Now lets suppose I like Friends (I'm not saying that I do. Don't accuse me of it. I might though, but I'll never admit to it:-). I set up my TiVo to record every episode of Friends. Eventually, I will have very little room left to record other programmig. But, if I could connect to my TiVo from my PC or iMac (don't have one, I'm just saying) and copy all the episodes of Friends, I could burn my own DVD's of Friends.
Ah, but making your own archives of TV shows is evil and wrong. You are supposed to use your VCR to record stuff when you are out only and then wipe the tape with an EMF emitter when you are done.
You should then save up to by the collectors boxed sets of all your favourite shows.
Then, in a few years when your obsolete VCR has flashed it's last 00:00 you can throw them all away and buy the whole lot again on whatever vogueish media is then current, like a good little consumer.
I have been playing the bejeesus out of IWD for the last week or so and it is really addictive. The gameplay is more of a dungeon hack than BG and you get to choose your entire party, rather than just one character plus NPCs.
The control system takes a bit of getting used to, and resembles realtime strategy games a bit, but is easy with a little practice.
The cool thing about IWD for me is the fact that now, after years of munchkinish AD&D playing in my youth, I can see what the game would be like if you actually stick to the rules and dont fudge the dice rolls.:-)
is it faster to use another machine to SSH in and kill X or is it faster to reboot and let fsck do its work?
well, there's the thing... you at least have the option of an SSH/Telnet or VNC connection. In the situation you describe, the computer isnt trashed - it is only the GUI or some process within it which has gone arse-upwards.
When explorer crashes on my NT 4.0 box and locks up the console I am basically forced to hit the power switch and suffer the trials of the NT boot sequence. There is no other way in (at least, not without third party tools).
every other command is 'ls' as they have to manually refresh information... with a GUI, refresh is free, automatic, and fast. It frees you to think about the problem itself,and not makeing sure you've got the latest info. And that's just a very tiny example.
Tiny, but rubbish.
When ever I use a command line I often find myself doing an 'ls' or similar almost on automatic while I think about what to do next. It is sort of a 'busy signal' for me. Odd, but true.
No one is saying that a unix command line is easier to learn than a GUI, but I for one find it immensely more powerful.
Every time I try to do anything even remotely complicated with Windows Explorer I find myself cursing the way it asks me to confirm everything, the pointless 'flying files' animation that serves no purpose other then to tick me off and waste cpu time and the godawful slowness of the whole caboodle.
The problem with the command line is that it requires the user to learn and to think - is this really so hard?
Then, when the video card in it died (8mb Diamond), I pulled it and slapped in a 2mb Cirrus Logic temporarily. It detected the card and kept my display settings exactly the way they were! I later pulled ^that^ card and stuck in an ATI 32mb card, and it did the same thing- retained my settings and didn't even tell me the card was different...
Could that be because you were running using the default SVGA X server?
Was there any need whatsoever for the faux-cyberpunk costumes you guys wore when Sealand made the BBC's 'Newsnight' the other week?
*Mirrorshades*? Good grief, its the year 2000! They haven't been 'futuristic' since Billy Idol co-opted them for his ludicrous comeback effort.
*Long Leather Coats*? Jeeezus. Why not just wear T-Shirts with 'Yes, we have seen the Matrix' on them?
Having the XMatrix screensaver running in the background of every shot - was that your idea or the BBC's?
Be warned - it may not be the efforts of world governments which will scupper Sealand. If you carry on like this it will just be the shame of people shouting 'Ha ha ha! This lot look like C-Net's Desmond Crisis, circa 1996!'
Other than that, great effort - keep up the good work.
We need to start 'seeding' the ESA with the *right* kind of SF.
Step one - force them all to watch 'Barbarella' - a future filled with Fonderesque babes in revealing spacesuits is a time I want to live in. Ditto the Orgasmatron tech. from 'Sleeper'.
Step two - Two Words...BIG FUCKING SPACESHIPS. Feed them Iain M Banks, wid a quickness.
Step three - Any SF which has Immortality./life extension as a theme. Make sure they read some of the 'Monkey's Paw' type stuff as well to help them iron out the bugs.
Step four - Make Neal Stephenson head of their computing R&D department.
Step five - Stop them from reading/seeing any Robert Heinlein/Jerry Pournelle stuff. If I want o live in an extremist right-wing future populated by smug patriarchs I'll move to the US. (joke!)
Step six - Try to persuade them to set up a division reading Fantasy novels as well. Given that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, I may end up with that magic carpet I have been after for years, after all.
Hmm.. I am not so sure that it is *Rob* who doesn't understand Open Source.
Releasing you software under an Open Source licence does not put you under any obligations to release it before it is finished! You can do whatever you like with it so long as you keep the source open.
Rob & Co are coding the Slash source in their own time & you are giving them nothing but grief for it. When it is ready it will be released (providing Rob wants to release it).
You have no claim on the source until it is released & unless you are prepared to offer up something in return then why should any programmer feel that they have to release their code just to keep you happy?
Sure, there are benefits to the 'release early, release often' maxim, but I people choose to do it their own way then that is their business, not yours.
>Then you, sir, are a scumbag and not a gentleman;)
My bag is not *completely* full of scum, but I take your point:-)
>it doesn't just have to www.royal.gov.uk, it could equally well be freshmeat.net
Whoah! Easy, tiger! I didnt say I was going to actually *do* it - I was just exercising my constitutional right to free speech which, thanks to the Schmindsors & the UK's lack of a written constitution, I don't actually have.
*Obviously* all punk-ass script kidz and crackers are pure evil & have no more right to breathe God's clean air than weasels...
...but I doubt if I would be too displeased if royal.gov.org suddenly got redirected to something more, ahh, forward thinking in a God hates/loves fags style.
I am more opposed to what the Royals stand for, rather than them personally. The Queen, I should imagine, would be a perfectly decent grandmother in different circumstances, and would doubtless be a leading light in her local women's institute or church group. Similarly, Prince Phillip would make an excellent London cab driver with his broad range of bigoted & racist opinions and inability to shut up.:-)
>And letting on "it's RedHat 5.2" is probably supplying someone with a little too much. IMO:)
Ack. All together now..."Security through obscurity is no security at all..." La la la, la la la...
>but do you really want the Royal webpages getting defaced and/or being unavailable, even for half an hour?
Er, yes. Yes, I do.
I would quite like them to be defaced with obscene messages and inflammatory statements protesting the existence of the bunch of web-toed, banjo-plucking leeches that own them.
Thanks for the offer.:-)
Stu.
{sorry, not exactly on-topic, but I wanted to make it clear that not all of us limey's are fans of the Windsors - just in case there where any doubts)
Oh come off it - UNIX cant be that hard to learn, can it?
I mean, You learned it, I learned it - I bet even BillG could write a shell script if he put his mind to it.
When I first got started in computers, DOS & UNIX were pretty hard for me to get my head around (I was used to my Commodore 64 BASIC shell - whaddaya mean, directory listings?:-).
But I stuck with it & learned how stuff worked. There is absolutely no reason why anyone else couldnt do the same. Sure, you may have some bad habits from using Windows/Mac, but any moderately intelligent person ought to be able to adapt to using a command line, etc. They may not *like* the CLI, but that is where good GUI design comes in - giving you power, but with ease of use.
Congratulations to the journo concerned - She did pretty well considering her self confessed limitations.
Karma strikes me as a good idea... but maybe we could take it further and have accounts 'die' after a preset time and get 'reborn' according to their karma.
There could be a sliding scale for such transmigrations, with high-karma posters getting cool priviliges or better html tags and first-posting trolls getting reborn as MEEPT or Bill_Gates.
>Thing is, Gimp is already ported to Windows, and as a free alternative to Photoshop, it goes a long way, IMHO it annihilates Paint Shop Pro and crap like that. Stability is of course an issue, but lots of good things will happen with the porting of GTK+ to windows (currently using MSVC++, but soon to also arrive in a cygwin incarnation).
I love the Windoze GIMP port. Easily as powerful as Paint Shop Pro, etc.
The only problem is it's lack of clipboard support - not being able to copy & paste images from GIMP into other Windoze apps is a real pain.
Wired covered the Xanadu project a couple of years ago. Sounded quite interesting in parts, although it had a real vapourware whiff about it.
Some parts of the tech seem pretty cool - in the Wired article, Nelson went on about a 'revolutionary' new method of indexing & searching textual information which was several orders of maginitude faster than anything else around. This sounded great, but the team's attitude was highly secretive and they refused to even give a demo, never mind release the source code.
Frankly their 'if we told you we'd have to kill you' schtick gave the impression that this was just so much talk which they had cooked up over a few bong hits and that they hadn't gotten around to installing their compilers yet, much less started to code.
Ted Nelson also gave the impression that he had slept through most of the WWW development that had taken place during his time on the Xanadu project. He envisaged a world of micropayments, tightly controlled data and strong copyright controls - basically the exact opposite of the way the Net seems to be going.
So, it is good to see something concrete after all this time - hopefully open sourcing the code will let somebody with a little more programming nouse give them a hand. It would be a shame to see whatever good ideas and models they have developed so far go to waste, but I doubt if Xanadu is ever going to come to fruition exactly as it was originally intended. We just arent working in that kind of world anymore.
I use cannabis regularly as do the majority of my friends.
I have a stable, well paid tech job which I perform as well as I am able (and with no complaints, so far).
My other stoner pals hold down jobs such as Magazine editor, journalist, programmer, etc. all of which require significant brainpower.
I dont think I am addicted to weed - I like it, a lot, and crave it in the same way you may crave chocolate but I have never had any 'withdrawal' symptoms such as those associated with drugs like Heroin, Alcohol or Tobacco.
That's not to say I dont get a mite pissed off when I am weedless for a week or so, but that is hardly the same thing.:-)
I find the numeric keypad useful if I have to key in a lot of numbers (say, on a spreadheet or even IP addresses).
>One little detail, though. Quake. Ever tried it *without* a numeric keypad? Eeew.
Are you insane? All right thinking Quakers know that you use the mouse to turn left & right and for mouselooking.
Movement should be via W & S for forward/backwards A & D for L-R strafing & Space for Jumping. Fire with the right mouse btn & mouselook toggle with the left.
Whenever I have to interview someone, the conversation is rarely as clear as one would like to see on a printed page.
Sentences get broken up with mumbles, hand gestures or references to multiple 'it's 'them's and 'thingumajig's which make perfect sense to both parties but would be meaningless out of context.
Therefore, it is often necessary to alter the quotes either by the insertion of the correct pronouns, etc. or by the use of square-bracketed references.
I doubt if the interviewer changed the sense of anything Linus had to say - if he did then would be trivial for Linus to spot it & issue a correcting statement given that the interview is online.
>Only one user can be the interactive user i.e. the one that gets a screen to play with. AFAIK there's nothing stopping >you writing your own multiuser shell onto the existing multiuser kernel and running it as user mode code (the NT4 >windowing stuff runs in kernel mode).
I think the phrase we are looking for is 'non-trivial'.
Grafting a new remote login shell onto NT is certainly possible, but it would require some hefty rewriting of all the heavily GUI-ed admin toops and apps to make running them remotely feasible.
Or you could just run an X server on NT or something, but that opens another can of flames entirely.:-)
Trouble is, even with an 'advanced' GUI like WinNT the user can still make mistakes.
Perhaps we should design a file manager app that knows exactly where a user should drag their files to?
Users can and will find ways to fuck things up. Faqct of life.
And by user, I mean *all* users. I bet even Linus rm's the wrong files sometimes.
Re:Worse than UNIX fragmentation
on
Storm Linux
·
· Score: 1
The commercial vehndors were not trying to 'add value' purely for the good of their health, you know. I would say that greed (or commerce, however you want to call it) played a significant part. Any added value was only available to the purchasers of that particular product and in the end resulted in a lack of choice for the consumer.
The Linux distros 'add value' too - both in the form of choice & flexibility and also by bundling extra software which is useful for the tasks the distro is intended to solve. (e.g. Caldera OpenLinux has a shedload of NetWare utils)
The big benefit with Open Source software is that this added value is available to a much wider auidience.
Not really a fragmentation
on
Storm Linux
·
· Score: 3
It may look as though Linux is going through the same fragmentation as UNIX went through, but this is not really true.
When UNIX fragmented, it was due to the competing vendors adding proprietary extras, closing up the code and introducing deliberate incompatibilities in order to lock in customers.
The various Linux distros, on the other hand, are all rooted in the same code base, are largely compatible with each other (bar a few different directory placings & choice of package management, etc) and by & large are not trying to lock out their competition.
Also,of the vast number of distros, a large number are specialist installs or micro distributions for narrow purposes (such as rescue disks, routers, simple IP masquerading for windows networks, etc) and do not need to be 100% code compatible with their mainstream counterparts.
Just chill out, there is room for everybody, it is going to be ok.
Slashdot Mirror
Now lets suppose I like Friends (I'm not saying that I do. Don't accuse me of it. I might though, but I'll never admit to it :-). I set up my TiVo to record every episode of Friends. Eventually, I will have very little room left to record other programmig. But, if I could connect to my TiVo from my PC or iMac (don't have one, I'm just saying) and copy all the episodes of Friends, I could burn my own DVD's of Friends.
Ah, but making your own archives of TV shows is evil and wrong. You are supposed to use your VCR to record stuff when you are out only and then wipe the tape with an EMF emitter when you are done.
You should then save up to by the collectors boxed sets of all your favourite shows.
Then, in a few years when your obsolete VCR has flashed it's last 00:00 you can throw them all away and buy the whole lot again on whatever vogueish media is then current, like a good little consumer.
I totally AOL that.
:-)
I have been playing the bejeesus out of IWD for the last week or so and it is really addictive. The gameplay is more of a dungeon hack than BG and you get to choose your entire party, rather than just one character plus NPCs.
The control system takes a bit of getting used to, and resembles realtime strategy games a bit, but is easy with a little practice.
The cool thing about IWD for me is the fact that now, after years of munchkinish AD&D playing in my youth, I can see what the game would be like if you actually stick to the rules and dont fudge the dice rolls.
is it faster to use another machine to SSH in and kill X or is it faster to reboot and let fsck do its work?
well, there's the thing... you at least have the option of an SSH/Telnet or VNC connection. In the situation you describe, the computer isnt trashed - it is only the GUI or some process within it which has gone arse-upwards.
When explorer crashes on my NT 4.0 box and locks up the console I am basically forced to hit the power switch and suffer the trials of the NT boot sequence. There is no other way in (at least, not without third party tools).
every other command is 'ls' as they have to manually refresh information... with a GUI, refresh is free, automatic, and fast. It frees you to think about the problem itself,and not makeing sure you've got the latest info. And that's just a very tiny example.
Tiny, but rubbish.
When ever I use a command line I often find myself doing an 'ls' or similar almost on automatic while I think about what to do next. It is sort of a 'busy signal' for me. Odd, but true.
No one is saying that a unix command line is easier to learn than a GUI, but I for one find it immensely more powerful.
Every time I try to do anything even remotely complicated with Windows Explorer I find myself cursing the way it asks me to confirm everything, the pointless 'flying files' animation that serves no purpose other then to tick me off and waste cpu time and the godawful slowness of the whole caboodle.
The problem with the command line is that it requires the user to learn and to think - is this really so hard?
Then, when the video card in it died (8mb Diamond), I pulled it and slapped in a 2mb Cirrus Logic temporarily. It detected the card and kept my display settings exactly the way they were! I later pulled ^that^ card and stuck in an ATI 32mb card, and it did the same thing- retained my settings and didn't even tell me the card was different...
Could that be because you were running using the default SVGA X server?
Was there any need whatsoever for the faux-cyberpunk costumes you guys wore when Sealand made the BBC's 'Newsnight' the other week?
*Mirrorshades*? Good grief, its the year 2000! They haven't been 'futuristic' since Billy Idol co-opted them for his ludicrous comeback effort.
*Long Leather Coats*? Jeeezus. Why not just wear T-Shirts with 'Yes, we have seen the Matrix' on them?
Having the XMatrix screensaver running in the background of every shot - was that your idea or the BBC's?
Be warned - it may not be the efforts of world governments which will scupper Sealand. If you carry on like this it will just be the shame of people shouting 'Ha ha ha! This lot look like C-Net's Desmond Crisis, circa 1996!'
Other than that, great effort - keep up the good work.
We need to start 'seeding' the ESA with the *right* kind of SF.
Step one - force them all to watch 'Barbarella' - a future filled with Fonderesque babes in revealing spacesuits is a time I want to live in. Ditto the Orgasmatron tech. from 'Sleeper'.
Step two - Two Words...BIG FUCKING SPACESHIPS. Feed them Iain M Banks, wid a quickness.
Step three - Any SF which has Immortality./life extension as a theme. Make sure they read some of the 'Monkey's Paw' type stuff as well to help them iron out the bugs.
Step four - Make Neal Stephenson head of their computing R&D department.
Step five - Stop them from reading/seeing any Robert Heinlein/Jerry Pournelle stuff. If I want o live in an extremist right-wing future populated by smug patriarchs I'll move to the US. (joke!)
Step six - Try to persuade them to set up a division reading Fantasy novels as well. Given that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, I may end up with that magic carpet I have been after for years, after all.
Just my 2 Zorkmids.
Hmm.. I am not so sure that it is *Rob* who doesn't understand Open Source.
Releasing you software under an Open Source licence does not put you under any obligations to release it before it is finished! You can do whatever you like with it so long as you keep the source open.
Rob & Co are coding the Slash source in their own time & you are giving them nothing but grief for it. When it is ready it will be released (providing Rob wants to release it).
You have no claim on the source until it is released & unless you are prepared to offer up something in return then why should any programmer feel that they have to release their code just to keep you happy?
Sure, there are benefits to the 'release early, release often' maxim, but I people choose to do it their own way then that is their business, not yours.
Please grow up.
I think this could actually be doing the programmers a favour.
I mean, most of them are probably a little bit embarrassed about having MacOS associated with their names anyway.
Their union will have asked the Apple management to cut the crediting system to save them having to change their names by deed poll, I should imagine.
When I started work at my current job the servers were all called i.e. ROSEBERY1, ROSEBERY2, etc.
This sucked, obviously.
After much whining from me, we have switched to 'Animal names that have a slight air of silliness about them'
i.e.
vole
llama
sheep
otter
skunk
marmoset
slow_loris (reserved for a future NT box)
etc.
it isn't perfect, but it will have to do until I talk them round to 'minor characters from Star Wars' or 'Gods of the Cthulhu Mythos'.
>Then you, sir, are a scumbag and not a gentleman ;)
:-)
:-)
:)
My bag is not *completely* full of scum, but I take your point
>it doesn't just have to www.royal.gov.uk, it could equally well be freshmeat.net
Whoah! Easy, tiger! I didnt say I was going to actually *do* it - I was just exercising my constitutional right to free speech which, thanks to the Schmindsors & the UK's lack of a written constitution, I don't actually have.
*Obviously* all punk-ass script kidz and crackers are pure evil & have no more right to breathe God's clean air than weasels...
...but I doubt if I would be too displeased if royal.gov.org suddenly got redirected to something more, ahh, forward thinking in a God hates/loves fags style.
I am more opposed to what the Royals stand for, rather than them personally. The Queen, I should imagine, would be a perfectly decent grandmother in different circumstances, and would doubtless be a leading light in her local women's institute or church group. Similarly, Prince Phillip would make an excellent London cab driver with his broad range of bigoted & racist opinions and inability to shut up.
>And letting on "it's RedHat 5.2" is probably supplying someone with a little too much. IMO
Ack. All together now..."Security through obscurity is no security at all..." La la la, la la la...
vive la revolution, or something.
>but do you really want the Royal webpages getting defaced and/or being unavailable, even for half an hour?
:-)
Er, yes. Yes, I do.
I would quite like them to be defaced with obscene messages and inflammatory statements protesting the existence of the bunch of web-toed, banjo-plucking leeches that own them.
Thanks for the offer.
Stu.
{sorry, not exactly on-topic, but I wanted to make it clear that not all of us limey's are fans of the Windsors - just in case there where any doubts)
Oh come off it - UNIX cant be that hard to learn, can it?
:-).
I mean, You learned it, I learned it - I bet even BillG could write a shell script if he put his mind to it.
When I first got started in computers, DOS & UNIX were pretty hard for me to get my head around (I was used to my Commodore 64 BASIC shell - whaddaya mean, directory listings?
But I stuck with it & learned how stuff worked. There is absolutely no reason why anyone else couldnt do the same. Sure, you may have some bad habits from using Windows/Mac, but any moderately intelligent person ought to be able to adapt to using a command line, etc. They may not *like* the CLI, but that is where good GUI design comes in - giving you power, but with ease of use.
Congratulations to the journo concerned - She did pretty well considering her self confessed limitations.
Karma strikes me as a good idea... but maybe we could take it further and have accounts 'die' after a preset time and get 'reborn' according to their karma.
There could be a sliding scale for such transmigrations, with high-karma posters getting cool priviliges or better html tags and first-posting trolls getting reborn as MEEPT or Bill_Gates.
Just a thought.
:-)
>Thing is, Gimp is already ported to Windows, and as a free alternative to Photoshop, it goes a long way, IMHO it annihilates
Paint Shop Pro and crap like that. Stability is of course an issue, but lots of good things will happen with the porting of GTK+ to
windows (currently using MSVC++, but soon to also arrive in a cygwin incarnation).
I love the Windoze GIMP port. Easily as powerful as Paint Shop Pro, etc.
The only problem is it's lack of clipboard support - not being able to copy & paste images from GIMP into other Windoze apps is a real pain.
Makes you wonder why NT runs on only tow platforms, and not that well on either.
Great chunks of both (NT & Linux) OS's can be considered kludges and hacks, the difference with Linux is that these hacks are open for peer review.
Wired covered the Xanadu project a couple of years ago. Sounded quite interesting in parts, although it had a real vapourware whiff about it.
Some parts of the tech seem pretty cool - in the Wired article, Nelson went on about a 'revolutionary' new method of indexing & searching textual information which was several orders of maginitude faster than anything else around. This sounded great, but the team's attitude was highly secretive and they refused to even give a demo, never mind release the source code.
Frankly their 'if we told you we'd have to kill you' schtick gave the impression that this was just so much talk which they had cooked up over a few bong hits and that they hadn't gotten around to installing their compilers yet, much less started to code.
Ted Nelson also gave the impression that he had slept through most of the WWW development that had taken place during his time on the Xanadu project. He envisaged a world of micropayments, tightly controlled data and strong copyright controls - basically the exact opposite of the way the Net seems to be going.
So, it is good to see something concrete after all this time - hopefully open sourcing the code will let somebody with a little more programming nouse give them a hand. It would be a shame to see whatever good ideas and models they have developed so far go to waste, but I doubt if Xanadu is ever going to come to fruition exactly as it was originally intended. We just arent working in that kind of world anymore.
I use cannabis regularly as do the majority of my friends.
:-)
I have a stable, well paid tech job which I perform as well as I am able (and with no complaints, so far).
My other stoner pals hold down jobs such as Magazine editor, journalist, programmer, etc. all of which require significant brainpower.
I dont think I am addicted to weed - I like it, a lot, and crave it in the same way you may crave chocolate but I have never had any 'withdrawal' symptoms such as those associated with drugs like Heroin, Alcohol or Tobacco.
That's not to say I dont get a mite pissed off when I am weedless for a week or so, but that is hardly the same thing.
I find the numeric keypad useful if I have to key in a lot of numbers (say, on a spreadheet or even IP addresses).
:-)
>One little detail, though. Quake. Ever tried it *without* a numeric keypad? Eeew.
Are you insane? All right thinking Quakers know that you use the mouse to turn left & right and for mouselooking.
Movement should be via W & S for forward/backwards A & D for L-R strafing & Space for Jumping. Fire with the right mouse btn & mouselook toggle with the left.
Jeez.. some people.
Whenever I have to interview someone, the conversation is rarely as clear as one would like to see on a printed page.
Sentences get broken up with mumbles, hand gestures or references to multiple 'it's 'them's and 'thingumajig's which make perfect sense to both parties but would be meaningless out of context.
Therefore, it is often necessary to alter the quotes either by the insertion of the correct pronouns, etc. or by the use of square-bracketed references.
I doubt if the interviewer changed the sense of anything Linus had to say - if he did then would be trivial for Linus to spot it & issue a correcting statement given that the interview is online.
>Only one user can be the interactive user i.e. the one that gets a screen to play with. AFAIK there's nothing stopping
:-)
>you writing your own multiuser shell onto the existing multiuser kernel and running it as user mode code (the NT4
>windowing stuff runs in kernel mode).
I think the phrase we are looking for is 'non-trivial'.
Grafting a new remote login shell onto NT is certainly possible, but it would require some hefty rewriting of all the heavily GUI-ed admin toops and apps to make running them remotely feasible.
Or you could just run an X server on NT or something, but that opens another can of flames entirely.
stu.
>Users can and will find ways to fuck things up.
:-)
>Faqct of life.
Case in point, I think!
Hmm.. well that would be nice wouldnt it?
Trouble is, even with an 'advanced' GUI like WinNT the user can still make mistakes.
Perhaps we should design a file manager app that knows exactly where a user should drag their files to?
Users can and will find ways to fuck things up. Faqct of life.
And by user, I mean *all* users. I bet even Linus rm's the wrong files sometimes.
The commercial vehndors were not trying to 'add value' purely for the good of their health, you know. I would say that greed (or commerce, however you want to call it) played a significant part. Any added value was only available to the purchasers of that particular product and in the end resulted in a lack of choice for the consumer.
The Linux distros 'add value' too - both in the form of choice & flexibility and also by bundling extra software which is useful for the tasks the distro is intended to solve. (e.g. Caldera OpenLinux has a shedload of NetWare utils)
The big benefit with Open Source software is that this added value is available to a much wider auidience.
It may look as though Linux is going through the same fragmentation as UNIX went through, but this is not really true.
When UNIX fragmented, it was due to the competing vendors adding proprietary extras, closing up the code and introducing deliberate incompatibilities in order to lock in customers.
The various Linux distros, on the other hand, are all rooted in the same code base, are largely compatible with each other (bar a few different directory placings & choice of package management, etc) and by & large are not trying to lock out their competition.
Also,of the vast number of distros, a large number are specialist installs or micro distributions for narrow purposes (such as rescue disks, routers, simple IP masquerading for windows networks, etc) and do not need to be 100% code compatible with their mainstream counterparts.
Just chill out, there is room for everybody, it is going to be ok.