Where did RobbieThe1st say Linux was ready for the masses? You're frothing at the mouth for all the wrong reasons here.
My take? I use Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD -heck- even IRIX still. I'm not the slightest bit interested in "the masses" or what they need or want. I value the freedom to build and manage my own computer the way I see fit. This has nothing to do with feeling 'leet' or any other juvenile excuse for misplaced feelings of superiority. Windows has no place on my systems but that's not because I think Microsoft is somehow inherently evil. It's just that on Windows I feel like I'm forced to use my computer with one hand tied behind my back. That's nothing more than simple personal preference built on -most likely- sub-optimal habits learned in a past when GUI's weren't even available, and you're welcome to have a different opinion.
Funny that you should mention and disqualify Haiku, though. If there's any OS that would fit your preference for being usable without a CLI it'd be BeOS and its free Haiku sibling. Sure, it still has a CLI if you want it (much like Windows and every other OS under the sun except MacOS Classic), but it's not needed.
When it comes to "the masses" I'm always surprised by the ease with which 1% of computer users is dismissed as 'next to nothing'. Have you ever stopped to think about how many individuals you're talking about when you say 1% of all computer users in the world? That'd be enough people to fill a small to mid-sized country with and it's certainly enough -as decades of steady development, growth and improvement have proven- to sustain free software as a viable choice in computing.
You should also understand that the ecosystem that forms around free software is not (nor was it ever intended to be) a single entity with a clear direction or even any kind of unifying goal. Sure, some commercial entities have emerged and made money using free software. They are welcome to do so and their contributions are very much welcomed, but making money or conquering percentages of market share is not the purpose. The only unifying aspect to the free software community is the combination of freedom and software, nothing else. Anyone who attempts to use free software as a stick to beat some other interest, is pushing an agenda of their own and is not representative of the loosely-knit group of people who love their freedom in computing. You're just as welcome as any other to simply take it or leave it, no questions asked. The rest is up to you.
As long as you have a true SPP parallel port on your system you should be good to go. Admittedly, these are becoming quite rare and it'd probably be cheaper to scavenge an old 486 from a dumpster somewhere than to try and find an actual PCI board that has such a port. Most on-board parallel ports theses days tend to do ECP and aren't 100% SPP compatible anymore. The good part is that moving your precious old files off those flimsy disks will be a one-off operation and you can put the sticky 486 back into the dumpster you found it in as soon as it's done.
Of course a Linux or other OS user might be able to disable this "feature" but that would *SERIOUSLY* tarnish the reputation of said OS. If it can not use "Secure boot" -for whatever reason- that implies it boots insecurely.. oh the horror!! It will put the adoption of any kind of grassroots OS at a major disadvantage.
For us tinkerers here it's an absolute outrage that the freedom to tinker will come at a premium in the near future, but we've always been the minority.
One of my colleagues is set to retire next year. He still has a big square plate of magnetic core memory in a frame on his wall. The state of the bits -which can be seen with the naked eye- is still the same as it was in the 1970's. Oh, and it's actually quite aesthetically pleasing as well.
Better quality as in lower capacity and lower density. If you chisel the bits in stone by hand it'll be readable thousands of years from now. From the 100 5.25 disks I still own from the '80s there were around 10 that had developed some sort of defect. That's when I soldered a cable to hook my CBM 1541 disk drive up to a DOS box and transfer all the remaining disks to image files. For all intents and purposes they take up no space at all on my multi-terabyte NAS today and my personal computing history is very conveniently part of my regular backup regime now. Running my stuff through an emulator just doesn't bring back the original sensation though, but neither does hooking my actual C64 up to a 42" flat panel TV (where I used to have a small CRT as a "monitor" back in the day).
So why even bother with gods at all if they're utterly beyond comprehension? For all intents and purposes they are not there, it's exactly the same but a heck of a lot simpler.
You're being quite dogmatic by saying "See, the truth is".. and presumptious as well there yourself dear minister. Scientist #6 would disqualify your "scientists" #1, #2, #3, #4 on the grounds of not understanding of deceitfully subverting the scientific method and #5 on the grounds of answering by proxy, thereby not answering the question at all. Religious #4 is a misnomer in that it reflects what scientist #6 would say without needing religion of any kind. But hey, I'm not an ordained scientist so what the heck do I know?
That little bit about your religion welcoming atheists sounds interesting if a little paradoxical, though. How does that work for you?
That mechanism has little to do with religion as such. It's simply the established power structure doing what it always does to maintain the status-quo: prevent change at all cost.
You're pushing a dishonest argument here. The question what my senses represent is utterly irrelevant as "reality" is no more than a matter of definition. I can define reality as that which my senses convey to my consciousness, thereby declaring it real. By keeping sensory perception outside the 'real' you push any argument whatsoever straight into futility. Such futility isn't necessarily bad, it's just that I consider talking to myself a rather pointless activity most of the time. It's a fast race to the bottom which I'm perfectly willing to accept. My consciousness may not have a purpose and that's ok with me, but that's beside the point.
The problem with belief in higher powers is that it's a leap of faith of a totally different order. Where the nature of my sensory perceptions has at the very least some modicum of perceptible evidence (the perceptions in question as my consciousness is aware of them), the same can not be said of godlike higher powers. I can live with the notion that I'll never be able to tell the true nature of what my senses are telling me (with "me" being the consciousness doing the perceiving). Such conscious perception is utterly missing when it comes to gods. At least my sensory perceptions are real in the sense that a consciousness perceives them, it just doesn't have the means to understand their nature forcing it to take them at face value. When it comes to gods we're quite a large step behind that. The utter lack of perception of gods makes it impossible to question their nature, let alone have any hope of understanding such a nature even if it were there to begin with.
In short: my senses provide my consciousness with tangible evidence of their presence, I just can't hope to ever truly understand them. God doesn't even begin to show evidence.
ALGOL solved a lot of problems back in its day and still has a legacy visible in just about any programming language in use today, even if ALGOL itself isn't around anymore (to my knowledge).
My first language was Commodore BASIC (v2), which tainted me heavily as a programmer. The second was 6502 Assembly, which felt like the shades falling from my eyes back in my C64 days even though it was difficult to get anything done. Third up was Visual Basic 5 and VBA years later.. yes.. I'm guilty of cobbling nasty converters in MS Access but I'm hopefully somewhat redeemed by the fact that my VBA-crap wer exclusively one-off preprocessors before larger imports into a real RDBMS. Then I went on to PHP, which is interesting because it teaches bad habits if you let it but doesn't require them per se.. and right now C++ is slowly pulling my nails out.
I don't blame the developers. I blame management for having their collective heads up their collective behinds for literally *YEARS* while the world was changing around them. The writing has been on the wall since at least 2006 that IE would irrevocably move on at some point in the future. That gave companies *FOUR YEARS* of time to plan, develop, test and smear the budget out very thinly over the 16 quarters that have passed already. At this point there are another three years yet to come. Companies that still don't get their crap together by 2014 deserve to be put out of their misery.
Back in the day I actually enjoyed shooting brown and blue blobs of pixels yelling "Argh, mein Leben!" just before going down. History suggests that the SS wore stylish black uniforms instead of bright blue overalls though.. and yes, I'm European and the Nazi war machine ravaged my country. No problem playing games with Nazi's in them, so why should this be different for Taliban?
I'm already on IPv6 at home through sixxs.net. They (or actually SurfNet.nl) gave me a/48 all to myself. I can now give unique addresses to my mediacenter, my 2 notebooks, the lady's 2 notebooks and the SGI O2 that's purring peacefully in the corner. Now what to do with the zillion addresses I have left?
Slashdot Mirror
Uh.. yeah.. you really need to get out of there. I wish you the best of luck! Oh, and DRM bad indeed.
Fuck FAT! Hmm.. never thought I'd reverse those two words and it would actually mean something not related to lipids. Interesting..
Where did RobbieThe1st say Linux was ready for the masses? You're frothing at the mouth for all the wrong reasons here. My take? I use Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD -heck- even IRIX still. I'm not the slightest bit interested in "the masses" or what they need or want. I value the freedom to build and manage my own computer the way I see fit. This has nothing to do with feeling 'leet' or any other juvenile excuse for misplaced feelings of superiority. Windows has no place on my systems but that's not because I think Microsoft is somehow inherently evil. It's just that on Windows I feel like I'm forced to use my computer with one hand tied behind my back. That's nothing more than simple personal preference built on -most likely- sub-optimal habits learned in a past when GUI's weren't even available, and you're welcome to have a different opinion. Funny that you should mention and disqualify Haiku, though. If there's any OS that would fit your preference for being usable without a CLI it'd be BeOS and its free Haiku sibling. Sure, it still has a CLI if you want it (much like Windows and every other OS under the sun except MacOS Classic), but it's not needed. When it comes to "the masses" I'm always surprised by the ease with which 1% of computer users is dismissed as 'next to nothing'. Have you ever stopped to think about how many individuals you're talking about when you say 1% of all computer users in the world? That'd be enough people to fill a small to mid-sized country with and it's certainly enough -as decades of steady development, growth and improvement have proven- to sustain free software as a viable choice in computing. You should also understand that the ecosystem that forms around free software is not (nor was it ever intended to be) a single entity with a clear direction or even any kind of unifying goal. Sure, some commercial entities have emerged and made money using free software. They are welcome to do so and their contributions are very much welcomed, but making money or conquering percentages of market share is not the purpose. The only unifying aspect to the free software community is the combination of freedom and software, nothing else. Anyone who attempts to use free software as a stick to beat some other interest, is pushing an agenda of their own and is not representative of the loosely-knit group of people who love their freedom in computing. You're just as welcome as any other to simply take it or leave it, no questions asked. The rest is up to you.
As long as you have a true SPP parallel port on your system you should be good to go. Admittedly, these are becoming quite rare and it'd probably be cheaper to scavenge an old 486 from a dumpster somewhere than to try and find an actual PCI board that has such a port. Most on-board parallel ports theses days tend to do ECP and aren't 100% SPP compatible anymore. The good part is that moving your precious old files off those flimsy disks will be a one-off operation and you can put the sticky 486 back into the dumpster you found it in as soon as it's done.
Of course a Linux or other OS user might be able to disable this "feature" but that would *SERIOUSLY* tarnish the reputation of said OS. If it can not use "Secure boot" -for whatever reason- that implies it boots insecurely.. oh the horror!! It will put the adoption of any kind of grassroots OS at a major disadvantage. For us tinkerers here it's an absolute outrage that the freedom to tinker will come at a premium in the near future, but we've always been the minority.
Etch into gold disk, shoot into space.
One of my colleagues is set to retire next year. He still has a big square plate of magnetic core memory in a frame on his wall. The state of the bits -which can be seen with the naked eye- is still the same as it was in the 1970's. Oh, and it's actually quite aesthetically pleasing as well.
Better quality as in lower capacity and lower density. If you chisel the bits in stone by hand it'll be readable thousands of years from now. From the 100 5.25 disks I still own from the '80s there were around 10 that had developed some sort of defect. That's when I soldered a cable to hook my CBM 1541 disk drive up to a DOS box and transfer all the remaining disks to image files. For all intents and purposes they take up no space at all on my multi-terabyte NAS today and my personal computing history is very conveniently part of my regular backup regime now. Running my stuff through an emulator just doesn't bring back the original sensation though, but neither does hooking my actual C64 up to a 42" flat panel TV (where I used to have a small CRT as a "monitor" back in the day).
So why even bother with gods at all if they're utterly beyond comprehension? For all intents and purposes they are not there, it's exactly the same but a heck of a lot simpler.
You're being quite dogmatic by saying "See, the truth is".. and presumptious as well there yourself dear minister. Scientist #6 would disqualify your "scientists" #1, #2, #3, #4 on the grounds of not understanding of deceitfully subverting the scientific method and #5 on the grounds of answering by proxy, thereby not answering the question at all. Religious #4 is a misnomer in that it reflects what scientist #6 would say without needing religion of any kind. But hey, I'm not an ordained scientist so what the heck do I know? That little bit about your religion welcoming atheists sounds interesting if a little paradoxical, though. How does that work for you?
Quod erat demonstrandum.. just have a quick glance into Christian schisms and that's just the beginning.
That mechanism has little to do with religion as such. It's simply the established power structure doing what it always does to maintain the status-quo: prevent change at all cost.
You're pushing a dishonest argument here. The question what my senses represent is utterly irrelevant as "reality" is no more than a matter of definition. I can define reality as that which my senses convey to my consciousness, thereby declaring it real. By keeping sensory perception outside the 'real' you push any argument whatsoever straight into futility. Such futility isn't necessarily bad, it's just that I consider talking to myself a rather pointless activity most of the time. It's a fast race to the bottom which I'm perfectly willing to accept. My consciousness may not have a purpose and that's ok with me, but that's beside the point. The problem with belief in higher powers is that it's a leap of faith of a totally different order. Where the nature of my sensory perceptions has at the very least some modicum of perceptible evidence (the perceptions in question as my consciousness is aware of them), the same can not be said of godlike higher powers. I can live with the notion that I'll never be able to tell the true nature of what my senses are telling me (with "me" being the consciousness doing the perceiving). Such conscious perception is utterly missing when it comes to gods. At least my sensory perceptions are real in the sense that a consciousness perceives them, it just doesn't have the means to understand their nature forcing it to take them at face value. When it comes to gods we're quite a large step behind that. The utter lack of perception of gods makes it impossible to question their nature, let alone have any hope of understanding such a nature even if it were there to begin with. In short: my senses provide my consciousness with tangible evidence of their presence, I just can't hope to ever truly understand them. God doesn't even begin to show evidence.
It could be nice to run a huge CPU and RAM hog on your PC at home and have just the display on your mobile.. I could see a use case in that.
ALGOL solved a lot of problems back in its day and still has a legacy visible in just about any programming language in use today, even if ALGOL itself isn't around anymore (to my knowledge).
My first language was Commodore BASIC (v2), which tainted me heavily as a programmer. The second was 6502 Assembly, which felt like the shades falling from my eyes back in my C64 days even though it was difficult to get anything done. Third up was Visual Basic 5 and VBA years later.. yes.. I'm guilty of cobbling nasty converters in MS Access but I'm hopefully somewhat redeemed by the fact that my VBA-crap wer exclusively one-off preprocessors before larger imports into a real RDBMS. Then I went on to PHP, which is interesting because it teaches bad habits if you let it but doesn't require them per se.. and right now C++ is slowly pulling my nails out.
..says the AC. Funny how that works.. meh.
I don't blame the developers. I blame management for having their collective heads up their collective behinds for literally *YEARS* while the world was changing around them. The writing has been on the wall since at least 2006 that IE would irrevocably move on at some point in the future. That gave companies *FOUR YEARS* of time to plan, develop, test and smear the budget out very thinly over the 16 quarters that have passed already. At this point there are another three years yet to come. Companies that still don't get their crap together by 2014 deserve to be put out of their misery.
Damn muggles!
Back in the day I actually enjoyed shooting brown and blue blobs of pixels yelling "Argh, mein Leben!" just before going down. History suggests that the SS wore stylish black uniforms instead of bright blue overalls though.. and yes, I'm European and the Nazi war machine ravaged my country. No problem playing games with Nazi's in them, so why should this be different for Taliban?
..and so your point is??
The Klingon ambassador.. he has quite a high profile, on his forehead.
Require NAT? As in *REQUIRE* and be the absolutely non-optional best-if-not-only way to do something? Would you mind naming a few of such scenarios?
I'm already on IPv6 at home through sixxs.net. They (or actually SurfNet.nl) gave me a /48 all to myself. I can now give unique addresses to my mediacenter, my 2 notebooks, the lady's 2 notebooks and the SGI O2 that's purring peacefully in the corner. Now what to do with the zillion addresses I have left?
But.. but.. what about subspace!? Folding space! Wormholes! The prophets of Bajor will be miffed indeed by your blasphemous remarks!