The world's richest software company and they can't even properly implement OpenGL on their systems and proper CSS in their webbrowser. Stupid third rate gits deserve all the scorn they get.
And for all the fanboys, here you are: micro$$$$oft. Screw'em.
> If you don't like that people JUST obey the license, then change the license!
Nobody said they did something illegal, just that they are not behaving as cooperative as they should. There's a whole lot more in dealing with people, staying within the bounds of the law is only the most basic layer. Quite hard to encode "don't be a jerk" into a license.
Normally i would have been reasonable and say "oh, change this and that", but i'm vengeful towards the content industry now. Abolish all copyright law except a GPL-like provision and fuck'em all.
I don't want to sound too harsh because I respect Linus a lot, but there has been a lot of discontent over the use of BK amongst kernel developers and with this situation, rightfully so. When Linus chose BK, he knew that the rug could be pulled from under him at any moment, for whatever reason. It might have been a good technological decision, but it was a pretty bad strategic management decision. The complication of the kernel development process is therefor his to blame only: he put the future of his development process in the hands of Larry McVoy and made himself dependent on the whole universe agreeing not to step on McVoy's toes. It was only a matter of time before someone came up with a utility to extract metadata from the repositories. Anyway, not all's doom and gloom. If the removal of BK from the development process spurs people to develop a free system that satisfies most of the needs of the developers, it will only have been for the better.
I have. I have a single computer acting as my local home server (a p3-500 with 512mb ram). This machine acts as a linux desktop, development machine, it handles my mail and web stuff, and it acts as a shells-server sandbox for a friend who uses it to test his code on. Some of these things are mutually exclusive (I like to run debian stable for mail+web, while my development stuff is bleeding edge). Also, it is handy for said friend to have root access in order to be able to install needed packages. With a VM he can have a sandbox to freely play around in without having it affect my system in any way.
As a result, i have a base system for my desktop (currently running Ubuntu Hoary), and on top of that are 3 VM's: one for mail, one for web, one for shells. The filesystems are stored in containerfiles, so they are very easy to backup. Until a couple of months ago I used User Mode Linux for these VM's, but UML development doesn't seem to progress very much and performance wasn't optimal, to say the least. Because of this, I switched to Xen and I've been very happy with the results. Setting is very easy. Compared to UML, Xen is _much_ faster. I haven't noticed any overhead from Xen, both the host system and the individual VM's seem to operate at native or near native speed, while UML (even with skas etc) took a very noticable performance hit. Development seems very active, tracking the newest kernels. Also, the management tools are really nice. Setup of the network was much easier for me than with UML, every VM automatically creates ports for the console, and there's is additional web management that makes managing the VM's really friendly. All in all, if you have any interest in playing with this stuff, I would very much recommend Xen.
I somewhat disagree with the premise of the article. 10 years ago, a barely usable word processor took 15 seconds to start up. I remember Wordperfect 6 being a terrible resource hog on my measly pc. Compare that with the load-times and responsiveness of AbiWord and a lot of progress has been made. The same with Mozilla/Firefox. Netscape 4.0 took something like a minute to load on my 386dx40/4mb iirc. Firefox takes 2 seconds (amd 1800+, 512mb) and has much more functionality. So, in my opinion, user experience of performance has improved. I think people might have forgotten how bad stuff really used to be performance-wise.
Every graphical program these days is designed around the same paradigms of icons, toolbars and windows, regardless the platform. Only implementation details differ. There are also many things the Windows user interface got right in its various iterations. Not learning from those things just because they look like something windows did before would be silly.
That said, both KDE and Gnome are application frameworks. You suggest using Windowmaker instead. Fine, but Windowmaker is just a plain window manager which offers you no functionality apart from drawing a neat border around your windows and prodiding a couple of application launchers in the form of docks. What applications that are not based on Qt or GTK are you going to use to actually get work done?
Having windowmaker running with a couple of xterms and doing your wordprocessing, image editing and other tasks on the commandline or in textmode surely will provide you with an aura of being different in a 1980's retro-unix kind of way and may gain you respect in some obscure subcultures of the computing world, but if its terribly productive is an entirely different question. Even windowmaker was originally developed to be the windowmanager for the GNUStep environment, and as such a component of a larger application framework environment.
Firing a lot of people this way can be risky for a company. It's good for short-time profit margins, but it also means a lot of highly skilled workers ready to join the competition. You rarely get something for nothing.
Wouldn't it be handy to use union/overlay mounts to unify the namespaces? That way you could give a package its own directory + subdirectories without having to bother with PATH settings. You could simply mount its package directory so the standard locations would be overlayed and the contents of the package directory transparently added to the system-wide directories.
What a tragedy:( My feelings go out to all the relatives and friends of Hans. Good luck in the hard period that follows. Best wishes for the people who are still in the hospital.
I never understood what all the fuss about those penn-based computers was. My normal handwriting is so incredibly garbled that i'm about the only one who's able to read it. In contrast, i can type extremely fast. When i'm able to, i type. It's that those notebook keyboards are too loud to take to university, but if i could i would take one with me too to avoid writing. For OCR purposes it would probably come in handy, and maybe for signature recognition on all sorts of transaction devices, but for me a computer reacting to handwriting or voice control would be a step back. (Can you imagine somebody sitting behind his desk, just finished his masterpiece, and somebody pops up behind him yelling "format slash why enter yes!!"?) Maybe not realistic, but it's got a point to it. Typing is fast, secure and error-proof. Maybe i'm looking at it from the perspective of a techie, but voice and handwriting recognition adds another layer between the user and the computer instead of removing one.
My first distribution was Redhat 4.0 (well, actually Slackware 3.1, but that was just for play:), and since i heard a lot of positive comments about Debian, i switched as soon as 2.0 (hamm) was released. I've never regretted it, since the distribution is very clean, feels mature, and is less 'messy' than i perceived Redhat to be.
But, more than a year between releases is too slow in my opinion, especially when development goes as fast as it does with Linux at the moment. Slink was allready out of date at the moment it was released, and when Potato keeps lagging it will suffer the same fate. Stable shouldn't have to mean fossile. I'd really be a happy camper if Debian would speed their bug tracking up a little and released twice a year or something. Dunno how feasible that it though.
I don't like the fact that ISP's are so trigger-happy at shutting a site down at the command of the first person that sends a threatening mail, be it on behalf of a company or not, without checking if the alleged accusations are true. When they are in doubt, they just shut a site down.
Why do i find this irritating? It removes the possibility for the site-owner to say: "okay, you think i'm violating the law? sue me."
The way ISP's behave now bully's will always achieve their goal because the people who are willing to stand up for their rights are taken away the opportunity to do so. Even if the content of a certain site was violating a law, the offended party should take it up with the owner of the site, and not the ISP who is merely responsable for the network connection.
Recently I decided to use FreeBSD on my machine at work and use OpenBSD as my firewall at home. Each works well. I dutifully subscribed to and read the relevant mailing lists. What is sad is the anti-Linux overtones that permeate the lists.
I have had the same experience. I was interested in the bsd's for a while since my internet provider runs its shell machines on bsdi/os, which i liked. So i browsed the *bsd sites a bit and hung out on a couple of irc channels for a while, and the thing that struck me the most was the relentless continual Linux bashing. "Linsux lusers", "Linux Unix wannabe's", "Wintel or Lintel, whats the difference", etc. Both the websites and the IRC channels are permeated with in the most positive variant an air of superiority and in its worst form plain pompous snobism and elitism. This disappointed me greatly. I was expecting a mature, intelligent crowd of people, since BSD has touts its long Unix heritage, and instead i got a herd of elitist snobs. The shocking thing was that it wasn't even a single Irc channel or site, but that it was displayed throughout every BSD source of information i walked in to. I really didn't expect this. If you have to get your identity by means of running a certain operating system you're a really sad bastard as far as i'm concerned. The BSD crowd seems to care more about bashing Linux users than to attract people to their (undoubtedly) great OS's.
For hours i had to hear and read how incredibly superior BSD was to Linux, and how i, lowly Linux user, would never be able to install it, because Linux users are unskilled script kiddies and Windows refugees. Linux was something for Windows haters, and BSD something for Unix lovers i was told, and since i never ran BSD i should rather give up and go run Windows or its next cousin Linux. People also questioned the technical abilities of Alan Cox, Linus, and other kernel hackers. The old asynchronous metadata updating dispute was dragged out of the closet again to prove that Linux kernel hackers really didn't knew what they were talking about. It must be devine intervention that i have never had a single byte lost using ext2fs then.
After this little "friendly encounter" with the bsd culture i went forth installing the actual software. OpenBSD took me 15 minutes to install, all went well the first time. Very nice, clean software, the install was sober but well-done. Apparently i'm a genius amongst Linux users, if i should believe the bsd folks at least;). After playing around a bit i wanted to try FreeBSD. To my surprise, FreeBSD was a little less easy to install than OpenBSD, probably because its install program is a little more detailed. After appx. 30 minutes i had a nice fresh FreeBSD system. I still have it running at the moment, it replaces my old Debian installation i had running on my test pc. I'm quite satisfied with it, it's my programming system, and i use it as a stimulus to make my programs less dependent on Linux-specific stuff.
I have reached three conclusions after this little installfest:
1) I'm a longtime Debian 2.0 (hamm) user. When comparing the install program as well as the installed operating system, there are hardly any noticable differences. FreeBSD is just as easy to install as Debian 2.0 which i'm used to. With only Debian experience, i had a bare running system in 30 minutes and a complete customized system in a couple of hours. It looks, feels, and acts completely the same as my old Debian install, except Debian is a little more complete and user-friendly in some area's. FreeBSD has some places where it feels a little spartan, which makes it not more difficult but simply a little inconvenient in some places. Gets familiar quickly though.
2) OpenBSD in its raw form is less suitable for home/desktop usage than FreeBSD which comes with standard with more software and is more tailored to Intel PC's. A thing that irked me about OpenBSD was its vt220 support for the virtual consoles. I want normal Ansi/vt100 emulation with IBM chars. Maybe its something in the setup i missed, or that can be adjusted, but i couldn't find anything about it. For a home system i simply want a good text console like Linux/FreeBSD has, i refuse to do without. However, if i was to install a firewall or server system i would choose OpenBSD. It feels like it's a very well-done, mature piece of software.
3) Large amounts of BSD users behave like pompous, elitist snobs who spend more time bashing Linux and Linux users than they spend advocating the virtues of their system. I can hardly remember any occasion where i have been more offended and abused than when i tried to get some info on BSD, both by websites and irc. Even most official BSD websites host articles that do basicly nothing else than bash Linux and Linux users. When i asked in an IRC channel what the reason of this childish bashing was i got the answer "Oh, Linux users bash BSD too". They must know different Linux users than i do, since most Linux users i know have actually praised the BSD's a lot. The one thing the BSD crowd appears to be good at is scaring away and offending potential users, which ofcourse is one way to stay elite.
So, my advice to Linux users wanting to try out a BSD variant is: Go ahead, especially FreeBSD works very nice for a home-system, its easy to install and it looks and feels very much like a clean Debian install. The software is very good, but avoid the crowd that hangs around it, they are not worth your attention.
Recently I decided to use FreeBSD on my machine at work and use OpenBSD as my firewall at home. Each works well. I dutifully subscribed to and read the relevant mailing lists. What is sad is the anti-Linux overtones that permeate the lists.
I have had the same experience. I was interested in the bsd's for a while since my internet provider runs its shell machines on bsdi/os, which i liked. So i browsed the *bsd sites a bit and hung out on a couple of irc channels for a while, and the thing that struck me the most was the relentless continual Linux bashing. "Linsux lusers", "Linux Unix wannabe's", "Wintel or Lintel, whats the difference", etc. Both the websites and the IRC channels are permeated with in the most positive variant an air of superiority and in its worst form plain pompous snobism and elitism. This disappointed me greatly. I was expecting a mature, intelligent crowd of people, since BSD has touts its long Unix heritage, and instead i got a herd of elitist snobs. The shocking thing was that it wasn't even a single Irc channel or site, but that it was displayed throughout every BSD source of information i walked in to. I really didn't expect this. If you have to get your identity by means of running a certain operating system you're a really sad bastard as far as i'm concerned. The BSD crowd seems to care more about bashing Linux users than to attract people to their (undoubtedly) great OS's.
For hours i had to hear and read how incredibly superior BSD was to Linux, and how i, lowly Linux user, would never be able to install it, because Linux users are unskilled script kiddies and Windows refugees. Linux was something for Windows haters, and BSD something for Unix lovers i was told, and since i never ran BSD i should rather give up and go run Windows or its next cousin Linux. People also questioned the technical abilities of Alan Cox, Linus, and other kernel hackers. The old asynchronous metadata updating dispute was dragged out of the closet again to prove that Linux kernel hackers really didn't knew what they were talking about. It must be devine intervention that i have never had a single byte lost using ext2fs then.
After this little "friendly encounter" with the bsd culture i went forth installing the actual software. OpenBSD took me 15 minutes to install, all went well the first time. Very nice, clean software, the install was sober but well-done. Apparently i'm a genius amongst Linux users, if i should believe the bsd folks at least;). After playing around a bit i wanted to try FreeBSD. To my surprise, FreeBSD was a little less easy to install than OpenBSD, probably because its install program is a little more detailed. After appx. 30 minutes i had a nice fresh FreeBSD system. I still have it running at the moment, it replaces my old Debian installation i had running on my test pc. I'm quite satisfied with it, it's my programming system, and i use it as a stimulus to make my programs less dependent on Linux-specific stuff.
I have reached three conclusions after this little installfest:
1) I'm a longtime Debian 2.0 (hamm) user. When comparing the install program as well as the installed operating system, there are hardly any noticable differences. FreeBSD is just as easy to install as Debian 2.0 which i'm used to. With only Debian experience, i had a bare running system in 20 minutes and a complete customized system in a couple of hours. It looks, feels, and acts completely the same as my old Debian install, except Debian is a little more complete and user-friendly in some area's. FreeBSD has some places where it feels a little spartan, which makes it not more difficult but simply a little inconvenient in some places. Gets familiar quickly though.
2) OpenBSD in its raw form is less suitable for home/desktop usage than FreeBSD which comes with standard with more software and is more tailored to Intel PC's. A thing that irked me about OpenBSD was its vt220 support for the virtual consoles. I want normal Ansi/vt100 emulation with IBM chars. Maybe its something in the setup i missed, or that can be adjusted, but i couldn't find anything about it. For a home system i simply want a good text console like Linux/FreeBSD has, i refuse to do without. However, if i was to install a firewall or server system i would choose OpenBSD. It feels like it's a very well-done, mature piece of software.
3) Large amounts of BSD users behave like pompous, elitist snobs who spend more time bashing Linux and Linux users than they spend advocating the virtues of their system. I can hardly remember any occasion where i have been more offended and abused than when i tried to get some info on BSD, both by websites and irc. Even most official BSD websites host articles that do basicly nothing else than bash Linux and Linux users. When i asked in an IRC channel what the reason of this childish bashing was i got the answer "Oh, Linux users bash BSD too". They must know different Linux users than i do, since most Linux users i know have actually praised the BSD's a lot. The one thing the BSD crowd appears to be good at is scaring away and offending potential users, which ofcourse is one way to stay elite.
So, my advice to Linux users wanting to try out a BSD variant is: Go ahead, especially FreeBSD works very nice for a home-system, its easy to install and it looks and feels very much like a clean Debian install. The software is very good, but avoid the crowd that hangs around it, they are not worth your attention.
Ofcourse America always touts itsself as the worlds guardian of democracy, but i have serious doubts. I have trouble calling a bi-partisan system a democracy. Here in the Netherlands there are at least 5 to 10 parties that matter. These parties have very different interests and cater to a specific part of the population. You have a couple of liberal parties, a couple of social-democratic parties, a couple of christian parties etc, and the result of an election is always to have a coalition formed, and compromises are made. The US has this bi-partisan system with 2 parties that have been in power for eternity. You don't see any new parties popping up having any influence, it's always between democrats and republicans, and even they don't really differ. They are both right-of-center conservative parties. I don't think thats a proper democracy, it's more an alternating olicharchy.
Strangely the music i code best to is Nirvana's In Utero. Don't know why. Whenever i put on that cd i go twice as fast as with other music, with less bugs.;) Others that work for me are The Velvet Underground (Nothing can beat Sister Ray on maximal volume!), REM, Front242, Bjork, Lou Reed, or when i'm not in the mood for lyrics dance music, like Hardsequencer or Westbam.
Just out of interest, when you say the maximum tax rate is 50-60% is that on a top portion of income? That is to say the first US$ 15,000 would be untaxed, the next $10,000 taxed at 30% and so on?
Yes, that is correct. I don't know the exact rates but they are in the right direction:)
>Umm...okay, Europe doesn't have concentration camps but are citizens of most European countries allowed to:
>* buy beef from the US? No, because cows from the US are treated with hormones that are outlawed here, since they have been proven to be harmful to people's health. I don't think thats a bad thing.
>* soon, buy genetically modified food? You can allready buy genetically modified food here. However, there have been demands to have gentically modified food to be mandatorily labelled as such, so people who have moral objections to it can have the choice in using it.
>* go to whatever doctor they please? Yes, i can do that. Any doctor, any hospital, alternative medicine etc.
>* keep a majority of what they earn? Yes, tax rates are divided by wealth. If you're not extremely rich you keep the majority of what you earn. The maximum tax rate is something between 50 and 60% at the moment and will be brought down with the new tax plans to be issued in 2001 or so.
>* own a gun? Nope. I don't need to since there is virtually nobody else with a gun. Professional criminals have them ofcourse, but it's not them i'm afraid about. It's the agressive drunk next-door neighbour from across the street that would worry me, and luckily he's not able to get a gun in this country.
>* ride on a non-car transportation system (i.e. train, bus) that isn't owned or regulated to practical ownership by the gov't? Yes, i can do that. Trains and busses have been privatized long ago. There is some regulation to make sure the companies don't abuse their strong positions they inherited from being a former state monopoly, but thats pretty much it.
>* many other things... I can do those also i guess.:)
>* take a medicine whether or not the gov't health agency says they can? Now hold on here. I wouldn't want to take a medicine that hasn't been approved by the government's health agency. Much too dangerous. So i don't see that as a bad thing. Medicines here are deviced in two cathegories, home-treatment and "real" medicines. The latter cathegory can only be aquired using a prescription from the doctor. This is done to counter medicine abuse and addiction.
I live in the Netherlands btw. The government here is a coalition between a socialist party and two liberal parties. Sure we have to pay more taxes, but in return we get a health system that offers the same level high-quality medical care for every citizen, regardless of wealth, a decent educational system with very good universities. To be admitted to a university you need brains, not money. Everybody has equal opportunity in getting a university degree here. To me that's more freedom, not less. That said, you can't really compare these two societies. The Netherlands has 16 million inhabitants and a tradition that goes back 1500 years. The Netherlands has been a republic since +/- 1590, ruled mostly by a council of provincial regents, being strongly in favour of a highly liberal capitalistic market. Eastern Germany and France for example have been much more rural in their economy, so they are bound to be more socialist in the traditional sense of the word. The history of these countries is VERY different, and their social and economical structure as a result is still very different, so it is dangerous to speak about "the European countries". There's a huge difference between eg. The Netherlands on one side and France, or even Belgium, on the other.
Slashdot Mirror
Its nice and shiny :)
Congrats to Taco, 10 years is a long time!
Hello,
>So, I have a job and insurance, because I don't want to be like this guy.
Trust me, there's no risk you'll ever be like that guy.
Hail Eris!
The world's richest software company and they can't even properly implement OpenGL on their systems and proper CSS in their webbrowser. Stupid third rate gits deserve all the scorn they get.
And for all the fanboys, here you are: micro$$$$oft.
Screw'em.
> If you don't like that people JUST obey the license, then change the license!
Nobody said they did something illegal, just that they are not behaving as cooperative as they should. There's a whole lot more in dealing with people, staying within the bounds of the law is only the most basic layer. Quite hard to encode "don't be a jerk" into a license.
Normally i would have been reasonable and say "oh, change this and that", but i'm vengeful towards the content industry now. Abolish all copyright law except a GPL-like provision and fuck'em all.
I don't want to sound too harsh because I respect Linus a lot, but there has been a lot of discontent over the use of BK amongst kernel developers and with this situation, rightfully so. When Linus chose BK, he knew that the rug could be pulled from under him at any moment, for whatever reason. It might have been a good technological decision, but it was a pretty bad strategic management decision. The complication of the kernel development process is therefor his to blame only: he put the future of his development process in the hands of Larry McVoy and made himself dependent on the whole universe agreeing not to step on McVoy's toes. It was only a matter of time before someone came up with a utility to extract metadata from the repositories. Anyway, not all's doom and gloom. If the removal of BK from the development process spurs people to develop a free system that satisfies most of the needs of the developers, it will only have been for the better.
It must be easy to find. Probably a white persian one, right next to his monocle.
I have. I have a single computer acting as my local home server (a p3-500 with 512mb ram). This machine acts as a linux desktop, development machine, it handles my mail and web stuff, and it acts as a shells-server sandbox for a friend who uses it to test his code on. Some of these things are mutually exclusive (I like to run debian stable for mail+web, while my development stuff is bleeding edge). Also, it is handy for said friend to have root access in order to be able to install needed packages. With a VM he can have a sandbox to freely play around in without having it affect my system in any way.
As a result, i have a base system for my desktop (currently running Ubuntu Hoary), and on top of that are 3 VM's: one for mail, one for web, one for shells. The filesystems are stored in containerfiles, so they are very easy to backup. Until a couple of months ago I used User Mode Linux for these VM's, but UML development doesn't seem to progress very much and performance wasn't optimal, to say the least. Because of this, I switched to Xen and I've been very happy with the results. Setting is very easy. Compared to UML, Xen is _much_ faster. I haven't noticed any overhead from Xen, both the host system and the individual VM's seem to operate at native or near native speed, while UML (even with skas etc) took a very noticable performance hit. Development seems very active, tracking the newest kernels. Also, the management tools are really nice. Setup of the network was much easier for me than with UML, every VM automatically creates ports for the console, and there's is additional web management that makes managing the VM's really friendly. All in all, if you have any interest in playing with this stuff, I would very much recommend Xen.
I somewhat disagree with the premise of the article. 10 years ago, a barely usable word processor took 15 seconds to start up. I remember Wordperfect 6 being a terrible resource hog on my measly pc. Compare that with the load-times and responsiveness of AbiWord and a lot of progress has been made. The same with Mozilla/Firefox. Netscape 4.0 took something like a minute to load on my 386dx40/4mb iirc. Firefox takes 2 seconds (amd 1800+, 512mb) and has much more functionality. So, in my opinion, user experience of performance has improved. I think people might have forgotten how bad stuff really used to be performance-wise.
Every graphical program these days is designed around the same paradigms of icons, toolbars and windows, regardless the platform. Only implementation details differ. There are also many things the Windows user interface got right in its various iterations. Not learning from those things just because they look like something windows did before would be silly.
That said, both KDE and Gnome are application frameworks. You suggest using Windowmaker instead. Fine, but Windowmaker is just a plain window manager which offers you no functionality apart from drawing a neat border around your windows and prodiding a couple of application launchers in the form of docks. What applications that are not based on Qt or GTK are you going to use to actually get work done?
Having windowmaker running with a couple of xterms and doing your wordprocessing, image editing and other tasks on the commandline or in textmode surely will provide you with an aura of being different in a 1980's retro-unix kind of way and may gain you respect in some obscure subcultures of the computing world, but if its terribly productive is an entirely different question. Even windowmaker was originally developed to be the windowmanager for the GNUStep environment, and as such a component of a larger application framework environment.
Firing a lot of people this way can be risky for a company. It's good for short-time profit margins, but it also means a lot of highly skilled workers ready to join the competition. You rarely get something for nothing.
Wouldn't it be handy to use union/overlay mounts to unify the namespaces? That way you could give a package its own directory + subdirectories without having to bother with PATH settings. You could simply mount its package directory so the standard locations would be overlayed and the contents of the package directory transparently added to the system-wide directories.
What a tragedy :( My feelings go out to all the relatives and friends of Hans. Good luck in the hard period that follows. Best wishes for the people who are still in the hospital.
Am i the only one who misread the title as "SparcStation slowly falling apart" ?
you rang, sir? :)
I never understood what all the fuss about those penn-based computers was. My normal handwriting is so incredibly garbled that i'm about the only one who's able to read it. In contrast, i can type extremely fast. When i'm able to, i type. It's that those notebook keyboards are too loud to take to university, but if i could i would take one with me too to avoid writing. For OCR purposes it would probably come in handy, and maybe for signature recognition on all sorts of transaction devices, but for me a computer reacting to handwriting or voice control would be a step back. (Can you imagine somebody sitting behind his desk, just finished his masterpiece, and somebody pops up behind him yelling "format slash why enter yes!!"?) Maybe not realistic, but it's got a point to it. Typing is fast, secure and error-proof. Maybe i'm looking at it from the perspective of a techie, but voice and handwriting recognition adds another layer between the user and the computer instead of removing one.
My first distribution was Redhat 4.0 (well, actually Slackware 3.1, but that was just for play :), and since i heard a lot of positive comments about Debian, i switched as soon as 2.0 (hamm) was released. I've never regretted it, since the distribution is very clean, feels mature, and is less 'messy' than i perceived Redhat to be.
But, more than a year between releases is too slow in my opinion, especially when development goes as fast as it does with Linux at the moment. Slink was allready out of date at the moment it was released, and when Potato keeps lagging it will suffer the same fate. Stable shouldn't have to mean fossile. I'd really be a happy camper if Debian would speed their bug tracking up a little and released twice a year or something. Dunno how feasible that it though.
I don't like the fact that ISP's are so trigger-happy at shutting a site down at the command of the first person that sends a threatening mail, be it on behalf of a company or not, without checking if the alleged accusations are true. When they are in doubt, they just shut a site down.
Why do i find this irritating? It removes the possibility for the site-owner to say: "okay, you think i'm violating the law? sue me."
The way ISP's behave now bully's will always achieve their goal because the people who are willing to stand up for their rights are taken away the opportunity to do so. Even if the content of a certain site was violating a law, the offended party should take it up with the owner of the site, and not the ISP who is merely responsable for the network connection.
Recently I decided to use FreeBSD on my machine at work and use OpenBSD as my firewall at home. Each works well. I dutifully subscribed to and read the relevant mailing lists. What is sad is the anti-Linux overtones that permeate the lists.
;). After playing around a bit i wanted to try FreeBSD. To my surprise, FreeBSD was a little less easy to install than OpenBSD, probably because its install program is a little more detailed. After appx. 30 minutes i had a nice fresh FreeBSD system. I still have it running at the moment, it replaces my old Debian installation i had running on my test pc. I'm quite satisfied with it, it's my programming system, and i use it as a stimulus to make my programs less dependent on Linux-specific stuff.
I have had the same experience. I was interested in the bsd's for a while since my internet provider runs its shell machines on bsdi/os, which i liked. So i browsed the *bsd sites a bit and hung out on a couple of irc channels for a while, and the thing that struck me the most was the relentless continual Linux bashing. "Linsux lusers", "Linux Unix wannabe's", "Wintel or Lintel, whats the difference", etc. Both the websites and the IRC channels are permeated with in the most positive variant an air of superiority and in its worst form plain pompous snobism and elitism. This disappointed me greatly. I was expecting a mature, intelligent crowd of people, since BSD has touts its long Unix heritage, and instead i got a herd of elitist snobs. The shocking thing was that it wasn't even a single Irc channel or site, but that it was displayed throughout every BSD source of information i walked in to. I really didn't expect this. If you have to get your identity by means of running a certain operating system you're a really sad bastard as far as i'm concerned. The BSD crowd seems to care more about bashing Linux users than to attract people to their (undoubtedly) great OS's.
For hours i had to hear and read how incredibly superior BSD was to Linux, and how i, lowly Linux user, would never be able to install it, because Linux users are unskilled script kiddies and Windows refugees. Linux was something for Windows haters, and BSD something for Unix lovers i was told, and since i never ran BSD i should rather give up and go run Windows or its next cousin Linux. People also questioned the technical abilities of Alan Cox, Linus, and other kernel hackers. The old asynchronous metadata updating dispute was dragged out of the closet again to prove that Linux kernel hackers really didn't knew what they were talking about. It must be devine intervention that i have never had a single byte lost using ext2fs then.
After this little "friendly encounter" with the bsd culture i went forth installing the actual software. OpenBSD took me 15 minutes to install, all went well the first time. Very nice, clean software, the install was sober but well-done. Apparently i'm a genius amongst Linux users, if i should believe the bsd folks at least
I have reached three conclusions after this little installfest:
1) I'm a longtime Debian 2.0 (hamm) user. When comparing the install program as well as the installed operating system, there are hardly any noticable differences. FreeBSD is just as easy to install as Debian 2.0 which i'm used to. With only Debian experience, i had a bare running system in 30 minutes and a complete customized system in a couple of hours. It looks, feels, and acts completely the same as my old Debian install, except Debian is a little more complete and user-friendly in some area's. FreeBSD has some places where it feels a little spartan, which makes it not more difficult but simply a little inconvenient in some places. Gets familiar quickly though.
2) OpenBSD in its raw form is less suitable for home/desktop usage than FreeBSD which comes with standard with more software and is more tailored to Intel PC's. A thing that irked me about OpenBSD was its vt220 support for the virtual consoles. I want normal Ansi/vt100 emulation with IBM chars. Maybe its something in the setup i missed, or that can be adjusted, but i couldn't find anything about it. For a home system i simply want a good text console like Linux/FreeBSD has, i refuse to do without. However, if i was to install a firewall or server system i would choose OpenBSD. It feels like it's a very well-done, mature piece of software.
3) Large amounts of BSD users behave like pompous, elitist snobs who spend more time bashing Linux and Linux users than they spend advocating the virtues of their system. I can hardly remember any occasion where i have been more offended and abused than when i tried to get some info on BSD, both by websites and irc. Even most official BSD websites host articles that do basicly nothing else than bash Linux and Linux users. When i asked in an IRC channel what the reason of this childish bashing was i got the answer "Oh, Linux users bash BSD too". They must know different Linux users than i do, since most Linux users i know have actually praised the BSD's a lot. The one thing the BSD crowd appears to be good at is scaring away and offending potential users, which ofcourse is one way to stay elite.
So, my advice to Linux users wanting to try out a BSD variant is: Go ahead, especially FreeBSD works very nice for a home-system, its easy to install and it looks and feels very much like a clean Debian install. The software is very good, but avoid the crowd that hangs around it, they are not worth your attention.
Recently I decided to use FreeBSD on my machine at work and use OpenBSD as my firewall at home. Each works well. I dutifully subscribed to and read the relevant mailing lists. What is sad is the anti-Linux overtones that permeate the lists.
;). After playing around a bit i wanted to try FreeBSD. To my surprise, FreeBSD was a little less easy to install than OpenBSD, probably because its install program is a little more detailed. After appx. 30 minutes i had a nice fresh FreeBSD system. I still have it running at the moment, it replaces my old Debian installation i had running on my test pc. I'm quite satisfied with it, it's my programming system, and i use it as a stimulus to make my programs less dependent on Linux-specific stuff.
I have had the same experience. I was interested in the bsd's for a while since my internet provider runs its shell machines on bsdi/os, which i liked. So i browsed the *bsd sites a bit and hung out on a couple of irc channels for a while, and the thing that struck me the most was the relentless continual Linux bashing. "Linsux lusers", "Linux Unix wannabe's", "Wintel or Lintel, whats the difference", etc. Both the websites and the IRC channels are permeated with in the most positive variant an air of superiority and in its worst form plain pompous snobism and elitism. This disappointed me greatly. I was expecting a mature, intelligent crowd of people, since BSD has touts its long Unix heritage, and instead i got a herd of elitist snobs. The shocking thing was that it wasn't even a single Irc channel or site, but that it was displayed throughout every BSD source of information i walked in to. I really didn't expect this. If you have to get your identity by means of running a certain operating system you're a really sad bastard as far as i'm concerned. The BSD crowd seems to care more about bashing Linux users than to attract people to their (undoubtedly) great OS's.
For hours i had to hear and read how incredibly superior BSD was to Linux, and how i, lowly Linux user, would never be able to install it, because Linux users are unskilled script kiddies and Windows refugees. Linux was something for Windows haters, and BSD something for Unix lovers i was told, and since i never ran BSD i should rather give up and go run Windows or its next cousin Linux. People also questioned the technical abilities of Alan Cox, Linus, and other kernel hackers. The old asynchronous metadata updating dispute was dragged out of the closet again to prove that Linux kernel hackers really didn't knew what they were talking about. It must be devine intervention that i have never had a single byte lost using ext2fs then.
After this little "friendly encounter" with the bsd culture i went forth installing the actual software. OpenBSD took me 15 minutes to install, all went well the first time. Very nice, clean software, the install was sober but well-done. Apparently i'm a genius amongst Linux users, if i should believe the bsd folks at least
I have reached three conclusions after this little installfest:
1) I'm a longtime Debian 2.0 (hamm) user. When comparing the install program as well as the installed operating system, there are hardly any noticable differences. FreeBSD is just as easy to install as Debian 2.0 which i'm used to. With only Debian experience, i had a bare running system in 20 minutes and a complete customized system in a couple of hours. It looks, feels, and acts completely the same as my old Debian install, except Debian is a little more complete and user-friendly in some area's. FreeBSD has some places where it feels a little spartan, which makes it not more difficult but simply a little inconvenient in some places. Gets familiar quickly though.
2) OpenBSD in its raw form is less suitable for home/desktop usage than FreeBSD which comes with standard with more software and is more tailored to Intel PC's. A thing that irked me about OpenBSD was its vt220 support for the virtual consoles. I want normal Ansi/vt100 emulation with IBM chars. Maybe its something in the setup i missed, or that can be adjusted, but i couldn't find anything about it. For a home system i simply want a good text console like Linux/FreeBSD has, i refuse to do without. However, if i was to install a firewall or server system i would choose OpenBSD. It feels like it's a very well-done, mature piece of software.
3) Large amounts of BSD users behave like pompous, elitist snobs who spend more time bashing Linux and Linux users than they spend advocating the virtues of their system. I can hardly remember any occasion where i have been more offended and abused than when i tried to get some info on BSD, both by websites and irc. Even most official BSD websites host articles that do basicly nothing else than bash Linux and Linux users. When i asked in an IRC channel what the reason of this childish bashing was i got the answer "Oh, Linux users bash BSD too". They must know different Linux users than i do, since most Linux users i know have actually praised the BSD's a lot. The one thing the BSD crowd appears to be good at is scaring away and offending potential users, which ofcourse is one way to stay elite.
So, my advice to Linux users wanting to try out a BSD variant is: Go ahead, especially FreeBSD works very nice for a home-system, its easy to install and it looks and feels very much like a clean Debian install. The software is very good, but avoid the crowd that hangs around it, they are not worth your attention.
Oh what custumes _will_ the poor girl ware then ?
Ofcourse America always touts itsself as the worlds guardian of democracy, but i have serious doubts. I have trouble calling a bi-partisan system a democracy. Here in the Netherlands there are at least 5 to 10 parties that matter. These parties have very different interests and cater to a specific part of the population. You have a couple of liberal parties, a couple of social-democratic parties, a couple of christian parties etc, and the result of an election is always to have a coalition formed, and compromises are made. The US has this bi-partisan system with 2 parties that have been in power for eternity. You don't see any new parties popping up having any influence, it's always between democrats and republicans, and even they don't really differ. They are both right-of-center conservative parties. I don't think thats a proper democracy, it's more an alternating olicharchy.
Strangely the music i code best to is Nirvana's In Utero. Don't know why. Whenever i put on that cd i go twice as fast as with other music, with less bugs. ;) Others that work for me are The Velvet Underground (Nothing can beat Sister Ray on maximal volume!), REM, Front242, Bjork, Lou Reed, or when i'm not in the mood for lyrics dance music, like Hardsequencer or Westbam.
Just out of interest, when you say the maximum tax rate is 50-60% is that on a top portion of income? That is to say the first US$ 15,000 would be untaxed, the next $10,000 taxed at 30% and so on?
:)
Yes, that is correct. I don't know the exact rates but they are in the right direction
Regards, Crush
Ciao!
Hi there,
:)
>Umm...okay, Europe doesn't have concentration camps but are citizens of most European countries allowed to:
>* buy beef from the US?
No, because cows from the US are treated with hormones that are outlawed here, since they have been proven to be harmful to people's health. I don't think thats a bad thing.
>* soon, buy genetically modified food?
You can allready buy genetically modified food here. However, there have been demands to have gentically modified food to be mandatorily labelled as such, so people who have moral objections to it can have the choice in using it.
>* go to whatever doctor they please?
Yes, i can do that. Any doctor, any hospital, alternative medicine etc.
>* keep a majority of what they earn?
Yes, tax rates are divided by wealth. If you're not extremely rich you keep the majority of what you earn. The maximum tax rate is something between 50 and 60% at the moment and will be brought down with the new tax plans to be issued in 2001 or so.
>* own a gun?
Nope. I don't need to since there is virtually nobody else with a gun. Professional criminals
have them ofcourse, but it's not them i'm afraid about. It's the agressive drunk next-door neighbour from across the street that would worry me, and luckily he's not able to get a gun in this country.
>* ride on a non-car transportation system (i.e. train, bus) that isn't owned or regulated to practical ownership by the gov't?
Yes, i can do that. Trains and busses have been privatized long ago. There is some regulation to make sure the companies don't abuse their strong positions they inherited from being a former state monopoly, but thats pretty much it.
>* many other things...
I can do those also i guess.
>* take a medicine whether or not the gov't health agency says they can?
Now hold on here. I wouldn't want to take a medicine that hasn't been approved by the government's health agency. Much too dangerous. So i don't see that as a bad thing. Medicines here are deviced in two cathegories, home-treatment and "real" medicines. The latter cathegory can only be aquired using a prescription from the doctor. This is done to counter medicine abuse and addiction.
I live in the Netherlands btw. The government here is a coalition between a socialist party and two liberal parties. Sure we have to pay more taxes, but in return we get a health system that offers the same level high-quality medical care for every citizen, regardless of wealth, a decent educational system with very good universities. To be admitted to a university you need brains, not money. Everybody has equal opportunity in getting a university degree here. To me that's more freedom, not less. That said, you can't really compare these two societies. The Netherlands has 16 million inhabitants and a tradition that goes back 1500 years. The Netherlands has been a republic since +/- 1590, ruled mostly by a council of provincial regents, being strongly in favour of a highly liberal capitalistic market. Eastern Germany and France for example have been much more rural in their economy, so they are bound to be more socialist in the traditional sense of the word. The history of these countries is VERY different, and their social and economical structure as a result is still very different, so it is dangerous to speak about "the European countries". There's a huge difference between eg. The Netherlands on one side and France, or even Belgium, on the other.