Well, yeah, that had a lot of appeal, now that I think about it.
The problem there, however, is that the landscape has changed. Linux used to be a smaller development community than it is now, obviously. As such, written, working code was more valuable than it is now. Hobbiests developed the kernel, mostly, so keeping the older hardware working was usually of some import. In fact, it was one of the primary appeals for Linux: you could run reasonably modern software (Netscape, mainly) on some pretty ancient hardware. Now, however, a Linux distro usually won't run nearly as well as XP will. And for a user and their common tasks, there's not much of a difference between the two's functionality.
Wow, that review sent me - like a drunk bum thrown into an alley from the back of a squad car - down memory lane!
Ah, anyone remember linuxconf? What a piece of junk! It mostly worked, when it worked. But I remember it interfering with any manual configuration changes made (without telling you). Very irritating. I ended up ignoring it, I think.
I can't believe Linux got any sort of foothold on the desktop with releases like the the early KDE and GNOME, to be honest. I remember constantly, constantly fighting with the two (and their respective toolkits) to make them a) look half decent, b) behave half decently, and c) work in a fashion which did not interfere. Part of that
I remember when I started out, more or less with RedHat 5.2. GUI options? What GUI options? You had (from my recollection) fvwm, fvwm95, afterstep, and -maybe- icewm. I don't remember for certain if icewm was available in 5.2, but it was in 6.0, as I used it in 6.0 when I moved to it. I dabbled for a while with 5.2 but never permanently, as my hardware was not yet supported. I also tried DOSLinux and the HappyHacker guides before I determined that yes, I needed a real linux distro. After a botched upgrade from RH6.1 to 6.2, I moved over to (IIRC) Mandrake 6 or 7 (whichever came out around the time of RH6.2).
It's funny, but when I decided to go with RH (largely because I could order the CDs - I ended up grabbing them from Best Buy, IIRC), Slackware was already considered to be a hodgepodge of crap thrown together, largely targeted at/used by the "h@x0r" community. It's only become more of the case, of course, but Slackware refuses to die.
It wasn't long after Mandrake that I went to debian (maybe late '99), and stuck with that until just this past April, when I gave Ubuntu a try. Stormix 2000 was a major catalyst in me moving to Debian, if I'm recalling things correctly. I still use Debian as much as possible, but Ubuntu goes on my primary workstation/laptop.
As this thread is about Linux in the year 2000: does anyone else remember Stormix 2000? It was an incredible, incredible distro for it's day (consistent look/feel, debian based, intelligent installer), and I'm sad to see that Progeny didn't make it as a company. They didn't get half the credit that was due them, IMO, as they were a major force behind the current way in which distros are packaged, IIRC. They stuck around for a while and provided some good additional packages, and an alternative installer for Debian 3, which was very nice (in terms of hardware support, which was lacking in Debian at the time).
'make oldconfig' has worked inconsistently over the past several years due to the kernel devs changing config locations of various devices or renaming them. Sometimes it's as 'simple' as a needed driver not building, sometimes it's as irritating as the kernel not booting at all (and then having to dig through the config to find what it was that caused it).
I noticed this largely because I have/had a script which would automatically build and package new kernels as they became available, and it stopped working effectively to the point of me abandoning the approach. Combine that with negative advances in terms of desktop performance and support for a stable and popular system configuration, and it just ceased being worth any attempt.
You have a point that it's better than most would've offered, but at the same time, IBM isn't doing it out of benevolence. They're doing it for the bottom dollar. It's like a second slap in the face: we don't think you're valuable enough to keep employed, but we'll hire you overseas for a fraction of what you're making, because it's cheaper for us to not have to train a foreigner to do your job.
Democracy and capitalism both flow from the same principles of "let people do what they want with their life, as long as they don't infringe on others". Capitalism is made possible by a sound foundation of non-infringing republican democracy*.
* What we've come to know as democracy today, isn't. I'm referring to the historic meaning of the word, not the modern "every modern country with elected representative officials" variety. A socialist state can not, by necessity of what it implies, be a democracy. This is also due to the necessary requirement of a democracy to be of the people, by the people.
What do you mean, what we have been spending? I wasn't old enough to be spending - on credit or otherwise - during the past 30 years of excess. The people who were doing that are now sitting comfortable (or not so comfortable, if they didn't exploit others) in retirement, able to watch their fucked policies play themselves out on the lives of younger generations.
CTS, the issue here isn't that weavers are being put out of business by a loom owner. The problem is that weavers are put out of work by their employer, who is shipping in product from foreign lands, performed by lesser or equal skilled weavers, at a fraction of the cost.
If there was any sort of advancement here, and not just pure unbridled greed, you'd have a point. But there's been no actual progress made. Just the devaluation of human efforts, and the people who make them.
If this were to happen 50 years ago, there'd be "employers" and CEOs hanging from trees, I have no doubt.
Oh, there are some things still made in the US. They're just, typically, illegal in much of the country. (In this case, I'm referring to firearms.)
No, electronics aren't made here. But there are still quite a few products made here:
1) Vehicles. This is, obviously, a very big one. But if nobody is buying our products overseas... it's hard for a single industry to sustain things on any significant scale. 2) Firearms and firearm-related products such as reloading presses. For whatever reason, the consumers of said products are traditionally pretty particular about things being US-made. (Hmm, wonder why...) 3) Machinery. We are still #1 in the world for machinery and the associated automation which goes with it. This is essential due to the large amount of land which we plant and harvest on an annual basis, our massive road structures, and our preference for big, powerful things. 4) Food. We are the largest food producer in the world, thankfully, given that it's something everyone needs. Unfortunately, food is relatively inexpensive compared to everything else out there. 5) Uh... guess we get most everything else from elsewhere.
Granted, that's not exhaustive. Though I will certainly give you the point that, in essence, we've destroyed our manufacturing in this country. Hell, we don't even have a forestry industry in the US anymore (largely brought on by eco-nuts), and import all our wood from Canada. That's sad, given how much forested land we've got and the amount of knowledge and experience which is simply lost when an industry dies.
Correct me if i'm wrong, but I would assume that most visa workers are there with the preconception of it being a temporary stay - you know, because visas are temporary. The people I know who have taken the route of living overseas on visas know this, and act accordingly: they live for the moment, enjoy the culture, and sack away as much money as they can.
Anyone who is in a foreign country, buying property and possessions for personal consumption, is a fool to expect to not have to leave it all behind: your very existence in the country is determined by whether or not your employer wants you anymore.
If you move to a country to work on a visa, especially one such as the US where citizenship is trivial to acquire, and want to stay, why not become a citizen? A visa holder certainly has that out.
Most companies won't even look at your resume if you're on the other side of the country and not local. Forget relocation packages; from what I've heard, even paying for half of the interview travel expenses is, today, almost unheard of.
Look at some of the crime, poverty, and disease statistics for India (or any other country), really. You'd not be living in an insular bubble; you'd be living in a neighborhood. You'd still have to contend with those things, all while essentially abandoning everything you've grown to accept as normal: clean (shit-free) streets, good wiring, traffic lights and laws, (relatively) honest police and officials.
And your children would then grow up in a society which has none of the values you grew up with. And it goes beyond values, even: it goes towards a way of thought. That is a LOT more to abandon back in America than just 2/3rds your wage.
Realistically, if you were to make this move, you're not coming back. You'd have no means to do so.
The problem is that we've reached a point where it's not "lower skilled jobs" are getting exported. There are no more of those which can be exported - we've only got service jobs and professional positions left in this country, in any significant numbers.
It's not such a problem for the economy as a whole when production is made more efficient within a country through the elimination of jobs and advances in technology. But that's not what's happening. Production isn't being made more efficient; it's being made less expensive, and it's not being kept in the country. That is a net loss for the country in a very real way.
Next time you've got the inclination to be depressed, look in your newspaper for jobs which actually produce, or perform work which sustains a country at the fundamental level. You won't find much, if any: you'll find service jobs. While there is nothing wrong with a service job, in and of itself, working at Hardees, as a nurse in a hospital or nursing home, as a sales associate for $company, and so on and so forth do not produce anything. They're just shifting money around. That's not a healthy, stable economy; that's the bedrock of an economy. When that's all that's left, you've got a problem.
First of all, it's not treasonous to employ people from another country.
Well, let's think of a corollary, shall we?
If you're in war, and you find yourself in a trench, during a cease fire, with an enemy soldier, is it treason to offer him some of your chocolate bar?
What if there are two soldiers? Still not treason?
How about supplying an entire regiment with food and supplies?
How about sharing a beer with a known Russian spy? That should be OK, right? How about information you got of a non-important nature (like a new Hardees coming in down the street)? Also OK. State or industrial secrets?
The problem is in the degree to which it is being pursued and thus happening. When a company as big and successful, run and incorporated by Americans, undermines the national interest in a major way (to the tune of a financial sum not that different from what might be taken out of the country through overt theft, espionage, or war? Corporations in the US are, under law, considered "persons". They reap many, many benefits from this. Why should they not also take the penalties for their poor behavior?
No, commerce isn't war. But the impact on a country can be much the same, when the day is done.
MS isn't going to sue Samba into oblivion for two simple reasons: antitrust and compatibility.
There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of installations which require and use Samba, whether it's as a primary file server(s) or as a backup, or even in a small NAS device. It's packaged with every Linux distribution and MacOS X for compatibility purposes with Windows networks - and even as the primary file storage sharing method on many Windows-free networks. Suing Samba into oblivion would not only require suing every Linux distro out there, but it would piss -everyone- off.
Second, even if they won, they'd run into massive anti-competitive antitrust claims. Samba has been around for some 15-odd years. If they had a complaint, they'd have had to levy it years ago.
For that matter, they'd have to levy it against various LDAP implementations, as well, as the Samba team's efforts on v4 can already largely be implemented with Samba v3 and various other tools. Not completely, mind you, but to a large degree. So suing samba would, essentially, be saying that it's only a concern if it's a single-package solution.
Your base station goes on your hip. The "phone" and various other utility comes from another device, like a wristwatch type device and/or HUD ear clip. Or a belt buckle projector. The tech to do this today is all already here. We're just too bound up in the form factors presented to us by Star Trek to go there - yet.
THe fact that it's small helps contribute to its speed, I imagine.
Having not run to NetBSD on a desktop and compared it to linux, I can only guess that it's for similar reasons to why previous linux kernels (2.2, 2.4) were faster than the current one: they weren't primarily being developed by people looking to create a fast server, but hobbiests who's primary metric for "speed" was the responsiveness of the system it's running on. This is great for people who want a responsive, fast system.
1) Linus "Testing is for someone else" Torvalds isn't running the show, and therefore you're more likely to get a properly tested kernel. 2) You can download an official kernel and expect for it to not only build using your old configuration, but to not have a previously-working driver not work any longer. 3) It has nice tools for doing #2, whereas in Linux, 'make oldconfig' has been seemingly abandoned in the name of progress and "let the distros handle it" 4) Slower, more thorough release cycle which is still aware of "development" and "stable" branches 5) You can still run a usable system on top of old hardware that only has 64Mb of RAM (or 32Mb, as I did recently with netbsd 4 - and yes, 32Mb is 'just barely' functional)
I didn't need much more than "hardly any experience" with it to know it was rubbish. That's how many minutes it took for it to crash - "hardly any". Did it perform well? Hardly. The same answer could be said for what actually worked - "hardly any".
So sure, I had hardly any experience on the matter. But it was based on the fact that the OS was hardly usable. I did try and get a couple users to sample it, but their response? It sucked: slow, awkwardly different, slow, unstable. (Hell, it was awkwardly different to me, and I can and do switch between different file managers, OSes, etc. in the course of a day with no issues. Vista was irritatingly different.)
This is what most people don't understand about linux. No one installs and uses "Linux," they install an operating system that happens to use the Linux kernel's functionality. "Using Linux" is a misnomer when its used in the same context as "uses Windows."
Fucking speak for yourself. Apparently you missed out on the time when it was not only reasonable but expected for a person to build a fresh kernel, from kernel.org sources, every once in a while. Not just individual hobbyists, though they'd do it, but small companies
Now, it's a disaster. Yes, it usually, mostly works, sometimes. But a kernel release is not what it used to be before they entered into the clusterfuck that is kernel 2.6 version releases.
New feature? Sure, throw it in. Rip out a subsystem because it needs to be reworked? Nobody will mind! Break a driver? Note it in the log and let it be; nobody will mind. Make oldconfig hasn't worked for the last 3 years to any degree of reliability? Who uses that? And so on. It makes for a hell of a lot more work for a sysadmin - to the point of making a person just want to give up and go with what the distro vendor says is best (even though they tend to fuck it up more often than not, too).
I damn well do install and use linux. And apache. And Xorg. And everything else I use.
And stop speaking in platitudes. You're not making any sense.
I don't know if it was the 'Stones, but the Angels used to do security for one of those 1970s bands. May have been the stones (in which case, you're likely referencing something I'm not aware of), but I seem to recall hearing they did very good security.
Why would Apple sell it for $50 when they're making a killing selling it for more? No successful company in their right mind would undercut themselves.
China IS making iTouch type personal entertainment assistants for right around that price mark. Quite a few. Just look on ebay; you'll find 'em.
Yes, their software mostly sucks; yes, they're often defective or sold deceptively. But if they work, they'll get the job done.
IF that were to happen, it'd blow up after about 60 minutes of use - and then you'd realize that it's just the speaker popping. It's a design feature, don't worry about it.
The software sucks, but yes, it's incredibly cheap to make this kind of hardware these days. I've seen a number of "direct from china" sites selling this, and other, shit for what I consider to be pennies - phones which wouldn't work here, but are otherwise (seemingly) featurelist compatible with the latest, greatest on the US and EU markets for $30-60.
Which brings to mind the iPhone. It's hilarious how it's one of the higher priced phones, when it is likely one of the cheapest to make. Apple is soaking up the profit with that one. It's a real boon for hte mto only have one actual phone at a time, as then they don't have to spend extra money for 'retooling' for different hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, yeah, that had a lot of appeal, now that I think about it.
The problem there, however, is that the landscape has changed. Linux used to be a smaller development community than it is now, obviously. As such, written, working code was more valuable than it is now. Hobbiests developed the kernel, mostly, so keeping the older hardware working was usually of some import. In fact, it was one of the primary appeals for Linux: you could run reasonably modern software (Netscape, mainly) on some pretty ancient hardware. Now, however, a Linux distro usually won't run nearly as well as XP will. And for a user and their common tasks, there's not much of a difference between the two's functionality.
Wow, that review sent me - like a drunk bum thrown into an alley from the back of a squad car - down memory lane!
Ah, anyone remember linuxconf? What a piece of junk! It mostly worked, when it worked. But I remember it interfering with any manual configuration changes made (without telling you). Very irritating. I ended up ignoring it, I think.
I can't believe Linux got any sort of foothold on the desktop with releases like the the early KDE and GNOME, to be honest. I remember constantly, constantly fighting with the two (and their respective toolkits) to make them a) look half decent, b) behave half decently, and c) work in a fashion which did not interfere. Part of that
I remember when I started out, more or less with RedHat 5.2. GUI options? What GUI options? You had (from my recollection) fvwm, fvwm95, afterstep, and -maybe- icewm. I don't remember for certain if icewm was available in 5.2, but it was in 6.0, as I used it in 6.0 when I moved to it. I dabbled for a while with 5.2 but never permanently, as my hardware was not yet supported. I also tried DOSLinux and the HappyHacker guides before I determined that yes, I needed a real linux distro. After a botched upgrade from RH6.1 to 6.2, I moved over to (IIRC) Mandrake 6 or 7 (whichever came out around the time of RH6.2).
It's funny, but when I decided to go with RH (largely because I could order the CDs - I ended up grabbing them from Best Buy, IIRC), Slackware was already considered to be a hodgepodge of crap thrown together, largely targeted at/used by the "h@x0r" community. It's only become more of the case, of course, but Slackware refuses to die.
It wasn't long after Mandrake that I went to debian (maybe late '99), and stuck with that until just this past April, when I gave Ubuntu a try. Stormix 2000 was a major catalyst in me moving to Debian, if I'm recalling things correctly. I still use Debian as much as possible, but Ubuntu goes on my primary workstation/laptop.
As this thread is about Linux in the year 2000: does anyone else remember Stormix 2000? It was an incredible, incredible distro for it's day (consistent look/feel, debian based, intelligent installer), and I'm sad to see that Progeny didn't make it as a company. They didn't get half the credit that was due them, IMO, as they were a major force behind the current way in which distros are packaged, IIRC. They stuck around for a while and provided some good additional packages, and an alternative installer for Debian 3, which was very nice (in terms of hardware support, which was lacking in Debian at the time).
'make oldconfig' has worked inconsistently over the past several years due to the kernel devs changing config locations of various devices or renaming them. Sometimes it's as 'simple' as a needed driver not building, sometimes it's as irritating as the kernel not booting at all (and then having to dig through the config to find what it was that caused it).
I noticed this largely because I have/had a script which would automatically build and package new kernels as they became available, and it stopped working effectively to the point of me abandoning the approach. Combine that with negative advances in terms of desktop performance and support for a stable and popular system configuration, and it just ceased being worth any attempt.
You have a point that it's better than most would've offered, but at the same time, IBM isn't doing it out of benevolence. They're doing it for the bottom dollar. It's like a second slap in the face: we don't think you're valuable enough to keep employed, but we'll hire you overseas for a fraction of what you're making, because it's cheaper for us to not have to train a foreigner to do your job.
Wrong.
Democracy and capitalism both flow from the same principles of "let people do what they want with their life, as long as they don't infringe on others". Capitalism is made possible by a sound foundation of non-infringing republican democracy*.
* What we've come to know as democracy today, isn't. I'm referring to the historic meaning of the word, not the modern "every modern country with elected representative officials" variety. A socialist state can not, by necessity of what it implies, be a democracy. This is also due to the necessary requirement of a democracy to be of the people, by the people.
What do you mean, what we have been spending? I wasn't old enough to be spending - on credit or otherwise - during the past 30 years of excess. The people who were doing that are now sitting comfortable (or not so comfortable, if they didn't exploit others) in retirement, able to watch their fucked policies play themselves out on the lives of younger generations.
CTS, the issue here isn't that weavers are being put out of business by a loom owner. The problem is that weavers are put out of work by their employer, who is shipping in product from foreign lands, performed by lesser or equal skilled weavers, at a fraction of the cost.
If there was any sort of advancement here, and not just pure unbridled greed, you'd have a point. But there's been no actual progress made. Just the devaluation of human efforts, and the people who make them.
If this were to happen 50 years ago, there'd be "employers" and CEOs hanging from trees, I have no doubt.
Oh, there are some things still made in the US. They're just, typically, illegal in much of the country. (In this case, I'm referring to firearms.)
No, electronics aren't made here. But there are still quite a few products made here:
1) Vehicles. This is, obviously, a very big one. But if nobody is buying our products overseas... it's hard for a single industry to sustain things on any significant scale.
2) Firearms and firearm-related products such as reloading presses. For whatever reason, the consumers of said products are traditionally pretty particular about things being US-made. (Hmm, wonder why...)
3) Machinery. We are still #1 in the world for machinery and the associated automation which goes with it. This is essential due to the large amount of land which we plant and harvest on an annual basis, our massive road structures, and our preference for big, powerful things.
4) Food. We are the largest food producer in the world, thankfully, given that it's something everyone needs. Unfortunately, food is relatively inexpensive compared to everything else out there.
5) Uh... guess we get most everything else from elsewhere.
Granted, that's not exhaustive. Though I will certainly give you the point that, in essence, we've destroyed our manufacturing in this country. Hell, we don't even have a forestry industry in the US anymore (largely brought on by eco-nuts), and import all our wood from Canada. That's sad, given how much forested land we've got and the amount of knowledge and experience which is simply lost when an industry dies.
Correct me if i'm wrong, but I would assume that most visa workers are there with the preconception of it being a temporary stay - you know, because visas are temporary. The people I know who have taken the route of living overseas on visas know this, and act accordingly: they live for the moment, enjoy the culture, and sack away as much money as they can.
Anyone who is in a foreign country, buying property and possessions for personal consumption, is a fool to expect to not have to leave it all behind: your very existence in the country is determined by whether or not your employer wants you anymore.
If you move to a country to work on a visa, especially one such as the US where citizenship is trivial to acquire, and want to stay, why not become a citizen? A visa holder certainly has that out.
Exactly!
Also, consider that you'd still have to pay taxes while overseas to America on your income. That's a bucket of fun.
Continue the job search from India? Are you nuts?
Most companies won't even look at your resume if you're on the other side of the country and not local. Forget relocation packages; from what I've heard, even paying for half of the interview travel expenses is, today, almost unheard of.
Do you have a family?
Look at some of the crime, poverty, and disease statistics for India (or any other country), really. You'd not be living in an insular bubble; you'd be living in a neighborhood. You'd still have to contend with those things, all while essentially abandoning everything you've grown to accept as normal: clean (shit-free) streets, good wiring, traffic lights and laws, (relatively) honest police and officials.
And your children would then grow up in a society which has none of the values you grew up with. And it goes beyond values, even: it goes towards a way of thought. That is a LOT more to abandon back in America than just 2/3rds your wage.
Realistically, if you were to make this move, you're not coming back. You'd have no means to do so.
The problem is that we've reached a point where it's not "lower skilled jobs" are getting exported. There are no more of those which can be exported - we've only got service jobs and professional positions left in this country, in any significant numbers.
It's not such a problem for the economy as a whole when production is made more efficient within a country through the elimination of jobs and advances in technology. But that's not what's happening. Production isn't being made more efficient; it's being made less expensive, and it's not being kept in the country. That is a net loss for the country in a very real way.
Next time you've got the inclination to be depressed, look in your newspaper for jobs which actually produce, or perform work which sustains a country at the fundamental level. You won't find much, if any: you'll find service jobs. While there is nothing wrong with a service job, in and of itself, working at Hardees, as a nurse in a hospital or nursing home, as a sales associate for $company, and so on and so forth do not produce anything. They're just shifting money around. That's not a healthy, stable economy; that's the bedrock of an economy. When that's all that's left, you've got a problem.
First of all, it's not treasonous to employ people from another country.
Well, let's think of a corollary, shall we?
If you're in war, and you find yourself in a trench, during a cease fire, with an enemy soldier, is it treason to offer him some of your chocolate bar?
What if there are two soldiers? Still not treason?
How about supplying an entire regiment with food and supplies?
How about sharing a beer with a known Russian spy? That should be OK, right? How about information you got of a non-important nature (like a new Hardees coming in down the street)? Also OK. State or industrial secrets?
The problem is in the degree to which it is being pursued and thus happening. When a company as big and successful, run and incorporated by Americans, undermines the national interest in a major way (to the tune of a financial sum not that different from what might be taken out of the country through overt theft, espionage, or war? Corporations in the US are, under law, considered "persons". They reap many, many benefits from this. Why should they not also take the penalties for their poor behavior?
No, commerce isn't war. But the impact on a country can be much the same, when the day is done.
MS isn't going to sue Samba into oblivion for two simple reasons: antitrust and compatibility.
There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of installations which require and use Samba, whether it's as a primary file server(s) or as a backup, or even in a small NAS device. It's packaged with every Linux distribution and MacOS X for compatibility purposes with Windows networks - and even as the primary file storage sharing method on many Windows-free networks. Suing Samba into oblivion would not only require suing every Linux distro out there, but it would piss -everyone- off.
Second, even if they won, they'd run into massive anti-competitive antitrust claims. Samba has been around for some 15-odd years. If they had a complaint, they'd have had to levy it years ago.
For that matter, they'd have to levy it against various LDAP implementations, as well, as the Samba team's efforts on v4 can already largely be implemented with Samba v3 and various other tools. Not completely, mind you, but to a large degree. So suing samba would, essentially, be saying that it's only a concern if it's a single-package solution.
And what if you're trying to migrate away from Windows on the desktop, and you've got existing apps written in Mono?
It's not ideal, but it'd provide a means to migrate. It's an option, whereas previously there was none - unless you consider Wine a viable option.
Your base station goes on your hip. The "phone" and various other utility comes from another device, like a wristwatch type device and/or HUD ear clip. Or a belt buckle projector. The tech to do this today is all already here. We're just too bound up in the form factors presented to us by Star Trek to go there - yet.
THe fact that it's small helps contribute to its speed, I imagine.
Having not run to NetBSD on a desktop and compared it to linux, I can only guess that it's for similar reasons to why previous linux kernels (2.2, 2.4) were faster than the current one: they weren't primarily being developed by people looking to create a fast server, but hobbiests who's primary metric for "speed" was the responsiveness of the system it's running on. This is great for people who want a responsive, fast system.
Here are some reasons:
1) Linus "Testing is for someone else" Torvalds isn't running the show, and therefore you're more likely to get a properly tested kernel.
2) You can download an official kernel and expect for it to not only build using your old configuration, but to not have a previously-working driver not work any longer.
3) It has nice tools for doing #2, whereas in Linux, 'make oldconfig' has been seemingly abandoned in the name of progress and "let the distros handle it"
4) Slower, more thorough release cycle which is still aware of "development" and "stable" branches
5) You can still run a usable system on top of old hardware that only has 64Mb of RAM (or 32Mb, as I did recently with netbsd 4 - and yes, 32Mb is 'just barely' functional)
I didn't need much more than "hardly any experience" with it to know it was rubbish. That's how many minutes it took for it to crash - "hardly any". Did it perform well? Hardly. The same answer could be said for what actually worked - "hardly any".
So sure, I had hardly any experience on the matter. But it was based on the fact that the OS was hardly usable. I did try and get a couple users to sample it, but their response? It sucked: slow, awkwardly different, slow, unstable. (Hell, it was awkwardly different to me, and I can and do switch between different file managers, OSes, etc. in the course of a day with no issues. Vista was irritatingly different.)
This is what most people don't understand about linux. No one installs and uses "Linux," they install an operating system that happens to use the Linux kernel's functionality. "Using Linux" is a misnomer when its used in the same context as "uses Windows."
Fucking speak for yourself. Apparently you missed out on the time when it was not only reasonable but expected for a person to build a fresh kernel, from kernel.org sources, every once in a while. Not just individual hobbyists, though they'd do it, but small companies
Now, it's a disaster. Yes, it usually, mostly works, sometimes. But a kernel release is not what it used to be before they entered into the clusterfuck that is kernel 2.6 version releases.
New feature? Sure, throw it in. Rip out a subsystem because it needs to be reworked? Nobody will mind! Break a driver? Note it in the log and let it be; nobody will mind. Make oldconfig hasn't worked for the last 3 years to any degree of reliability? Who uses that? And so on. It makes for a hell of a lot more work for a sysadmin - to the point of making a person just want to give up and go with what the distro vendor says is best (even though they tend to fuck it up more often than not, too).
I damn well do install and use linux. And apache. And Xorg. And everything else I use.
And stop speaking in platitudes. You're not making any sense.
I don't know if it was the 'Stones, but the Angels used to do security for one of those 1970s bands. May have been the stones (in which case, you're likely referencing something I'm not aware of), but I seem to recall hearing they did very good security.
What? Put their mind to it?
Why would Apple sell it for $50 when they're making a killing selling it for more? No successful company in their right mind would undercut themselves.
China IS making iTouch type personal entertainment assistants for right around that price mark. Quite a few. Just look on ebay; you'll find 'em.
Yes, their software mostly sucks; yes, they're often defective or sold deceptively. But if they work, they'll get the job done.
Be afraid, be very afraid.
IF that were to happen, it'd blow up after about 60 minutes of use - and then you'd realize that it's just the speaker popping. It's a design feature, don't worry about it.
Something like this, maybe?
16GB 3" 16:9 QVGA RMVB MP3 MP4 MP5 Player FQ5-16R - $57
The software sucks, but yes, it's incredibly cheap to make this kind of hardware these days. I've seen a number of "direct from china" sites selling this, and other, shit for what I consider to be pennies - phones which wouldn't work here, but are otherwise (seemingly) featurelist compatible with the latest, greatest on the US and EU markets for $30-60.
Which brings to mind the iPhone. It's hilarious how it's one of the higher priced phones, when it is likely one of the cheapest to make. Apple is soaking up the profit with that one. It's a real boon for hte mto only have one actual phone at a time, as then they don't have to spend extra money for 'retooling' for different hardware.