly true that, if Linux had the market share of Windows, then it would see far more attacks and security exposures, that sort of argument cuts both ways. If we're not judging things of how they are but how they might be if market shares were equivalent then many of Windows' advantages evaporate: if Linux had Windows' level market share I doubt you'd have any issues with hardware or getting drivers working, since hardware manufacturers would all ensure it worked out of the box; likewise, if linux had Windows' level market share, I doubt you'd have any issues with off the shelf software or being able to play the latest game etc. (indeed, software installation, even for stuff not in the distro repository, would be easy because the companies making the software would make it so). A very large amount of Windows' "just works" (in as much as they have it) is derived from their market share dominance, and the fact that everyone else ensures that their software or hardware "just works" with Windows. So sure, if linux had the sort of market share that Windows does then it would be less secure than it is now - it would "just work" and have across the board hardware and commercial software support.
Interestingly I think Autopackage meets most of your requirements pretty well.
installs new software correctly, in default and custom locations
Autopackage certainly installs stuff correctly and uses default locations. Moreover it support use of --prefix=/path to specify custom locations. Of course if the maker of the software hardcodes paths and such like then there's not much you can do for relocatability - that's not something packaging is ever going to be able to fix though. Custom locations are fully supported by the packaging system - enough said.
uninstalls old software correctly
Autopackage will do uninstalls perfectly happily, and provides a simple GUI (under a "Manage Third Party Software" desktop menu entry) to handle all your Autopackage installed software.
updates old to new software correctly
To update an already installed autopackage just download the new package and run it. Updating software installed via other systems is trickier in that it creates rollback issues: for instance if you're upgrading a package you installed via rpm, you either need to install to a custom location, say/usr/local, uninstall the rpm when prompted by the installer, or have it trample the rpm on install; the end result being that a rollback will involve reinstalling the rpm from whateer source you acquired it. This is, of course, hardly surprising.
is aware of and can work with custom-installed libraries and dependencies (i.e. EVERYTHING doesn't have to be installed using this system, some stuff can be compiled from source or downloaded from third party).
On this point Autopackage does well, checking for actual files that pass tests rather than the existence of particular packages. That means it deals with custom/handrolled libraries and dependencies just fine. Indeed, Autopackage is designed not to have everything installed by it: it is expected that base material will be installed via a standard packaging scheme, be it rpm, deb, tgz, or whatever; autopackages are meant to be for extra third party applications.
is scriptable through some command-line interface
Autopackage certainly support both command line and GUI interfaces and is quite easily scriptable.
isn't a pain in the neck
This is, of course, subjective. I've not had any problem dealing with autopackages I've downloaded: everything just runs smoothly. That is just my experience. Who knows, maybe you'll find it a pain in the neck for some reason.
As far as I know, none of the software installation systems out there for any platform meet all of the above requirements.
To be honest I find that a combination of either rpm or deb (to be honest it doesn't matter that much anymore) with either apt (or apt-rpm as the case may be) and suitable frontend (be it synaptic, or whatever) or smart (which is still coming along, but should be ready soon) for the base distribution and general maintenance and updates thereto, and Autopackage for any extra third party software you want to add works great and meets the requirements you've outlined - at least as far as I am aware.
I have to say, XFCE is looking very impressive. Thunar is, IMHO, a significant improvement over the earlier file manager. The desktop in general is also looking more robust and featureful - XFCE is starting to look like good competition for GNOME and KDE, and in the space of resource light desktops it looks like a clear winner. Better yet, due to freedesktop.org standards it interacts with GNOME and KDE just fine. For a while I had been hoping E17 would provide the impressive option for light desktops but, with interminable delays and XFCE now looking like a perfectly good alternative to GNOME or KDE regardless of whether you are interested in a light desktop or not, it looks as if XFCE is the clear winner.
That's okay, I understand the urge to evangelise things, and beamer is pretty damn impressive. Thanks for such a reasonable response - and I'm glad you enjoyed your trip to NZ:-)
Also worth looking into is LiteratePrograms which provides a wide range of algorithms written (and documented - hence the "literate" part) in a wide variety of languages. Currently there are over 50 different "Hello World" programs in different languages, including such things as AliceML, AspectJ, Haskell, and Oz, as well as all the usual suspects. More to the point, it also includes a decent variety of more interesting algorithms, including basic sorting algorithms (quick sort, merge sort etc.) in a wide variety of languages, right the way up to a basic GUI file manager in GTK. It's a Wiki, and still growing, but it seems to be well ahead of RosettaCode at the moment.
Clearly you didn't follow my link or you would know that I am acquainted with Beamer, as well as Prospere, and other slide classes for LaTeX. The particular system I described has its own unique advantages - mostly in flexibility of slide template creation.
That's fine, if that's what the expectations really are; but the Slashdot submission makes it sound like the people behind the phone think they can take on the world. So please, seriously - tell us WHY anyone outside the "live open or die" community will care?
Because it is a really nice looking device and they look like they've already put together a great software stack for it, and have an expectation for a lot more interesting applications to be added prior to mass market launch. In short they expect to have mass market appeal because they think (and I have to agree with them on this) that they have a very nice smart phone. Try looking at the press page which has pictures of the device and screenshots of it. It looks good. Sure, it's not going to take over the world of mobile phones, but in the class of upper end smartphones (the sort of market the iPhone is pitched toward) it can certainly compete, and given the price, could do well.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm, that seems a round-about way to do things. I presume you never happened to run into some of the nice features in Emacs python-mode, specifically python-shift-left and python-shift-right which will move the selected region left or right one python indent (that is, as many spaces as you have set for your block indentation in python-mode). Usually these are bound to "C-c <" and "C-c >" which lets you easily select a region (such as a pasted block) and move it to the correct indent level very quickly.
As others have pointed out, and you have quietly ignored, the effort being described in Australia is about significant reduction, not elimination. Indeed, I expect the bill probably even has provisions for continued use of incandescents for a variety of purposes (for instance in ovens and fridges). So really, I don't think they'll be the least bit bothered if there is a "black market" or "gray market" in incandescent bulbs - the result they desire: a significant reduction in use of incadescents; will have been achieved. That is, it will indeed likely work just like CFCs. Sure there is till a CFC black market, but use of CFCs has been so dramatically reduced that a small black market doesn't matter - the goal has been achieved. This is, of course, the difference between ideological and pragmatic approaches. From an ideological standpoint (apparently the only one you understand) this Australian measure and the CFC ban could be conisdered failures. From a pragmatic viewpoint, however, the CFC ban worked just fine, and the Australian measures likely will too.
I expect they'll just pick one, two at most. If you aren't happy with the options provided... well you're no worse off than getting the computer with Windows on it are you. People can clamour all they want, I don't see how it makes much difference.
How do you know Windows has been set up properly? If it hasn't been set up to your very personal and exacting standards then feel free to reinstall. You'll have the minor bonus that all the hardware in the machine has drivers and can be made to work with Linux, which is a damn good start really. Having Linux pre-installed isn't preventing you from installing Linux the way you want.
Yeah, sure we do. I would be quite happy to just buy a computer and not have to jump through the hoops of setting up Linux on it, let alone the trouble of worrying about the hardware configuration when I order it to make sure it will work properly under Linux. That means I am someone who can't be bothered to install Linux myself (providing someone else is willing to do all the work for me), and I've been using Linux on the desktop almost exclusively for 7 years or more. What I really want is something that just works. That means I might buy and Apple, but if someone can offer me a working out of the box Linux machine, well I would certainly consider that too.
I have used Linux more or less exclusively for many years, and I'd gladly buy a machine with it pre-installed. Sure it could, in theory, be a horribly botched install, but then at worst I can just re-install and have less work than I would had I bought a machine with Windows on it because at least I know all the hardware will work. Then again the install could quite likely not be botched, and then I can just unpack the box and have a nice working Linux box. That's definitely a good thing - I am not interested in spending long time tweaking everything to be just so anymore, I want things to work without fuss.
So sure, there are people like you who aren't in the target market for pre-installed Linux. On the other hand there are peopel like me who very much are in the target market. How many people are there like me? I don't really know. Apparently, however, Dell's request service found a lot of people who were willing to claim that they were interested in pre-installed Linux. Stop pretending that everyone is like you, and that your ideas are the only possible views.
Two things should be mentioned here. The first is that the OP missed a zero. It is 650,000 years. Secondly, while that may be very small in comparison to the earth's history of some 6.5 billion years, it is quite a lot in comparison to the history of modern humans (only around 200,000 years). Sure things have been different in the past, but then the world was a dramatically different place in the past. What we should concern ourselves with is the environment that the current flora and fauna of the planet are adapted to - because if it changes too fast then some of those species won't manage to adapt to cope swiftly enough. Worse still 650,000 years is a positively massive amount of time compared to human history as settled farming species (around 10,000 years). Shifting climate bands can have a significant impact on where feasible growing areas are, and shifting massive farming infrastructure is not a trivial thing.
I think the important point is that the OLPC project "allows countries to optionally establish a license period". I agree that it is hardly ideal, but it is being offered as an option because some countries demanded a feature of this kind. Other countries aren't quite so silly and won't enable the option. I think realistically one of the greatest theft deterrents for the XO machines is that they are seriously targetted towards young children. Sure there are geeks on Slashdot who would love to get their hands on one anyway - it is a linux machine after all, and anyone with sufficient nouse could make it do some fun and interesting stuff. That makes for a fairly small market however. It's not like you can grab one of these things and install Windows on it to have a laptop. If you steal one of these things you'll either have a machine with an unfamiliar interface designed for children and very little software that is particularly useful outside of an educational setting. You'll have to know what you're doing to get anything more out of it than that... and if you know what you're doing then you're more than likely in a position to cheaply and much more easily get and set up a laptop for your needs.
I think you'll find that the XO machines prove to not be terribly attractive targets for theives because they are so target specific - I don't think many people other than kids (and shameless geeks such as hang out here) are going to be able to do much useful with them, and if it isn't going to be very useful, why steal it?
I think, ultimately, this issue will resolve itself. That is, as desktop Linux starts to gain a little critical mass (likely via office wide installations) there will be more pressure on distros to work together and increasingly only a very small handful of distros will be recognised as options for the desktop. That doesn't mean the other distros will die - they'll just continue to have the same size userbase as they do now while the 2 or 3 popular desktop distros grow significantly. The result will be 2 or 3 desktop versions of Linux that are widely recognised and popular enough that third party software works with them etc. - no different, in many ways, from the "Win98, Win2k and WinXP" range you get now: for many apps one install will work across all three, and for some you'll have separate options.
Essentially it's just a matter of popularity. If Linux does get more popular on the desktop it will be in only a few forms. As it gets more attention and more people expect and ask for things to work with one of the few popular options there will be more and more pressure on developers to make sure things work resulting in a little more compatability, and better workarounds otherwise. The downside, of course, is that any such development will be slow and painful because it will necessarily happen slowly. Something like Autopackage was a great attempt to try and provide some grease for the wheels to make things easier. It was a great project, and worked well - thanks for all your hard work on it. I'm sorry that apparently it didn't gain the attention and adoption that it deserved. I think that failure has set back desktop Linux adoption many many years.
Enron is not gone because they broke the law and got obliterated for it, Enron is gone because the reality that they actually had no money overtook their fiction and they collapsed into overnight bankruptcy. Legal recourse against Enron only really began after it was long gone, and was against the company's directors.
I think the point is that if you are demanding "_proof_" where even observed remains don't count then you may as well fall into solipsism.
You are really making a stretch there. Speciation has definitely been observed. Here is an article listing a bunch of observed speciation cases, and here's a list of a few more. It's all referenced so you can follow it up to original sources if you don't happen to like talk.origins. That pretty much covers the fact that there is clear evidence of species "coming" - as in new species arising. As to whether species have "gone" - I think the burden of proof for that is falling squarely on you: there are plenty of species tht have been identified as extinct, both species that had been previously observed and documented while alive (such as the dodo, among many others), and those determined via fossil or other archaeological records (for instance the moa of New Zealand, which are known by actual bones, not fossils). To claim that these species have not "gone" is to claim that they are still around somewhere. I think the odds (due to lack of observation despite concerted efforts to find them, and in the case of, for instance, larger dinosaurs, their lack of ability to hide very effectively) have to come down pretty strongly in favour of the fact that they are no longer around, and thus have "gone".
On the other hand Exxon-Mobil is offering money for any paper that offers a dissenting view to the IPCC report. The result, that it dissents, is what is important. What the particular topic that the paper is discussing, be it solar variation, proxy data reconstruction methods, climate model analysis, or otherwise is, apparently, irrelevant to Exxon-Mobil. They want a particular result. Thus, they are the converse of the Clay Mathematics Institute: They don't care what the question being answered is, they just want a particular result.
As far as I can tell the difference couldn't be more stark.
The simple reality is that things are the way they are, and that means Windows has an advantage in available software and hardware compatability, but Linux has the lead in security. Were the relative popularity reversed the advantages would likely be reversed.
The only major strongpoint I can see for OpenOffice is its MS Office compatibility; both in file formats, and in general similarity for users (particularly feature-wise). To be honest for many uses KOffice is more than adequate, much lighter, and much faster. Likewise, while GNOME doesn't have an equivalent "office" package, Abiword, Gnumeric, Inkscape, Glom, and Evolution make a fairly nice set.
It is, at least, quite different from a CD install in that your Windows install (presuming this works the same as the Ubuntu version) remains untouched (aside from getting a new directory and a couple of extra files) with no risk of data loss via repartioning etc. Certainly an interesting idea.
I think the point is that we should deal with such things by teaching kids not to do that to each other rather than letting them abuse each other and hurt each other until they become sufficiently damaged to either crack or no longer care. I don't see how condining that sort of behaviour helps anyone. Sure, you'll never stamp it out completely, but that doesn't mean that actually standing up and telling kids that it is wrong and that they shouldn't be doing it, and providing punishment when they do indulge in it, isn't worth doing.
While its certainly true that, if Linux had the market share of Windows, then it would see far more attacks and security exposures, that sort of argument cuts both ways. If we're not judging things of how they are but how they might be if market shares were equivalent then many of Windows' advantages evaporate: if Linux had Windows' level market share I doubt you'd have any issues with hardware or getting drivers working, since hardware manufacturers would all ensure it worked out of the box; likewise, if linux had Windows' level market share, I doubt you'd have any issues with off the shelf software or being able to play the latest game etc. (indeed, software installation, even for stuff not in the distro repository, would be easy because the companies making the software would make it so). A very large amount of Windows' "just works" (in as much as they have it) is derived from their market share dominance, and the fact that everyone else ensures that their software or hardware "just works" with Windows. So sure, if linux had the sort of market share that Windows does then it would be less secure than it is now - it would "just work" and have across the board hardware and commercial software support.
Autopackage certainly installs stuff correctly and uses default locations. Moreover it support use of --prefix=/path to specify custom locations. Of course if the maker of the software hardcodes paths and such like then there's not much you can do for relocatability - that's not something packaging is ever going to be able to fix though. Custom locations are fully supported by the packaging system - enough said.
Autopackage will do uninstalls perfectly happily, and provides a simple GUI (under a "Manage Third Party Software" desktop menu entry) to handle all your Autopackage installed software.
To update an already installed autopackage just download the new package and run it. Updating software installed via other systems is trickier in that it creates rollback issues: for instance if you're upgrading a package you installed via rpm, you either need to install to a custom location, say
On this point Autopackage does well, checking for actual files that pass tests rather than the existence of particular packages. That means it deals with custom/handrolled libraries and dependencies just fine. Indeed, Autopackage is designed not to have everything installed by it: it is expected that base material will be installed via a standard packaging scheme, be it rpm, deb, tgz, or whatever; autopackages are meant to be for extra third party applications.
Autopackage certainly support both command line and GUI interfaces and is quite easily scriptable.
This is, of course, subjective. I've not had any problem dealing with autopackages I've downloaded: everything just runs smoothly. That is just my experience. Who knows, maybe you'll find it a pain in the neck for some reason.
To be honest I find that a combination of either rpm or deb (to be honest it doesn't matter that much anymore) with either apt (or apt-rpm as the case may be) and suitable frontend (be it synaptic, or whatever) or smart (which is still coming along, but should be ready soon) for the base distribution and general maintenance and updates thereto, and Autopackage for any extra third party software you want to add works great and meets the requirements you've outlined - at least as far as I am aware.
I have to say, XFCE is looking very impressive. Thunar is, IMHO, a significant improvement over the earlier file manager. The desktop in general is also looking more robust and featureful - XFCE is starting to look like good competition for GNOME and KDE, and in the space of resource light desktops it looks like a clear winner. Better yet, due to freedesktop.org standards it interacts with GNOME and KDE just fine. For a while I had been hoping E17 would provide the impressive option for light desktops but, with interminable delays and XFCE now looking like a perfectly good alternative to GNOME or KDE regardless of whether you are interested in a light desktop or not, it looks as if XFCE is the clear winner.
That's okay, I understand the urge to evangelise things, and beamer is pretty damn impressive. Thanks for such a reasonable response - and I'm glad you enjoyed your trip to NZ :-)
Also worth looking into is LiteratePrograms which provides a wide range of algorithms written (and documented - hence the "literate" part) in a wide variety of languages. Currently there are over 50 different "Hello World" programs in different languages, including such things as AliceML, AspectJ, Haskell, and Oz, as well as all the usual suspects. More to the point, it also includes a decent variety of more interesting algorithms, including basic sorting algorithms (quick sort, merge sort etc.) in a wide variety of languages, right the way up to a basic GUI file manager in GTK. It's a Wiki, and still growing, but it seems to be well ahead of RosettaCode at the moment.
Clearly you didn't follow my link or you would know that I am acquainted with Beamer, as well as Prospere, and other slide classes for LaTeX. The particular system I described has its own unique advantages - mostly in flexibility of slide template creation.
Because it is a really nice looking device and they look like they've already put together a great software stack for it, and have an expectation for a lot more interesting applications to be added prior to mass market launch. In short they expect to have mass market appeal because they think (and I have to agree with them on this) that they have a very nice smart phone. Try looking at the press page which has pictures of the device and screenshots of it. It looks good. Sure, it's not going to take over the world of mobile phones, but in the class of upper end smartphones (the sort of market the iPhone is pitched toward) it can certainly compete, and given the price, could do well.