a) I want to understand what's under the hood in Linux. b) I want to have complete control over what is and is not installed or running on my systems. Gentoo turns on by default only the bare minimum of services required to boot to a login prompt. Anything else is controlled by you. c) Their documentation is both easy to get to and very helpful, and their forums just simply rock. d) Optimized compiles are golden on the PII 300 and PII 266 systems I currently run as secondary and tertiary desktop systems on my home LAN. These boxen would be otherwise unusable using a modern precompiled distro like Mandrake or Debian. e) Kernel upgrades on the bleeding edge using genkernel are easy. All three of my boxen at home run on Linux kernel 2.6.3 (PII 266, PII 300, and PIV 1.7) and I love it. Even before genkernel, I could upgrade my kernel easily - genkernel just reduces the steps and takes care of initrd for me. f) Dual boot with Windows (while a necessary evil in my home) is easy to set up as long as you follow the simple install docs accordingly. g) It is insanely easy to stay current compared to other distros I've tried.
Done. Sometime doing the above will do something that causes someting to break, but the Gentoo forums are so lively that a quick visit usually yields a thread that has a fix or a quick workaround, and I usually learn something more about Linux internals in the process.
- Any Debian based distro (MEPIS, Libranet, Knoppix, etc.)
# apt-get update && apt-get upgrade (this could be wrong - it's been awhile;))
Ok, that's pretty simple, but the stable branch is too old, and using the unstable branch would eventually hose the system more easily than Gentoo. Also, you have to update your sources.lst, which can be tricky.
- Mandrake
# urpmi ????????
I am sure that urpmi is a good tool (like apt-get), but it only installs rpm packages, and I had no idea how to get urpmi to point to something other than the install CD's (I know this is on the web somewhere, but why bother when Gentoo's defaults point to the bleeding edge already?). Using urpmi requires more learning and setup than I am willing to invest considering the simplicity of Gentoo's emerge tool. I know you can use apt-get with Mandrake, but I fear hosing the system in the same way I did with Debian without being able to recover easily. Besides, Mandrake hides too much of the internals for my taste.
- Red Hat/Fedora
I hate the dependency hell of RPM, so I haven't bothered. Same goes for the risks of apt-get.
Basically I like emerge way better than apt-get and urpmi, because I am way less worried I'm going to hose my system doing an 'emerge -u world' than I am using apt-get or urpmi. emerge protects my system from idiots like me, and I like that.;-)
I understand why you interpret Christianity as you do, because for the outside in, it sure can appear to be the case that IF you live a certain way THEN you get eternal life, and there have been many people within the Christian faith who have erroneously been proponents of that type of thinking.
The truth is that there is no way we can ever live our entire life in a way that perfectly pleases God. We've already screwed up, which is what the Bible calls sin. We're (Christians and non-Christians) all in the same predicament:
"For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" - Romans 3:23
You may or may not have heard that before.
At face value, you can read that verse and say,
"Why does it matter that I've sinned? If I've already blown it, where is the hope?"
The answer to both of these questions is found later in Romans 6:23
"For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord."
So sin leads to death, but God has a gift He wants to give us - eternal life! How do we get it? Through Jesus, who paid the penalty for our sin by dying on the cross in our place. All we have to do is to accept God's gift of eternal life by acknowledging that Jesus died on the cross and was raised from the dead, confess Jesus as your Lord.
"... if you confess with your mouth that Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved" - Romans 10:9
Saved from what? Saved from death (wages of sin). Not physical death, but spiritual death in Hell. Our obedience to God's word after we are saved (through confessing and believing) is merely an expression of our gratitude towards God for saving our souls from an eternity in Hell.
The grace is found in that we don't deserve eternal life, but God freely gives it to us if we confess and believe.
There is an if-then-ness to Christianity, but I other faith offers eternal life simply for the asking. Other faiths simply say you should live a "good" life and hope God is pleased. With Christ, you can be sure of your salvation the moment you confess and believe in Him, and then spend the rest of your life saying thank you and getting to know Him better.
Don't take my word for it. Read the book of Romans, find people who know the Bible, and bug the heck out of them until you get your questions answered. Challenge God's Word to live up to the promise that actually it is true. You won't be disappointed if you stick to it and don't give up.
There's a big difference between "adaptation" and "evolution".
Adaptation is the ability of a species to physically adapt to its environment. This is a demonstrable, repeatable phenomenon.
Evolution takes the concept of adaptation to a ludicrous extreme, i.e. through adaptation, an entirely new, genetically different type of animal was generated over the course of time due to adaptation to its environment. Example: water breathing fish develops lungs to breathe air, then developing legs and losing gills to become a lizard or a mammal or some other such thing.
Hogwash.
The God that is described in the Bible is a God who can create based on simply speaking. "And God said, 'Let there be light', and there was light". If this is actually true (which has to be taken on faith, no way we can prove how it happened after the fact), then He is obviously powerful enough to create the universe in six literal 24hr days, or in six extended days, or pretty much according to His own timetable. I don't claim to understand HOW He did it. I believe the important thing is that I believe He CAN and DID. Another thing to remember is that the Bible says that God created all living beings "according to their kinds", which I take to mean that he put the polar bears where it was cold, and the pythons in the jungle, etc. I also believe that He gave each animal the ability to adapt to its surroundings, because the world He created is not static, but alive and changing all the time.
In any case, the I believe it matters to Him whether we believe His word or not. The Bible talks a lot about that. Most of God's dealings with Israel center around whether they actually believed He would do what He said He would do.
Interpreting Genesis or any other part of the Bible as allegory is simply trying to rationalize away the fact that you don't truly believe in the God that is actually described, but some safe palatable version that doesn't require absolute obedience.
Believing in Creation versus Evolution is simply a question of whether you believe God's word (the Bible) is true or not. You can't reconcile the two and maintain any semblance of logic, based on objective observation.
I believe that once the movies chains recover from the massive expense of building all these new theaters that have sprung up in the past 5-6 years and figure out how to be profitable, by that time the cost of moving to DLP will make the decision a no brainer. I work at TI (not in DLP, but I'm stoked about the technology. We do all of our M$ PowerPoint presentions on DLP projectors, and they are SWEET!).
My ideal scenario is that home DLP projectors drop to $500, in which case I'm installing one in the ceiling of my den for wall projection, putting in 5.1 speakers, and throwing away my 19" TV. Imagine playing your DVD's or PC/console games on a 10' wide screen IN YOUR OWN HOME! It's only a matter of time before that's affordable to the mass market. I can't wait.
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I use Gentoo because...
;))
;-)
a) I want to understand what's under the hood in Linux.
b) I want to have complete control over what is and is not installed or running on my systems. Gentoo turns on by default only the bare minimum of services required to boot to a login prompt. Anything else is controlled by you.
c) Their documentation is both easy to get to and very helpful, and their forums just simply rock.
d) Optimized compiles are golden on the PII 300 and PII 266 systems I currently run as secondary and tertiary desktop systems on my home LAN. These boxen would be otherwise unusable using a modern precompiled distro like Mandrake or Debian.
e) Kernel upgrades on the bleeding edge using genkernel are easy. All three of my boxen at home run on Linux kernel 2.6.3 (PII 266, PII 300, and PIV 1.7) and I love it. Even before genkernel, I could upgrade my kernel easily - genkernel just reduces the steps and takes care of initrd for me.
f) Dual boot with Windows (while a necessary evil in my home) is easy to set up as long as you follow the simple install docs accordingly.
g) It is insanely easy to stay current compared to other distros I've tried.
- Gentoo
# emerge sync && emerge -u world
# etc-update (if necessary)
Done. Sometime doing the above will do something that causes someting to break, but the Gentoo forums are so lively that a quick visit usually yields a thread that has a fix or a quick workaround, and I usually learn something more about Linux internals in the process.
- Any Debian based distro (MEPIS, Libranet, Knoppix, etc.)
# apt-get update && apt-get upgrade (this could be wrong - it's been awhile
Ok, that's pretty simple, but the stable branch is too old, and using the unstable branch would eventually hose the system more easily than Gentoo. Also, you have to update your sources.lst, which can be tricky.
- Mandrake
# urpmi ????????
I am sure that urpmi is a good tool (like apt-get), but it only installs rpm packages, and I had no idea how to get urpmi to point to something other than the install CD's (I know this is on the web somewhere, but why bother when Gentoo's defaults point to the bleeding edge already?). Using urpmi requires more learning and setup than I am willing to invest considering the simplicity of Gentoo's emerge tool. I know you can use apt-get with Mandrake, but I fear hosing the system in the same way I did with Debian without being able to recover easily. Besides, Mandrake hides too much of the internals for my taste.
- Red Hat/Fedora
I hate the dependency hell of RPM, so I haven't bothered. Same goes for the risks of apt-get.
Basically I like emerge way better than apt-get and urpmi, because I am way less worried I'm going to hose my system doing an 'emerge -u world' than I am using apt-get or urpmi. emerge protects my system from idiots like me, and I like that.
I understand why you interpret Christianity as you do, because for the outside in, it sure can appear to be the case that IF you live a certain way THEN you get eternal life, and there have been many people within the Christian faith who have erroneously been proponents of that type of thinking. The truth is that there is no way we can ever live our entire life in a way that perfectly pleases God. We've already screwed up, which is what the Bible calls sin. We're (Christians and non-Christians) all in the same predicament: "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" - Romans 3:23 You may or may not have heard that before. At face value, you can read that verse and say, "Why does it matter that I've sinned? If I've already blown it, where is the hope?" The answer to both of these questions is found later in Romans 6:23 "For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord." So sin leads to death, but God has a gift He wants to give us - eternal life! How do we get it? Through Jesus, who paid the penalty for our sin by dying on the cross in our place. All we have to do is to accept God's gift of eternal life by acknowledging that Jesus died on the cross and was raised from the dead, confess Jesus as your Lord. "... if you confess with your mouth that Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved" - Romans 10:9 Saved from what? Saved from death (wages of sin). Not physical death, but spiritual death in Hell. Our obedience to God's word after we are saved (through confessing and believing) is merely an expression of our gratitude towards God for saving our souls from an eternity in Hell. The grace is found in that we don't deserve eternal life, but God freely gives it to us if we confess and believe. There is an if-then-ness to Christianity, but I other faith offers eternal life simply for the asking. Other faiths simply say you should live a "good" life and hope God is pleased. With Christ, you can be sure of your salvation the moment you confess and believe in Him, and then spend the rest of your life saying thank you and getting to know Him better. Don't take my word for it. Read the book of Romans, find people who know the Bible, and bug the heck out of them until you get your questions answered. Challenge God's Word to live up to the promise that actually it is true. You won't be disappointed if you stick to it and don't give up.
There's a big difference between "adaptation" and "evolution".
Adaptation is the ability of a species to physically adapt to its environment. This is a demonstrable, repeatable phenomenon.
Evolution takes the concept of adaptation to a ludicrous extreme, i.e. through adaptation, an entirely new, genetically different type of animal was generated over the course of time due to adaptation to its environment. Example: water breathing fish develops lungs to breathe air, then developing legs and losing gills to become a lizard or a mammal or some other such thing.
Hogwash.
The God that is described in the Bible is a God who can create based on simply speaking. "And God said, 'Let there be light', and there was light". If this is actually true (which has to be taken on faith, no way we can prove how it happened after the fact), then He is obviously powerful enough to create the universe in six literal 24hr days, or in six extended days, or pretty much according to His own timetable. I don't claim to understand HOW He did it. I believe the important thing is that I believe He CAN and DID. Another thing to remember is that the Bible says that God created all living beings "according to their kinds", which I take to mean that he put the polar bears where it was cold, and the pythons in the jungle, etc. I also believe that He gave each animal the ability to adapt to its surroundings, because the world He created is not static, but alive and changing all the time.
In any case, the I believe it matters to Him whether we believe His word or not. The Bible talks a lot about that. Most of God's dealings with Israel center around whether they actually believed He would do what He said He would do.
Interpreting Genesis or any other part of the Bible as allegory is simply trying to rationalize away the fact that you don't truly believe in the God that is actually described, but some safe palatable version that doesn't require absolute obedience.
Believing in Creation versus Evolution is simply a question of whether you believe God's word (the Bible) is true or not. You can't reconcile the two and maintain any semblance of logic, based on objective observation.
I believe that once the movies chains recover from
the massive expense of building all these new
theaters that have sprung up in the past 5-6 years
and figure out how to be profitable, by that time
the cost of moving to DLP will make the decision
a no brainer. I work at TI (not in DLP, but I'm
stoked about the technology. We do all of our
M$ PowerPoint presentions on DLP projectors, and
they are SWEET!).
My ideal scenario is that home DLP projectors
drop to $500, in which case I'm installing
one in the ceiling of my den for wall projection,
putting in 5.1 speakers, and throwing away my 19" TV.
Imagine playing your DVD's or PC/console
games on a 10' wide screen IN YOUR OWN HOME!
It's only a matter of time before that's
affordable to the mass market. I can't wait.