For me, as a Computer Scientist, it's all about the packages.
For me, as a Baptist, it's not. Just as long as we're tossing out unrelated qualifiers.
No other distro out there offers the depth and breadth of packages that Gentoo does.
Interestingly, I feel the exact same way about Debian, and that's what kept putting me off of Gentoo - the packages I wanted just weren't there.
I like Gentoo and still use it on some very old hardware where the extra 5% performance from "-fomit-instructions" actually makes a difference. Those systems also have so relatively few packages installed that I haven't run into the problems that other people are complaining about here. However, I wouldn't hold it up as the epitome of having everything available. It does a decent job, but no better than some other distros.
I run Gentoo on five different systems, including a laptop and an Alpha. For me one of the big advantages is that it doesn't fill up with dozens of unwanted libraries.
On Debian and its derivatives, that's a feature of the recommended "aptitude" package manager. I can't believe that the major RPM-based distros don't have that functionality in their package managers, too (and no, the "rpm" command doesn't count here).
Who cares if it's popular? If it solves your problem, use it.
Two reasons: first, the more people use it, the wider it will be supported. It's nice to be involved with something on the upswing that more people are interested in than bored with. Second, it's nice to know why something's unpopular. Maybe it's hard to use, but you're a genius and will be able to put it to work. Or, maybe, everyone else realized that it's awful and moved on to something less heinous.
The eye is pure Masonic, and I know I'll take flack on this, but this is all straight out of the Illuminati playbook too.
As a Mason, I'm always a little bit amused by these comments. The reality of a Lodge meeting is that we have a business meeting, grouse about the price of postage for our newsletter, then go downstairs to eat pie and drink coffee (decaf because it's late). I wish that Lodge was as glamorous as TV and countless conspiracy theories make it, but then, "House" also is a lot cooler than your average real-life doctor.
And you're missing the point. "Public domain" has a specific legal meaning, and the idea of content losing any copyright status simply because it's been sent over a wireless connection is completely idiotic. Put in a way that might resonate with this audience: that would mean that Linux loses all GPL protections if it's downloaded over a Wi-Fi link (or if one of its network hops is via microwave or satellite).
I'm not even particularly pro-copyright, but that's just amazingly bad. If the original poster had something else in mind, he should have said so.
Anything broadcast over the public airwaves (_all_ spectra is a natural public resource, spectrum "auctions" be damned), should be considered to have been placed into the public domain (it has, quite literally, but it should apply legally, also).
That's an excellent idea! Please let me know when you email your latest novel over Wi-Fi. After all, it's being broadcast over the public airwaves, so I should be entitled to it.
Honestly, did you think about that for more than 2 seconds before you decided to write it, or did you just check to see if it passed the "Slashdotters will love it!" filter and decide to run with it?
Its the guy (the capitain) who couldn't keep his dcik in his pants. He's the one who ought to be fired for playing with women's emotions.
OK, I know you're trolling. But taking that seriously anyway, would any reasonable person not expect an astronaut to like the ladies?
Thrillseekers are notoriously promiscuous, and notoriously good at it. The reasons are probably too long to get into here, but you can boil it down to "women like dangerous men" and "dangerous men like women" (yeah, generalization - shoot me). This isn't really debatable, it just is. Now, astronauts are basically the embodied ideal of thrillseeking behavior. Sure, they're incredibly smart and selected to be calm under immense stress, but those are the main things separating them from cliff divers, parachutists, and dragracers.
What you're asking for is brilliant, brave, healthy, clean, and chaste. Has that combination happened more than a couple of times in history?
Since Feinstein is a prominent Democrat, and not acting in a way that can conceivably be written off as being oppressed by the Republican majority, can we finally admit that both parties hate us?
I actually didn't think he was being *that* much of a dick. I mean, you can tell he was frustrated. He takes a bunch of shots at the people trying to help him, but still, he just seems frustrated.
But that's all it takes to end any chance of him getting help. These aren't paid employees, but people who want to help others just like themselves use the system that they're all learning together. Maybe he had a reason to be frustrated (although I don't think so), but you absolutely cannot take it out on people who are altruistically trying to help you and expect them to keep doing it.
Right, I didn't tell them which version of Windows it was. Of course, when it *doesn't even get to the point where it would load an operating system*, that is clearly not necessary.
You were asking for help from people who presumably know more about the issue than you do. After all, if they didn't, you wouldn't be asking them, right? OK, here's the deal: there's nothing, nothing I hated more when working tech support than to ask a question and be told that I didn't need to know the answer. Well, the fact that I asked it would strongly indicate that I needed that information to help you. Furthermore, I don't necessarily have the time or energy to explain why I need every individual piece of information (although I'll usually tell you if you ask nicely and I can spare a few seconds). The usual reason is that there's some obscure interaction involved that I know about and that wouldn't usually occur to a novice, but I don't want to confuse the issue until I've confirmed the hypothesis.
No, people who insist that my questions are irrelevant are my single biggest peeve. Now that I don't get paid to deal with it, I won't. I'm willing to treat you like an adult by answering your questions accurately and intelligently, but your end of the contract is to treat me like an adult by answering my questions, even if your experience isn't enough to tell you why I'm asking them.
5) If you act like a spoiled jerk on a community-driven forum, stamp your little feet, and absolutely refuse to try any of their troubleshooting ideas or provide them with the information they repeatedly ask for, then they probably won't help you.
Yeah, I read the thread where you "tried" to get help. Your take on the episode doesn't have a lot to do with what you actually posted at the time.
Moderators, before you mark me down, actually read the Slashdot thread he linked to. I'm not the one who initially pointed out his tantrums and complete refusal to help fix his own problem. I can't believe that he uses that thread as supporting evidence of why Ubuntu is broken.
Most people don't stick with Office because they have to, they stick with it because frankly everything else sucks royally in comparison.
They stick with it because most of the time they don't realize there are choices. My company switched almost completely to OpenOffice. There are still a couple of people that need Word and Excel for specific reasons, but everyone else is chugging along merrily.
We're not a nest of high-tech early adopters; quite the opposite, in fact. It just doesn't make financial sense to give every employee a copy of Office when almost none of them use the "extra" features.
First, in general, losing market share is exactly equal to losing money. By definition, that's a threat to a for-profit organization.
Second, Microsoft is particularly vulnerable here. Their business model is pretty much built around the idea of having near-total market dominance. I could see Office going from a 98% market share to 50% in an extremely short period of time - all indications are that this has already begun - and a major government stating that they are officially OpenOffice-compatible is only going to make that happen faster.
Seriously, think about that. Today, if you're a government contractor, you have to buy Office to work with your client. Since 20% of your employees have to use Office, and they'll probably want to work with the other 80% at some time, you're pretty much going to end up a 100% Office shop. If this bill passes, you can still let that customer-facing 20% use Office if they really want it (maybe they're power users and comfortable? Whatever your reasons) assuming that MS gives it a working ODF plugin. However, maybe it starts making a lot more sense to put OpenOffice or something else on those other employees' desktops. That's pretty much the definition of a nightmare in Redmond.
I guess I just don't see why an open binary format, which can store all this information much more precisely and efficiently, wouldn't be better.
In this particular case, we're talking about government documents. Remember, the gov't likes to keep things for a long, long time. Don't believe me? Go down the the land office and see how far back they keep property titles.
In this context, XML makes perfect sense as its contents will probably be readable forever. Even if we forget how to write ASCII or UTF-8, future infoarchaeologists wouldn't have any problem figuring it out. There is no doubt whatsoever that in 100 years, a government will still be able to open these files. Compare and contrast with.doc files, where an increasing number of documents are lost forever with each Office upgrade.
Word's.doc is fine if you're writing a letter. If you want to keep something for a century, plaintext is a requirement, and XML is the only game in town for storing lots of diverse content in plaintext.
Wikipedians don't generally let people wave around credentials and end discussions thereby.
But everyone else seems to; that's the Slashdotter's constant lament. And Wikipedia isn't just "Wikipedians", but lots of regular people who have something to add to an article or two. A jaded editor isn't likely to be bullied around, but that's not the kind of person this hurts most.
He didn't deliberately flood wikipedia with false information to mislead.
Most of us put "lying" and "misleading" on roughly the same footing.
What about all the good he has done? Are we to flush it down the toilet.
Yes. Because at this point, it's probably impossible to tell how much influence he improperly exerted through his lies. Every single article he's touched has to be considered tainted until it can be generally agreed that:
He posted accurate information that stands on its own merits, and not just random junk that people let stand because, hey, it was written by a Th.D., and/or
He didn't prevent anyone else from posting accurate information by way of the prestige he lied his way into.
Essjay's damage is particularly bad because it could be so subtle. How many people deferred to his judgment at the expense of correctness? We'll probably never know.
Ben Franklin aka Silence Dogood "lied" about his identity too.. I ask.. so what?
Indeed: so what? Silence Dogood was a middle-aged widow. What particular authority did that lie grant Franklin, assuming that he wasn't writing about childbearing or what it's like to lose your spouse? Essjay, though, directly stated that he had the educational background to make authoritative statements in his pages. Surely you can see that there's much more than a semantic difference between the two actions?
I trust people based on whether i think they'll screw me over. And nothing else.
The real question: Do you like George Bush [...] Or do you hate Bush [...]?
No, the real, real question is: why are you so desperate to drag political bullshit into every story? Love him or hate him, GWB has absolutely nothing to do with how much Microsoft charges for a patch.
It's hard to say this without sounding like a zealot, but these kinds of things are nothing but good for Free Software. This patch should be nothing more than an edit to a single configuration file (and if it's not, then that's another problem), but you can't download that change freely or give it to your friends? I can understand - even if I disagree - with not giving away your applications. I cannot be made to understand, though, not giving away trivial bugfixes.
They could have used "misc" (for miscellaneous) but the original Unix developers were both more classically educated and had a preference for 3-letter abbreviations.
Google says:
Miscellaneous in the English language is a word used to describe a thing or a set of things that cannot be categorized into other categories. It can be distinguished from Etcetera as etcetera is a continuation of a set of things while this word deals with the incategorization of things.
Now that you mention it, that seems a lot more accurate than "etc". Looking back, I'm not sure why we're not explaining that "/msc" doesn't stand for "manual system control" or some other heinous backronym.
I find the OSX root-level breakdown (Applications, Library, System, Users) a bit more sensible.
And they're even more logical once you realize that "Library" has absolutely nothing to do with what an average new user would expect. If you're going to "humanize" the decades-old directory structure, then go all the way.
Slashdot Mirror
For me, as a Baptist, it's not. Just as long as we're tossing out unrelated qualifiers.
Interestingly, I feel the exact same way about Debian, and that's what kept putting me off of Gentoo - the packages I wanted just weren't there.
I like Gentoo and still use it on some very old hardware where the extra 5% performance from "-fomit-instructions" actually makes a difference. Those systems also have so relatively few packages installed that I haven't run into the problems that other people are complaining about here. However, I wouldn't hold it up as the epitome of having everything available. It does a decent job, but no better than some other distros.
On Debian and its derivatives, that's a feature of the recommended "aptitude" package manager. I can't believe that the major RPM-based distros don't have that functionality in their package managers, too (and no, the "rpm" command doesn't count here).
Two reasons: first, the more people use it, the wider it will be supported. It's nice to be involved with something on the upswing that more people are interested in than bored with. Second, it's nice to know why something's unpopular. Maybe it's hard to use, but you're a genius and will be able to put it to work. Or, maybe, everyone else realized that it's awful and moved on to something less heinous.
As a Mason, I'm always a little bit amused by these comments. The reality of a Lodge meeting is that we have a business meeting, grouse about the price of postage for our newsletter, then go downstairs to eat pie and drink coffee (decaf because it's late). I wish that Lodge was as glamorous as TV and countless conspiracy theories make it, but then, "House" also is a lot cooler than your average real-life doctor.
You are fnord ordered to believe this.
How many of those compounds are 100% guaranteed to completely disappear the instant they're done poisoning the target cells?
1) Mine is "kanga". DNS: learn it, love it.
2) Because if you're doing it, do it once - correctly - and be done with it.
And you're missing the point. "Public domain" has a specific legal meaning, and the idea of content losing any copyright status simply because it's been sent over a wireless connection is completely idiotic. Put in a way that might resonate with this audience: that would mean that Linux loses all GPL protections if it's downloaded over a Wi-Fi link (or if one of its network hops is via microwave or satellite).
I'm not even particularly pro-copyright, but that's just amazingly bad. If the original poster had something else in mind, he should have said so.
That's an excellent idea! Please let me know when you email your latest novel over Wi-Fi. After all, it's being broadcast over the public airwaves, so I should be entitled to it.
Honestly, did you think about that for more than 2 seconds before you decided to write it, or did you just check to see if it passed the "Slashdotters will love it!" filter and decide to run with it?
OK, I know you're trolling. But taking that seriously anyway, would any reasonable person not expect an astronaut to like the ladies?
Thrillseekers are notoriously promiscuous, and notoriously good at it. The reasons are probably too long to get into here, but you can boil it down to "women like dangerous men" and "dangerous men like women" (yeah, generalization - shoot me). This isn't really debatable, it just is. Now, astronauts are basically the embodied ideal of thrillseeking behavior. Sure, they're incredibly smart and selected to be calm under immense stress, but those are the main things separating them from cliff divers, parachutists, and dragracers.
What you're asking for is brilliant, brave, healthy, clean, and chaste. Has that combination happened more than a couple of times in history?
Since Feinstein is a prominent Democrat, and not acting in a way that can conceivably be written off as being oppressed by the Republican majority, can we finally admit that both parties hate us?
Chris, he was a troll and got modded as such. Forget about him.
But that's all it takes to end any chance of him getting help. These aren't paid employees, but people who want to help others just like themselves use the system that they're all learning together. Maybe he had a reason to be frustrated (although I don't think so), but you absolutely cannot take it out on people who are altruistically trying to help you and expect them to keep doing it.
You were asking for help from people who presumably know more about the issue than you do. After all, if they didn't, you wouldn't be asking them, right? OK, here's the deal: there's nothing, nothing I hated more when working tech support than to ask a question and be told that I didn't need to know the answer. Well, the fact that I asked it would strongly indicate that I needed that information to help you. Furthermore, I don't necessarily have the time or energy to explain why I need every individual piece of information (although I'll usually tell you if you ask nicely and I can spare a few seconds). The usual reason is that there's some obscure interaction involved that I know about and that wouldn't usually occur to a novice, but I don't want to confuse the issue until I've confirmed the hypothesis.
No, people who insist that my questions are irrelevant are my single biggest peeve. Now that I don't get paid to deal with it, I won't. I'm willing to treat you like an adult by answering your questions accurately and intelligently, but your end of the contract is to treat me like an adult by answering my questions, even if your experience isn't enough to tell you why I'm asking them.
Oh, and:
5) If you act like a spoiled jerk on a community-driven forum, stamp your little feet, and absolutely refuse to try any of their troubleshooting ideas or provide them with the information they repeatedly ask for, then they probably won't help you.
Yeah, I read the thread where you "tried" to get help. Your take on the episode doesn't have a lot to do with what you actually posted at the time.
Moderators, before you mark me down, actually read the Slashdot thread he linked to. I'm not the one who initially pointed out his tantrums and complete refusal to help fix his own problem. I can't believe that he uses that thread as supporting evidence of why Ubuntu is broken.
They stick with it because most of the time they don't realize there are choices. My company switched almost completely to OpenOffice. There are still a couple of people that need Word and Excel for specific reasons, but everyone else is chugging along merrily.
We're not a nest of high-tech early adopters; quite the opposite, in fact. It just doesn't make financial sense to give every employee a copy of Office when almost none of them use the "extra" features.
First, in general, losing market share is exactly equal to losing money. By definition, that's a threat to a for-profit organization.
Second, Microsoft is particularly vulnerable here. Their business model is pretty much built around the idea of having near-total market dominance. I could see Office going from a 98% market share to 50% in an extremely short period of time - all indications are that this has already begun - and a major government stating that they are officially OpenOffice-compatible is only going to make that happen faster.
Seriously, think about that. Today, if you're a government contractor, you have to buy Office to work with your client. Since 20% of your employees have to use Office, and they'll probably want to work with the other 80% at some time, you're pretty much going to end up a 100% Office shop. If this bill passes, you can still let that customer-facing 20% use Office if they really want it (maybe they're power users and comfortable? Whatever your reasons) assuming that MS gives it a working ODF plugin. However, maybe it starts making a lot more sense to put OpenOffice or something else on those other employees' desktops. That's pretty much the definition of a nightmare in Redmond.
In this particular case, we're talking about government documents. Remember, the gov't likes to keep things for a long, long time. Don't believe me? Go down the the land office and see how far back they keep property titles.
In this context, XML makes perfect sense as its contents will probably be readable forever. Even if we forget how to write ASCII or UTF-8, future infoarchaeologists wouldn't have any problem figuring it out. There is no doubt whatsoever that in 100 years, a government will still be able to open these files. Compare and contrast with .doc files, where an increasing number of documents are lost forever with each Office upgrade.
Word's .doc is fine if you're writing a letter. If you want to keep something for a century, plaintext is a requirement, and XML is the only game in town for storing lots of diverse content in plaintext.
How To Tell Someone Hasn't Seen Lisp, Lesson #1.
What we have right here is Slashdot's first instance of "+5: N-word".
But everyone else seems to; that's the Slashdotter's constant lament. And Wikipedia isn't just "Wikipedians", but lots of regular people who have something to add to an article or two. A jaded editor isn't likely to be bullied around, but that's not the kind of person this hurts most.
Most of us put "lying" and "misleading" on roughly the same footing.
Yes. Because at this point, it's probably impossible to tell how much influence he improperly exerted through his lies. Every single article he's touched has to be considered tainted until it can be generally agreed that:
Essjay's damage is particularly bad because it could be so subtle. How many people deferred to his judgment at the expense of correctness? We'll probably never know.
Indeed: so what? Silence Dogood was a middle-aged widow. What particular authority did that lie grant Franklin, assuming that he wasn't writing about childbearing or what it's like to lose your spouse? Essjay, though, directly stated that he had the educational background to make authoritative statements in his pages. Surely you can see that there's much more than a semantic difference between the two actions?
Essjay screwed you over.
No, the real, real question is: why are you so desperate to drag political bullshit into every story? Love him or hate him, GWB has absolutely nothing to do with how much Microsoft charges for a patch.
It's hard to say this without sounding like a zealot, but these kinds of things are nothing but good for Free Software. This patch should be nothing more than an edit to a single configuration file (and if it's not, then that's another problem), but you can't download that change freely or give it to your friends? I can understand - even if I disagree - with not giving away your applications. I cannot be made to understand, though, not giving away trivial bugfixes.
Google says:
Now that you mention it, that seems a lot more accurate than "etc". Looking back, I'm not sure why we're not explaining that "/msc" doesn't stand for "manual system control" or some other heinous backronym.
And they're even more logical once you realize that "Library" has absolutely nothing to do with what an average new user would expect. If you're going to "humanize" the decades-old directory structure, then go all the way.