Ubuntu isn't the only solid desktop Linux distribution. It wasn't even the first. SuSE Linux has always been pretty nice, as has Mandriva, as has Knoppix. Even Linspire isn't that bad.
Ubuntu has two things that make it unique: First, it's a full featured Debian derivative that's completely usable for a novice without sacrificing the power or flavor of Debian like Linspire does. Second, it's a commercially supported distro that costs $0. All of the pieces have been there for a while, but it took Ubuntu to put them together.
Linux works *perfectly* if you can just manage the simple task of *using supported hardware*. No one complains that Windows won't install on a Sparcstation, or that Mac OS X won't install on a Dell, but you feel that your Broadcom wireless card should work automatically on Ubuntu.
Sorry, it doesn't. You might be able to get it to work through some sort of ridiculous unsupported hack like ndiswrapper. That's an advantage that Linux has - it's probably possible to get anything to work - but you're off in unsupported-land with the people running OS X on their Dells; if it breaks you get to keep both pieces.
In the end, if you want it to work, choose supported hardware. The hardware you use is your choice, and Linux supports enough hardware that it's not hard to choose hardware that will just work.
Finding an.exe file on the manufacturer's website is not innately easier than looking at http://help.ubuntu.com/ and following some simple instruction. When installing dual boot systems for people, the Windows side always takes me more effort because I have to scrabble around for drivers and apps rather than having everything easily available in the Ubuntu package repository.
It's reasonable that we know how to generate cheap, clean, safe power for tens of thousands of years, and we have a law against using the technique? Even when we're using power at an accelerating rate and our only other viable power generation technique (coal) will only work for a couple hundred years at the cost of probable environmental devastation?
Proliferation is an interesting question, absolutely worth considering. It turns out that a lot of work has been put in to it, and modern reactor designs with proper fuel cycles are more proliferation resistant than the reactors we have in production today. In the context of implementing modern fission plant designs, proliferation is mostly mentioned as a FUD tactic.
You should take another look at the actual properties of a modern nuclear plant with a decent fuel cycle. What you call "waste" in your blog post can be more accurately called "stored nuclear fuel" - reprocessing lets you use the fuel a bunch more times and in the end you end up with the real nuclear waste - leave it sit for 50 or 100 years and it's as safe as any other industrial byproduct. Sure, 100 years is a long time - but there's no need for Yucca Mountain foolishness.
For a better understanding of the damage that the anti-Nuke movement has done, check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_Fast_Reactor. We had a working modern reactor that did on-site fuel reprocessing. This design fixed every significant issue with fission power reactors. It got quietly decommissioned in 1994 due to "lack of public support for nuclear power".
Today there are known designs that are even better than the IFR, but *we had one built that worked*. If that had gone into commercial production then, we'd have modern nuclear reactors coming online today. Now - it's not that we aren't building new power plants constantly, they just aren't modern nuclear plants. We get dirty coal plants wit h environmental waivers instead. Good job, "environmentalists".
Actually, to even get this kind of stretch you need to rely on methods which are not legal in the US.
I think I covered that with my "If we aren't totally inept at engineering" qualifier. Yes, the USA currently has some *really stupid* laws on the books that make effective nuclear power illegal. No, I don't support building more crappy meltdown-prone fuel-cycle-less reactors.
Clearly we have to change the law and start using the resources we have available to build clean, safe, and modern nuclear reactors.
Hydroelectric power is a reasonably good deal. The dams screw up river ecosystems, but the couple species of fish we lose is probably a small price to pay for the cheap electricity. The problem is, there are only so many usable rivers. We're using almost every easily dammed river in the USA for hydroelectric power today, and it's only supplying 10% of our power needs. Further, our power needs are going up and our hydropower resources aren't, so that 10% will go down as our energy usage increases.
The question to ask is this: Where is the other 90% of our power coming from? It breaks down like this: 55% Coal, 22% Nuclear, 10% Natural Gas, 3% Other. Note that "Other" isn't windmills and solar power, it's mostly burning Petrol and Old Tires.
In the United States, we're not building any new Nuclear plants because of the environmentalist asshole protesters in the 1970's. They stopped new plants opening, and have killed a ton of valuable nuclear research since. Even not building any new plants for 30 years, we still have about 1/4th of the power in the USA coming from old poorly designed nuclear plants.
The rest of our power basically comes from Coal. We need new capacity, that'll be coal too. It'd be better if it were nice clean modern nuclear plants, but the hippies want their power from windmills and unicorns - those plans turn out to be economically absurd, so we get more coal plants instead.
Not setting up nuclear reactors for some sort of useful fuel cycle is stupid. The old, crappy reactors in production in the USA today will run us out of easily accessible fissile uranium really quick - something like 50 or 100 years.
On the other hand, even with a proper fuel cycle nuclear fuel isn't an unlimited resource. Our uranium will only last about 7,000 years, and we only have about four times that much Thorium. But, now that I think about it, I'm willing to bet that we can get fusion power working in the next 35,000 years.
Nuclear fuel *is* a limited resource. If we aren't totally inept at engineering, the world's nuclear fuel resources will run out in not significantly more than 20,000 years. Wait... that's longer than recorded history - I guess we don't really have a problem there.
Dell Precision Workstations are really as different from a desktop system as a server would be. They're for very specific 3D modeling and CAD applications, and they have the $500 workstation graphics card to prove it.
I'm all for supporting Dell selling Linux on desktops, but that isn't it - and it's not worth buying a $500 graphics card that runs games poorly to try to pretend that it is.
The OpenBSD guys have put a lot of effort into techniques that make exploiting exploits harder. On OpenBSD, (any remote exploit) + (any local root exploit) does not equal a remote root exploit.
It's true enough that "remote root exploits in the default install" is an arbitrary metric, but the fact of the matter is that OpenBSD is the closest thing to a secure general purpose operating system that exists today.
Dell's N series is an interesting strategic decision on their part. It's carefully hidden on their website so no "normal" customer could ever find it, but it's available from an easily linked to URL so that it can be used to prove that "Dell really does sell Microsoft-free PCs" in Slashdot and Digg discussions.
I'd stay away from it myself - every n-Series system that Dell sells is one less system that a smaller vendor who provides better support for Linux doesn't get. Until Dell actually supports Linux, at all, on a machine that it's possible to find by clicking around from the Dell homepage, I'm going to have to recommend supporting smaller vendors that actually support Linux.
Why watch "The Two Towers" if "The Fellowship of the Ring" still plays on your DVD player? Why buy the new Harry Potter book if the last one is still readable?
For single player computer games, there is limited replay value. Even Tetris gets boring after a while.
Multiplayer games are somewhat different, but eventually games get old and it's more fun to do something new. Sure, there are still people playing Starcraft or Counter Strike 1.x, but not every game is that good and not everyone is interested in playing for 6 months just to get competitive.
None of this makes it ethical to buy Windows Vista, but the "there's no reason to play new games because old games still exist" reasoning is absurd.
The only thing that's wrong about piracy is that it supports inferior proprietary software over superior Free alternatives. There's no reason to be guilted into giving these unethical software hoarders money, just stop using their stuff.
The GPL *is* substantially different from most software licenses, in that it's actually a license.
If I go to the store and buy a book, I haven't bought any sort of license - I've bought the book, and I get to read it or otherwise use it as a book. It's the same with GPLed software. If you have a copy of GPLed software, you have the right to use it. The GPL only comes into play when you try to do things that are normally prevented by copyright law - modifying the software or redistributing copies or modfied versions of the software. There's no way for the GPL to be challenged by anyone other than the copyright older - either it's valid and you get to copy/modify or it's invalid and you don't.
Most commercial software licenses are much sketchier. They try to apply restrictions *beyond* those of copyright law. There are apparently some legal precedents that there is some reason why the licenses are legally relevant at all - you'd think you could just not accept the license and then only be constrained by copyright law - but the GPL doesn't rely on those rulings.
It degrades the quality of the video by inserting useless noise into it.
More generally, it's a feature that isn't beneficial to the owner of the product. If it's my video encoder, it should do things that are useful for me - a feature that serves no purpose except to allow others to track my behavior doesn't belong in my stuff.
This isn't unlike the unique tracking patterns that laser printers output on printouts. Sure, I'm less likely to use a TV encoder in the process of producing an anonymous political message, but embedding insidious tracking codes into all of our electronics just isn't something that should be considered even slightly socially acceptable.
Copyright as a restriction on personal sharing is already dead. There are only two questions: 1.) Will the media distribution companies notice that they have to change their business models fast enough to survive, and 2.) How long will it take for the general public to realize that there's nothing wrong with downloading music and movies on the internet.
Currently, the pirates provide decent quality DRM-free releases of music and movies for free. The only points of competition that the media distribution companies have are guilt and ease of use, and both of those edges are fading fast. If the movie companies provided high quality (better than a 1CD XviD) DRM-free direct movie downloads for a reasonable fee (say $5/movie), they could easily compete - but they're fighting for their absurd fantasy of charging per view and preventing sharing entirely.
... and that's where stupid tax loopholes come from.
Copyright is intended to apply to for-profit distribution. Anything else is just money grubbing on the part of content distributors. There's no reason to compromise with these people beyond "you can keep your government granted monopoly on for-profit distribution".
I'm not sure that it should be legal for me to pay a vendor to remove functionality from a product that the vendor is going to sell to you.
Would it be reasonable for Sony to pay Toyota to not include CD players in cars so that people would be more likely to buy aftermarket players? Would it be reasonable for the Wall Street Journal to pay the New York Times to not include stock prices? I'm not sure that there's something wrong there, but it's damn well sketchy - and it damn well wouldn't be good for consumers.
By the way, unless Emperor Linux is run by complete morons, it's buying at wholesale, not retail.
If they were getting any sort of reasonable wholesale discount, I'd expect that their prices would be lower.
How about this: If it's really feasible to buy from Lenovo at wholesale, wipe, install Linux, and resell while staying within $50 of other resellers - you do it. You'll crush EmperorLinux into the ground in no time and dominate the "I'm to lazy to reformat my own thinkpad" market.
Dell competes primarily on price, so they use the cheapest components they can get away with. I can't find a reference, but they have a reputation for going so far as to request special "reduced cost" versions of components like power supplies and motherboards to reduce their cost further than they could with off-the-shelf components.
Dell probably really isn't any worse than the other major discount PC makers, but - as usual - when you buy a discount product you risk getting exactly what you paid for.
"Thinkpad" brand computers come from Lenovo with Windows on them. You can get them through authorized resellers, unmodified, at a slightly increased cost. You can get them thorough unauthorized resellers, modified, at a significantly increased cost.
I'm not seeing what the problem here is. Obviously a company that buys at retail and rebrands (like Emperor Linux) isn't going to be able to compete with companies that produce their own products (like System76).
Besides this, the video is still the so-called "invidious" GeForce 6150 which requires proprietary drivers for reasonable performance. This just goes to show, no one can truly build a linux friendly system for a modern desktop. Quelle dommage.
No, this just goes to show that you can't always get everything you want at the same time. If you want 3D acceleration with free software drivers, that maked Intel integrated graphics a requirement. The System76 Koala Mini meets that requirement, but costs more money.
Just like anything else, there are three options and you only get to pick two. For desktop computers:
Really cheap.
Every feature you want.
No assembly required.
Also, why don't they offer to throw in a cheapo keyboard and mouse?
Because there's no such thing as "throw in". If they included a keyboard and mouse, that would increase the price. They offer a reasonably nice keyboard and mouse for a reasonable price.
If you want to play the nickel and dime game on peripherals like keyboard/mouse/monitor, there's always http://www.newegg.com/. There's no reason for System76 to try to compete with that.
Slashdot Mirror
Ubuntu isn't the only solid desktop Linux distribution. It wasn't even the first. SuSE Linux has always been pretty nice, as has Mandriva, as has Knoppix. Even Linspire isn't that bad.
Ubuntu has two things that make it unique: First, it's a full featured Debian derivative that's completely usable for a novice without sacrificing the power or flavor of Debian like Linspire does. Second, it's a commercially supported distro that costs $0. All of the pieces have been there for a while, but it took Ubuntu to put them together.
Linux works *perfectly* if you can just manage the simple task of *using supported hardware*. No one complains that Windows won't install on a Sparcstation, or that Mac OS X won't install on a Dell, but you feel that your Broadcom wireless card should work automatically on Ubuntu.
Sorry, it doesn't. You might be able to get it to work through some sort of ridiculous unsupported hack like ndiswrapper. That's an advantage that Linux has - it's probably possible to get anything to work - but you're off in unsupported-land with the people running OS X on their Dells; if it breaks you get to keep both pieces.
In the end, if you want it to work, choose supported hardware. The hardware you use is your choice, and Linux supports enough hardware that it's not hard to choose hardware that will just work.
Finding an .exe file on the manufacturer's website is not innately easier than looking at http://help.ubuntu.com/ and following some simple instruction. When installing dual boot systems for people, the Windows side always takes me more effort because I have to scrabble around for drivers and apps rather than having everything easily available in the Ubuntu package repository.
It's reasonable that we know how to generate cheap, clean, safe power for tens of thousands of years, and we have a law against using the technique? Even when we're using power at an accelerating rate and our only other viable power generation technique (coal) will only work for a couple hundred years at the cost of probable environmental devastation?
Proliferation is an interesting question, absolutely worth considering. It turns out that a lot of work has been put in to it, and modern reactor designs with proper fuel cycles are more proliferation resistant than the reactors we have in production today. In the context of implementing modern fission plant designs, proliferation is mostly mentioned as a FUD tactic.
You should take another look at the actual properties of a modern nuclear plant with a decent fuel cycle. What you call "waste" in your blog post can be more accurately called "stored nuclear fuel" - reprocessing lets you use the fuel a bunch more times and in the end you end up with the real nuclear waste - leave it sit for 50 or 100 years and it's as safe as any other industrial byproduct. Sure, 100 years is a long time - but there's no need for Yucca Mountain foolishness.
For a better understanding of the damage that the anti-Nuke movement has done, check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_Fast_Reactor . We had a working modern reactor that did on-site fuel reprocessing. This design fixed every significant issue with fission power reactors. It got quietly decommissioned in 1994 due to "lack of public support for nuclear power".
Today there are known designs that are even better than the IFR, but *we had one built that worked*. If that had gone into commercial production then, we'd have modern nuclear reactors coming online today. Now - it's not that we aren't building new power plants constantly, they just aren't modern nuclear plants. We get dirty coal plants wit h environmental waivers instead. Good job, "environmentalists".
I think I covered that with my "If we aren't totally inept at engineering" qualifier. Yes, the USA currently has some *really stupid* laws on the books that make effective nuclear power illegal. No, I don't support building more crappy meltdown-prone fuel-cycle-less reactors.
Clearly we have to change the law and start using the resources we have available to build clean, safe, and modern nuclear reactors.
Hydroelectric power is a reasonably good deal. The dams screw up river ecosystems, but the couple species of fish we lose is probably a small price to pay for the cheap electricity. The problem is, there are only so many usable rivers. We're using almost every easily dammed river in the USA for hydroelectric power today, and it's only supplying 10% of our power needs. Further, our power needs are going up and our hydropower resources aren't, so that 10% will go down as our energy usage increases.
The question to ask is this: Where is the other 90% of our power coming from? It breaks down like this: 55% Coal, 22% Nuclear, 10% Natural Gas, 3% Other. Note that "Other" isn't windmills and solar power, it's mostly burning Petrol and Old Tires.
In the United States, we're not building any new Nuclear plants because of the environmentalist asshole protesters in the 1970's. They stopped new plants opening, and have killed a ton of valuable nuclear research since. Even not building any new plants for 30 years, we still have about 1/4th of the power in the USA coming from old poorly designed nuclear plants.
The rest of our power basically comes from Coal. We need new capacity, that'll be coal too. It'd be better if it were nice clean modern nuclear plants, but the hippies want their power from windmills and unicorns - those plans turn out to be economically absurd, so we get more coal plants instead.
Here's the long version of my rant, if you're interested http://www.cs.uml.edu/~ntuck/nuclear/index.html
Not setting up nuclear reactors for some sort of useful fuel cycle is stupid. The old, crappy reactors in production in the USA today will run us out of easily accessible fissile uranium really quick - something like 50 or 100 years.
On the other hand, even with a proper fuel cycle nuclear fuel isn't an unlimited resource. Our uranium will only last about 7,000 years, and we only have about four times that much Thorium. But, now that I think about it, I'm willing to bet that we can get fusion power working in the next 35,000 years.
Nuclear fuel *is* a limited resource. If we aren't totally inept at engineering, the world's nuclear fuel resources will run out in not significantly more than 20,000 years. Wait... that's longer than recorded history - I guess we don't really have a problem there.
Dell Precision Workstations are really as different from a desktop system as a server would be. They're for very specific 3D modeling and CAD applications, and they have the $500 workstation graphics card to prove it.
I'm all for supporting Dell selling Linux on desktops, but that isn't it - and it's not worth buying a $500 graphics card that runs games poorly to try to pretend that it is.
It depends on the copyright law, but yes - copyright infringement *should* require redistribution.
The OpenBSD guys have put a lot of effort into techniques that make exploiting exploits harder. On OpenBSD, (any remote exploit) + (any local root exploit) does not equal a remote root exploit.
It's true enough that "remote root exploits in the default install" is an arbitrary metric, but the fact of the matter is that OpenBSD is the closest thing to a secure general purpose operating system that exists today.
Dell's N series is an interesting strategic decision on their part. It's carefully hidden on their website so no "normal" customer could ever find it, but it's available from an easily linked to URL so that it can be used to prove that "Dell really does sell Microsoft-free PCs" in Slashdot and Digg discussions.
I'd stay away from it myself - every n-Series system that Dell sells is one less system that a smaller vendor who provides better support for Linux doesn't get. Until Dell actually supports Linux, at all, on a machine that it's possible to find by clicking around from the Dell homepage, I'm going to have to recommend supporting smaller vendors that actually support Linux.
Smaller vendors like: http://store.madtux.org/index.php?cPath=57 (Really cheap Linux PCs), http://www.system76.com/ (Nice Ubuntu systems), http://www.powernotebooks.com/ (Nice OS-free laptops).
Why watch "The Two Towers" if "The Fellowship of the Ring" still plays on your DVD player? Why buy the new Harry Potter book if the last one is still readable?
For single player computer games, there is limited replay value. Even Tetris gets boring after a while.
Multiplayer games are somewhat different, but eventually games get old and it's more fun to do something new. Sure, there are still people playing Starcraft or Counter Strike 1.x, but not every game is that good and not everyone is interested in playing for 6 months just to get competitive.
None of this makes it ethical to buy Windows Vista, but the "there's no reason to play new games because old games still exist" reasoning is absurd.
The only thing that's wrong about piracy is that it supports inferior proprietary software over superior Free alternatives. There's no reason to be guilted into giving these unethical software hoarders money, just stop using their stuff.
The GPL *is* substantially different from most software licenses, in that it's actually a license.
If I go to the store and buy a book, I haven't bought any sort of license - I've bought the book, and I get to read it or otherwise use it as a book. It's the same with GPLed software. If you have a copy of GPLed software, you have the right to use it. The GPL only comes into play when you try to do things that are normally prevented by copyright law - modifying the software or redistributing copies or modfied versions of the software. There's no way for the GPL to be challenged by anyone other than the copyright older - either it's valid and you get to copy/modify or it's invalid and you don't.
Most commercial software licenses are much sketchier. They try to apply restrictions *beyond* those of copyright law. There are apparently some legal precedents that there is some reason why the licenses are legally relevant at all - you'd think you could just not accept the license and then only be constrained by copyright law - but the GPL doesn't rely on those rulings.
It degrades the quality of the video by inserting useless noise into it.
More generally, it's a feature that isn't beneficial to the owner of the product. If it's my video encoder, it should do things that are useful for me - a feature that serves no purpose except to allow others to track my behavior doesn't belong in my stuff.
This isn't unlike the unique tracking patterns that laser printers output on printouts. Sure, I'm less likely to use a TV encoder in the process of producing an anonymous political message, but embedding insidious tracking codes into all of our electronics just isn't something that should be considered even slightly socially acceptable.
Copyright as a restriction on personal sharing is already dead. There are only two questions: 1.) Will the media distribution companies notice that they have to change their business models fast enough to survive, and 2.) How long will it take for the general public to realize that there's nothing wrong with downloading music and movies on the internet.
Currently, the pirates provide decent quality DRM-free releases of music and movies for free. The only points of competition that the media distribution companies have are guilt and ease of use, and both of those edges are fading fast. If the movie companies provided high quality (better than a 1CD XviD) DRM-free direct movie downloads for a reasonable fee (say $5/movie), they could easily compete - but they're fighting for their absurd fantasy of charging per view and preventing sharing entirely.
... and that's where stupid tax loopholes come from.
Copyright is intended to apply to for-profit distribution. Anything else is just money grubbing on the part of content distributors. There's no reason to compromise with these people beyond "you can keep your government granted monopoly on for-profit distribution".
I'm not sure that it should be legal for me to pay a vendor to remove functionality from a product that the vendor is going to sell to you.
Would it be reasonable for Sony to pay Toyota to not include CD players in cars so that people would be more likely to buy aftermarket players? Would it be reasonable for the Wall Street Journal to pay the New York Times to not include stock prices? I'm not sure that there's something wrong there, but it's damn well sketchy - and it damn well wouldn't be good for consumers.
If they were getting any sort of reasonable wholesale discount, I'd expect that their prices would be lower.
How about this: If it's really feasible to buy from Lenovo at wholesale, wipe, install Linux, and resell while staying within $50 of other resellers - you do it. You'll crush EmperorLinux into the ground in no time and dominate the "I'm to lazy to reformat my own thinkpad" market.
Obviously they're being facetious.
Dell competes primarily on price, so they use the cheapest components they can get away with. I can't find a reference, but they have a reputation for going so far as to request special "reduced cost" versions of components like power supplies and motherboards to reduce their cost further than they could with off-the-shelf components.
Dell probably really isn't any worse than the other major discount PC makers, but - as usual - when you buy a discount product you risk getting exactly what you paid for.
"Thinkpad" brand computers come from Lenovo with Windows on them. You can get them through authorized resellers, unmodified, at a slightly increased cost. You can get them thorough unauthorized resellers, modified, at a significantly increased cost.
I'm not seeing what the problem here is. Obviously a company that buys at retail and rebrands (like Emperor Linux) isn't going to be able to compete with companies that produce their own products (like System76).
No, this just goes to show that you can't always get everything you want at the same time. If you want 3D acceleration with free software drivers, that maked Intel integrated graphics a requirement. The System76 Koala Mini meets that requirement, but costs more money.
Just like anything else, there are three options and you only get to pick two. For desktop computers:
Because there's no such thing as "throw in". If they included a keyboard and mouse, that would increase the price. They offer a reasonably nice keyboard and mouse for a reasonable price.
If you want to play the nickel and dime game on peripherals like keyboard/mouse/monitor, there's always http://www.newegg.com/. There's no reason for System76 to try to compete with that.