Hell, the 486 providing masq for my network at home does egress (makes sure it's a 192.168.1.0/24 address), it's a BASIC function of a properly installed router.
Gee, so does mine, but I don't think I'll advertise my local addresses.
Thanks for the insulting lecture but you missed the point. Uncle Sam's box will do more than advertised. This is not a government funtion, you ass.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Price is often more a funtion of hype then anything else. Sure, they may not last. Ten years later your typical $100 gadget can be found selling for $3 at a garage sale. My brother in law got burn by minidisk. He bought early and expensive. The anti-skip was inadequate for jogging and the software was all crippled with Sony DAT type "you can't do what you want" stuff. Huh. I waited for normal CD players to support MP3 for cheap. I can jog with mine.
I'm not that bright, however. I'm still suffering with LAME and NotLame notcompiles and I don't know how to write to my CD player with Linux. Because of that, I don't consider any of these things "PC" compatible. They are M$ compatible, the best example of overpriced hype that won't be here ten years from now.
Routers already keep local packets in. I can't think of anyone who would want their local telnet (naked passwords! use ssh, please) broadcast beyond a building, and most scripts for gateways do this too.
When Uncle Sam tells me he wants to set up a filter at the local ISP, I know exactly what he means. I have not forgotten what he told me yesterday.
... Carnivore. No thanks. The goal is to promote sturdy, redundant comunication networks. Anything that gets in the way has got to go!
I've got a long list of things I do not want the govenment doing, and what they should do instead. They should not be reading my email, they should prosecute those who do as they prosecute those who use the inherently insecure potocal known as US mail. They should not be collecting information they don't need to do the job of infrastucture development, military defense and welfare. They should not be buying insecure propriatory OS such as M$ offers. I'd much rather have information kept on secure servers so that it will stay put. The government should not hand over the publically built communications infrastructure to a cartel of greedy corporate interests. Redundancy should be encouraged and inexpensive anonymous public access assured.
Security should not be an excuse to hand the internet over to either corporate of govenment censors. This is the future of publications and it must remain free. The future freedom and prosperity of our country depends on free information interchange. Business can not funtion without privacy in their plans. Individuals can not be sure what is true if they can not trust the media that brings them their news. Control of the internet by government or corporate censors will eliminate all the blessings of this new form of communications.
How exactly do you do this? Mr. Senator, that is your job. Now get to work.
A programmer will whine about a function that he thinks is messy. It's supposed to be a simple function to display a window or something, but for some reason it takes up two pages and has all these ugly little hairs and stuff on it and nobody knows why. OK. I'll tell you why. Those are bug fixes. One of them fixes that bug that Jill had when she tried to install the thing on a computer that didn't have Internet Explorer. Another one fixes a bug that occurs in low memory conditions. Another one fixes some bug that occurred when the file is on a floppy disk and the user yanks out the diskette in the middle. That LoadLibrary call is sure ugly but it makes the code work on old versions of Windows 95. When you throw that function away and start from scratch, you are throwing away all that knowledge. All those collected bug fixes. Years of programming work.
Now we know, in the M$ world bugs=knowledge. No wonder SpyG^H^H^H^H MSIE takes up a 500M foot print. Whoo hooo!
The real question is, "How do you sell that shit?"
Like Aristotle, they lean toward the notion that it is the equations that flow from nature instead of the other way around. Mathematics is just a tool for making sense of it all.
Aristotle was right. Those who think their models are more real than the world are deluded.
This will be bad for Debian and difficult for Cygwin. The software will all be limited by the poor design of the OS underneath, and will give a bad impression in the best of worlds. This is not the best of worlds and M$ will waste little time breaking things. The overall impression will be, "Dude, this share ware stuff sucks".
My closest brush with stuff like this was Exceed, the X port to Win32. It made me think X sucked, and I never learned a thing. Why? Because half of it was broken by the suck OS underneath and I had no reference to the way things were supposed to work. A year later I learned to program the Win95 API and understood how things had shifted around under the shiny binary.
Think about how crippled the ports will be. How on earth can you issue ssh user@host -X and expect it to work under M$? Even if the X GUI interface can talk to Windoze, what user is runing the local display? How can you keep malicious third parties from corrupting your display? How on earth will you be able to tunnel that unholy mess through a secure shell? The path issues alone are enough to make me gag, can they be passed to new shells in M$ land? Heck, I can't even find the much vaunted (and sorely incomplete) kshell on my NT cripled work box. The average M$ box lacks basic security features such as users, PIDs and embeded file permisions. How can you build anything on top of that stinking dung heap?
Good luck to the folks at Cygwin. They are taking on a endless, difficult and thankless task. Breaking everything on a windows platform is as easy as changing default fonts. Try running ispell under NT service pack six. Changing the functionality of dlls is a sure way to break stuff. In the end, M$ will only tollerate M$ on their Micros~ OS.
I'm sure win32 is a registered trademark. The name should follow the fine tradition of negation. GNU is not Unix, Lesstif acts like Motif, Loss32 would be a good name for Win32 TM.
The problem is that motorists only saw the daily toll charges and not the weekly savings in petrol/time.
Ha ha ha. The problem is that some greedy looser always wants to come between people and what they want. It's the "asshole in the middle" idea. The usual line is that they know better and that things will really be improved with you giving them money.
My wife uses Red Hat and likes it. It was cheaper, easier to install, works better, is easier to maintain, and is more difficult for her to screw up. She knows the root pasword but does not need to use it. That Linux is ready for the desktop is more than obvious at my house it's an accomplished fact. M$ junk is NOT easy to learn, despite the "familiarity" of it's ever changing and never truly unified face. Hell, it's not even easy to keep up with. We quit and followed the path of least resistance.
$200 per seat for an M$ desktop? You are dreaming, or you think that their crummy OS alone is a useful tool. Those things cost as much as mainframes did, and the prices get jacked every year. Unix admins make more because they are currently deployed on higher dollar work. They are deployed on higher dollar work because people spending money want results and *nix delivers where M$ fails. The work is not that much harder, in fact it's easier. Digging ditches is harder than drafting and pays worse too. Go figure, some people dig ditches. Study after study continue to prove Linux is cheaper and better. The only people still recomending M$ are salesmen, PHBs and marketdroids.
My mom chucked out two $1000 machines because the software quit working. Yep, M$ was the only thing wrong with them. Parts of them form my gateway and a mail server "Lusers" is what M$ considers their customers. Her loss bothered me a little. Fraud bothers me. Bitter? Nah, I'm going to bundle them up and sell them to physics students cheap, then take her to dinner with the money. Blame the luser just won't cut it anymore. People expect things to work and keep working. The M$ upgrade train is derailed.
When Open Source advocates realize this, they'll start developing software the community needs, not just themselves. Its ok that it started off selfish, but it needs to end with cooperation and community.
You have got it all backwards. It's never been selfish.
What can be less selfish than sharing your source code, without cost, so that anyone can can use, modify and redistribute it as they please?
What can be more cooperative than making everything work together?
Why do you assume that people's egos are so big that they will be hurt if no one else uses their work? Sorry bud, I'm going to continue to advocate free software for what's there and for how awful the alternatives are. If people want to be abused by the likes of M$, that's their problem. I'll advise them not to just like I'll advise you not to go riding while drunk. Don't get confused about the motives, some people simply have everyone's best interest at heart. I've got what I want, I'd like you to get what you want too.
Then, the linux community can say "We support Linux better than any MS Support service! And our support is $0.00 per hour."
What support is lacking? It's not nice to call people "clueless newbies". With man pages, and online info even the most bone-headed engineer like me can become profficient. Sure, it was all free but a few reference books. M$ has never been as easy, and most of the real info is hidden.
Having given all that, why should people give their time up as well? Lawers, doctors, engineers and others charge for their insight on publically available information. Would you deny computer consultants a living? I suppose you would have them all work to help M$ maintain it's vanishing monopoly. Blah, I'm never going to write another line of Win32 code again and I'll never recomend M$ to anyone. The whole mindset is screwed up, and the products are all worst in their class. I'm not getting paid and I'll write what ever I feel like. I'll give it away when I feel like it. I offer advice when I feel like it, and I give away hardware to my frinds. If you want me to do what you want, you can do something I want, like pay me.
I wish that writers would make other points. This one is blatantly obvious, and every linux user knows it. How about some other points that most IT Managers don't know?
OK, Linux is more secure. Linux is more stable. Linux is easier to use. Linux is easier to maintain. Linux is easier to modify. Linux avoids the data loss propriatory applications cause by changing their formats and interfaces. Linux programs can easily share data. Linux has much better and more flexible foundations.
The article did well to consider a single aspect. Don't we all know that each of the above statements is blantantly obvious? The points must be made one at a time to overcome the billions of dollars M$ has put into adverts and FUD. PHBs will nod in agreement as they consider the world around them, but they lack a basis for compairison. Articles like this build up that basis, while mentioning the other points. Throw them in your PHB's face at once is not polite. No one likes feeling like a sucker.
Reference Neiven's Protector: At some point you wake up and think, "I've been stupid".
It all boils down to this: If I gave my mother a Porche 911 Twin Turbo tomorrow, I know that she would drive it to work every day exactly the same as she drives her Subaru Outback station wagon. It's only certain people that will take advantage of the extra power. This analogy isn't less applicable to computers, it's MORE applicable.
It all boils down to this: My mother is a sucker. She bought one of Bill Gates air cooled VWs (Windows ME) and it pains her to use it everyday. He charged her about 100 times what my Porche costs (Debian), but she would be better off with a Ford (Red Hat), Lincoln (Mandrake), or even a Honda (Turbo Linux), with a few German performance parts (KDE). I wish that I had the time to help her out, but she is fiercly loyal to a few model T parts (AOL) that are hard to come by in the modern world. Bill Gate's junk has been the ruin of two perfectly usable computers she has owned and it makes me sad to think of all the others out there who have suffered like she has.
The point? Win32 is easier than *nix. And Win32 is STILL TOO HARD for the masses.
What's easy about a box that does not work? Most people end up throwing away their M$ computers because the software fails. Trying to make M$ stuff stable and usable is an imposible task.
Offices are the ideal place for linux desktops. They offer low price, security, stablility, and more. The few things that are difficult or "missing" are not really needed in an office environment where 90% of the work are routine reports. It's good to remember that all these "complex business documents" used to be prepared on typewriters and kept in file drawers with little better organization than alphabatized indexes. All the Linux distros are up to this by now, and all long surpassed M$ junk in all other catagories.
I know less about the newer KDE releases with regard to frendliness, performance, and bloat. If someone would be kind enough to fill me in on how KDE is in these respects, I'd appreciate it.
The KDE desktop and applications work just fine on my wife's 500MHz K6/2 with 128M RAM. By just fine, I mean faster than M$ Office on a nicer machine at work I'm forced to endure. It's faster by a factor of two. XP might not even work. Print services work just fine and were as easy to configure as Red Hat could make them.
For a fast clean window environment, you might check out Window Maker on Debian. Fast, clean, beautiful and functional.
I work in an electronic music studio. I'd love to use Linux, but the apps just aren't there. The fact that there's almost no development community addressing this potentially enormous market amazes me to no end.
Ahem. I suppose you are unaware of the Debian Multimedia Release. No? How about the hundreds of applications that people are building that form the foundation of that release? If that's not a large enough community, I'm not sure what is. A quick google search will turn up plenty of sites about movie making and sound editing on Linux. It's only a mater of time before it becomes much easier to use.
But, until then, I'll use Windows. Not because it's great, but because it has the apps I need.
Woops, you are a troll. If you really cared about sound, you would be using a Mac. Dr. Watson? What's that about? I've never been able to make all the Windoze multimedia trash to behave and work together. The one computer I tried to work with M$ on was unstable, half working, and produced inferior product. I suppose I was just not leet enough to spend enough, but something makes me think my experience was more typical than the adverts at CompUSA.
You beat me too it, and I was not going to be as nice to him as you were.
how to initially draw people to a community when the a community itself is the selling point
There's the whole problem, right there, wrong attitude. The instant you start to think about "selling" something, you've lost it. The whole point of the web is publishing among equal peers. If you try to squeeze money off someone else's interests, to become the asshole in the middle, you will be replaced and fast.
A friend asked me the other day, "Linux, who uses that?" My answer is that I could care less. The same thing goes for my little ftp site, any software I actually write, and any "community" pages I ever try to build. I'd be happy if anyone enjoys my stuff and contributes to it, but I won't be too sad if they have something better.
I really hope no troll out there takes my word on this and actually do this.
Why worry about the trolls when big ISPs are here for you? ATT would never use this to filter objectionable content would they? I mean who would want to block the local LUG? Not the MSN? No, everyone is nice enough to astroturf that kind of thing. Stephen Barktoo signs up for the local LUG then reports the mail as spam. Poof local LUG looses mail list. Then, when the ISP consolidation is over and ATT and MS own everything, they can block the LUGs webpage like they block incoming port80 now. Thanks for the insightful thought, there in return is the mechanism for email control and motive you fear with a bonus mal thought about web control.
It's obvious that you have your dns taken care of. How else could you be posting to Slashdot? OK, you could be at work, sorry! Oh well, when the world sucks it's time to make things better for yourself.
For those of you at work with dead DNS at home, try the following:
www.google.com 216.239.35.101, look up DNS + name of local university.
http.us.debian.org 141.213.4.21, add to/etc/apt/sources.list then run dselect as root and get task-dns-server
Not too many people are going to spend $40 on crap service. Those folks paying $24/month for AOL don't count their phone sevice as part of the bill, because they can't imagine living without a phone. Ask them to spend twice as much for essentially the same thing? No way.
I'm spending about $50 for a cable box with blocked port 80 and 25, and I'm not too happy. I'd go with DSL but guese what? The local phone company has delusions of selling long distance and thinks that DSL is a competitor. They are right of course, and they have the DSL folks by the nads. The circuits are all full here, but I would not count on new ones comming out until the DSL companies are all owned by local phone companies.
Kind of like ATT buying up the cable companies, except ATT does not have any more power over @home but the 25% share they used to crap up the sevicc and drive it bankrupt.
Consider a secure, multi-user setup. A user has read/write access to their own files and executables thay install (~/bin/). In such a setup, a trojan or virus-infected executable (d/l'd from elsewhere, or compiled locally) could delete or corrupt your files or executables. The only reason this isn't prevalent on linux is the critical mass of users (and commercial software worth warezing) isn't present in linux land.
Considering how obfuscicated perl code is, it's a wonder no one hasn't released a perl script that anylizes your web logs and erases all the user files it can. Or maybe someone has, but those affected keep quiet to avoid looking stupid.
Wow, where to begin? First, you have not described a secure system. Bin is owned by root, so only root (is that "thay" on your machines?) can put files there or modify those that exist there. Letting your users put random files in bin is likely to get you something funny named ls.
While running executables can open the door to nasties, reasonable binary distribution systems like Debian have checks against such things. Only a very well formed executable that takes advantage of known venerabilities to elevate privladges can overcome the built in safegaurds of reasonable multi-user systems. A web nasty is may delete user files, but is unlikely to get further than that. While this is sad, the home directory concept makes backups much easier than on some OSs where important information is written in dozens of places. Other usefull user protections, such as real java virtural machines, are enhanced by the true user accounts. These things can not exist on other OS.
The "critical mass" idea is total nonsense. Considering the dollar value of M$'s "market", M$'s track record of breaking other people's applications, and M$'s less than ethical use of astroturfing, I imagine that MicroTurds everywhere are bussy trying to make Linux worms and viruses. Their lack of success is demostrated at uptime where linux and BSD systems have much greater performance than M$'s numerically inferior offerings.
These companies have zero credibility to begin with. Their software can not and will not make up for all the problems of the inadequate OS (that's M$, thank you) that it runs on. The folks where I work do as much as they can to keep the database of viruses to detect "current", so there are always new nasties and old nasties that can and do slip through. The listings look ipressive enough until you realize that it changes every month and the previous list is only partly contained in the new list. Go figure!
Proper security is impossible without real user accounts. Those who use Windoze are naked.
Don't forget that the records were orignally compiled at public expense. Great expense if you count all the time each and every listed member stood in line to be granted the license to access the public roadways. Such shakedowns that don't really insure vehicle workability, driver safety or make it difficult to steal vehicles are another rant. The US post office becomeing a spammer is another rant I'll pass on.
This rant's point is that government records should ALL be free! They are yours and you deserve to benefit from them as you please. If the information is really sensitive, the govenrment should not be interested in it. The privacy filter should be applied on the front end. Abuse of benign information is what needs to be outlawed. If the public has a need to keep the information, the public has a right to access it.
Who sets up the termianals? A PR stunt it could be! What a great way for a local consulting firm to demonstrate what they can do. What satisfaction to do it on M$ suppied hardware, "Thanks. *slap*.", and to do it for local schools. Red Hat would have trouble selecting from all the volunteers if this happens.
Certianly it will take less effort than the current M$ waste, but it will be an effort. Go Red Hat!
Well, light does have less momentum and is easier to redirect at a distance than a BB is. Knowing where the object is does you no good if you can't put holes in it.
So, how much energy can you cram into a laser beam these days? Anyone lazed ionizing UV and soft Xrays yet? Imagine a nice sharp beam of gammas. Yikes, I'm vaporized.
Slashdot Mirror
Gee, so does mine, but I don't think I'll advertise my local addresses.
Thanks for the insulting lecture but you missed the point. Uncle Sam's box will do more than advertised. This is not a government funtion, you ass.
That letter from your teacher about your cHIld.
tHIs, you thought of it!
wHIch.
wHIle
anytHIng and everytHIng.
It's hard to imagine the tHIng that won't be HIt.
I'm not that bright, however. I'm still suffering with LAME and NotLame notcompiles and I don't know how to write to my CD player with Linux. Because of that, I don't consider any of these things "PC" compatible. They are M$ compatible, the best example of overpriced hype that won't be here ten years from now.
When Uncle Sam tells me he wants to set up a filter at the local ISP, I know exactly what he means. I have not forgotten what he told me yesterday.
I've got a long list of things I do not want the govenment doing, and what they should do instead. They should not be reading my email, they should prosecute those who do as they prosecute those who use the inherently insecure potocal known as US mail. They should not be collecting information they don't need to do the job of infrastucture development, military defense and welfare. They should not be buying insecure propriatory OS such as M$ offers. I'd much rather have information kept on secure servers so that it will stay put. The government should not hand over the publically built communications infrastructure to a cartel of greedy corporate interests. Redundancy should be encouraged and inexpensive anonymous public access assured.
Security should not be an excuse to hand the internet over to either corporate of govenment censors. This is the future of publications and it must remain free. The future freedom and prosperity of our country depends on free information interchange. Business can not funtion without privacy in their plans. Individuals can not be sure what is true if they can not trust the media that brings them their news. Control of the internet by government or corporate censors will eliminate all the blessings of this new form of communications.
How exactly do you do this? Mr. Senator, that is your job. Now get to work.
A programmer will whine about a function that he thinks is messy. It's supposed to be a simple function to display a window or something, but for some reason it takes up two pages and has all these ugly little hairs and stuff on it and nobody knows why. OK. I'll tell you why. Those are bug fixes. One of them fixes that bug that Jill had when she tried to install the thing on a computer that didn't have Internet Explorer. Another one fixes a bug that occurs in low memory conditions. Another one fixes some bug that occurred when the file is on a floppy disk and the user yanks out the diskette in the middle. That LoadLibrary call is sure ugly but it makes the code work on old versions of Windows 95. When you throw that function away and start from scratch, you are throwing away all that knowledge. All those collected bug fixes. Years of programming work.
Now we know, in the M$ world bugs=knowledge. No wonder SpyG^H^H^H^H MSIE takes up a 500M foot print. Whoo hooo!
The real question is, "How do you sell that shit?"
Aristotle was right. Those who think their models are more real than the world are deluded.
My closest brush with stuff like this was Exceed, the X port to Win32. It made me think X sucked, and I never learned a thing. Why? Because half of it was broken by the suck OS underneath and I had no reference to the way things were supposed to work. A year later I learned to program the Win95 API and understood how things had shifted around under the shiny binary.
Think about how crippled the ports will be. How on earth can you issue ssh user@host -X and expect it to work under M$? Even if the X GUI interface can talk to Windoze, what user is runing the local display? How can you keep malicious third parties from corrupting your display? How on earth will you be able to tunnel that unholy mess through a secure shell? The path issues alone are enough to make me gag, can they be passed to new shells in M$ land? Heck, I can't even find the much vaunted (and sorely incomplete) kshell on my NT cripled work box. The average M$ box lacks basic security features such as users, PIDs and embeded file permisions. How can you build anything on top of that stinking dung heap?
Good luck to the folks at Cygwin. They are taking on a endless, difficult and thankless task. Breaking everything on a windows platform is as easy as changing default fonts. Try running ispell under NT service pack six. Changing the functionality of dlls is a sure way to break stuff. In the end, M$ will only tollerate M$ on their Micros~ OS.
I'm sure win32 is a registered trademark. The name should follow the fine tradition of negation. GNU is not Unix, Lesstif acts like Motif, Loss32 would be a good name for Win32 TM.
Ha ha ha. The problem is that some greedy looser always wants to come between people and what they want. It's the "asshole in the middle" idea. The usual line is that they know better and that things will really be improved with you giving them money.
$200 per seat for an M$ desktop? You are dreaming, or you think that their crummy OS alone is a useful tool. Those things cost as much as mainframes did, and the prices get jacked every year. Unix admins make more because they are currently deployed on higher dollar work. They are deployed on higher dollar work because people spending money want results and *nix delivers where M$ fails. The work is not that much harder, in fact it's easier. Digging ditches is harder than drafting and pays worse too. Go figure, some people dig ditches. Study after study continue to prove Linux is cheaper and better. The only people still recomending M$ are salesmen, PHBs and marketdroids.
My mom chucked out two $1000 machines because the software quit working. Yep, M$ was the only thing wrong with them. Parts of them form my gateway and a mail server "Lusers" is what M$ considers their customers. Her loss bothered me a little. Fraud bothers me. Bitter? Nah, I'm going to bundle them up and sell them to physics students cheap, then take her to dinner with the money. Blame the luser just won't cut it anymore. People expect things to work and keep working. The M$ upgrade train is derailed.
You have got it all backwards. It's never been selfish.
What can be less selfish than sharing your source code, without cost, so that anyone can can use, modify and redistribute it as they please?
What can be more cooperative than making everything work together?
Why do you assume that people's egos are so big that they will be hurt if no one else uses their work? Sorry bud, I'm going to continue to advocate free software for what's there and for how awful the alternatives are. If people want to be abused by the likes of M$, that's their problem. I'll advise them not to just like I'll advise you not to go riding while drunk. Don't get confused about the motives, some people simply have everyone's best interest at heart. I've got what I want, I'd like you to get what you want too.
Then, the linux community can say "We support Linux better than any MS Support service! And our support is $0.00 per hour."
What support is lacking? It's not nice to call people "clueless newbies". With man pages, and online info even the most bone-headed engineer like me can become profficient. Sure, it was all free but a few reference books. M$ has never been as easy, and most of the real info is hidden.
Having given all that, why should people give their time up as well? Lawers, doctors, engineers and others charge for their insight on publically available information. Would you deny computer consultants a living? I suppose you would have them all work to help M$ maintain it's vanishing monopoly. Blah, I'm never going to write another line of Win32 code again and I'll never recomend M$ to anyone. The whole mindset is screwed up, and the products are all worst in their class. I'm not getting paid and I'll write what ever I feel like. I'll give it away when I feel like it. I offer advice when I feel like it, and I give away hardware to my frinds. If you want me to do what you want, you can do something I want, like pay me.
OK, Linux is more secure. Linux is more stable. Linux is easier to use. Linux is easier to maintain. Linux is easier to modify. Linux avoids the data loss propriatory applications cause by changing their formats and interfaces. Linux programs can easily share data. Linux has much better and more flexible foundations.
The article did well to consider a single aspect. Don't we all know that each of the above statements is blantantly obvious? The points must be made one at a time to overcome the billions of dollars M$ has put into adverts and FUD. PHBs will nod in agreement as they consider the world around them, but they lack a basis for compairison. Articles like this build up that basis, while mentioning the other points. Throw them in your PHB's face at once is not polite. No one likes feeling like a sucker.
Reference Neiven's Protector: At some point you wake up and think, "I've been stupid".
It all boils down to this: My mother is a sucker. She bought one of Bill Gates air cooled VWs (Windows ME) and it pains her to use it everyday. He charged her about 100 times what my Porche costs (Debian), but she would be better off with a Ford (Red Hat), Lincoln (Mandrake), or even a Honda (Turbo Linux), with a few German performance parts (KDE). I wish that I had the time to help her out, but she is fiercly loyal to a few model T parts (AOL) that are hard to come by in the modern world. Bill Gate's junk has been the ruin of two perfectly usable computers she has owned and it makes me sad to think of all the others out there who have suffered like she has.
The point? Win32 is easier than *nix. And Win32 is STILL TOO HARD for the masses.
What's easy about a box that does not work? Most people end up throwing away their M$ computers because the software fails. Trying to make M$ stuff stable and usable is an imposible task.
Offices are the ideal place for linux desktops. They offer low price, security, stablility, and more. The few things that are difficult or "missing" are not really needed in an office environment where 90% of the work are routine reports. It's good to remember that all these "complex business documents" used to be prepared on typewriters and kept in file drawers with little better organization than alphabatized indexes. All the Linux distros are up to this by now, and all long surpassed M$ junk in all other catagories.
The KDE desktop and applications work just fine on my wife's 500MHz K6/2 with 128M RAM. By just fine, I mean faster than M$ Office on a nicer machine at work I'm forced to endure. It's faster by a factor of two. XP might not even work. Print services work just fine and were as easy to configure as Red Hat could make them.
For a fast clean window environment, you might check out Window Maker on Debian. Fast, clean, beautiful and functional.
Ahem. I suppose you are unaware of the Debian Multimedia Release. No? How about the hundreds of applications that people are building that form the foundation of that release? If that's not a large enough community, I'm not sure what is. A quick google search will turn up plenty of sites about movie making and sound editing on Linux. It's only a mater of time before it becomes much easier to use. But, until then, I'll use Windows. Not because it's great, but because it has the apps I need.
Woops, you are a troll. If you really cared about sound, you would be using a Mac. Dr. Watson? What's that about? I've never been able to make all the Windoze multimedia trash to behave and work together. The one computer I tried to work with M$ on was unstable, half working, and produced inferior product. I suppose I was just not leet enough to spend enough, but something makes me think my experience was more typical than the adverts at CompUSA.
how to initially draw people to a community when the a community itself is the selling point
There's the whole problem, right there, wrong attitude. The instant you start to think about "selling" something, you've lost it. The whole point of the web is publishing among equal peers. If you try to squeeze money off someone else's interests, to become the asshole in the middle, you will be replaced and fast.
A friend asked me the other day, "Linux, who uses that?" My answer is that I could care less. The same thing goes for my little ftp site, any software I actually write, and any "community" pages I ever try to build. I'd be happy if anyone enjoys my stuff and contributes to it, but I won't be too sad if they have something better.
Why worry about the trolls when big ISPs are here for you? ATT would never use this to filter objectionable content would they? I mean who would want to block the local LUG? Not the MSN? No, everyone is nice enough to astroturf that kind of thing. Stephen Barktoo signs up for the local LUG then reports the mail as spam. Poof local LUG looses mail list. Then, when the ISP consolidation is over and ATT and MS own everything, they can block the LUGs webpage like they block incoming port80 now. Thanks for the insightful thought, there in return is the mechanism for email control and motive you fear with a bonus mal thought about web control.
End the last mile tyrany! Go wireless now.
For those of you at work with dead DNS at home, try the following:
www.google.com 216.239.35.101, look up DNS + name of local university.
http.us.debian.org 141.213.4.21, add to /etc/apt/sources.list then run dselect as root and get task-dns-server
images.slashdot.org, 64.28.67.57. We sould not want to be without thinkgeed would we?
I'm spending about $50 for a cable box with blocked port 80 and 25, and I'm not too happy. I'd go with DSL but guese what? The local phone company has delusions of selling long distance and thinks that DSL is a competitor. They are right of course, and they have the DSL folks by the nads. The circuits are all full here, but I would not count on new ones comming out until the DSL companies are all owned by local phone companies.
Kind of like ATT buying up the cable companies, except ATT does not have any more power over @home but the 25% share they used to crap up the sevicc and drive it bankrupt.
Considering how obfuscicated perl code is, it's a wonder no one hasn't released a perl script that anylizes your web logs and erases all the user files it can. Or maybe someone has, but those affected keep quiet to avoid looking stupid.
Wow, where to begin? First, you have not described a secure system. Bin is owned by root, so only root (is that "thay" on your machines?) can put files there or modify those that exist there. Letting your users put random files in bin is likely to get you something funny named ls.
While running executables can open the door to nasties, reasonable binary distribution systems like Debian have checks against such things. Only a very well formed executable that takes advantage of known venerabilities to elevate privladges can overcome the built in safegaurds of reasonable multi-user systems. A web nasty is may delete user files, but is unlikely to get further than that. While this is sad, the home directory concept makes backups much easier than on some OSs where important information is written in dozens of places. Other usefull user protections, such as real java virtural machines, are enhanced by the true user accounts. These things can not exist on other OS.
The "critical mass" idea is total nonsense. Considering the dollar value of M$'s "market", M$'s track record of breaking other people's applications, and M$'s less than ethical use of astroturfing, I imagine that MicroTurds everywhere are bussy trying to make Linux worms and viruses. Their lack of success is demostrated at uptime where linux and BSD systems have much greater performance than M$'s numerically inferior offerings.
Who needs "warez"? Free software kicks ass.
Proper security is impossible without real user accounts. Those who use Windoze are naked.
This rant's point is that government records should ALL be free! They are yours and you deserve to benefit from them as you please. If the information is really sensitive, the govenrment should not be interested in it. The privacy filter should be applied on the front end. Abuse of benign information is what needs to be outlawed. If the public has a need to keep the information, the public has a right to access it.
Who sets up the termianals? A PR stunt it could be! What a great way for a local consulting firm to demonstrate what they can do. What satisfaction to do it on M$ suppied hardware, "Thanks. *slap*.", and to do it for local schools. Red Hat would have trouble selecting from all the volunteers if this happens.
Certianly it will take less effort than the current M$ waste, but it will be an effort. Go Red Hat!
So, how much energy can you cram into a laser beam these days? Anyone lazed ionizing UV and soft Xrays yet? Imagine a nice sharp beam of gammas. Yikes, I'm vaporized.