It's not just Belgians. I'm pro-nuke too, but looking at the people out there who'd run this stuff today, I'd say they're not up to it.
Nuclear power should morph in the direction of "The Cloud." Amazon and Google focus on getting their stuff right and finding the right people to make that happen, and selling the result to those who need it. Not everyone can do that with the labour and management that's out there these days. Maybe it'd make sense to leave it to France to run the reactors with the best people they can find, selling the result to all comers.
I started out moaning reading your post as yet another defeatist anti-nuke greenie, but eventually came to essentially agree. However, it's not the regulatory lapses, I think. Instead, it's 21st Century stupidity and management ineptitude we need to fear. People today, in general, can't do what's necessary to make things like nuclear safe. We're slip-sliding back into the Dark Ages. We shouldn't be fiddling with stuff like ubiquitous nuclear power when all we have to work with is the iPod generation.
Sounds like you are a very stupid individual. All you had to do was download the install floppy image and you were set. Yes, there are install cd images now. No, you should not try again. Stick to freebsd, we don't need any more idiots that can't read clogging up the mailing list with stupid questions that are answered in the FAQ.
I realize others have probably told you this today, but you're a despicable human being.
Ubuntu 11.10 is out too and Windows 8 will be out soon!
... as compared to them.
In other news, Kim Kardashian got divorced after 72 days!
Who?
Seriously, I didn't know they'd released a new version, and I was just wondering what I should do with a presently mothballed system I have. Now, I can build an OpenBSD sandbox to play with. Woohoo!:-)
I'd like to take this opportunity to point out the brilliance of the "file" command (in *nix). All its smarts, plus all the details mentioned in its manpage, are all I ever needed to know about any file's technical details. This BS from Microsoft is re-inventing the wheel, badly and foolishly, with suspiciously strange priorities. No surprise there.
The "file(1)" manpage is a great read, including potshots at SysV, BSD, and mention that it (or at least Debian's version) was written by a fellow Canuck (Ian F. Darwin).
FYI, a point & click interface to manpages:
xman -notopbox -bothshown &
Enjoy the odd behaviour of the Athena Widget Set's scrollbars.:-)
Most people out there are not like you, who can whip up a bash shell and instinctively know which commands to enter, which files to edit, and so on. They need a GUI way to fix things whenever something doesn't work.
i) Yes they are. ii) (corollary) How do you think I got to be the way I am?
I used to run Windows. Before that, DOS. I ran into many problems with both, then chanced upon a Unix box (Thank you, thank you, thank you,...), saw it was ***FAR*** better than what I'd previously used, so I put my nose to the grindstone and *learned* how to use it properly.
Granted, that's not a quick process, but it is easy. All you need to do to master it is read for comprehension. *That's* what's wrong with those who don't get it. They have to learn it, but that takes too long for their tastes.
No sympathy, sorry. No, not sorry. This sort of knowledge is worth the effort. If they can't see that, they're fools. Fine, fritter your life away on bad tech, see if I care.
*Anyone can* do this. Pining for magical GUIs that'll make it easier/simpler for them is a fool's quest. CLI is a feature, not a hurdle to be avoided.
Look at my.sig - the journey is the adventure. Learning is good! Don't be afraid of steep learning curves. The plateau you land on at the end of them makes the effort worth it.
What we do need is a single functional version of linux which is widely accepted as standard, and that works for pretty much everything.
Three words: No. You. Don't.
You need to train your people (support staff) to the point that they don't need to care what is on the box. Whatever's there, they ought to be able to figure out what to do with it. This's not that difficult! You don't need to be a wizard to understand this stuff. You just need to be able to read the supplied documentation, maybe dig into a web search engine, then try a few things out before you roll it out to production.
This isn't rocket science. Stop trying to make it look like it is.
As an old usenetter, whenever I see C&C, I think of "coffee and cats warning" as in "put down the coffee and push the cat off your lap before you read this."
I'm an old Usenetter, and I've never seen that one. Thanks. The equivalent I saw was C|N>K ("Coke piped through nose to keyboard", or something.:-)
Doesn't rising sea level equate to an increase in marine habitat?
No, it equates to a change in marine habitat.
I'll try again. More land submerged equates to a greater area and volume of potential marine habitat. Some species accustomed to specific depths will be forced to migrate (if they can) to other places within their habitat where those depths still exist or are newly created. Regardless, marine habitat has increased.
... the bigger the change, the more it will be bad.
That's just sloppy reasoning. It's hard to take your argument seriously when you do things like that.
I have no idea what your argument is. What does any of that have to do with what I wrote? However,...
"Oh noooooos! Linux isn't monolithic! There's too much choice, so it's doomed! Aiiiii!!" Okay, so you don't like choice and prefer to be spoon fed from on high. That's your choice. So go with Redhat or SuSE or Ubuntu, or CentOS if you can live without vendor support. Scientific Linux is another RH clone tailored for scientific use. Princeton University's Institute for Advanced Studies offers an alternative to SL in puias. Don't want either of them? *buntu offers science-astronomy, science-biology, science-chemistry,...
Have you seriously given any thought on what happens, when one distro works but other one doesn't? The scenario is fairly common in linux world, and RTFM-style answer is almost always "just try the other distro".
What happens when Redhat shows a flaw to those who use it? At Exxonmobil, they call Redhat! Redhat's support is pretty damned good apparently since Redhat made out like a bandit this past year.
What is your complaint? What is wrong with having alternatives? What happens in the Win* world when their monolithic, one size fits all, doesn't work?
I've never understood this argument. If you don't like the fact that Linux offers a plethora of choice, then go with OpenBSD or FreeBSD. You end up with pretty much the same result regardless of what you choose.
BTW, I really don't give a rat's ass about the corporate world. Their problems are their problems, not mine, and they're welcome to them. If they had any smarts, they'd know that all they need to do is keep people like me around who'd solve their problems when they run into them, duh! Instead, corporate culture deems IT a cost centre, so we're considered a hateful drain on the bottom line. I think that's pretty shallow thinking, but they think that works for them. They're welcome to their delusions.
Feh. You're spreading FUD, and pretty poor FUD from the looks of it.
The other problem is bad attitude, which in a way reminds me of the way online shooters have become. go to ANY forum and ask for a non CLI way to solve a simple problem and what do you get? Most likely a wave of pure hatred, with every filthy name in the book, ending with "RTFM or go back to Winblowz noob LOL!".
What a crock of !@#$. Have you even looked at the Ubuntu forums? BS like that is not allowed at all! That crap doesn't even fly in debian-user, and anything and anyone can post to it without even subscribing. Usenet and IRC used to be like that, but that stuff hasn't flown for years (which is a shame because I enjoyed stamping on those jerks' heads and teaching them civility).
What's wrong with CLI ways to solve problems? You can't type? Could'a fooled me. Why are you looking for non-CLI progs in the first place when simpler, quicker solutions already exist? Just because you're used to Windows Explorer doesn't mean GUI file managers are the right way to do things. They even decided to hide filename extensions from you, despite the dangerous security implications (in Windows) that raises.
Stop spreading FUD. It makes you look like a fool. And buy yourself a cheap sandbox machine so you can try out modern installs without fscking up your working machine. Go to Distrowatch and find some ISOs to burn. Run the install over and over again and learn their potential. Pretty soon, you'll be able to build a fully functional box in half an hour.
Need to maintain different distros over different machines will force the (already very small) amount of IT support that can properly support desktop linux to utterly explode...
Who said anything about using multiple distros? I said there's many to choose from. Pick the one that you find works best for your environment.
Not to mention, that "small amount of IT support" is going to love it once it's all up to speed. It's easy to maintain many *nix boxes with far fewer staff than the equivalent Win* boxes would need. I've seen many ops with one or two admins maintaining hundreds of *nix machines comfortably.
They may renew licenses but only for servers which are in good condition, not too outdated and for which linux is not feasible. Outdated servers, or those which are not totally locked into microsoft may well get replaced with linux.
Besides, migrating server ops may entail a lot of work. If they've been locked into IIS, Exchange, Access & etc., they may have a mountain of proprietary code and procedures to convert, not to mention a complete redesign of system security.
LibreOffice is well and good, but if what you need is interoperability, you're just screwed.
I disagree. I've been IT consulting for fifteen years, and that means interacting with recruiters/headhunters and clients, almost all of whom were exclusively MS Office users. Not once have I heard that any of them couldn't open my resume and related documents. The only time I've had trouble was when people sent me.pdf's that they expected me to edit (I had to resort to pdf2txt in that case; now I see abiword can do it (yay!:-)).
Perhaps if you're excessively anal about fonts you may be impossible to please. I'm far more focused on content than I am about formatting.
But on [a] lark last weekend, i [wanted] gnome2 so I installed debian stable on another partition...
I was just despairing that this thread is lousy with some of the dumbest pro-Linux writings I've seen in a while. Some of you guys make people like me ashamed to be a FLOSS user. For anyone else here who's curious about FLOSS and trying to learn something, please accept my apologies. Not all of us are such doofuses.
For instance, you don't have to reinstall your OS to try another window manager or desktop environment, FFS! Most of the *dm's I've seen let you choose which one you want to use when you login. It's even easier to do if you don't use a GUI login; change your.xinitrc to run the one you want. You can have as many wm's installed as your harddrive will hold. Gah!
As for all the ragging on Shuttleworth for shoving unity down your throats, damn, that's clueless! You guys need to start over. You're just not getting it. Please, stop making FLOSS look bad! It doesn't deserve it.
As a result, you can expect a MASSIVE amount of problems when introducing FOSS. Linux et al are not known for their great hardware compatibility even in modern systems, much less in really old ones that have most components in EOL for a long time.
Pure, unadulterated FUD, and demonstrably untrue. Spend a little time on distrowatch.com. There are many distributions specifically designed for running on older, under-powered, seemingly obsolete systems. *buntu has at least three of its own. Damn Small Linux is *still* going strong. Hell, even OpenBSD works well on those systems.
Slashdot Mirror
The nuke waste problem still hasn't gone away. Building new plants is insane.
Yes it has.
Belgians are stupid.
It's not just Belgians. I'm pro-nuke too, but looking at the people out there who'd run this stuff today, I'd say they're not up to it.
Nuclear power should morph in the direction of "The Cloud." Amazon and Google focus on getting their stuff right and finding the right people to make that happen, and selling the result to those who need it. Not everyone can do that with the labour and management that's out there these days. Maybe it'd make sense to leave it to France to run the reactors with the best people they can find, selling the result to all comers.
I started out moaning reading your post as yet another defeatist anti-nuke greenie, but eventually came to essentially agree. However, it's not the regulatory lapses, I think. Instead, it's 21st Century stupidity and management ineptitude we need to fear. People today, in general, can't do what's necessary to make things like nuclear safe. We're slip-sliding back into the Dark Ages. We shouldn't be fiddling with stuff like ubiquitous nuclear power when all we have to work with is the iPod generation.
Why do I never have mod points when I need them?
Why the hell do you people keep asking that stupid question?!?
"India will build a working Thorium reactor."
Building a non-working Thorium reactor would be an absurd plan.
Never heard of prototyping or simulations? I thought we were all geeks here. apt-get -s install $blah
The only reason i could see someone needing a whole iso is if they lack connectivity.
If you're doing multiple installs, it'd be a lot nicer for their servers if you're not slurping down a fresh copy for every install.
Sounds like you are a very stupid individual. All you had to do was download the install floppy image and you were set. Yes, there are install cd images now. No, you should not try again. Stick to freebsd, we don't need any more idiots that can't read clogging up the mailing list with stupid questions that are answered in the FAQ.
I realize others have probably told you this today, but you're a despicable human being.
Sigh. Some people just can't handle the truth.
Why is this news on the main page?
Because OpenBSD matters?
Ubuntu 11.10 is out too and Windows 8 will be out soon!
... as compared to them.
In other news, Kim Kardashian got divorced after 72 days!
Who?
Seriously, I didn't know they'd released a new version, and I was just wondering what I should do with a presently mothballed system I have. Now, I can build an OpenBSD sandbox to play with. Woohoo! :-)
Needless to say, I didn't want that job.
FTFY. "Ah, a smartass know-it-all, eh?" It's always best to avoid managers who're easily intimidated by competence.
I'd like to take this opportunity to point out the brilliance of the "file" command (in *nix). All its smarts, plus all the details mentioned in its manpage, are all I ever needed to know about any file's technical details. This BS from Microsoft is re-inventing the wheel, badly and foolishly, with suspiciously strange priorities. No surprise there.
The "file(1)" manpage is a great read, including potshots at SysV, BSD, and mention that it (or at least Debian's version) was written by a fellow Canuck (Ian F. Darwin).
FYI, a point & click interface to manpages:
xman -notopbox -bothshown &
Enjoy the odd behaviour of the Athena Widget Set's scrollbars. :-)
Most people out there are not like you, who can whip up a bash shell and instinctively know which commands to enter, which files to edit, and so on. They need a GUI way to fix things whenever something doesn't work.
i) Yes they are.
ii) (corollary) How do you think I got to be the way I am?
I used to run Windows. Before that, DOS. I ran into many problems with both, then chanced upon a Unix box (Thank you, thank you, thank you, ...), saw it was ***FAR*** better than what I'd previously used, so I put my nose to the grindstone and *learned* how to use it properly.
Granted, that's not a quick process, but it is easy. All you need to do to master it is read for comprehension. *That's* what's wrong with those who don't get it. They have to learn it, but that takes too long for their tastes.
No sympathy, sorry. No, not sorry. This sort of knowledge is worth the effort. If they can't see that, they're fools. Fine, fritter your life away on bad tech, see if I care.
*Anyone can* do this. Pining for magical GUIs that'll make it easier/simpler for them is a fool's quest. CLI is a feature, not a hurdle to be avoided.
Look at my .sig - the journey is the adventure. Learning is good! Don't be afraid of steep learning curves. The plateau you land on at the end of them makes the effort worth it.
What we do need is a single functional version of linux which is widely accepted as standard, and that works for pretty much everything.
Three words: No. You. Don't.
You need to train your people (support staff) to the point that they don't need to care what is on the box. Whatever's there, they ought to be able to figure out what to do with it. This's not that difficult! You don't need to be a wizard to understand this stuff. You just need to be able to read the supplied documentation, maybe dig into a web search engine, then try a few things out before you roll it out to production.
This isn't rocket science. Stop trying to make it look like it is.
As an old usenetter, whenever I see C&C, I think of "coffee and cats warning" as in "put down the coffee and push the cat off your lap before you read this."
I'm an old Usenetter, and I've never seen that one. Thanks. The equivalent I saw was C|N>K ("Coke piped through nose to keyboard", or something. :-)
Doesn't rising sea level equate to an increase in marine habitat?
No, it equates to a change in marine habitat.
I'll try again. More land submerged equates to a greater area and volume of potential marine habitat. Some species accustomed to specific depths will be forced to migrate (if they can) to other places within their habitat where those depths still exist or are newly created. Regardless, marine habitat has increased.
... the bigger the change, the more it will be bad.
That's just sloppy reasoning. It's hard to take your argument seriously when you do things like that.
Not only bad for humans, bad for all the other extant species we share the Earth with.
Sweeping generalizations are always wrong. :-)
Doesn't rising sea level equate to an increase in marine habitat?
I have no idea what your argument is. What does any of that have to do with what I wrote? However, ...
"Oh noooooos! Linux isn't monolithic! There's too much choice, so it's doomed! Aiiiii!!" Okay, so you don't like choice and prefer to be spoon fed from on high. That's your choice. So go with Redhat or SuSE or Ubuntu, or CentOS if you can live without vendor support. Scientific Linux is another RH clone tailored for scientific use. Princeton University's Institute for Advanced Studies offers an alternative to SL in puias. Don't want either of them? *buntu offers science-astronomy, science-biology, science-chemistry, ...
Have you seriously given any thought on what happens, when one distro works but other one doesn't? The scenario is fairly common in linux world, and RTFM-style answer is almost always "just try the other distro".
What happens when Redhat shows a flaw to those who use it? At Exxonmobil, they call Redhat! Redhat's support is pretty damned good apparently since Redhat made out like a bandit this past year.
What is your complaint? What is wrong with having alternatives? What happens in the Win* world when their monolithic, one size fits all, doesn't work?
I've never understood this argument. If you don't like the fact that Linux offers a plethora of choice, then go with OpenBSD or FreeBSD. You end up with pretty much the same result regardless of what you choose.
BTW, I really don't give a rat's ass about the corporate world. Their problems are their problems, not mine, and they're welcome to them. If they had any smarts, they'd know that all they need to do is keep people like me around who'd solve their problems when they run into them, duh! Instead, corporate culture deems IT a cost centre, so we're considered a hateful drain on the bottom line. I think that's pretty shallow thinking, but they think that works for them. They're welcome to their delusions.
Feh. You're spreading FUD, and pretty poor FUD from the looks of it.
Holy crap. That zero content rant earns a +5 Insightful?!? Must be a slow news day. Holy crap.
No, I can't be bothered to attempt to refute this BS, except to say, didn't RH make a killing this past year?
For instance, you don't have to reinstall your OS to try another window manager or desktop environment, FFS!
Ubuntu 11.10 doesn't ship with Gnome 2 period.
Then go to a gnome fileserver and download a tarball, then unzip it into /usr/local. Or burn a DebianLive CD if all you want to do is try it out.
What a hoser.
The other problem is bad attitude, which in a way reminds me of the way online shooters have become. go to ANY forum and ask for a non CLI way to solve a simple problem and what do you get? Most likely a wave of pure hatred, with every filthy name in the book, ending with "RTFM or go back to Winblowz noob LOL!".
What a crock of !@#$. Have you even looked at the Ubuntu forums? BS like that is not allowed at all! That crap doesn't even fly in debian-user, and anything and anyone can post to it without even subscribing. Usenet and IRC used to be like that, but that stuff hasn't flown for years (which is a shame because I enjoyed stamping on those jerks' heads and teaching them civility).
What's wrong with CLI ways to solve problems? You can't type? Could'a fooled me. Why are you looking for non-CLI progs in the first place when simpler, quicker solutions already exist? Just because you're used to Windows Explorer doesn't mean GUI file managers are the right way to do things. They even decided to hide filename extensions from you, despite the dangerous security implications (in Windows) that raises.
Stop spreading FUD. It makes you look like a fool. And buy yourself a cheap sandbox machine so you can try out modern installs without fscking up your working machine. Go to Distrowatch and find some ISOs to burn. Run the install over and over again and learn their potential. Pretty soon, you'll be able to build a fully functional box in half an hour.
It still doesn't change the reality that even old hardware works with Windows while it doesn't with Linux.
More FUD. I own decade old hardware that's still supported and runs snappily with FLOSS. It'd be on its knees attempting to run Win*.
Need to maintain different distros over different machines will force the (already very small) amount of IT support that can properly support desktop linux to utterly explode ...
Who said anything about using multiple distros? I said there's many to choose from. Pick the one that you find works best for your environment.
Not to mention, that "small amount of IT support" is going to love it once it's all up to speed. It's easy to maintain many *nix boxes with far fewer staff than the equivalent Win* boxes would need. I've seen many ops with one or two admins maintaining hundreds of *nix machines comfortably.
They may renew licenses but only for servers which are in good condition, not too outdated and for which linux is not feasible. Outdated servers, or those which are not totally locked into microsoft may well get replaced with linux.
Besides, migrating server ops may entail a lot of work. If they've been locked into IIS, Exchange, Access & etc., they may have a mountain of proprietary code and procedures to convert, not to mention a complete redesign of system security.
LibreOffice is well and good, but if what you need is interoperability, you're just screwed.
I disagree. I've been IT consulting for fifteen years, and that means interacting with recruiters/headhunters and clients, almost all of whom were exclusively MS Office users. Not once have I heard that any of them couldn't open my resume and related documents. The only time I've had trouble was when people sent me .pdf's that they expected me to edit (I had to resort to pdf2txt in that case; now I see abiword can do it (yay! :-)).
Perhaps if you're excessively anal about fonts you may be impossible to please. I'm far more focused on content than I am about formatting.
But on [a] lark last weekend, i [wanted] gnome2 so I installed debian stable on another partition ...
I was just despairing that this thread is lousy with some of the dumbest pro-Linux writings I've seen in a while. Some of you guys make people like me ashamed to be a FLOSS user. For anyone else here who's curious about FLOSS and trying to learn something, please accept my apologies. Not all of us are such doofuses.
For instance, you don't have to reinstall your OS to try another window manager or desktop environment, FFS! Most of the *dm's I've seen let you choose which one you want to use when you login. It's even easier to do if you don't use a GUI login; change your .xinitrc to run the one you want. You can have as many wm's installed as your harddrive will hold. Gah!
As for all the ragging on Shuttleworth for shoving unity down your throats, damn, that's clueless! You guys need to start over. You're just not getting it. Please, stop making FLOSS look bad! It doesn't deserve it.
As a result, you can expect a MASSIVE amount of problems when introducing FOSS. Linux et al are not known for their great hardware compatibility even in modern systems, much less in really old ones that have most components in EOL for a long time.
Pure, unadulterated FUD, and demonstrably untrue. Spend a little time on distrowatch.com. There are many distributions specifically designed for running on older, under-powered, seemingly obsolete systems. *buntu has at least three of its own. Damn Small Linux is *still* going strong. Hell, even OpenBSD works well on those systems.