It's marketing. Or the technology of Marketing. Originally VCR tapes just started with the movie, then 5 minutes of commercials and previews. Now it's up to 10 and 15 minutes for VCR tapes. DVD's have the same but the newer technology has removed the ability to fast forward over some of the content.
Some places it's hard to purchase a product without a oversized logo of the company. I think at some size or ratio of surface area, I should start getting paid to wear their clothing.
Marketing is highly aggressive, targeted, and pervasive.
I think you understand the point I'm trying to make here. While there may be cases for someone to want a highly consolidated system (dorms, studios) these might be only cases where something like this can be effective. As a minor point, I can't imagine someone trying to use a laptop for their TV when they have guests over.
But more significantly, if you look at a home (spouse & kids) you are presenting a picture where each person effectively has their own TV, TiVO, Game Console, Computer, Stereo. That's really NOT cost effective for a household. Even in a highly built up metropolis. For singles, this might make sense -- and they have the disposable income to do it. But it's not effective for anyone else.
I would disagree. I can have the same social effect if I were to do this via street fliers stapled to phone poles in the respective neighborhoods.
The internet is different, but the people are the same. You can still meet some real jerks -- just faster and they're harder to spot because it's easier to pose on the internet.
For all you know, I might be a hyper-intelligent shade of blue and not a carbon based life form.
If this is the direction they go into then they are probably risking over-diversification.
Historically, Apple has made a mighty fine user-centric computer and have even set that standard of what a Graphical User Interface means. They have done well in terms of GUI design since the early Mac up to today with a consistent and well behaved interface.
I personally do not believe there is any real merit in trying to consolidate everything into one box. When I say everything I mean: computer, game console, visual media center, audio media center, all things that are audo-visual in nature beyond a book. The problem that you will ultimately experience is that this one unit for all services becomes a choke point in your house, unless you only have one room. It is very common in my multi-user domestic facility to have a stereo on in one room, a television on in another (with computer) and a third location that is computer only (needs more concentration).
In order to service these needs you would have to purchase three of these consolidated units and only be able to utilize 25% of the systems capabilities at any given time. It's a waste of resources and money.
The only useful applicatin for something like this is a single person dwelling where they can only use a small portion of the things that they have at their disposal anyways.
But imagine the pain involved in having to upgrade your stereo because you game console has a new product release and you can't get games for the old unit anymore...
I ran into this question some years ago and decided on a different solution. I installed Linux and bought a PS2 (Now GameCube). The reasons are simple and straightforward:
Game consoles don't crash like computers do.
They are less expensive than the video upgrades or anything else
Similarly the games are console compatible for years without requiring hardware upgrades.
I have a 34" game monitor!
Kids play games and I still have my computer available.
I found over the years that this is a great solution.
While there are some games I can't get on my console I've learned to live without them (see human history for survival stories of people without video games). And there's always a variety of free games. Frozen Bubble!
I won't pretent to be an expert but if you can use card A to crash the kernel stack without relying on some defect within the card A driver then it stands to reason that card B will crash as well. RTFA and you will see that his attack it against the kernel stack by way of the net socket. He's way past the drivers on this exploit.
This is not the same as some esoteric MSIE/javascript/activex exploit that depends upon so many software layers to line up. He's boinking the kernel.
I wonder what is going to happen to these unsigned songs when the band is signed and wants to use these songs in their first album. Will MySpace own the music?
I have been looking into a Mac for myself and after some trolling around areas where there have been many users (perl, ruby, lugs) of Apple notebooks I found there is a dark side to the story about Apple.
Apple's computers are not Open Source. OpenBSD based yes, but not Open.
This means that there are a lot of obfuscations and disconnections going on. Like gcc is called cc. X windows isn't really X11. OpenOffice doesn't install easily and when it does it's fugly. There is no real package manager like apt-get.
Apple looks more like Windows than it does Linux. Who's going to be attracted to a machine that looks like Windows? Similar to Windows, much of what it really does is heavily wrapped in it's own disguise, making changes harder to do because you only have the choice of a GUI interface.
Check out the software. Lots of data stored in binary file formats. Hardly open. Will this attract Linux users or send them away?
I think the people who are using Linux today aren't likely to pick up a machine that looks more like Windows...
Have they changed their practices or changed their model?
I don't have to read any RTFM to know that I don't want to remove/replace my fstab file. But what I did run into is a process of upgrades where I have 100's of diffs to sort our on my/etc/ directory and over time I do make mistakes. When it's 10 I can deal with it. When it's 200 I can't. I'm human. But when the mistake is make on a critical system file it makes me wonder why something like this is even included as a file that can be upgraded by Gentoo. Or contrarily -- can it be excluded from system/automated modification and update and if so, why is this not the default?
I still like the concept behind Gentoo. But I like the overall politeness of being very careful not to trash anything that Debian has developed. If they could fit the two together then you would really have something.
OK, it's nice to see someone trying to give an even handed approach to a distro. But I think there are a few points that could be improved upon.
In the end there are some comments about the Debian web site regarding the use of weblogs for technical support and a cleaner site so you can find the razor sharp release of etch.
Weblogs for technical support suck. There are better ways of doing it. I have found mailing lists to be far superior to web logs for the simple reason that they are more accessabble, easier to read (no ads, no extra content fighting for your attentions) and above all else, filterable by machines and humans based on content, writer, and subject. Weblogs are for little people who want to talk about support, not get it. Yes, I'm very opinionated about this. I've yet to have a good experience with weblogs and technical support.
Debian Etch 3 is not for the new user. If it was, it would be called stable. Yet everyone insists on reviewing this one. The fact that it's harder to find from the debian front page is a good thing. I would not want to have to support something that hasn't yet been released. Similarly, expert mode is not for the faint of heart. Making a comment that it would be nice to provide more information for the new user in expert mode's use of FSCK is retarded. expertmode it not intended for the new user -- don't expect it to be.
Why does everyone have to review the installation process itself? Sure, it's the first introduction to the OS and that means something. But everyone makes such a big deal about nice looking gui installers. What's the value in a gui installer versus a curses based installer when you are trying to get the job done. I'm sure Debian will benefit greatly because of this but in reality it's not a requirement to getting the job done.
All that said, I would like to see reviews done not on the first 5 minutes of use of a distro but based on the first 90 days or 12 months of use on a distro. This is were it matters most. These 5 minute reviews are like a one night stand. You won't really know what you have landed until you see the make-up come off.
I have to confess, I'm a fan of Debian. Never tried Unbuntu. But I've tried Gentoo, RedHat, and Suse 9. After using these for 18 months I dropped them all and went back to Debian. That's my idea of a review. I had to use the things for a long period of time and live with their decisions long enough to understand what they were doing and not doing well.
Gentoo -- not my favorite. I like the idea behind it, but they have this uncanny ability during upgrades to allow the user to do amazingly stupid things based on stupid ideas to begin with. I trashed my fstab file based on an upgrade from gentoo. Why would the distro EVER consider upgrading a file like fstab? Really, if there's any reason why a working system should have one of it's most critical files ever considered as upgradable I would love to hear it. This is just an example of the difficulties in upgrading -- hundreds of diff files to sort through every few days.
RedHat -- They just had some weird stuff that was really inconsistent. Everytime I change my firewall rules, my ntpserver was disabled. WTF? Inconsistent behaviour that was never disclosed during the operation. And I don't like their GUI approach of making everything appear as one. Too socialistic for me.
Suse -- I used this one the longest and found the greatest problem with it over time. Suse does a superior job of supporting you hardware/software needs as long as you do exactly what they expect you to do. Installation of anything beside KDE you are stepping closer to the edge. Custom configurations of installations will push you to a point where Suse will not upgrade/manage that package for you and before you know it -- you're running a whole software space in customized RPM's or having your installation re-configured back to the basics during upgrades.
Debian -- It's not the easiest to configure. But it's the most polite about allowing you to make modifications, keep those modifications, and follow expected behaviours. And it's stable, allowing me more time to do the fun stuff.
I want to know how you are supposed to block ports from going outbound if you have to deal with this stupid FTP process that goes hi_port to hi_port... I can't remember right now what it's called because it's been a long time since I actually wrote my iptables firewall but this is something that was always strange to me.
I would tend to agree with that. In addition, the vast majority of sellers on E-Bay are no longer the individuals trying to find a home for... but someone who read all those get rich on E-Bay books and it trying to make a profit with various schemes -- many of which are suspect.
I've given up on E-Bay. A lot of the stuff I have bid on are being bought by aliases trying to jack the prices. Fraud, exchanges, and returns have become an unholy nightmare. One person sent me a product with a return address of another seller on E-Bay. When I returned it using the address on the box, they claimed to never have gotten it. A rather nice way of managing returns of defective product.
It's not always one sided. I also sold someone something that apparently didn't work upon arrival. Funny thing is, they demanded a full refund for shipping, purchase price and refused to return the defective product. Kind of works out like free...
E-Bay was a good idea. But it's actually gotten very expensive to deal with. Not work it anymore.
I don't think it's bullshit. I think you misread my intentions...
I have a Thinkpad A21m notebook which has never had a properly functioning APM on it. Check the internet and you'll find reference to the IBM APM BIOS commands being horribly broken and in some cases dangerous to use the standard API (lm-sensors). This isn't the fault of a shitty API development by the Linux developers, rather it's because IBM screwed the pooch on this one.
The response should have been for the linux community to put out a general bulleting that the IBM A21 series has a crap APM implementation and should be avoided at all costs. Rather than doing this, there are hundreds of pages dedicated to things you might try that might work and sometimes don't. Just a small bit better than Windows support but still suffering from the underlying problem of the hardware manufacturer was a dick-head when they implenented the specification.
If there is a specification for something, like ACPI, APM, USB, SATA, Firewire, and the linux API is written to the specification then they should be able to identify who makes hardware that is compliant to the specifications and who is a dick-head for making their own variations on the theme and then pretending it wasn't them.
The firewire card I bought that is a brick, and the network card I bought three years ago that didn't work, and the 802.11b router, PCMCIA nic, bridge, and another router all failed to work correctly because someone either made something that didn't work the way is was supposed to (bad implementation of the API), made something that only worked under their brand of equipment (Netgear can't talk to DLink at the time), or they changed the chipsets significantly without making any mention to anyone that they did so -- resulting in what eventually became a seperate part number.
It's because of experiences like these that there are manufactures who I will not buy certain product lines from. For example -- I will not recommend NetGear for wireless products because I spend ~$200 on what was junk. But I love their switches/hubs. I will probably stay away from any NVidia chipset in the future because getting their chipset support as part of my personal choice of distribution is almost impossible.
Perhaps Linux could take a tip from both Microsoft and Apple in how they support hardware.
These companies make decisions of what hardware they are willing to support and which ones they are not going to support. Apple has an absolute stranglehold on the hardware that goes into their computers. This makes it pretty easy to make software that works. They are able to leverage their control of both hardware and software to combine a very solid solution.
In slightly different methodologies, Microsoft has a very high degree of control over the software that runs on their boxes and the hardware that they are willing to support. If there is software/hardware that they like, they will make the drivers/API necessary for it a part of their Core. People and products they don't like go largely ignored and have a tough time making a profit.
I recognize that Linux has far less control of dictates over their hardware/software but it would be a valuable endeavor to actually come out and state what hardware/software they are going to support into the future and just hang the rest out to dry. There is so much time and effort spent on trying to find out what hardware is supported and how well under which version of software. To buy something as simple as a firewire card is a major research project with a 50/50 chance of success.
For example, I bought a firewire card. The first one was a brick. The second one was perfect. But I had a very difficult time finding any information about the first card and after a week of searching and sitting on mailing lists I finally figured out it was just never going to work. Maybe in 3 years, maybe never. I hope that the decision is made to never support this product because by the time they do, it'll be a P.O.S.
As another example: NVidia video cards. Some people swear by them, others swear at them. I won't get started on this stupid conversation but I think Matrox is the only graphics card that didn't screw me over at some point.
In some ways I do agree with the more idealistic thinkers of the EFF and such. We should not be required to try and support every variation of hardware that someone comes out just because. It would be more useful to turn the roles around and choose to support only certain products/companies and to make that well known. If they get cute with their licensing then drop them. I really don't think anyone is willing to fall completely out of the Linux community -- there's a lot of publicity at risk.
Getting hardware to work is the hardest thing you can do on Linux.
First Detroit was the Murder Capital of the Nation. Thank you Washington DC for relinquishing us of that.
Then Detroit is identified as the fattest city in the fattest state of the fattest nation on the planet. We still hold that title.
About the same time Detroit was identified as one of the top 3 (or 5?) most congested cities in the country. Thanks you Big Three Automotive for that one -- we couldn't do it without the abundance of SUV's on the road.
Recently Detroit was identified as the third most angry city. No surprises if you live here.
And just when it was starting to look bleak for the city of Detroit, we have a judge who actually conducts themselves in such a way as to give hope.
Not hard, but that rarely fixes any real problems. You need to stop thinking like a Windows User and actually start thinking like you have functional grey matter between your ears.
You're funny... You've managed to take the basic situation of solve your own problem without calling in a life line and managed to compare it with some of the greatest technological accomplishments in medicine. I can't wait to see what you are going to do with the pet rock.
Try backing down a little bit off your soap box and consider this... If every time I get into a little trouble the answer is always to just call for assistance (mom, dad, friends, police) then when will I know how to actually solve my own problems for myself or learn to recognize when I'm getting in over my head?
Take your medical analogy: If you live in a perfectly sterile bubble you will have no chance of death by simple virus or bacteria. But the moment you step outside of that bubble you are many times more likely to suffer serious ailments within 24 hours than if you never lived in that bubble. Similarly, if you never had to get out of a problem on your own, or find a creative solution, you will never survive the first time you hit the streets without four bars on your phone.
These are the things that make us better parents, better children, better storytellers, and better people. Hardship is what makes you grow up. Having a phone to bail you out of every situation, parent or child, inhibits your progress to adulthood.
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It's marketing. Or the technology of Marketing. Originally VCR tapes just started with the movie, then 5 minutes of commercials and previews. Now it's up to 10 and 15 minutes for VCR tapes. DVD's have the same but the newer technology has removed the ability to fast forward over some of the content.
Some places it's hard to purchase a product without a oversized logo of the company. I think at some size or ratio of surface area, I should start getting paid to wear their clothing.
Marketing is highly aggressive, targeted, and pervasive.
I think you understand the point I'm trying to make here. While there may be cases for someone to want a highly consolidated system (dorms, studios) these might be only cases where something like this can be effective. As a minor point, I can't imagine someone trying to use a laptop for their TV when they have guests over.
But more significantly, if you look at a home (spouse & kids) you are presenting a picture where each person effectively has their own TV, TiVO, Game Console, Computer, Stereo. That's really NOT cost effective for a household. Even in a highly built up metropolis. For singles, this might make sense -- and they have the disposable income to do it. But it's not effective for anyone else.
I would disagree. I can have the same social effect if I were to do this via street fliers stapled to phone poles in the respective neighborhoods.
The internet is different, but the people are the same. You can still meet some real jerks -- just faster and they're harder to spot because it's easier to pose on the internet.
For all you know, I might be a hyper-intelligent shade of blue and not a carbon based life form.
If this is the direction they go into then they are probably risking over-diversification.
Historically, Apple has made a mighty fine user-centric computer and have even set that standard of what a Graphical User Interface means. They have done well in terms of GUI design since the early Mac up to today with a consistent and well behaved interface.
I personally do not believe there is any real merit in trying to consolidate everything into one box. When I say everything I mean: computer, game console, visual media center, audio media center, all things that are audo-visual in nature beyond a book. The problem that you will ultimately experience is that this one unit for all services becomes a choke point in your house, unless you only have one room. It is very common in my multi-user domestic facility to have a stereo on in one room, a television on in another (with computer) and a third location that is computer only (needs more concentration).
In order to service these needs you would have to purchase three of these consolidated units and only be able to utilize 25% of the systems capabilities at any given time. It's a waste of resources and money.
The only useful applicatin for something like this is a single person dwelling where they can only use a small portion of the things that they have at their disposal anyways.
But imagine the pain involved in having to upgrade your stereo because you game console has a new product release and you can't get games for the old unit anymore...
Have you ever tried rendering a web page in speech? It sucks. It reads EVERYTHING that is ascii text: TAGS, JAVASCRIPT, even COMMENTS
What's more in my mind is, what does this do to AJAX sites?
An imperfect solution?
I ran into this question some years ago and decided on a different solution. I installed Linux and bought a PS2 (Now GameCube). The reasons are simple and straightforward:
- Game consoles don't crash like computers do.
- They are less expensive than the video upgrades or anything else
- Similarly the games are console compatible for years without requiring hardware upgrades.
- I have a 34" game monitor!
- Kids play games and I still have my computer available.
I found over the years that this is a great solution.While there are some games I can't get on my console I've learned to live without them (see human history for survival stories of people without video games). And there's always a variety of free games. Frozen Bubble!
I won't pretent to be an expert but if you can use card A to crash the kernel stack without relying on some defect within the card A driver then it stands to reason that card B will crash as well. RTFA and you will see that his attack it against the kernel stack by way of the net socket. He's way past the drivers on this exploit.
This is not the same as some esoteric MSIE/javascript/activex exploit that depends upon so many software layers to line up. He's boinking the kernel.
I wonder what is going to happen to these unsigned songs when the band is signed and wants to use these songs in their first album. Will MySpace own the music?
I have been looking into a Mac for myself and after some trolling around areas where there have been many users (perl, ruby, lugs) of Apple notebooks I found there is a dark side to the story about Apple.
Apple's computers are not Open Source. OpenBSD based yes, but not Open.
This means that there are a lot of obfuscations and disconnections going on. Like gcc is called cc. X windows isn't really X11. OpenOffice doesn't install easily and when it does it's fugly. There is no real package manager like apt-get.
Apple looks more like Windows than it does Linux. Who's going to be attracted to a machine that looks like Windows? Similar to Windows, much of what it really does is heavily wrapped in it's own disguise, making changes harder to do because you only have the choice of a GUI interface.
Check out the software. Lots of data stored in binary file formats. Hardly open. Will this attract Linux users or send them away?
I think the people who are using Linux today aren't likely to pick up a machine that looks more like Windows...
Have they changed their practices or changed their model?
I don't have to read any RTFM to know that I don't want to remove/replace my fstab file. But what I did run into is a process of upgrades where I have 100's of diffs to sort our on my /etc/ directory and over time I do make mistakes. When it's 10 I can deal with it. When it's 200 I can't. I'm human. But when the mistake is make on a critical system file it makes me wonder why something like this is even included as a file that can be upgraded by Gentoo. Or contrarily -- can it be excluded from system/automated modification and update and if so, why is this not the default?
I still like the concept behind Gentoo. But I like the overall politeness of being very careful not to trash anything that Debian has developed. If they could fit the two together then you would really have something.
OK, it's nice to see someone trying to give an even handed approach to a distro. But I think there are a few points that could be improved upon.
In the end there are some comments about the Debian web site regarding the use of weblogs for technical support and a cleaner site so you can find the razor sharp release of etch.
Weblogs for technical support suck. There are better ways of doing it. I have found mailing lists to be far superior to web logs for the simple reason that they are more accessabble, easier to read (no ads, no extra content fighting for your attentions) and above all else, filterable by machines and humans based on content, writer, and subject. Weblogs are for little people who want to talk about support, not get it. Yes, I'm very opinionated about this. I've yet to have a good experience with weblogs and technical support.
Debian Etch 3 is not for the new user. If it was, it would be called stable. Yet everyone insists on reviewing this one. The fact that it's harder to find from the debian front page is a good thing. I would not want to have to support something that hasn't yet been released. Similarly, expert mode is not for the faint of heart. Making a comment that it would be nice to provide more information for the new user in expert mode's use of FSCK is retarded. expertmode it not intended for the new user -- don't expect it to be.
Why does everyone have to review the installation process itself? Sure, it's the first introduction to the OS and that means something. But everyone makes such a big deal about nice looking gui installers. What's the value in a gui installer versus a curses based installer when you are trying to get the job done. I'm sure Debian will benefit greatly because of this but in reality it's not a requirement to getting the job done.
All that said, I would like to see reviews done not on the first 5 minutes of use of a distro but based on the first 90 days or 12 months of use on a distro. This is were it matters most. These 5 minute reviews are like a one night stand. You won't really know what you have landed until you see the make-up come off.
I have to confess, I'm a fan of Debian. Never tried Unbuntu. But I've tried Gentoo, RedHat, and Suse 9. After using these for 18 months I dropped them all and went back to Debian. That's my idea of a review. I had to use the things for a long period of time and live with their decisions long enough to understand what they were doing and not doing well.
Gentoo -- not my favorite. I like the idea behind it, but they have this uncanny ability during upgrades to allow the user to do amazingly stupid things based on stupid ideas to begin with. I trashed my fstab file based on an upgrade from gentoo. Why would the distro EVER consider upgrading a file like fstab? Really, if there's any reason why a working system should have one of it's most critical files ever considered as upgradable I would love to hear it. This is just an example of the difficulties in upgrading -- hundreds of diff files to sort through every few days.
RedHat -- They just had some weird stuff that was really inconsistent. Everytime I change my firewall rules, my ntpserver was disabled. WTF? Inconsistent behaviour that was never disclosed during the operation. And I don't like their GUI approach of making everything appear as one. Too socialistic for me.
Suse -- I used this one the longest and found the greatest problem with it over time. Suse does a superior job of supporting you hardware/software needs as long as you do exactly what they expect you to do. Installation of anything beside KDE you are stepping closer to the edge. Custom configurations of installations will push you to a point where Suse will not upgrade/manage that package for you and before you know it -- you're running a whole software space in customized RPM's or having your installation re-configured back to the basics during upgrades.
Debian -- It's not the easiest to configure. But it's the most polite about allowing you to make modifications, keep those modifications, and follow expected behaviours. And it's stable, allowing me more time to do the fun stuff.
I wonder how long before Apple deploys 64-bit notebooks...
I want to know how you are supposed to block ports from going outbound if you have to deal with this stupid FTP process that goes hi_port to hi_port... I can't remember right now what it's called because it's been a long time since I actually wrote my iptables firewall but this is something that was always strange to me.
I would tend to agree with that. In addition, the vast majority of sellers on E-Bay are no longer the individuals trying to find a home for ... but someone who read all those get rich on E-Bay books and it trying to make a profit with various schemes -- many of which are suspect.
I've given up on E-Bay. A lot of the stuff I have bid on are being bought by aliases trying to jack the prices. Fraud, exchanges, and returns have become an unholy nightmare. One person sent me a product with a return address of another seller on E-Bay. When I returned it using the address on the box, they claimed to never have gotten it. A rather nice way of managing returns of defective product.
It's not always one sided. I also sold someone something that apparently didn't work upon arrival. Funny thing is, they demanded a full refund for shipping, purchase price and refused to return the defective product. Kind of works out like free...
E-Bay was a good idea. But it's actually gotten very expensive to deal with. Not work it anymore.
I don't think it's bullshit. I think you misread my intentions...
I have a Thinkpad A21m notebook which has never had a properly functioning APM on it. Check the internet and you'll find reference to the IBM APM BIOS commands being horribly broken and in some cases dangerous to use the standard API (lm-sensors). This isn't the fault of a shitty API development by the Linux developers, rather it's because IBM screwed the pooch on this one.
The response should have been for the linux community to put out a general bulleting that the IBM A21 series has a crap APM implementation and should be avoided at all costs. Rather than doing this, there are hundreds of pages dedicated to things you might try that might work and sometimes don't. Just a small bit better than Windows support but still suffering from the underlying problem of the hardware manufacturer was a dick-head when they implenented the specification.
If there is a specification for something, like ACPI, APM, USB, SATA, Firewire, and the linux API is written to the specification then they should be able to identify who makes hardware that is compliant to the specifications and who is a dick-head for making their own variations on the theme and then pretending it wasn't them.
The firewire card I bought that is a brick, and the network card I bought three years ago that didn't work, and the 802.11b router, PCMCIA nic, bridge, and another router all failed to work correctly because someone either made something that didn't work the way is was supposed to (bad implementation of the API), made something that only worked under their brand of equipment (Netgear can't talk to DLink at the time), or they changed the chipsets significantly without making any mention to anyone that they did so -- resulting in what eventually became a seperate part number.
It's because of experiences like these that there are manufactures who I will not buy certain product lines from. For example -- I will not recommend NetGear for wireless products because I spend ~$200 on what was junk. But I love their switches/hubs. I will probably stay away from any NVidia chipset in the future because getting their chipset support as part of my personal choice of distribution is almost impossible.
Perhaps Linux could take a tip from both Microsoft and Apple in how they support hardware.
These companies make decisions of what hardware they are willing to support and which ones they are not going to support. Apple has an absolute stranglehold on the hardware that goes into their computers. This makes it pretty easy to make software that works. They are able to leverage their control of both hardware and software to combine a very solid solution.
In slightly different methodologies, Microsoft has a very high degree of control over the software that runs on their boxes and the hardware that they are willing to support. If there is software/hardware that they like, they will make the drivers/API necessary for it a part of their Core. People and products they don't like go largely ignored and have a tough time making a profit.
I recognize that Linux has far less control of dictates over their hardware/software but it would be a valuable endeavor to actually come out and state what hardware/software they are going to support into the future and just hang the rest out to dry. There is so much time and effort spent on trying to find out what hardware is supported and how well under which version of software. To buy something as simple as a firewire card is a major research project with a 50/50 chance of success.
For example, I bought a firewire card. The first one was a brick. The second one was perfect. But I had a very difficult time finding any information about the first card and after a week of searching and sitting on mailing lists I finally figured out it was just never going to work. Maybe in 3 years, maybe never. I hope that the decision is made to never support this product because by the time they do, it'll be a P.O.S.
As another example: NVidia video cards. Some people swear by them, others swear at them. I won't get started on this stupid conversation but I think Matrox is the only graphics card that didn't screw me over at some point.
In some ways I do agree with the more idealistic thinkers of the EFF and such. We should not be required to try and support every variation of hardware that someone comes out just because. It would be more useful to turn the roles around and choose to support only certain products/companies and to make that well known. If they get cute with their licensing then drop them. I really don't think anyone is willing to fall completely out of the Linux community -- there's a lot of publicity at risk.
Getting hardware to work is the hardest thing you can do on Linux.
First Detroit was the Murder Capital of the Nation. Thank you Washington DC for relinquishing us of that.
Then Detroit is identified as the fattest city in the fattest state of the fattest nation on the planet. We still hold that title.
About the same time Detroit was identified as one of the top 3 (or 5?) most congested cities in the country. Thanks you Big Three Automotive for that one -- we couldn't do it without the abundance of SUV's on the road.
Recently Detroit was identified as the third most angry city. No surprises if you live here.
And just when it was starting to look bleak for the city of Detroit, we have a judge who actually conducts themselves in such a way as to give hope.
Not hard, but that rarely fixes any real problems. You need to stop thinking like a Windows User and actually start thinking like you have functional grey matter between your ears.
You're funny... You've managed to take the basic situation of solve your own problem without calling in a life line and managed to compare it with some of the greatest technological accomplishments in medicine. I can't wait to see what you are going to do with the pet rock.
Try backing down a little bit off your soap box and consider this... If every time I get into a little trouble the answer is always to just call for assistance (mom, dad, friends, police) then when will I know how to actually solve my own problems for myself or learn to recognize when I'm getting in over my head?
Take your medical analogy: If you live in a perfectly sterile bubble you will have no chance of death by simple virus or bacteria. But the moment you step outside of that bubble you are many times more likely to suffer serious ailments within 24 hours than if you never lived in that bubble. Similarly, if you never had to get out of a problem on your own, or find a creative solution, you will never survive the first time you hit the streets without four bars on your phone.
I'm sure Amtrak wouldn't mind...
These are the things that make us better parents, better children, better storytellers, and better people. Hardship is what makes you grow up. Having a phone to bail you out of every situation, parent or child, inhibits your progress to adulthood.
So when I call HP for support, I can watch for their posting on the Debian mailing list to find out the answer? This should be fun!
Wait a minute. Doesn't anyone know that the word google isn't a verb, isn't owned by a company, but actually refers to a mathematical number?
With all his calls for fanatic zealotry I'm thinking this guy is starting to appear dangerous. That, or he's a douche.
I can prove with 100% certainty that dropping a hammer on top of your head will cause you to experience pain. This is a really stupid thread.