I think this is where Linux needs to go desktop-wise. polish the desktop.
Personally, my impression is the reverse. OS X and Windows should improve their desktops. I have been using Linux and the various BSDs for several years, and the major desktop environments, by which I mean Gnome and KDE, have more or less consistently taken the best aspects of both of the proprietary interfaces and produced something better. A few years ago, I wouldn't have been able to honestly say that (although I would have liked to), but now I find the OS X and windows interfaces positively clunky by comparison.
Indeed, I had to look around to see who this Jamie Zawinski is. Seems to me that he made the newbie's mistake of buying the hardware before looking to see if it would work.
If he has indeed been messing around with Linux for long enough to be prominent in development/maintenance of xscreensaver (I haven't checked this) or XEmacs (I, for one, am happy with my GNU emacs overlord;-)) he should be aware by now of the hardware limitations of Linux, such as they are. (Which in my experience, are no longer very many.)
Has anyone else had any problems getting the hardware he mentions to work with ALSA?
This whole thing seems like mud-flinging; most Winbloze drivers aren't that great, and with OS X there's no choice, since you're locked into both Apple hardware and software.
Never mind, I've checked it out myself; that's an iframe, and I've blocked these ads through my/etc/hosts file (pagead{1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9}.googlesyndicate.com).
Yes, I know I could install the adblock extension or do it through the userchrome.css, but I I'm a bit short of RAM and don't want to put extra load on the browser unnecessarily...
Are they talking about Google ads? E.g. if you go to this article, for the sake of example, you'll see a small Google text ad frame in the middle, for which there's no location showing in the status bar when you mouseover it in Firefox.
I try to block as many advertisers as possible, and I wasn't happy to see that slip through...
Neverless, somehow I don't think it's tabbed browsing that's going to scare people away from IE. I can think of a much more likely candidate, and its name begins with an M.
Mmmm mmmm. If I had air for five months and the "promise" that NASA will deliver in August (that's three months by my reckoning), I would be getting a little anxious about it. It isn't as if NASA haven't fucked up before, after all...
...the date of the the article is 1983, and even though it was (is) a joke, it hits close to home.
Indeed, though I seem to remember something similar circulating years earlier. I cut my teeth coding in assembler (with an 029 keypunch) on a Burroughs B3700 (1976), when the high-level language of choice was Fortran 4, though I occasionally had to get my hands greasy with COBOL. Ugh...:-}
By 1983, however, I too was working on an Sperry/Univac 1100, but that 1982 machine had a large array of disk drives at the centre of a network of ~320 dumb termials. Guess the outfit I was at might have had a bit more money to spend.:-)
I never did get to like Pascal, though. After a few years coding in more hairy-chested languages, I came to think of Pascal as the programmer's idea of soft porn.:-D
But wow, they still have the same website that they did back when I was at university. In 1998.
So? Slackware is a distro with a staff of one. It is probably that which makes it so solid. Pat probably doesn't have time to futz around with glitzy webpages, and I for one am content that he doesn't bother.
I see no particular advantage in a triumph of form over content; the webpage reflects the simplicity of the distro. All the page has to say is who the distro might benefit and where to get it.
It doesn't discuss many things that me as an admin of a printer and file server need to know.
It seems to me that Slackware's biggest strength is in its simplicity, in so far as the user finds very few unnecessary hurdles in the way of finding out for himself how to get something set up. I'm unlikely to refer to it myself, but then I've been using Slack since it was SLS.
Sure, the book may be insufficient for some, but given the apparent revival of interest in Slackware, it is probably timely.
Fair comment. I have another equally subjective one:
Am I alone in getting the impression that some of Apple's products are falling down on their prior reputation for being of high quality? I'm not just referring to the matter referred to in the original post; a case in point is all those dodgy iPod batteries. And those two broken Combo drives I've got on a desk over there...
OTOH, if you live in Australia, the money goes to the State - and you are the State! So, you do get the money.
Err, if you can believe that, then I guess you don't live in Australia. Our illustrious leaders do not even blush when large swags of government (i.e. taxpayers') money end up in the coffers of private companies, in most cases with little or no net return to the Australian people.
Well said. But successive Australian governments seem determined to turn the country into a nanny state, in a misguided attempt to protect people from their own stupidity.
That said, however, it could be argued that someone who knowingly commits an intrusion or act of vandalism against an individual's property (which is what spyware essentially does) should be subject to legal redress. The fact that Australia is just one country among many, and the fact that statistically the majority of these exploits seem to originate in the US makes no difference. There is no real reason why similar laws should not be applied under other jurisdictions.
I was living in the UK at the time the idea of privatisation of British Telecom entered the otherwise vacant brains of Thatcher and her delightful band of cronies. My monthly bill quadrupled immediately.
But the story in TFA sounds remarkably similar to my Australian story of the scenarios I had to endure when I foolishly was enticed into moving my mobile phone service from Vodafone to Three.
To cut a long story short, it took exactly forty days and forty nights (and countless calls to customer care services which, needless to say, were outsourced to India) to port my number from one service to the other.
I'm regretting the whole excercise now, and as soon as Vodafone gets their 3G services under way, I'm going back.
and any ISP may obviously be subject to blacklisting due to infected machines,Telewest is probably no worse than any other.
Yes, if that is what it takes to get their attention. Many ISPs adopt an "it's not my fault" approach to users abusing their networks, and anybody who runs any kind of mail server without taking steps to secure it is guilty of abuse.
Similarly, in this day and age, there is no excuse for users not to know that their machines have been zombied. The simple fact is that unless they are running reliable firewalls or anti-virus programs, they already will have been zombied. I know it is possible to secure a Windows box, but most OEM installations are left totally insecure, and a majority of people never change their computer settings once the machine is on or under their desk.
I'm not a fan of leaving a machine on if it isn't doing anything
Fair enough; but there are valid reasons to leave it on; it seems to me that some of the little fans fitted to a number of motherboards stick or are noisy when powered up from cold. I find it more convenient to just leave the machine running since it seems to help overall reliability of the system. This machine I'm using now has only been rebooted for OS changes since 2001 and is still going strong.
Also, I get impatient with waiting for the POST and bootup process to grind its way along...;-)
...but it doesn't seems like rpm resembles portage very much.
Agreed, it doesn't. But if you go back and read my post, you might notice I never said it did.
I merely said that I came to dislike it for the same reasons I disliked rpm. I'm not going to go into my subjective perceptions of the demerits of gentoo's portage system, since I am aware that for other users it rocks, and I have no reason to insult their intelligence by insisting that their requirements should be congruent with mine.
considering the problem Pat had recently with his health and all...
I was a bit worried myself for a while. According to posts in other forums, some people did desert to Gentoo and Ubuntu, but apparently some of those returned to Slackware when the worst of Pat's illness was reported to be over.
Is this because it is a "new to linux" linux and because of this is too basic and dumbed-down for most of the/. crowd?
Could be. I'm not a fan of Mandrake, but I guess it probably is a good way for the newbie to get his feet wet in the Linux world if he doesn't have the leisure to go the whole hog with a "real" distro or LFS.
Plus I guess being able to walk into any computer shop and pick up a boxed pack off the shelf might inspire some warm and fuzzy feeling of confidence...
Heh... Well they might have got a bad number from me the other week then. I downloaded Gentoo and did a complete stage 1 install. It took a few days to get the machine into a useful state, but while I was futzing around getting it set up whe way I prefer, it occurred to me that I was coming to dislike the packaging system for all the same reasons that I disliked rpm.
At that point I decided enough was enough and went back to Slackware.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, my impression is the reverse. OS X and Windows should improve their desktops. I have been using Linux and the various BSDs for several years, and the major desktop environments, by which I mean Gnome and KDE, have more or less consistently taken the best aspects of both of the proprietary interfaces and produced something better. A few years ago, I wouldn't have been able to honestly say that (although I would have liked to), but now I find the OS X and windows interfaces positively clunky by comparison.
If he has indeed been messing around with Linux for long enough to be prominent in development/maintenance of xscreensaver (I haven't checked this) or XEmacs (I, for one, am happy with my GNU emacs overlord ;-)) he should be aware by now of the hardware limitations of Linux, such as they are. (Which in my experience, are no longer very many.)
Has anyone else had any problems getting the hardware he mentions to work with ALSA?
This whole thing seems like mud-flinging; most Winbloze drivers aren't that great, and with OS X there's no choice, since you're locked into both Apple hardware and software.
Your philosophy will probably go over the head of many slashbots, but here's another one: how many people even know what money actually is?
Yes, I know I could install the adblock extension or do it through the userchrome.css, but I I'm a bit short of RAM and don't want to put extra load on the browser unnecessarily...
I try to block as many advertisers as possible, and I wasn't happy to see that slip through...
Neverless, somehow I don't think it's tabbed browsing that's going to scare people away from IE. I can think of a much more likely candidate, and its name begins with an M.
:-)
Mmmm mmmm. If I had air for five months and the "promise" that NASA will deliver in August (that's three months by my reckoning), I would be getting a little anxious about it. It isn't as if NASA haven't fucked up before, after all...
Indeed, though I seem to remember something similar circulating years earlier. I cut my teeth coding in assembler (with an 029 keypunch) on a Burroughs B3700 (1976), when the high-level language of choice was Fortran 4, though I occasionally had to get my hands greasy with COBOL. Ugh... :-}
By 1983, however, I too was working on an Sperry/Univac 1100, but that 1982 machine had a large array of disk drives at the centre of a network of ~320 dumb termials. Guess the outfit I was at might have had a bit more money to spend. :-)
I never did get to like Pascal, though. After a few years coding in more hairy-chested languages, I came to think of Pascal as the programmer's idea of soft porn. :-D
So? Slackware is a distro with a staff of one. It is probably that which makes it so solid. Pat probably doesn't have time to futz around with glitzy webpages, and I for one am content that he doesn't bother.
I see no particular advantage in a triumph of form over content; the webpage reflects the simplicity of the distro. All the page has to say is who the distro might benefit and where to get it.
Apparently the worst is over, and he has since released 10.1. Slackware just keeps getting better and better.
It seems to me that Slackware's biggest strength is in its simplicity, in so far as the user finds very few unnecessary hurdles in the way of finding out for himself how to get something set up. I'm unlikely to refer to it myself, but then I've been using Slack since it was SLS.
Sure, the book may be insufficient for some, but given the apparent revival of interest in Slackware, it is probably timely.
But of course, we should remember that Real Programmers don't use PASCAL"
:-)
Fair comment. I have another equally subjective one:
Am I alone in getting the impression that some of Apple's products are falling down on their prior reputation for being of high quality? I'm not just referring to the matter referred to in the original post; a case in point is all those dodgy iPod batteries. And those two broken Combo drives I've got on a desk over there...
Err, if you can believe that, then I guess you don't live in Australia. Our illustrious leaders do not even blush when large swags of government (i.e. taxpayers') money end up in the coffers of private companies, in most cases with little or no net return to the Australian people.
That said, however, it could be argued that someone who knowingly commits an intrusion or act of vandalism against an individual's property (which is what spyware essentially does) should be subject to legal redress. The fact that Australia is just one country among many, and the fact that statistically the majority of these exploits seem to originate in the US makes no difference. There is no real reason why similar laws should not be applied under other jurisdictions.
[attack of the language nazi]"
Nothing is submersed. It is either submerged or not.
[/attack of the language nazi]
But the story in TFA sounds remarkably similar to my Australian story of the scenarios I had to endure when I foolishly was enticed into moving my mobile phone service from Vodafone to Three.
To cut a long story short, it took exactly forty days and forty nights (and countless calls to customer care services which, needless to say, were outsourced to India) to port my number from one service to the other.
I'm regretting the whole excercise now, and as soon as Vodafone gets their 3G services under way, I'm going back.
Yes, if that is what it takes to get their attention. Many ISPs adopt an "it's not my fault" approach to users abusing their networks, and anybody who runs any kind of mail server without taking steps to secure it is guilty of abuse.
Similarly, in this day and age, there is no excuse for users not to know that their machines have been zombied. The simple fact is that unless they are running reliable firewalls or anti-virus programs, they already will have been zombied. I know it is possible to secure a Windows box, but most OEM installations are left totally insecure, and a majority of people never change their computer settings once the machine is on or under their desk.
Fair enough; but there are valid reasons to leave it on; it seems to me that some of the little fans fitted to a number of motherboards stick or are noisy when powered up from cold. I find it more convenient to just leave the machine running since it seems to help overall reliability of the system. This machine I'm using now has only been rebooted for OS changes since 2001 and is still going strong.
Also, I get impatient with waiting for the POST and bootup process to grind its way along... ;-)
Hey, relax. I wasn't one of those who "deserted" to another distro. OK?
:-D
Agreed, it doesn't. But if you go back and read my post, you might notice I never said it did.
I merely said that I came to dislike it for the same reasons I disliked rpm. I'm not going to go into my subjective perceptions of the demerits of gentoo's portage system, since I am aware that for other users it rocks, and I have no reason to insult their intelligence by insisting that their requirements should be congruent with mine.
I was a bit worried myself for a while. According to posts in other forums, some people did desert to Gentoo and Ubuntu, but apparently some of those returned to Slackware when the worst of Pat's illness was reported to be over.
Sort of. But in 11 years of using Linux, the only occasions I've seen a panic with a stable release of the kernel were when it was my own fault.
I can't say that for the BSOD.
Could be. I'm not a fan of Mandrake, but I guess it probably is a good way for the newbie to get his feet wet in the Linux world if he doesn't have the leisure to go the whole hog with a "real" distro or LFS.
Plus I guess being able to walk into any computer shop and pick up a boxed pack off the shelf might inspire some warm and fuzzy feeling of confidence...
Heh... Well they might have got a bad number from me the other week then. I downloaded Gentoo and did a complete stage 1 install. It took a few days to get the machine into a useful state, but while I was futzing around getting it set up whe way I prefer, it occurred to me that I was coming to dislike the packaging system for all the same reasons that I disliked rpm.
At that point I decided enough was enough and went back to Slackware.