HTTP headers exist for explicitly requesting access to a resource in a certain language (though I dont know of any site that actually makes use of them), as for locating users though... well, you're largely going to be SOL there. Suppose you rDNS someone and their TLD is.fr, fine, that user is probably french. If their language request code is 'es' they're probably either spanish or from some spanish speaking territory - on its own not very useful but in tandem with an rDNS it could narrow things down. If you end up with a.com though, your choices are limited. Perhaps an IP and domain WHOIS could be made to intelligently parse the contact addresses for territories and such but if you're looking at a user from, say, AOL, you really cannot know unless they actually tell you where they're from; I'm sure AOL isnt giving this information.
Then again, I suppose all this might be rendered redundant if The Man forces us all to go through an earmarking gateway of some sort, we'll see;)
That's proven quite useful to me. Right now I'm connected to AIM, ICQ and MSN via Gabber. It's an open protocol (massively verbose XML strings are about as open as it gets...), and because the IM system gating is done at the server the protocol is also simple, as are, by extension, the clients.
Granted the server transports sometimes go down, though I use theoretic.com's server which has been doing a sterling job so far. Now if I could just figure out how to go on IRC from this thing....
Hmm. No, I didnt mean there's incompatibility problems. I mean there's too much duplication of effort;) Compatibility is good as one might expect; just about every office format under Linux is some sort of gzipped XML file
I'm quite sure there's downsides to it. Who the hell is going to care if a politician announces he's going to push for public funding towards free software? as opposed to the usual pitches like education, social services (well in the UK at least), public transport and so forth.
And if you exempt software from market forces, quality IS going to go down the tube. Because we'll get fourty different office suites, a few thousand MP3 organising systems and toy window managers and programming languages and no central focus. Sorry folks, open source is all well and good, and on a small to medium scale it can work; I, for instance, use KDE, I think its architecture and homogeneous design is a testament to the capabilities of open source developers. But for every such gem there's going to be hundreds of time sinks. You're going to need a PHB in there somewhere to focus people into a cohesive unit, so that instead of implementing some weird Emacs mode, a developer can help with a database project, or an IPC framework or hell SOMETHING. And that the entire system functions as a unit too - Debian's probably the best distribution in terms of actually having an overall plan to it but it's really at what I see as the fundamental scalability limit.
For other examples, look at Linux. Great OS huh? yeah sure, but look at LKML. The old protracted bickering over which VM is better continues to grow. Statistics and patches and optimisations and forced commits all go on and yet there's no progress. The 2.4 tree is absolute shit - I run it on my home server and it crashes every few weeks. Every few weeks?? what the hell is this shit, Windows 98? I've seen better uptimes on Win2K boxes! A 2.2 box I admin over in the US that runs as an IRC server once hit 130+ days of uptime before it crashed due to a power outage. Isnt 2.4 supposed to be a stable tree?
Anyways, I digress. The point is there's things open source is good for, and there's things commercial software is good for; I like Linux and all but I dont buy all this Stallman zealotry about the whole thing. I'd be happier seeing a bound and chained Microsoft, but equally so I dont think stuff like, say, Oracle, could ever be the product of open source coders. Say what you will about the arrogance of Oracle's CEO or whatever, point is it's the best in the market, and unfortunately enterprise level apps still don't run anything open source on the high level because open source initiatives simply lack the resources to agressively develop something like this. Open source, however, does produce well engineered foundations, such as the GNU toolset, which is pretty much standard these days.
But, hey, what do I know. I'll be interested to see some counter-examples to this though.
Actually, insofar as I know, Kups was subsumed by KPrint... see here.
KPrint's even got its own site so it may worth be checking out. I've managed to set up a printer entirely from its KControl applet in a GUI interface so it's really something. Then again I suppose there's GNOME Print but I dont know too much about that...
I use KPrint (part of KDE infrastructure) with CUPS... I dont think I could ask for much more, though admittedly I think you still have to set the thing up via the CUPS web interface.
Still, it's better than using lpr/lpq and wondering what bit of the pipeline ate your document =)
On a more serious note though, I can't say I've ever heard of an official name for the base2 metric, however I remember there was some confusion a while ago about hard disk capacity... marketing weenies using one base and BIOS diagnostics displaying the other.... having said that of course these units just sound a bit lame anyway, perhaps we ought to come up with something, if nothing else, a little less ambiguous...
AHAHAHAHAHAHA I crack myself up;) I dunno. Quake3 is pretty good I guess, but for some reason all the games I run under linux run about 20% slower. NV drivers perhaps? Whatever. So long as ZSNES works I'm happy with it.
I notice a lot of people are complaining about mass marketed music like NSync and Britney Spears. The problem is that, the RIAA isnt responsible for this watered down content manufacturing - people in general are. Take a tally of how many people listen to Linkin Park or the Offspring or something, then square it against the number of adolescents who buy BS and NSync. Sorry folks, but cheese pop seems to be where all the money's at, and if you're like Katz and think that people shouldnt follow simple market forces then go back to writing for Pravda:P
If you and others like you like music by these bands and buy it, fine. If there's money in it someone will service that niche, be it the RIAA or autonomous artists. However, until more people buy 'proper' music as one might refer to it, that's all it's gonna be, a niche.
But one has to wonder, is any of the stuff on slashdot FUD, opinionated and/or innacurate wrt Microsoft? (witness michael's article about MIME type holes recently)... mm... just a bit;)
And, just to secure my Troll rating (and to prove that I too probably dunno what I'm on about), an OS which compiles into a 350K or so kernel for even the most basic of functions, plus tacked on realtime scheduling doesnt strike me as being very appropriate for embedded applications. Sorry folks, but this is one area where you NEED to pay for a lot of R&D and yea that does mean proprietary software; I'm no CS student but I do know that hard RT is a thankless thing to get right, as is supporting embedded microcontrollers and peripherals (CPU's dont exist in vacuum, right?) and consistent support for dozens of possible platforms (and, yes, bootloading said platforms). I remember RedHat was making something called EcOS.. it's young but the architecture at least seems designed for embedding; anyone know what's up with that recently?
OK, I'm an admin at a rather large (5000ish users) messageboard. Pray excuse the blatant plug but this is a fairly good case in point. People tend to spend extensive amounts of time on it, and the average users online is somewhere in the region of fifty during busy hours. So, naturally one would expect the company running the banner ads running our site to be thrilled (well, we dont do business with them directly, instead we go via the GSN network). Err, yeah possibly. Now let's examine the demographic for a second here. Check the calendar and some people's profiles and it would appear that most people are around, say, 14-21 years of age, with a lot living in Canada and the united kingdom, as well as the US.
So why the bloody hell do I see ads for god damn anti-baldness cream?! Saw these a while ago. I dont know many teenagers with a hairloss problem. Only, now we see some long-distance offers for as little as 4 cents per hour! wow! I'm ecstatic! please! tell me where to sign up!!!!
Oh, hang on
See, if you resolve my IP, it ends in.uk
So I'm not eligible for the service.
Drat.
Such a pity they wasted an impression on me.
This shouldnt be happening. Come on, if they stopped using their technical expertise to come up with elaborate systems which send me cookies but don't even sharpen their focus, they might be able to come up with something a bit more clever. Like resolving my IP (I'm gonna view more than one page per site so they can cache it) and serving me an ad based on something that's available in my area. Like an ADSL ISP in the UK with interesting rates - this might actually warrant me to click on it, and considering most people don't suddenly drop everything and tear off to their nearest Volkswagen dealership as soon as they see an ad on TV, that's an impression definately NOT wasted.
Or during the signup process for our site we could supply some information about us. Like the fact that we're a site based around a computer game series, or that most people here arent actually old enough to take out a credit card account with all those wonderful APR incentives. Serve me an ad for where I can get a PS2 or GeForce3 in the UK on the cheap! I'd click that too!
No, let's be big, flashy and patronising. That's always worked, hasnt it. Morons.
I'm of the opinion that there's only really one proper way to do this: an image generator. The site should keep a database of emails, together with a random ID. Then, whenever an email needs to be displayed on a page, you insert an image tag that looks like, say /> or whatever. This script looks up the email address in its database, then draws it. It then applies some noise and distorts it so that the email is more or less readable, but you'll have a hell of a job trying to automatically read these emails. Dunno, anyone think this will work?
Man... well, I dont exactly write code for a living but I can appreciate what you've done, for one. Nice job mate, but then again, life's hardly fair. At the end of the day you might console yourself with the warm fuzzy feeling you get inside;)
Correct me if I'm wrong but weren't they grepping a.DL_ file for 'uake 3' as opposed to a.DLL? now, I dont use windows a great deal but afaict, a.DL_ file is an LZ compressed.DLL file... considering compression tends to munge the original contents out of recognition, this is probably little more than a coincidence.
Having said that though, if a symbol swap did indeed cause the drivers to slow down and output different images, this makes the point moot anyways. Can someone clarify here?
...damn, we've lost the war on the desktop. Allright, I'd better dump my KDE system and put win2k on immediately! after all, its just a losing battle right?
m'eh, this has been said aleph-1 times by now I suppose but I honestly dont give two hoots about 'market share'. KDE is bloody amazing, and doubly so for getting there in the space of 1/3 of the time it took microsoft. Word to the KDE developers, and keep on coding. I happen to like KDE and Linux and Apache, I couldnt really give two hoots whether or not there's a great deal of market share.
I live in the UK and I just my new DSL in. It costs insane amounts of money (equiv of $200/mo) but I get a 5-IP block and 256kb/512kb of up/down bandwidth and it's very low-latency and reliable (well, between 5am and 10pm anyway, Demon seem to like doing maintainance at midnight). From what I can tell broadband is only on the up in the UK - are we really beginning to beat the US here? if so it's going to be the biggest irony I've seen in a while;)
but, what the hell is VM? Virtual Memory? Virtual Machine? I hear a lot of stuff about VM performance wrt krnl2.4, can someone enlighten me? *waves down some karma whores*
Well, apparently Qt works fine under Windows (DCOP and the kio's for KDE, well that's another matter.. oh by hay why is my Konqueror taking several seconds to display anything i type... uh fuggit this is too annoying I cant be arsed to correct my spelling right now itf it's gonna take me half an hour -_-)
Anyways windows has an integrated widget and some weird font emantics and Qt seems to abstract that out fine. I'm sure it could cope with exported widgets. And i dont think any codfe rut is suppld by the app runs inside the display server, it's just that the display server is more advanced wrt being ble to redraw widgets by itself and stuff.
Ugh. fucking konqueror, what's with it all of a sudden.. memory leak ahoy.
Most programs don't wire to the X metal; toolkits do this and porting a single toolkit immediately goes a long way to porting a desktop environment over to a new windowing system. There's already some/dev/fb versions of GTK+ being developed, and Qt is particularly well suited to window independence; look at QT/Embedded. Any bets on how quickly we'll see Konqui running under Berlin?;) (Although I'd like to see the reaction and ensuing bloodshed when someone tells the KDE developers the whole thing's implemented on top of CORBA =) )
Come on, I'm no expert in this but there ought to be a way to prove the fundamental amount of information that is involved here. I'd like to see decent streaming AUDIO at 2kbytes/sec, let alone tv-quality AV.
Hmn. I actually don't know what to make of it, but personally I think 'GNU/Linux' is a bit inappropriate not because it's claiming credit for something the FSF didnt do or somesuch, it's just too damn long. Linux is two syllables, GNU/Linux is three. Talk about GNU/Linux in conversation and you sound like a bit of a ponce. Perhaps people should acknowledge that it's a GNU system but people shouldnt call Linux GNU/Linux any more than people should call Windows 'Microsoft Windows'.
...isnt there readwrite support for NTFS now? last I checked it was marked Dangerous but that was 2.4.4 and I'm sure its changed by.8 or.7 or whatever. It shouldnt be dangerous anyways because the file's blocks are all preallocated so the fs metadata shouldnt change (ok, maybe checksums & whatnot but no allocation or anything) so its probably safe. Was this the problem?
Now, what makes Linux difficult? First, there is partitioning your hard drive and installing file systems in preparation for the install. This makes many users really nervous. But here's the reality. If you started with a blank hard drive and installed Windows from scratch, you'd still have to set up the file system on the hard drive during the install. You might not have to *partition* the drive, but you don't have to do that with some of the Linux distributions if you are running them without a dual-boot situation. Don't want to go through the trouble of installing it yourself? Do what most people do with Windows -- buy a machine with the OS preinstalled. While rare, you can find machines with Linux preinstalled.
Look, there's a far simpler way of installing Linux without bothering with partitions or any of that UMSDOS crap; I was feeling REALLY bored a while back and I stumbled upon a fascinating HOWTO. You know the BeOS trick of making a virtual 'partition' out of a 400MB file on your Windows drive? Linux can do that. The HOWTO is here but here's the gist of it - you boot linux with root=/dev/loop0, and supply it with an initrd. The linuxrc on this initrd mounts the Windows partition and then calls losetup to tie/dev/loop0 to the 400MB 'partition' (typically it would also set up loop1 as a swap but one could always just use a swap file). Linuxrc then terminates and the kernel mounts/dev/loop0 as root, and moves the initrd onto/initrd. Provided you defragment your DOS partition beforehand this is probably going to be roughly as efficient as a partition and a heck of a lot less dangerous. The HOWTO is dated 1999, how come no-one's put this into a distro? Perhaps I should add it to Debian or something...;)
Slashdot Mirror
HTTP headers exist for explicitly requesting access to a resource in a certain language (though I dont know of any site that actually makes use of them), as for locating users though... well, you're largely going to be SOL there. Suppose you rDNS someone and their TLD is .fr, fine, that user is probably french. If their language request code is 'es' they're probably either spanish or from some spanish speaking territory - on its own not very useful but in tandem with an rDNS it could narrow things down. If you end up with a .com though, your choices are limited. Perhaps an IP and domain WHOIS could be made to intelligently parse the contact addresses for territories and such but if you're looking at a user from, say, AOL, you really cannot know unless they actually tell you where they're from; I'm sure AOL isnt giving this information.
;)
Then again, I suppose all this might be rendered redundant if The Man forces us all to go through an earmarking gateway of some sort, we'll see
That's proven quite useful to me. Right now I'm connected to AIM, ICQ and MSN via Gabber. It's an open protocol (massively verbose XML strings are about as open as it gets...), and because the IM system gating is done at the server the protocol is also simple, as are, by extension, the clients.
Granted the server transports sometimes go down, though I use theoretic.com's server which has been doing a sterling job so far. Now if I could just figure out how to go on IRC from this thing....
Hmm. No, I didnt mean there's incompatibility problems. I mean there's too much duplication of effort ;) Compatibility is good as one might expect; just about every office format under Linux is some sort of gzipped XML file
I'm quite sure there's downsides to it. Who the hell is going to care if a politician announces he's going to push for public funding towards free software? as opposed to the usual pitches like education, social services (well in the UK at least), public transport and so forth.
And if you exempt software from market forces, quality IS going to go down the tube. Because we'll get fourty different office suites, a few thousand MP3 organising systems and toy window managers and programming languages and no central focus. Sorry folks, open source is all well and good, and on a small to medium scale it can work; I, for instance, use KDE, I think its architecture and homogeneous design is a testament to the capabilities of open source developers. But for every such gem there's going to be hundreds of time sinks. You're going to need a PHB in there somewhere to focus people into a cohesive unit, so that instead of implementing some weird Emacs mode, a developer can help with a database project, or an IPC framework or hell SOMETHING. And that the entire system functions as a unit too - Debian's probably the best distribution in terms of actually having an overall plan to it but it's really at what I see as the fundamental scalability limit.
For other examples, look at Linux. Great OS huh? yeah sure, but look at LKML. The old protracted bickering over which VM is better continues to grow. Statistics and patches and optimisations and forced commits all go on and yet there's no progress. The 2.4 tree is absolute shit - I run it on my home server and it crashes every few weeks. Every few weeks?? what the hell is this shit, Windows 98? I've seen better uptimes on Win2K boxes! A 2.2 box I admin over in the US that runs as an IRC server once hit 130+ days of uptime before it crashed due to a power outage. Isnt 2.4 supposed to be a stable tree?
Anyways, I digress. The point is there's things open source is good for, and there's things commercial software is good for; I like Linux and all but I dont buy all this Stallman zealotry about the whole thing. I'd be happier seeing a bound and chained Microsoft, but equally so I dont think stuff like, say, Oracle, could ever be the product of open source coders. Say what you will about the arrogance of Oracle's CEO or whatever, point is it's the best in the market, and unfortunately enterprise level apps still don't run anything open source on the high level because open source initiatives simply lack the resources to agressively develop something like this. Open source, however, does produce well engineered foundations, such as the GNU toolset, which is pretty much standard these days.
But, hey, what do I know. I'll be interested to see some counter-examples to this though.
Actually, insofar as I know, Kups was subsumed by KPrint... see here.
KPrint's even got its own site so it may worth be checking out. I've managed to set up a printer entirely from its KControl applet in a GUI interface so it's really something. Then again I suppose there's GNOME Print but I dont know too much about that...
I use KPrint (part of KDE infrastructure) with CUPS... I dont think I could ask for much more, though admittedly I think you still have to set the thing up via the CUPS web interface.
Still, it's better than using lpr/lpq and wondering what bit of the pipeline ate your document =)
Why does this remind me of AMD's GiggaHertz(TM) lark?
On a more serious note though, I can't say I've ever heard of an official name for the base2 metric, however I remember there was some confusion a while ago about hard disk capacity... marketing weenies using one base and BIOS diagnostics displaying the other.... having said that of course these units just sound a bit lame anyway, perhaps we ought to come up with something, if nothing else, a little less ambiguous...
Both of them.
;) I dunno. Quake3 is pretty good I guess, but for some reason all the games I run under linux run about 20% slower. NV drivers perhaps? Whatever. So long as ZSNES works I'm happy with it.
AHAHAHAHAHAHA I crack myself up
I notice a lot of people are complaining about mass marketed music like NSync and Britney Spears. The problem is that, the RIAA isnt responsible for this watered down content manufacturing - people in general are. Take a tally of how many people listen to Linkin Park or the Offspring or something, then square it against the number of adolescents who buy BS and NSync. Sorry folks, but cheese pop seems to be where all the money's at, and if you're like Katz and think that people shouldnt follow simple market forces then go back to writing for Pravda :P
If you and others like you like music by these bands and buy it, fine. If there's money in it someone will service that niche, be it the RIAA or autonomous artists. However, until more people buy 'proper' music as one might refer to it, that's all it's gonna be, a niche.
But one has to wonder, is any of the stuff on slashdot FUD, opinionated and/or innacurate wrt Microsoft? (witness michael's article about MIME type holes recently)... mm... just a bit ;)
And, just to secure my Troll rating (and to prove that I too probably dunno what I'm on about), an OS which compiles into a 350K or so kernel for even the most basic of functions, plus tacked on realtime scheduling doesnt strike me as being very appropriate for embedded applications. Sorry folks, but this is one area where you NEED to pay for a lot of R&D and yea that does mean proprietary software; I'm no CS student but I do know that hard RT is a thankless thing to get right, as is supporting embedded microcontrollers and peripherals (CPU's dont exist in vacuum, right?) and consistent support for dozens of possible platforms (and, yes, bootloading said platforms). I remember RedHat was making something called EcOS.. it's young but the architecture at least seems designed for embedding; anyone know what's up with that recently?
OK, I'm an admin at a rather large (5000ish users) messageboard. Pray excuse the blatant plug but this is a fairly good case in point. People tend to spend extensive amounts of time on it, and the average users online is somewhere in the region of fifty during busy hours. So, naturally one would expect the company running the banner ads running our site to be thrilled (well, we dont do business with them directly, instead we go via the GSN network). Err, yeah possibly. Now let's examine the demographic for a second here. Check the calendar and some people's profiles and it would appear that most people are around, say, 14-21 years of age, with a lot living in Canada and the united kingdom, as well as the US.
So why the bloody hell do I see ads for god damn anti-baldness cream?! Saw these a while ago. I dont know many teenagers with a hairloss problem. Only, now we see some long-distance offers for as little as 4 cents per hour! wow! I'm ecstatic! please! tell me where to sign up!!!!
Oh, hang on
See, if you resolve my IP, it ends in .uk
So I'm not eligible for the service.
Drat.
Such a pity they wasted an impression on me.
This shouldnt be happening. Come on, if they stopped using their technical expertise to come up with elaborate systems which send me cookies but don't even sharpen their focus, they might be able to come up with something a bit more clever. Like resolving my IP (I'm gonna view more than one page per site so they can cache it) and serving me an ad based on something that's available in my area. Like an ADSL ISP in the UK with interesting rates - this might actually warrant me to click on it, and considering most people don't suddenly drop everything and tear off to their nearest Volkswagen dealership as soon as they see an ad on TV, that's an impression definately NOT wasted.
Or during the signup process for our site we could supply some information about us. Like the fact that we're a site based around a computer game series, or that most people here arent actually old enough to take out a credit card account with all those wonderful APR incentives. Serve me an ad for where I can get a PS2 or GeForce3 in the UK on the cheap! I'd click that too!
No, let's be big, flashy and patronising. That's always worked, hasnt it. Morons.
Care to elucidate me? =)
I'm of the opinion that there's only really one proper way to do this: an image generator. The site should keep a database of emails, together with a random ID. Then, whenever an email needs to be displayed on a page, you insert an image tag that looks like, say/> or whatever. This script looks up the email address in its database, then draws it. It then applies some noise and distorts it so that the email is more or less readable, but you'll have a hell of a job trying to automatically read these emails. Dunno, anyone think this will work?
Man... well, I dont exactly write code for a living but I can appreciate what you've done, for one. Nice job mate, but then again, life's hardly fair. At the end of the day you might console yourself with the warm fuzzy feeling you get inside ;)
Correct me if I'm wrong but weren't they grepping a .DL_ file for 'uake 3' as opposed to a .DLL? now, I dont use windows a great deal but afaict, a .DL_ file is an LZ compressed .DLL file... considering compression tends to munge the original contents out of recognition, this is probably little more than a coincidence.
Having said that though, if a symbol swap did indeed cause the drivers to slow down and output different images, this makes the point moot anyways. Can someone clarify here?
...damn, we've lost the war on the desktop. Allright, I'd better dump my KDE system and put win2k on immediately! after all, its just a losing battle right?
m'eh, this has been said aleph-1 times by now I suppose but I honestly dont give two hoots about 'market share'. KDE is bloody amazing, and doubly so for getting there in the space of 1/3 of the time it took microsoft. Word to the KDE developers, and keep on coding. I happen to like KDE and Linux and Apache, I couldnt really give two hoots whether or not there's a great deal of market share.
I live in the UK and I just my new DSL in. It costs insane amounts of money (equiv of $200/mo) but I get a 5-IP block and 256kb/512kb of up/down bandwidth and it's very low-latency and reliable (well, between 5am and 10pm anyway, Demon seem to like doing maintainance at midnight). From what I can tell broadband is only on the up in the UK - are we really beginning to beat the US here? if so it's going to be the biggest irony I've seen in a while ;)
but, what the hell is VM? Virtual Memory? Virtual Machine? I hear a lot of stuff about VM performance wrt krnl2.4, can someone enlighten me? *waves down some karma whores*
Kerberos is licensed under the BSD license; there's plenty of commercial implementations and the loophole is an intentional one.
Well, apparently Qt works fine under Windows (DCOP and the kio's for KDE, well that's another matter.. oh by hay why is my Konqueror taking several seconds to display anything i type... uh fuggit this is too annoying I cant be arsed to correct my spelling right now itf it's gonna take me half an hour -_-)
.. memory leak ahoy.
Anyways windows has an integrated widget and some weird font emantics and Qt seems to abstract that out fine. I'm sure it could cope with exported widgets. And i dont think any codfe rut is suppld by the app runs inside the display server, it's just that the display server is more advanced wrt being ble to redraw widgets by itself and stuff.
Ugh. fucking konqueror, what's with it all of a sudden
Most programs don't wire to the X metal; toolkits do this and porting a single toolkit immediately goes a long way to porting a desktop environment over to a new windowing system. There's already some /dev/fb versions of GTK+ being developed, and Qt is particularly well suited to window independence; look at QT/Embedded. Any bets on how quickly we'll see Konqui running under Berlin? ;) (Although I'd like to see the reaction and ensuing bloodshed when someone tells the KDE developers the whole thing's implemented on top of CORBA =) )
Information Theory.
Come on, I'm no expert in this but there ought to be a way to prove the fundamental amount of information that is involved here. I'd like to see decent streaming AUDIO at 2kbytes/sec, let alone tv-quality AV.
Hmn. I actually don't know what to make of it, but personally I think 'GNU/Linux' is a bit inappropriate not because it's claiming credit for something the FSF didnt do or somesuch, it's just too damn long. Linux is two syllables, GNU/Linux is three. Talk about GNU/Linux in conversation and you sound like a bit of a ponce. Perhaps people should acknowledge that it's a GNU system but people shouldnt call Linux GNU/Linux any more than people should call Windows 'Microsoft Windows'.
However much MS might like that.
...isnt there readwrite support for NTFS now? last I checked it was marked Dangerous but that was 2.4.4 and I'm sure its changed by .8 or .7 or whatever. It shouldnt be dangerous anyways because the file's blocks are all preallocated so the fs metadata shouldnt change (ok, maybe checksums & whatnot but no allocation or anything) so its probably safe. Was this the problem?
Now, what makes Linux difficult? First, there is partitioning your hard drive and installing file systems in preparation for the install. This makes many users really nervous. But here's the reality. If you started with a blank hard drive and installed Windows from scratch, you'd still have to set up the file system on the hard drive during the install. You might not have to *partition* the drive, but you don't have to do that with some of the Linux distributions if you are running them without a dual-boot situation. Don't want to go through the trouble of installing it yourself? Do what most people do with Windows -- buy a machine with the OS preinstalled. While rare, you can find machines with Linux preinstalled.
Look, there's a far simpler way of installing Linux without bothering with partitions or any of that UMSDOS crap; I was feeling REALLY bored a while back and I stumbled upon a fascinating HOWTO. You know the BeOS trick of making a virtual 'partition' out of a 400MB file on your Windows drive? Linux can do that. The HOWTO is here but here's the gist of it - you boot linux with root=/dev/loop0, and supply it with an initrd. The linuxrc on this initrd mounts the Windows partition and then calls losetup to tie /dev/loop0 to the 400MB 'partition' (typically it would also set up loop1 as a swap but one could always just use a swap file). Linuxrc then terminates and the kernel mounts /dev/loop0 as root, and moves the initrd onto /initrd. Provided you defragment your DOS partition beforehand this is probably going to be roughly as efficient as a partition and a heck of a lot less dangerous. The HOWTO is dated 1999, how come no-one's put this into a distro? Perhaps I should add it to Debian or something... ;)