True, the actual CPU is rarely defective. I'll attest to that. However, as you said, the motherboard's chipset is often the root cause of severe stability and performance problems. Intel has historically made the most reliable chipsets and motherboards, which of course only take Intel chips, which is why (whether people realize it or not) Intel has the reputation as the higher quality vendor.
Contrary to the parent, the ATI Linux drivers only work 'fine' for very liberal definitions of the word. They are slow. They are buggy. They do not support Xinerama. They do not support FSAA in any usable way. Hell, they don't support 16-bit video modes. ATI may be 'listening', but that doesn't necessarily get drivers written. I, and many others, are still stuck using ATI drivers released mid last year because all their subsequent releases have been worthless.
I bought a 9600 Pro thinking that whatever drivers ATI had would be 'good enough'. Well, they aren't. Not by a long shot. If I weren't so fundamentally opposed to separate power connectors for video cards, I might've traded it in for a nvidia months ago. Those drivers are the sole cause of instability in my system. If you're buying a card for Linux, buy Nvidia. Case closed.
Ok. Point 1: You're in Texas. Texas is sport-crazy. Texas has always been sport-crazy. Your local problems are likely not representative of the nation as a whole.
Point 2: Why does athletics not matter? Just because it doesn't matter to you doesn't mean it doesn't matter in general. Many people derive lots of pleasure from participating in, or even just watching, sports. Why should school teach to the technology industry but not to the entertainment industry?
Point 3: We live in a (theoretically) capitalist society. If a father wants to spend his money so his kid can play baseball after school, regardless of the underlying reasons, who are you to say he can't? According to your alleged study, lots of fathers want to do that. If its their taxes that pay for the school, what they vote to spend them on is none of your business. For that matter, I don't really see whats so objectionable about fathers wanting to watch their sons play sports because thats what their fathers did for them. Seems natural to me.
Well, as they say, "all generalizations are wrong."
I never really experienced anything like the stereotypical treatment while I was in school. Some teasing maybe, but then who wasn't teased at some point in their life? And I was (and continue to be) quite geekish myself. However, I'm quite sure my fellow geeks in other areas have been substantially mistreated. Really, it all depends on the makeup of your school district and your own personality. I'm sure we all can think of a few geeks who really bring it upon themselves.
> For example, if a child is actively participating in sports outside of school (and they mostly all should be), then why is PE necessary?
Whether they should be or not, how often is it actually the case that most children are actively participating in sports outside of school? And how did they get introduced to those sports in the first place? Ok, kids who play baseball, football, etc could have easily decided to do that without gym class. I'm skeptical about, say, lacrosse though. I wouldn't necessarily be opposed to removing gym requirements from the high school level, but its got to be somewhere.
> Also, while I think music is an amazing thing for children to learn, those who are serious about learning to play an instrument generally have private instruction, or a great deal of practice outside of school anyway.
Music isn't mandatory. At least it wasn't at my high school, and we were a very good music school. At lower grade levels, the same reasoning applies as per gym: how else are the kids going to get introduced to it?
I guess I'm not sure what you're arguing against. People raise money for music and sports because those things are often targets when the budget needs to be reduced. You can't cut the history department, or the science department. And honestly, music and sports (or really, extracurricular activites in general) give kids a sense of pride and accomplishment you just don't get from regular academics,and I say that as someone who was always very proud of his grades.
Oh, and about updating textbooks: how often does that *really* need to be done? I'd say once per decade is plenty for anything you're learning in K-12. Its not like the subject matter is really changing, just the details of presentation.
Well, its not like they lower the standards for everyone so that the downs syndrome kid will pass. They lower the standards for that kid. I don't know if it really helps the impaired kids to be handled that way, but I don't see how it necessarily hurts anybody else.
Hear hear! I *still* can't really do iptables all that well, but I picked up pf in virtually no time. Its not only the better documentation, its that pf is so much less cumbersome to work with. Though I guess I should say I've never bothered to learn the new-fangled iptables-save/iptables-restore system, but why bother when I can just use OpenBSD on the firewall box?
I second all that about the interface. Though maybe it would be better to give every window a toolbar rather than the right-click menu. Heck, no wonder Mac users hate GIMP! But I definitely much prefer the dialog-based MDI to Photoshop's parent-window business. Though I bet lack of good focus-follows-mouse support in Windows is a big reason why the MS-types don't like GIMP. The interface just doesn't work nearly as well without it.
APT, yum, Portage, et al only save you from dependency hell if all the packages you need are in their repositories. I still run into dependency problems much more often with RedHat/Fedora than I do on Gentoo. Why? Because Gentoo has by far more packages in its repository than any other distro I've used, even Debian.
What admin needs new software now? You (gasp) TEST things before you implement them! Which is why you have a TEST machine, on which you can do any compiling you may need to. Moreover, it really doesn't take that long to compile most programs on modern hardware. Ok, maybe it takes a while on that old 200MHz machine in the basement, but barring that... and its not like you build KDE every day (or at all on a server).
Yeah... I actually discovered that moments after posting. Its not quite the same though. You *could* do what I describe using that, but it requires a lot of typing, scrolling output, and general tedium. Suffice to say I could do it a lot faster and be more confident that I got everything in Debian.
Now if somebody were to write a dselect/synaptic-ish interface around qpkg, we might have something
> That is like saying "because Ferrari isn't prepared to build economy cars, they suffer"
They do. Ferrari is owned by Fiat for a reason.
> Sun's real market is not the commodity-server area where Windows is popular.
i.e. Sun's market is very small. Small markets are hardly ever sustainable long-term. Business consolidation happens for largely this reason. Your car analogy was very apt, but not for the reason you thought. Similarly, I saw a documentary about BMW on the history channel the other day. After WWII they focused heavily on luxury cars, and nearly went bankrupt as a result. It seems the postwar German economy couldn't afford them. Well, companies are spending less money than ever on computers these days. They don't have to anymore. So Sun is either going to have to work on the low-mid end market like BMW did, or I suspect they're done for.
But listening quality's only half the point. The other reason for lossless encoding is that you can always transcode to whatever format you want without weird artifacts. Nevermind that if you're buying lossy encoded files, you're getting less than you would buying the CD, sometimes at an inflated price no less.
The only thing I miss about Debian now that I'm on Gentoo is the easy ability to clean out the install. With Debian I could always go into dselect and walk through all the crap I had installed and remove it selectively, with full dependancy checking. It was tedious, but I was glad to be able to do it every now and then. As far as I can tell, Gentoo has no comparable functionality.
Your logic thoroughly escapes me. People have *always* gone for more "mainstream" distros, hence the term "mainstream". And yes, most people don't change distros on a whim. They change when their current distro pisses them off in a substantial way. For the guy running RedHat 7.3, that will happen when the box gets thoroughly hacked because its using non-patched software from years ago. Even then, maybe he'll just go with Fedora because its what he knows, but so what? How is any of this a new trend? And furthermore, what does this have to do with Debian being aged? If this RedHat 7.3 guy is happy now, imagine how much happier he'd be with Debian stable, which he could trivially keep secure.
And your conclusion that Debian and Gentoo will fade away... where does that come from? Theres clearly some logical leap I'm missing, as I see no particular reason to believe that their userbase will shift percentagewise from what it already is.
I haven't looked lately, but in the past you've been able to buy Word, Excel, and possibly Powerpoint as standalone programs. Can you no longer do that?
My resume was done in OO.o from day one. All changes have been made in OO.o. In 99% of situations, the version I exported to.doc has worked just fine. However, I will admit that I load it up in Word after any substantial changes just to make sure nothing stupid happens. Don't have a copy of Word to test with? No problem! Microsoft provides a Word Viewer as a free download. Worked great in WINE last time I tried.
Ah, that makes a bit of sense. I was wondering what the deal was. Though it seems to me it would have made more sense to just take the Galeon source, make it respect GNOME prefs, and label it Epiphany.
Epiphany at this point is at the "good enough" phase, I suppose. And if someone were to actually write good plugins for it, it'd be great. In fact, once there are plugins, Epiphany will likely leave Galeon in the dust, since Galeon's not similarly extensible AFAIK. But for now I miss my gestures and a few other minor details too much to switch.
I agree that Miguel dismisses Win3.1 unfairly, but what the hell are you talking about WRT the Linux filesystem? Few, if any, filesystems *today* can guarantee that, journalled or not. And FAT16 sure as hell couldn't even pretend to claim that. The only time you could just hit the power button was if you were in DOS, and thats only because DOS was dumb and not doing anything. Services and multiple processes are what cause filesystem corruption.
For that matter, I dunno about hardware support... back in those days it was much simpler than it is today. Any respectable soundcard would be soundblaster-compatible, so you really only had to have 1 or 2 drivers, and video cards were all some variation of VESA or whatever... few fancy 3d-accelerators yet. Printers, I'm sure, were a bitch, though the dot-matrixes would have all worked well enough.
Furthermore, whats this about development platforms??? What were the platforms in 1994? BASIC? C++? Java was nothing then. Borland was the IDE and it was DOS-based. GUI toolkits? Ok, maybe we needed those.
Betcha none of the newer stuff works though. Try anything on windowsmedia.com or espn.com. If you can make them play in Linux, hats off, because I've been trying forever.
Whats interesting though is that with all that stuff, the game's hardware requirements are rather modest. Sure, you need a ton of diskspace. But you only need 128MB of RAM to play the game (256MB recommended). CPU/graphics requirements are not that intesive either. So yeah, its a giant install, but IMO its a remarkably well coded game and certaintly not an example of an application that will cause people grief with this alleged RAM shortage.
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True, the actual CPU is rarely defective. I'll attest to that. However, as you said, the motherboard's chipset is often the root cause of severe stability and performance problems. Intel has historically made the most reliable chipsets and motherboards, which of course only take Intel chips, which is why (whether people realize it or not) Intel has the reputation as the higher quality vendor.
Contrary to the parent, the ATI Linux drivers only work 'fine' for very liberal definitions of the word. They are slow. They are buggy. They do not support Xinerama. They do not support FSAA in any usable way. Hell, they don't support 16-bit video modes. ATI may be 'listening', but that doesn't necessarily get drivers written. I, and many others, are still stuck using ATI drivers released mid last year because all their subsequent releases have been worthless.
I bought a 9600 Pro thinking that whatever drivers ATI had would be 'good enough'. Well, they aren't. Not by a long shot. If I weren't so fundamentally opposed to separate power connectors for video cards, I might've traded it in for a nvidia months ago. Those drivers are the sole cause of instability in my system. If you're buying a card for Linux, buy Nvidia. Case closed.
Ok. Point 1: You're in Texas. Texas is sport-crazy. Texas has always been sport-crazy. Your local problems are likely not representative of the nation as a whole.
Point 2: Why does athletics not matter? Just because it doesn't matter to you doesn't mean it doesn't matter in general. Many people derive lots of pleasure from participating in, or even just watching, sports. Why should school teach to the technology industry but not to the entertainment industry?
Point 3: We live in a (theoretically) capitalist society. If a father wants to spend his money so his kid can play baseball after school, regardless of the underlying reasons, who are you to say he can't? According to your alleged study, lots of fathers want to do that. If its their taxes that pay for the school, what they vote to spend them on is none of your business. For that matter, I don't really see whats so objectionable about fathers wanting to watch their sons play sports because thats what their fathers did for them. Seems natural to me.
Well, as they say, "all generalizations are wrong."
I never really experienced anything like the stereotypical treatment while I was in school. Some teasing maybe, but then who wasn't teased at some point in their life? And I was (and continue to be) quite geekish myself. However, I'm quite sure my fellow geeks in other areas have been substantially mistreated. Really, it all depends on the makeup of your school district and your own personality. I'm sure we all can think of a few geeks who really bring it upon themselves.
> For example, if a child is actively participating in sports outside of school (and they mostly all should be), then why is PE necessary?
Whether they should be or not, how often is it actually the case that most children are actively participating in sports outside of school? And how did they get introduced to those sports in the first place? Ok, kids who play baseball, football, etc could have easily decided to do that without gym class. I'm skeptical about, say, lacrosse though. I wouldn't necessarily be opposed to removing gym requirements from the high school level, but its got to be somewhere.
> Also, while I think music is an amazing thing for children to learn, those who are serious about learning to play an instrument generally have private instruction, or a great deal of practice outside of school anyway.
Music isn't mandatory. At least it wasn't at my high school, and we were a very good music school. At lower grade levels, the same reasoning applies as per gym: how else are the kids going to get introduced to it?
I guess I'm not sure what you're arguing against. People raise money for music and sports because those things are often targets when the budget needs to be reduced. You can't cut the history department, or the science department. And honestly, music and sports (or really, extracurricular activites in general) give kids a sense of pride and accomplishment you just don't get from regular academics,and I say that as someone who was always very proud of his grades.
Oh, and about updating textbooks: how often does that *really* need to be done? I'd say once per decade is plenty for anything you're learning in K-12. Its not like the subject matter is really changing, just the details of presentation.
Yeah, well good luck applying those security updates your machine doesn't know about because you didn't do an 'apt-get update' first!
Well, its not like they lower the standards for everyone so that the downs syndrome kid will pass. They lower the standards for that kid. I don't know if it really helps the impaired kids to be handled that way, but I don't see how it necessarily hurts anybody else.
Hear hear! I *still* can't really do iptables all that well, but I picked up pf in virtually no time. Its not only the better documentation, its that pf is so much less cumbersome to work with. Though I guess I should say I've never bothered to learn the new-fangled iptables-save/iptables-restore system, but why bother when I can just use OpenBSD on the firewall box?
I second all that about the interface. Though maybe it would be better to give every window a toolbar rather than the right-click menu. Heck, no wonder Mac users hate GIMP! But I definitely much prefer the dialog-based MDI to Photoshop's parent-window business. Though I bet lack of good focus-follows-mouse support in Windows is a big reason why the MS-types don't like GIMP. The interface just doesn't work nearly as well without it.
APT, yum, Portage, et al only save you from dependency hell if all the packages you need are in their repositories. I still run into dependency problems much more often with RedHat/Fedora than I do on Gentoo. Why? Because Gentoo has by far more packages in its repository than any other distro I've used, even Debian.
What admin needs new software now? You (gasp) TEST things before you implement them! Which is why you have a TEST machine, on which you can do any compiling you may need to. Moreover, it really doesn't take that long to compile most programs on modern hardware. Ok, maybe it takes a while on that old 200MHz machine in the basement, but barring that... and its not like you build KDE every day (or at all on a server).
Yeah... I actually discovered that moments after posting. Its not quite the same though. You *could* do what I describe using that, but it requires a lot of typing, scrolling output, and general tedium. Suffice to say I could do it a lot faster and be more confident that I got everything in Debian.
Now if somebody were to write a dselect/synaptic-ish interface around qpkg, we might have something
> That is like saying "because Ferrari isn't prepared to build economy cars, they suffer"
They do. Ferrari is owned by Fiat for a reason.
> Sun's real market is not the commodity-server area where Windows is popular.
i.e. Sun's market is very small. Small markets are hardly ever sustainable long-term. Business consolidation happens for largely this reason. Your car analogy was very apt, but not for the reason you thought. Similarly, I saw a documentary about BMW on the history channel the other day. After WWII they focused heavily on luxury cars, and nearly went bankrupt as a result. It seems the postwar German economy couldn't afford them. Well, companies are spending less money than ever on computers these days. They don't have to anymore. So Sun is either going to have to work on the low-mid end market like BMW did, or I suspect they're done for.
But listening quality's only half the point. The other reason for lossless encoding is that you can always transcode to whatever format you want without weird artifacts. Nevermind that if you're buying lossy encoded files, you're getting less than you would buying the CD, sometimes at an inflated price no less.
The only thing I miss about Debian now that I'm on Gentoo is the easy ability to clean out the install. With Debian I could always go into dselect and walk through all the crap I had installed and remove it selectively, with full dependancy checking. It was tedious, but I was glad to be able to do it every now and then. As far as I can tell, Gentoo has no comparable functionality.
Trouble with those is they make you buy the computer to go with it.
Your logic thoroughly escapes me. People have *always* gone for more "mainstream" distros, hence the term "mainstream". And yes, most people don't change distros on a whim. They change when their current distro pisses them off in a substantial way. For the guy running RedHat 7.3, that will happen when the box gets thoroughly hacked because its using non-patched software from years ago. Even then, maybe he'll just go with Fedora because its what he knows, but so what? How is any of this a new trend? And furthermore, what does this have to do with Debian being aged? If this RedHat 7.3 guy is happy now, imagine how much happier he'd be with Debian stable, which he could trivially keep secure.
And your conclusion that Debian and Gentoo will fade away... where does that come from? Theres clearly some logical leap I'm missing, as I see no particular reason to believe that their userbase will shift percentagewise from what it already is.
I haven't looked lately, but in the past you've been able to buy Word, Excel, and possibly Powerpoint as standalone programs. Can you no longer do that?
My resume was done in OO.o from day one. All changes have been made in OO.o. In 99% of situations, the version I exported to .doc has worked just fine. However, I will admit that I load it up in Word after any substantial changes just to make sure nothing stupid happens. Don't have a copy of Word to test with? No problem! Microsoft provides a Word Viewer as a free download. Worked great in WINE last time I tried.
Ah, that makes a bit of sense. I was wondering what the deal was. Though it seems to me it would have made more sense to just take the Galeon source, make it respect GNOME prefs, and label it Epiphany.
Epiphany at this point is at the "good enough" phase, I suppose. And if someone were to actually write good plugins for it, it'd be great. In fact, once there are plugins, Epiphany will likely leave Galeon in the dust, since Galeon's not similarly extensible AFAIK. But for now I miss my gestures and a few other minor details too much to switch.
I agree that Miguel dismisses Win3.1 unfairly, but what the hell are you talking about WRT the Linux filesystem? Few, if any, filesystems *today* can guarantee that, journalled or not. And FAT16 sure as hell couldn't even pretend to claim that. The only time you could just hit the power button was if you were in DOS, and thats only because DOS was dumb and not doing anything. Services and multiple processes are what cause filesystem corruption.
For that matter, I dunno about hardware support... back in those days it was much simpler than it is today. Any respectable soundcard would be soundblaster-compatible, so you really only had to have 1 or 2 drivers, and video cards were all some variation of VESA or whatever... few fancy 3d-accelerators yet. Printers, I'm sure, were a bitch, though the dot-matrixes would have all worked well enough.
Furthermore, whats this about development platforms??? What were the platforms in 1994? BASIC? C++? Java was nothing then. Borland was the IDE and it was DOS-based. GUI toolkits? Ok, maybe we needed those.
Betcha none of the newer stuff works though. Try anything on windowsmedia.com or espn.com. If you can make them play in Linux, hats off, because I've been trying forever.
Whats interesting though is that with all that stuff, the game's hardware requirements are rather modest. Sure, you need a ton of diskspace. But you only need 128MB of RAM to play the game (256MB recommended). CPU/graphics requirements are not that intesive either. So yeah, its a giant install, but IMO its a remarkably well coded game and certaintly not an example of an application that will cause people grief with this alleged RAM shortage.
Oops.. it says automatic at the top, but 5-speed manual in the description, and you can see the stick-shift and clutch pedal in the pictures. My bad.
EEEW! Furthermore, its a fsking *automatic* transmission! What kind of person goes to all this effort and doesn't start with a manual???