You know, I keep hearing this: "It wouldn't be that hard to make malware for Linux, it's just that no one bothers with you dumb nerds! LOLzers!"
I call bullshit. Where's the really sensitive data? It's on Linux servers. If you're a malware author, that's the mother lode. I don't give a good God damn about what's in the Excel spreadsheets, I want the password file. So no, this tired old "no one bothers" line isn't gonna cut it with me.
So let me get this straight. You're an end-user tech, and three hours of your work bills out to more than $500? I am totally sickened right now. No wonder people think our profession is predatory. Please get out of the business and let us honest folks try to make a living.
What a bunch of bullshit. I sell these things ("these things" being Ubuntu boxes) to old people and soccer moms and liberal arts kids. And although I agree with your assertion that that "a lot of things that can make geeks more productive are detrimental to general usage," virtual desktops is (are?) something that everybody I've ever shown it to has immediately been like "Whoa, that's great! Does Windows do that?" Seriously, old women and English majors get it. You obviously don't.
Certainly. I know several Mac users who would probably go (back) to Windows if it didn't suck so horribly. You're gonna have a hell of a lot tougher time selling it to me as a free software user, because I can assure you that my concerns about Windows are not being fixed.
Train them to be nervous and worried about UAC dialogs... they should never see one unless they are installing software. It will encourage them to call you when one shows up.
You must have one of those unlimited minutes plans.
Re:I also give the book a 9...I own it
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Ubuntu Kung Fu
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· Score: 1
Really? I used to say that, but as I've become more advanced as a Linux user, I find more and more that I don't get the answers I need there. They are great for rookie questions, it's what got me over the hump, and for that I'm eternally grateful. But now most of my questions go to my local LUG listserv or IRC.
Re:Simple shit you didn't know existed
on
Ubuntu Kung Fu
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· Score: 1
'man hier'
You know, although I'm familiar with most of the material already, I did not know that man page was there. Thanks!
Re:So much for free!
on
Ubuntu Kung Fu
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· Score: 2, Insightful
What horseshit. You learn something about Linux, and that knowledge is universally useful for the rest of your life. You "learn" something about the buttons to push in Windows, and that is wasted time. You actually come out dumber.
Windows: It's not free even if your time is worthless.
I don't know why you got modded troll. I think you're wrong, but I don't see it as a troll.
But the true novice (I was in a college course with them... I took it for an easy A and for some of the more advanced stuff, but it started with how to install Linux...) is going to be doing these weird random console commands and has NO clue what he's doing.
I can totally see where you're coming from with this, but what's the solution? I myself, when I was a green n00b, really liked it when I would get console help that included brief descriptions of what each command did. But that's me, and a lot of people are simply going to be further intimidated by that. I don't see an easy answer.
install a printer. In Windows, you plug it in, and it works. Or, you put in the CD, install the drivers, and it works. On Linux, sometimes you have to do some really weird things to get this or that printer to work.
Let's look at this another way.
Linux: Plug the printer in. 95% of the time it will work. The other 5% of the time you may need some bash-fu. But then it'll work.
Windows: Plug the printer in. 50% of the time it will work. 40% of the time you will put in the CD and it will work. The other 10% of the time... well, you're fucked.
I know which one of those I like better.
Even package management can be a real pain, with this or that dependency missing. What's a dependency? Why doesn't it install? Why is this so confusing, why can't they just make it so I download something and install it and it works, like on Windows?
Here you lose me. Since I started using Ubuntu (in '04 or so, pretty early on), I have never never NEVER had this happen to me with the Ubuntu repositories. I have had it happen on occasion when pulling from non-standard repos, but I think that's a whole different ballgame and if you're advanced enough to get to that spot in the first place, you're advanced enough to deal with it. But my main point here is that I've never seen it happen with the main Ubuntu repositories. Never. Installing, maintaining, and removing software on a Debian-based system is so much easier than on Windows that it's not even a fair comparison. Full stop.
Anyways. Point is that the documentation for those that know enough to use it (even if "documentation" equals "google") is pretty good. But having to BUY "documentation" (e.g., a book) because you have no clue about this whole Linux thing, you just got tired of having Windows crash with spyware, adware, and viruses... I don't know. IMO, that documentation is pretty bad if you don't know enough to barely know what to look for..:)
Then again, I guess paying $100-$150 for Windows to have it "just work" is basically paying for the documentation, just you don't have to read it;)
Okay, this is kind of trollish and I'm not going to reply to it.
Okay, but don't laugh. It's a Pentium D processor, Intel onboard graphics, and I just recently upgraded from 1 to 2 gig of RAM. Compiz barely runs (haven't tried since the memory upgrade, to be fair). Kwin absolutely flies. I realize this is a battle of anecdotes and proves nothing, but it's my experience, fwiw. Also, I have never gotten artifacts with Kwin. I don't think I've ever seen it crash on me either (Plasma is another story altogether...)
The desktop and the panel are still different, although the same widgets can now go in both places.
No they're not. Plasma is built on the idea of "containments." Widgets, the desktop, and the panel are all containments. They can contain data and/or they can contain other containments. I wish I could find the link to Seigo's blog that explains this better...
And they do have to be widgets -- applications won't do.
This guy made a "window-swallowing" widget within about four months of the dot-oh release. Also, see the "web browser" plasmoid which is really just a stripped-down version of Konqueror. Granted, that "window-swallowing" link is more of a concept piece than a working idea, but yeah, it can totally be done.
The desktop background is not drawn by a widget.
No, the desktop is a containment. See above. Which is one of the cool things about this. There's no more "coding for a desktop widget" or "coding for a panel applet" or "coding for X or Y." You're just coding for Plasma. And as an added bonus, you can write for Plasma in whatever language you like. This is the same thing that allows Plasma to use Google Widgets, Screenlets, etc.
Really, I am far more interested in the technical improvements and concepts of Plasma than I am the eye candy factor. Not that that isn't cool, but as you say, it's been done. But this stuff hasn't been done before. No, it's not a paradigm shift in terms of user interface, but it most certainly is a pretty major shift in how you code for the desktop.
(This is the part where I skip over Amarok, because really it's not related to the topic, and I certainly don't like Amarok all that much either.)
And they did so by perverting the meaning of version numbers in the same way Microsoft has for decades.
Way to drag out Microsoft as a strawman there. Whether you like their version numbering or not, they told you what was coming. Some people did not listen, and that's their own damn fault. Some distribution packagers did not listen, and that's a damn shame, but there it is.
Granted. But Firefox 3 was over two years in the making, and they still managed to pull off a solid release.
Okay, but again, "making" means something totally different in the context of a single application (especially something like a web browser, which is a pretty well mapped-out space already), and it certainly means something different when your "making" means adapting and updating an existing code base. There may be other examples you could use in this spot, but Firefox isn't one.
I'm not trying to argue economics with you, although yes, lots and lots of people (me too!) make their living developing, distributing, and/or using free software. But that's immaterial to my argument.
I'm not talking about the programmer's livelihood. I'm talking about everybody's livelihood who makes their money in front of a computer. I'm talking about communities of people that exist on the internet. I'm talking about all computer users everywhere and the rights that they should have, and the rights I demand.
If we're all going to spend more and more of our times hooked into these machines, then free software is fundamentally a social justice issue. That's the thrust of what I'm trying to say here.
Compiz can do everything Kwin can. Why am I using KDE again?
Kwin is so much faster than Compiz on my hardware it's not even a fair comparison. That's why.
Plasma... marketspeak... Vista/OSX...
Not at all. I'm not talking about clicking the pretty widgets here, I'm talking a desktop system that's totally built on svg graphics, and a system that removes the artificial barriers between application, desktop, panel, etc. In Plasma it's all of a piece. The eye candy's nice, but it's not the point.
as another poster points out, how the fuck does an audio player release a 2.0 which doesn't have a fucking pause button that works?
Hey man, no arguments from me. But in the interest of fairness, Amarok is a completely different team and development cycle. Amarok is not KDE.
It's the audacity to call an alpha a dot-oh release, and a beta a dot-one release -- and then trying to blame everyone but yourselves when we expect a sane, smooth upgrade.
Not true at all. The KDE team told you what to expect. We all walked into this with eyes wide open. "If you want stability you want 3.5. If you want the Next Big Thing you want 4." To my knowledge the KDE folks didn't tell anyone to stop packaging KDE3 for their distributions. Maybe you should bring this up with the people that did that.
Firefox 3 was usable at launch, and Firefox 2 kept getting patches for six months after launch
This is an absurd comparison. It's like comparing a hammer to a truck. Firefox 3 is a web browser (and built on the same code as the earlier version to boot). KDE4 is... not.
You don't have an inherent right to demand that everyone use shit you yourself have vetted as being oh-so-FREE-SOFTWAAAAAAAAAAAAAARE.
No. What you do have (until you piss it away) is the right to use your tools however you want. Flash detracts from my ability to do that. Simple as that. If my refusal to tolerate that means you get to punch the dancing monkey and I don't, then I've got to say I just don't give a fuck.
Your philosophy is based on the erroneous assumption that a computer is "just a tool." It is not. A computer is people's livelihoods, people's communities. A computer is where millions of people spend half their lives. It's not just about "having a working tool." It is about freedom.
I have some tools that I was given for free, and I have some tools that I went to Home Depot and bought outright. I use each of them, in different ways, for different tasks in order to maximize my overall efficiency and minimize my overhead.
Yeah, but I bet you don't have any hammers that come with a license that says "You must pay Sears an additional $50 if you want to use this hammer to build a structure larger than X" or "This hammer is licensed to you for your personal use, you may not lend this hammer to your neighbor." I'm fairly sure you also don't have any "evaluation copy" hammers that stop being hammers after 90 days. So why would you put up with that kind of bullshit with your software?
Nonsense. There is no way the kernel team would have written the GNU toolset from scratch. Having an existing, free stack to put on top of the Linux kernel is what made the whole thing happen.
Why should people care about freedom? Because it's not just a tool. It's where millions of people spend half their lives. It's people's livelihoods. It's people's communities. Freedom matters in your computer just as much as it matters in your town. Freedom matters because freedom matters.
and Linux/BSD/etc. in the last corner with poor (but slowly improving) driver support that may or may not work out of the box.
Bull. GNU/Linux supports more hardware out of the box than any other operating system ever has.
What Stallman needs to do is catch up with the biggest development in the computing world of the past 25 years: the growth of computer users who do not know anything about their computers, and do not care to know.
Absolutely. We reached technological parity with the non-free competition years ago. But that's not the end of the road, it's just the start. Because regardless of how advanced the system is, put a new user in front of it and the first time something goes wrong (and something always goes wrong, whether you're using a free system or a non-free one) it's gonna be "Well, why'd you push this freeware crap on me?!"
But in the years I've been involved with this (plenty), I've never once seen a user who really understood freedom and what it meant and why it's important, and then went back to non-free software. It's an issue of education, and there's no easy way to overcome that. Just gotta keep pushing.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm actually posting from a winXP machine, which has been up since April 2004
Screenshot or it didn't happen.
Seriously. If that's true, I'm hella-impressed.
Your OS has to reboot to run updates! LULZ!
When you do your homework before making a major electronics purchase, dumbass.
And FYI, we are a business to business company providing outsourced IT support. A real bargain for them not to employ an in-house tech full time.
Okay, that's a whole different ballgame. I was extrapolating from two of your comments, and came up with a mistaken impression. I sincerely apologize.
You know, I keep hearing this: "It wouldn't be that hard to make malware for Linux, it's just that no one bothers with you dumb nerds! LOLzers!"
I call bullshit. Where's the really sensitive data? It's on Linux servers. If you're a malware author, that's the mother lode. I don't give a good God damn about what's in the Excel spreadsheets, I want the password file. So no, this tired old "no one bothers" line isn't gonna cut it with me.
So let me get this straight. You're an end-user tech, and three hours of your work bills out to more than $500? I am totally sickened right now. No wonder people think our profession is predatory. Please get out of the business and let us honest folks try to make a living.
What a bunch of bullshit. I sell these things ("these things" being Ubuntu boxes) to old people and soccer moms and liberal arts kids. And although I agree with your assertion that that "a lot of things that can make geeks more productive are detrimental to general usage," virtual desktops is (are?) something that everybody I've ever shown it to has immediately been like "Whoa, that's great! Does Windows do that?" Seriously, old women and English majors get it. You obviously don't.
You can have my maximize button when you pry it from my cold dead hands.
Certainly. I know several Mac users who would probably go (back) to Windows if it didn't suck so horribly. You're gonna have a hell of a lot tougher time selling it to me as a free software user, because I can assure you that my concerns about Windows are not being fixed.
I've seen that movie.
Train them to be nervous and worried about UAC dialogs... they should never see one unless they are installing software. It will encourage them to call you when one shows up.
You must have one of those unlimited minutes plans.
I liked it. I was 9.
Really? I used to say that, but as I've become more advanced as a Linux user, I find more and more that I don't get the answers I need there. They are great for rookie questions, it's what got me over the hump, and for that I'm eternally grateful. But now most of my questions go to my local LUG listserv or IRC.
'man hier'
You know, although I'm familiar with most of the material already, I did not know that man page was there. Thanks!
What horseshit. You learn something about Linux, and that knowledge is universally useful for the rest of your life. You "learn" something about the buttons to push in Windows, and that is wasted time. You actually come out dumber.
Windows: It's not free even if your time is worthless.
I don't know why you got modded troll. I think you're wrong, but I don't see it as a troll.
But the true novice (I was in a college course with them... I took it for an easy A and for some of the more advanced stuff, but it started with how to install Linux...) is going to be doing these weird random console commands and has NO clue what he's doing.
I can totally see where you're coming from with this, but what's the solution? I myself, when I was a green n00b, really liked it when I would get console help that included brief descriptions of what each command did. But that's me, and a lot of people are simply going to be further intimidated by that. I don't see an easy answer.
install a printer. In Windows, you plug it in, and it works. Or, you put in the CD, install the drivers, and it works. On Linux, sometimes you have to do some really weird things to get this or that printer to work.
Let's look at this another way.
Linux: Plug the printer in. 95% of the time it will work. The other 5% of the time you may need some bash-fu. But then it'll work.
Windows: Plug the printer in. 50% of the time it will work. 40% of the time you will put in the CD and it will work. The other 10% of the time... well, you're fucked.
I know which one of those I like better.
Even package management can be a real pain, with this or that dependency missing. What's a dependency? Why doesn't it install? Why is this so confusing, why can't they just make it so I download something and install it and it works, like on Windows?
Here you lose me. Since I started using Ubuntu (in '04 or so, pretty early on), I have never never NEVER had this happen to me with the Ubuntu repositories. I have had it happen on occasion when pulling from non-standard repos, but I think that's a whole different ballgame and if you're advanced enough to get to that spot in the first place, you're advanced enough to deal with it. But my main point here is that I've never seen it happen with the main Ubuntu repositories. Never. Installing, maintaining, and removing software on a Debian-based system is so much easier than on Windows that it's not even a fair comparison. Full stop.
Anyways. Point is that the documentation for those that know enough to use it (even if "documentation" equals "google") is pretty good. But having to BUY "documentation" (e.g., a book) because you have no clue about this whole Linux thing, you just got tired of having Windows crash with spyware, adware, and viruses... I don't know. IMO, that documentation is pretty bad if you don't know enough to barely know what to look for.. :)
Then again, I guess paying $100-$150 for Windows to have it "just work" is basically paying for the documentation, just you don't have to read it ;)
Okay, this is kind of trollish and I'm not going to reply to it.
"Oh, well... someone else woulda done it!"
But they didn't.
What hardware would that be?
Okay, but don't laugh. It's a Pentium D processor, Intel onboard graphics, and I just recently upgraded from 1 to 2 gig of RAM. Compiz barely runs (haven't tried since the memory upgrade, to be fair). Kwin absolutely flies. I realize this is a battle of anecdotes and proves nothing, but it's my experience, fwiw. Also, I have never gotten artifacts with Kwin. I don't think I've ever seen it crash on me either (Plasma is another story altogether...)
The desktop and the panel are still different, although the same widgets can now go in both places.
No they're not. Plasma is built on the idea of "containments." Widgets, the desktop, and the panel are all containments. They can contain data and/or they can contain other containments. I wish I could find the link to Seigo's blog that explains this better...
And they do have to be widgets -- applications won't do.
This guy made a "window-swallowing" widget within about four months of the dot-oh release. Also, see the "web browser" plasmoid which is really just a stripped-down version of Konqueror. Granted, that "window-swallowing" link is more of a concept piece than a working idea, but yeah, it can totally be done.
The desktop background is not drawn by a widget.
No, the desktop is a containment. See above. Which is one of the cool things about this. There's no more "coding for a desktop widget" or "coding for a panel applet" or "coding for X or Y." You're just coding for Plasma. And as an added bonus, you can write for Plasma in whatever language you like. This is the same thing that allows Plasma to use Google Widgets, Screenlets, etc.
Really, I am far more interested in the technical improvements and concepts of Plasma than I am the eye candy factor. Not that that isn't cool, but as you say, it's been done. But this stuff hasn't been done before. No, it's not a paradigm shift in terms of user interface, but it most certainly is a pretty major shift in how you code for the desktop.
(This is the part where I skip over Amarok, because really it's not related to the topic, and I certainly don't like Amarok all that much either.)
And they did so by perverting the meaning of version numbers in the same way Microsoft has for decades.
Way to drag out Microsoft as a strawman there. Whether you like their version numbering or not, they told you what was coming. Some people did not listen, and that's their own damn fault. Some distribution packagers did not listen, and that's a damn shame, but there it is.
Granted. But Firefox 3 was over two years in the making, and they still managed to pull off a solid release.
Okay, but again, "making" means something totally different in the context of a single application (especially something like a web browser, which is a pretty well mapped-out space already), and it certainly means something different when your "making" means adapting and updating an existing code base. There may be other examples you could use in this spot, but Firefox isn't one.
I'm not trying to argue economics with you, although yes, lots and lots of people (me too!) make their living developing, distributing, and/or using free software. But that's immaterial to my argument.
I'm not talking about the programmer's livelihood. I'm talking about everybody's livelihood who makes their money in front of a computer. I'm talking about communities of people that exist on the internet. I'm talking about all computer users everywhere and the rights that they should have, and the rights I demand.
If we're all going to spend more and more of our times hooked into these machines, then free software is fundamentally a social justice issue. That's the thrust of what I'm trying to say here.
Compiz can do everything Kwin can. Why am I using KDE again?
Kwin is so much faster than Compiz on my hardware it's not even a fair comparison. That's why.
Plasma... marketspeak... Vista/OSX...
Not at all. I'm not talking about clicking the pretty widgets here, I'm talking a desktop system that's totally built on svg graphics, and a system that removes the artificial barriers between application, desktop, panel, etc. In Plasma it's all of a piece. The eye candy's nice, but it's not the point.
as another poster points out, how the fuck does an audio player release a 2.0 which doesn't have a fucking pause button that works?
Hey man, no arguments from me. But in the interest of fairness, Amarok is a completely different team and development cycle. Amarok is not KDE.
It's the audacity to call an alpha a dot-oh release, and a beta a dot-one release -- and then trying to blame everyone but yourselves when we expect a sane, smooth upgrade.
Not true at all. The KDE team told you what to expect. We all walked into this with eyes wide open. "If you want stability you want 3.5. If you want the Next Big Thing you want 4." To my knowledge the KDE folks didn't tell anyone to stop packaging KDE3 for their distributions. Maybe you should bring this up with the people that did that.
Firefox 3 was usable at launch, and Firefox 2 kept getting patches for six months after launch
This is an absurd comparison. It's like comparing a hammer to a truck. Firefox 3 is a web browser (and built on the same code as the earlier version to boot). KDE4 is... not.
You don't have an inherent right to demand that everyone use shit you yourself have vetted as being oh-so-FREE-SOFTWAAAAAAAAAAAAAARE.
No. What you do have (until you piss it away) is the right to use your tools however you want. Flash detracts from my ability to do that. Simple as that. If my refusal to tolerate that means you get to punch the dancing monkey and I don't, then I've got to say I just don't give a fuck.
Your philosophy is based on the erroneous assumption that a computer is "just a tool." It is not. A computer is people's livelihoods, people's communities. A computer is where millions of people spend half their lives. It's not just about "having a working tool." It is about freedom.
I have some tools that I was given for free, and I have some tools that I went to Home Depot and bought outright. I use each of them, in different ways, for different tasks in order to maximize my overall efficiency and minimize my overhead.
Yeah, but I bet you don't have any hammers that come with a license that says "You must pay Sears an additional $50 if you want to use this hammer to build a structure larger than X" or "This hammer is licensed to you for your personal use, you may not lend this hammer to your neighbor." I'm fairly sure you also don't have any "evaluation copy" hammers that stop being hammers after 90 days. So why would you put up with that kind of bullshit with your software?
Nonsense. There is no way the kernel team would have written the GNU toolset from scratch. Having an existing, free stack to put on top of the Linux kernel is what made the whole thing happen.
Why should people care about freedom? Because it's not just a tool. It's where millions of people spend half their lives. It's people's livelihoods. It's people's communities. Freedom matters in your computer just as much as it matters in your town. Freedom matters because freedom matters.
and Linux/BSD/etc. in the last corner with poor (but slowly improving) driver support that may or may not work out of the box.
Bull. GNU/Linux supports more hardware out of the box than any other operating system ever has.
What Stallman needs to do is catch up with the biggest development in the computing world of the past 25 years: the growth of computer users who do not know anything about their computers, and do not care to know.
Absolutely. We reached technological parity with the non-free competition years ago. But that's not the end of the road, it's just the start. Because regardless of how advanced the system is, put a new user in front of it and the first time something goes wrong (and something always goes wrong, whether you're using a free system or a non-free one) it's gonna be "Well, why'd you push this freeware crap on me?!"
But in the years I've been involved with this (plenty), I've never once seen a user who really understood freedom and what it meant and why it's important, and then went back to non-free software. It's an issue of education, and there's no easy way to overcome that. Just gotta keep pushing.