Getting these people over to Free operating systems will require a fundamental shift in thinking, one that emphasizes thier freedom. This cannot be a war of features (ie that a GNU/Linux system is better than Microsoft Windows), rather it must be an issue of what freedoms the Microsoft users have lost, and how we can replace the things they "need" from thier old system with equilivant Free utilities.
I've been using free software OS's
(mostly Debian)
exclusively for quite a few years now —
I do so for philosophical
reasons, rather than stricte technical ones, i.e.
I consider the whole technical superiority of my working environment a nice side effect of the freedom I have.
I always smile while reading about every new
“improvement” from Microsoft.
First of all, I think about Microsoft users:
“How much more will they stand?”
I think “No way! This time Microsoft has gone to far, people will never agree to such EULA/DRM/etc.!”
But people keep suprising me every time.
When I talk with MS users about the freedom and privacy issues the usual answer is “Yeah, but what are you gonna do...”
Few years ago I thought that people usually don't give a damn about their freedom to see, modify and redistribute the source code of programs they use, so I thought that the technical aspects of free software (security, stability) however they are not the main reasons for me to use it, should be the main subject while telling people why they might consider using Debian or other free software OS, instead of Windows.
Now I see that the freedom is more important
to people than ever before,
because they almost don't have any freedom left.
I used to tell people that I use Debian because I don't like rebooting every time some program crashes.
Now I tell people that I use Debian,
because I think my freedom and privacy are
very important to me,
and it seems to be more interesting to them
with every new version of Windows.
So, thank you Microsoft!
You make people need free software!
That is the best way to ensure that the strength of Free Software (and other movements who want to come along) remains strong at its base while still expanding, even if the progress is slow, slow growth of staunch supporters is healthier than fast growth of people comparing application features.
Unfortunately those
other movements who want to come along
don't say about freedom at all.
A small percentage of PC users have heard about
this new open-source operating system called Linux,
made by Linus Torvalds
who doesn't care about politics and philosophy and
made his OS for fun and who thinks
it's main advantages over proprietary software are
of strictly technical nature.
Almost no one of them has heard about GNU, about
free software, about The Free Software Foundation, about the GNU philosophy or about software being
free as free speech
while not necessarily being free as free beer, etc.
The most important advantage of GNU/Linux
distributions and other
free software operating systems is totally unknown to most of people, even those who knows about alternative OSs.
But I agree with you that it is very important and
freedom/privacy issues should be the main points
in free vs. proprietary software discussions.
If more people think so, we might eventually see
the GNU project ideals which they've been talking
about for almost twenty years, finally reaching
people's minds.
"CNET has an article about how holography is being used to create next generation storage devices. The researchers promise they'll beat out DVD by an order of magnitude."
Holographic memory is not a simple metter of more bits
per cm^2 or whatever.
It's a different kind of memory, where every part stores
the whole picture, i.e. when you break such memory into
two halfs, every part still has the entire content,
only with lower quality.
Also, there are no fixed limits on how much information you can store on hologram — you can always store something more, which will lower the quality of the rest of stored information, but you won't hit any fixed maximum number of bits, like with standard types of memory.
Saying that it "[beats] out DVD by an order of magnitude" is totally ignoring the most fundamental features of holographic memory.
What I want to know is how this impacts those of use who own/operate our own domains and SMTP server (i.e. those of us who do not use ISP supplied SMTP servers to send out mail).
I hope
Jenda
is already working on a new version of
Mail::Sender...
Because he's not pro-terrorist, now is he?
Re:Wondering why NPR might do this?
on
Blogspace vs. NPR
·
· Score: 1
The reason is that NPR hosts high-bandwidth audio material and the website archives many of the shows. NPR doesn't care if you link to a text article, but if I create
www.bestofnpr.com
and then offer DIRECT links to the.ra files than NPR's got a problem. I can make money off of NPR's work and cost them a fortune.
This problem was first known in the porn industry
years ago. Do people sue averyone for using
<img src="their-pictures"> tags?
No, people started using the HTTP Referer headers
and there's no problem with hot-linking since then.
NPR should just use a trivial technical sollution
(see: mod_rewrite)
and there would be no problem at all.
So, the reason of their behaviour can't be the bandwidth
alone — now, bandwidth and stupidity,
that's more like it.
Now, with the big 5, you have to sign your copyright
to them for them to publish.
And the copyright law is now 70 years after the death of me.
So, in other words, they will profit on your work
for 70 years after your death —
the longer you live, the more profit for them,
ergo they should be your guardian angels!
It reminds me a magnificent play of Aleksander Fredro
—
Doywocie (Life Annuity).
If you're interested in theatre, you should
have seen or read this play
and exactly know what I mean.
If you don't know the Life Annuity,
I won't tell you anything — instead I urge you to
see this play in the theatre by yourself,
it's one of the most splendid and funniest
plays I have ever seen.
Aleksander Fredro
wrote Doywocie in 1835
and it was translated into English by Segel Harold Bernard,
as far as I know.
For more informations, see Fredro on Google:
all results, only in English.
So, everyone who wants to see how absurdal is the situation when
someone else gets more money if you live longer
(the exact situation as with the record industry giants as
the copyright holders),
ask for Life Annuity by Aleksander Fredro
in your local theatre.
(Please do not moderate this post as off-topic, unles you have seen
this play — thanks.)
I have somewhere a VHS tape with
Teatr Telewizji
(a Polish Public TV theatre)
version of Doywocie
with Wojtek Pszoniak, one of my favourite actors,
I think I'll watch it today.
At least the software you are installing knows what dlls it needs, and it comes with them, rather than me trying to figure out 10000 dependencies, what they are, how to install them, etc. Deiban I would use, but the installer for the distro sucks. It's so hard to install debian its not worth my time.
Did you try installing Debian lately?
When it was already Debian 1.1 Buzz or earlier?
Please do not spread misinformation —
installing e.g. Debian 3.0 Woody is very simple.
You can even download just the boot floppy and the installer
will ask you few simple questions and download everything
from the network — even
the net install is very easy
(not to say about simply installing from the CDs).
As for the rest of
this thread,
I see that you just like Windows
(and that's nothing to be ashamed of).
Debian (as well as any other GNU/Linux distribution)
is not a Microsoft Windows clone, nor it should be.
I don't understand why won't you just use Windows,
if you prefer its way of handling software installations
and shared objects?
Under Debian you have tasksel, dselect, apt-get,
gnome-apt-pkgset, dpkg, alien, etc.
—
every concern from your
original post
(and actually much more) is already addressed
by Debian's
(and probably by most of other distros')
package management tools.
And versioning sounds horrible to me. Why would you keep multiple versions of a library on your system? That's a poorly designed system to me. Only the newest most up to date library should need to be on the system. If the libraries aren't backwards compatible or software isn't forwards compatible that is another design flaw.
I see two serious
reasons why one could use Debian,
other than to be c00l hax0r:
For technical reasons
(supported platforms, security, stability,
easy administration,
number of available software packages,
lack of dependency problems,
great package management tools, etc.)
Site Map
(to many to list all of them)
If none of the above is important to you,
I don't really see why should you abandon Microsoft
platforms.
Most of people like the Microsoft way
(otherwise MS wouldn't have dominated the OS market),
so it's nothing unusual that you don't have any reason
to try anything different.
But please don't misinform people about
the alternatives.
Most of people will prefer
this camera
over
this one plus
lens
— it's perfectly normal,
but looking for other reasons than just
"it's easy and get the job done" is quite pointless.
You can only insult some people
writing comments like the above,
but other than that, you won't achieve anything
constructive.
Please have at least minimum respect for people who
wrote the entire systems just to give them to
people without any restrictions.
GNU is almost 20 years of hard work,
Linux is over 10 years, Debian is almost 10 years.
These people deserve lots of our respect,
because they have much higher imperatives than money.
And this is why you insult people
much more easily saying
that Debian sucks, than when you say that Windows sucks
— the motivations for developing Debian are
totally different and people take the flames
very personally,
you have to understand that.
Then excuse my ignorance
— I don't know Red Hat very well and
after reading the Apreche's
comment which started
this thread I thought that it's in fact very hard to install
e.g. KDE under Red Hat.
Now I see that's as easy as under Debian, so actually
my whole long post had no point at all,
thank's for clarifying this issue.
The Debian Task Installer — tasksel
on
Is RPM Doomed?
·
· Score: 1
Inexperienced users need to be able to install software. If they can't, we will never get any more experienced users, because they will give up on Linux and we will never have the privilege of having them as members of our community.
Packages need to have reasonable defaults. Complex programs need a simple and user-friendly way to install a usable subset of their full configuration.
I use Debian and
there are two very powerfull tools for managing
the software packages
which I use — apt-get and dselect
(see the docs about
APT
and
dselect)
but what you seem to ask for here is tasksel.
With tasksel
(it's run when you select
the "Simple Package Selection" during
the system installation process,
and you can run it any time later
with tasksel command).
See the
Debian Installation Manual:
Simple Package Selection The Task Installer:
If you chose ``simple'' installation, you will next be thrown into the Task Installer (tasksel). This technique offers you a number of pre-rolled software configurations offered by Debian. You could always choose, package by package, what you want to install on your new machine. This is the purpose of the dselect program, described below. But this can be a long task with around 8300 packages available in Debian!
So, you have the ability to choose tasks first, and then add on more individual packages later. These tasks loosely represent a number of different jobs or things you want to do with your computer, such as `desktop environment', `development in C', or `file server'.
For each task, you can highlight that task and select ``Task Info'' to see more information on that task. This will show you an extended description and the list of packages which will be installed for that task. A table showing approximate sizes of the various tasks for planning purposes is in Disk Space Needed for Tasks, Section 11.4.
Once you've selected your tasks, select ``Finish''. At this point, apt-get will install the packages you've selected. Note, if you did not select any tasks at all, any standard, important, or required priority packages that are not yet present on your system will be installed. This functionality is the same as running tasksel -s at the command line, and currently involves a download of about 37M of archives. You will be shown the number of packages to be installed, and how many kilobytes of packages, if any, need to be downloaded.
Of the 8300 packages available in Debian, only a small minority are covered by tasks offered in the Task Installer. To see information on more packages, either use apt-cache search search-string for some given search string (see the apt-cache(8) man page), or run dselect as described below.
So, as you can see, you don't even have to know
the names of the programs you need
(not to say about what do they depand on),
you just have to know what are you going to do
(e.g. select
Servers: SQL database, mail server, web server and
Development C and C++, Fortran, etc.),
great for beginners who want to play with Debian
but don't exactly know where to start from.
When I was first using Debian, I was using tasksel only,
then after some time I started using dselect and
have never used tasksel again. Now I'm using mostly
apt-get and sometimes dselect.
[...]
software should install in linux the same way it installs in windows. There should be one file, like setup.exe. I should take that file, execute it, it will ask me what parts of the software I want, and where I want to put it, etc. [...]
But when you get to the package selection phase you're stuck forever weeding through thousands and thousands of checkboxes. Not cool.
One piece of software should be one checkbox. KDE alone has like 20+ rpm files. There should be one file. KDE3setup.exe.
Here's how I install KDE on Debian:
I write apt-get install kde and hit enter.
See the simulation below on Debian 3.0 Woody,
the -s option of apt-get means
"No action; perform a simulation of events that
would occur but do not actually change the system.
Configuration Item: APT::Get::Simulate.
Simulate prints out a series of lines each one representing a dpkg operation, Configure (Conf),
Remove (Remv), Unpack (Inst)."
And that's it. One command.
If that's not your automaticness, than I don't know what is.
Maybe you are just using a distro which is not
the best for you,
maybe you should try Debian
(Disclaimer:
I don't want to start any stupid flame war which distro
is always better for everyone, I'm just saying that if
you want automatic installs without any dependency problems,
then Debian is what I bet on).
I hope it helps.
The Matrix was probably the closest we'll ever get to a thinking man's movie, and I heard somewhere that even that was dumbed down a tad (IIRC, the enslaved humans were originally supposed to be part of a tremendously huge RAID via their unused brain capacity, instead of as an energy source).
Unused brain capacity?
You mean
that 90% of brain that we don't use?
Now, that would be realistic.
Trust me, I want to see someone make a run at M$ crap, BUT I don't see it happening. Not without an act of God.
Actually, there's no need for any act of God —
Microsoft has much more serious financial problems
than every technical problem with all of
their products combined.
Read the Microsoft Financial Pyramid Summary and other articles from the
Research and Press Release Archive of Bill Parish.
All we need is a critical mass of people who
have read it —
especially among the current and potential MSFT shareholders
— and they're boned.
Hopefully the good differences will be better than the bad differences, but there is a difference.
I surely hope that the good differences
will be better than the bad differences, but what if
the bad differences are worse than
the good differences? — We're boned then...
Zapp:
"Captain's Journal. Stardate...uh..."
Kif:*sigh* "April 13th."
Zapp:
"April 13.2! We have failed to uphold Brannigan's Law.
However, I did make it with a hot alien babe.
And in the end, is that not what man
has dreamt of since first he looked up at the stars?
Kif, I'm asking you a question."
Kif:*sigh*
Or insert a little time bombs into their computers,
and when the office is on fire, appear with the water,
save the day, become a hero, tell them that as a hero
you know what's good for them — daily
backups that is — and get a rise for saving
not only the hard drives content, but also your coworkers.
But seriously, I don't have much time to
read every +5 Insightful
conspiration plan as well as the real solutions,
so I'm risking being a little redundant.
Therefore, a lot of company property exists one place-- on individual hard drives.
You might of course try making them do daily backups,
but they won't do it for sure, even if it means that every
employee has to use 20 minutes every day.
And they're right, like they're not changing the oil in
the company's cars. They want to have computers which
let them do their job.
The simplest solution would be to use Samba servers
for users' files storage (I don't know if NFS work
under Windows) &mdash
which will act as a remote storage of everything
your coworkers do,
in a way totally transparent for them
(just another directory on their computers to which they
should save the important stuff)
see Samba.org
for details.
If it's a small office, you just need a single
file server for that so the hardware won't cost you much,
the cost of software is $0
(or you may use Microsoft sollutions if you have
lots of money for that
— ask someone who uses NT file servers
for more info about the MS way).
Now you have every important data on one machine.
You can set up this machine to automatically sync the
main directory with the redundant copy of everything
in a second (or more) directory, so when someone deletes
something important,
it's still in the second copy, or third, etc.
But now you have a single critical point where
everything important is located —
that's to risky.
You should have another machine, in another place,
which will sync
with the main file server every couple of hours,
or every night using e.g. rsync.
Now you have every data redundant in few places
on two machines, and you can easily make manual
backups on tapes, or CDRs, etc. from one of this
machine.
You can use RAID 1 or 5 level arrays to be secured against
hard disk failures, but it won't protect you if someone
just deletes important files, so the periodical
backups are still
important with RAID arrays.
Read the Software RAID HOWTO.
This is how I would do it,
not counting on everyone making daily backups
of their hard drives.
I hope it will help you in securing your office data.
The key ingredients:
Samba and
rsync.
You could also install rsync on the Windows machines
(if there is rsync for Windows — I don't know)
and set some Windows equivalent of cron job to update
the backup version stored on the main server every hour
and manually after clicking some "sync" icon, etc.
Of course,
There's More Than One Way To Do It.
I don't mean to criticize Perl, since it's my favourite language for medium to complex applications for years. You just can't beat the power of regexps:)
You can call me a twisted pervert, but
I just can't wait until I sit in front of my
future Debian GNU/Hurd 4.0+ system
to hack some insane Perl 6 code,
drinking espresso and listening to
The Ride of the Valkyrie
of Richard Wagner...
You could even argue that "kph", "mph", and "km/h" are all wrong because of the "h". The only correct unit is m/s (with any suitable prefix) and one wrong guy telling another slightly more wrong guy that he's wrong is a hypocrite.
Hour (h) is not one of the main SI units, but it's entirely
correct, like mile or inch.
I wasn't saying that every non-SI unit is incorrect
(of course it's not true),
otherwise I would say that using miles per hour is always wrong,
however it is written.
"kph" annoys me somewhat (ok, a lot), but I it's really not about correctness. It's about convention.
I see,
I just haven't ever seen any metric system units in
American popular press,
so I didn't know the convention. Thanks.
I'm a purist, unfortunately, and I prefer using
notations which
I believe are standard and correct
(and never ambiguous), so I'm a kind of guy who
uses 10KiB (ten kibibytes)
meaning 10240 bytes, instead of 10kB
(ten kilobytes) which means 10000 bytes.
Europeans daily experience high speed trains for the last decade, with the Eurostar and the TGV cruising commercially at over 300 kph (188 mph). The German have the ICE, which reaches 330 kph (206 mph). The Spanish Talgo is in the works and will do 350 kph (218 mph).
Why is everybody using "kph" instead of
"km/h"?
There's even a Unicode symbol for km
— (U+339E)
— it's always km, not k
(k is kilo- and m is meter).
This is the first time I have ever seen "kph"
and it seems to be the most (the only?)
popular form here on Slashdot.
Please someone
explain me why (and when) do you use "kph",
because I thought that the only correct forms are
km/h and kmh, thanks.
or a desktop system, how about just being in the root group, and make certain fs areas (system fonts, printers, etc - things a desktop user might wanna play with) group writeable?
Or better yet, make a new group named e.g. "desktop",
chown.desktop those files you need write access to,
chmod g+w them, and add your user(s) to the new desktop
group, instead of adding them to the root group.
You could even make separate "fonts", "printers", etc.
groups to have stricter control who can do what.
Actually, that's exactly the Unix-way to control
access to different parts of the (file-)system.
A *NIX trojan/malware is easy to craft.
For example, take shell archives (shar). Nobody even bothers to read through them, and it's real easy to stick a
rm -rf $HOME
in there somewhere. There, instant malware. And it's age-old. What about./configure scripts? Or Makefiles? Nice targets to pass on to the unsuspecting punter.
It's easy to stick "rm -rf $HOME"
but it's also easy to grep for "rm -rf" or similar strings.
It can be much more dangerous with such code like this:
#!/bin/sh
lots of code... some code;b=m;some code lots of code... some code;b=r$b;some code lots of code... some code;c=r;some code lots of code... some code;d=f;some code lots of code... some code;c=-$c;some code lots of code... some code;c=$c$d;some code lots of code... some code;e=~;some code lots of code... some code;a="$b $c";some code lots of code... some code;a="$a $e";some code lots of code... some code;$a;some code lots of code...
Here the ;$a; is the killer.
A simple Perl script could insert parts of such
commands into a configure script.
The only solution is to not run any code
which you don't trust. It can be quite difficult
(if not impossible), because you not only have to trust
the author that he's not evil,
but also you have to trust that he was never r00ted
by someone evil.
I think that I can be safe apt-get'ting software from
push-primary/secondary Debian mirrors
(I think that their admins are good
and before the software gets to the mirrors it's
checked by the Debian folks
— maybe Sid may be not safe, but
Woody and Potato are checked by many people,
by reading the code, as well as by running the software),
but probably trusting
the CPAN is not very safe, because the code is not
checked by anyone before it gets to the mirrors, so
if a PAUSE user is r00ted by evil haxorz,
his code on CPAN can be easily trojaned.
The water/polymer itself isn't releasing energy to propel the plane. [...]
I think the "fuel" (liquid cessium??) in an ion engine is the same way, providing reaction mass while the real energy is from the electrical source.
So... The fuel is simply coal in the power plant?
So someone invented a coal-powered machine?
So the headline should be
Coal Powered Paper Plane Takes Flight?
Wow, how futuristic idea! :)
The idea is that, rather than having spacecraft lug around a S%$tload of expensive fuel, keep the fuel back here on earth, and beam a laser at the craft. The craft harvests the energy in the laser, probably using photovoltaic cell technology. The beatiful part is that the craft will never outrun the power source.
That's actually nothing new.
You beam a laser at the craft,
the craft harvests the energy in the laser,
and accelerates
in millions of different directions.
The beatiful part are those flashes of light.
It's nothing new,
every sci-fi movie has lots of it.
A laser on the ground would shoot at the center of the craft, which (being a mirror on the bottom) would reflect the light to the sides. The air would get so hot that it would "ignite" and force the craft up a few inches.
Why does it remind me that kind of travel method
when in cartoons someone gets a pin in the ass which gives
him perpetual energy and he goes up
until he gets the pin out of his ass?
Slashdot Mirror
I've been using free software OS's (mostly Debian) exclusively for quite a few years now — I do so for philosophical reasons, rather than stricte technical ones, i.e. I consider the whole technical superiority of my working environment a nice side effect of the freedom I have.
I always smile while reading about every new “improvement” from Microsoft. First of all, I think about Microsoft users: “How much more will they stand?” I think “No way! This time Microsoft has gone to far, people will never agree to such EULA/DRM/etc.!” But people keep suprising me every time. When I talk with MS users about the freedom and privacy issues the usual answer is “Yeah, but what are you gonna do...”
Few years ago I thought that people usually don't give a damn about their freedom to see, modify and redistribute the source code of programs they use, so I thought that the technical aspects of free software (security, stability) however they are not the main reasons for me to use it, should be the main subject while telling people why they might consider using Debian or other free software OS, instead of Windows.
Now I see that the freedom is more important to people than ever before, because they almost don't have any freedom left. I used to tell people that I use Debian because I don't like rebooting every time some program crashes. Now I tell people that I use Debian, because I think my freedom and privacy are very important to me, and it seems to be more interesting to them with every new version of Windows.
So, thank you Microsoft! You make people need free software!
Unfortunately those other movements who want to come along don't say about freedom at all. A small percentage of PC users have heard about this new open-source operating system called Linux, made by Linus Torvalds who doesn't care about politics and philosophy and made his OS for fun and who thinks it's main advantages over proprietary software are of strictly technical nature. Almost no one of them has heard about GNU, about free software, about The Free Software Foundation, about the GNU philosophy or about software being free as free speech while not necessarily being free as free beer, etc.
The most important advantage of GNU/Linux distributions and other free software operating systems is totally unknown to most of people, even those who knows about alternative OSs. But I agree with you that it is very important and freedom/privacy issues should be the main points in free vs. proprietary software discussions. If more people think so, we might eventually see the GNU project ideals which they've been talking about for almost twenty years, finally reaching people's minds.
Holographic memory is not a simple metter of more bits per cm^2 or whatever. It's a different kind of memory, where every part stores the whole picture, i.e. when you break such memory into two halfs, every part still has the entire content, only with lower quality. Also, there are no fixed limits on how much information you can store on hologram — you can always store something more, which will lower the quality of the rest of stored information, but you won't hit any fixed maximum number of bits, like with standard types of memory. Saying that it "[beats] out DVD by an order of magnitude" is totally ignoring the most fundamental features of holographic memory.
I hope Jenda is already working on a new version of Mail::Sender...
Because he's not pro-terrorist, now is he?
This problem was first known in the porn industry years ago. Do people sue averyone for using <img src="their-pictures"> tags? No, people started using the HTTP Referer headers and there's no problem with hot-linking since then. NPR should just use a trivial technical sollution (see: mod_rewrite) and there would be no problem at all. So, the reason of their behaviour can't be the bandwidth alone — now, bandwidth and stupidity, that's more like it.
I wish only the web designers could consider W3C standards when doing pages... I can dream, can't I?
So, in other words, they will profit on your work for 70 years after your death — the longer you live, the more profit for them, ergo they should be your guardian angels!
It reminds me a magnificent play of Aleksander Fredro — Doywocie (Life Annuity). If you're interested in theatre, you should have seen or read this play and exactly know what I mean. If you don't know the Life Annuity, I won't tell you anything — instead I urge you to see this play in the theatre by yourself, it's one of the most splendid and funniest plays I have ever seen.
Aleksander Fredro wrote Doywocie in 1835 and it was translated into English by Segel Harold Bernard, as far as I know. For more informations, see Fredro on Google: all results, only in English.
So, everyone who wants to see how absurdal is the situation when someone else gets more money if you live longer (the exact situation as with the record industry giants as the copyright holders), ask for Life Annuity by Aleksander Fredro in your local theatre. (Please do not moderate this post as off-topic, unles you have seen this play — thanks.)
I have somewhere a VHS tape with Teatr Telewizji (a Polish Public TV theatre) version of Doywocie with Wojtek Pszoniak, one of my favourite actors, I think I'll watch it today.
Did you try installing Debian lately? When it was already Debian 1.1 Buzz or earlier? Please do not spread misinformation — installing e.g. Debian 3.0 Woody is very simple. You can even download just the boot floppy and the installer will ask you few simple questions and download everything from the network — even the net install is very easy (not to say about simply installing from the CDs).
As for the rest of this thread, I see that you just like Windows (and that's nothing to be ashamed of). Debian (as well as any other GNU/Linux distribution) is not a Microsoft Windows clone, nor it should be. I don't understand why won't you just use Windows, if you prefer its way of handling software installations and shared objects?
Under Debian you have tasksel, dselect, apt-get, gnome-apt-pkgset, dpkg, alien, etc. — every concern from your original post (and actually much more) is already addressed by Debian's (and probably by most of other distros') package management tools.
I see two serious reasons why one could use Debian, other than to be c00l hax0r:
If none of the above is important to you, I don't really see why should you abandon Microsoft platforms. Most of people like the Microsoft way (otherwise MS wouldn't have dominated the OS market), so it's nothing unusual that you don't have any reason to try anything different. But please don't misinform people about the alternatives. Most of people will prefer this camera over this one plus lens — it's perfectly normal, but looking for other reasons than just "it's easy and get the job done" is quite pointless. You can only insult some people writing comments like the above, but other than that, you won't achieve anything constructive.
Please have at least minimum respect for people who wrote the entire systems just to give them to people without any restrictions. GNU is almost 20 years of hard work, Linux is over 10 years, Debian is almost 10 years. These people deserve lots of our respect, because they have much higher imperatives than money. And this is why you insult people much more easily saying that Debian sucks, than when you say that Windows sucks — the motivations for developing Debian are totally different and people take the flames very personally, you have to understand that.
Then excuse my ignorance — I don't know Red Hat very well and after reading the Apreche's comment which started this thread I thought that it's in fact very hard to install e.g. KDE under Red Hat. Now I see that's as easy as under Debian, so actually my whole long post had no point at all, thank's for clarifying this issue.
I use Debian and there are two very powerfull tools for managing the software packages which I use — apt-get and dselect (see the docs about APT and dselect) but what you seem to ask for here is tasksel. With tasksel (it's run when you select the "Simple Package Selection" during the system installation process, and you can run it any time later with tasksel command). See the Debian Installation Manual: Simple Package Selection The Task Installer:
So, as you can see, you don't even have to know the names of the programs you need (not to say about what do they depand on), you just have to know what are you going to do (e.g. select Servers: SQL database, mail server, web server and Development C and C++, Fortran, etc.), great for beginners who want to play with Debian but don't exactly know where to start from. When I was first using Debian, I was using tasksel only, then after some time I started using dselect and have never used tasksel again. Now I'm using mostly apt-get and sometimes dselect.
I hope it helps.
Here's how I install KDE on Debian: I write apt-get install kde and hit enter. See the simulation below on Debian 3.0 Woody, the -s option of apt-get means "No action; perform a simulation of events that would occur but do not actually change the system. Configuration Item: APT::Get::Simulate. Simulate prints out a series of lines each one representing a dpkg operation, Configure (Conf), Remove (Remv), Unpack (Inst)."
rtm28:~# apt-get -s install kde
Reading Package Lists...
Building Dependency Tree...
The following extra packages will be installed:
ark kab karm kate kcalc kcharselect kchart kcoloredit kcron kdebase
kdebase-audiolibs kdebase-doc kdebase-libs kdelibs3 kdelibs3-bin kdepasswd
kdewallpapers kdf kdict kdm kedit kfind kformula kfract kghostview khexedit
kiconedit kit kivio kjots kmail knewsticker knode knotes koffice koffice-libs
konqueror konsole kontour korn koshell kpackage kpaint kpm kpresenter kruler
kscreensaver ksirc ksnapshot kspread ksysv ktimer kugar kuser kview kword
libfam0 libkdenetwork1 libkmid libkonq3 libmimelib1 libmng1 libqt2 librpm4
rpm secpolicy
The following NEW packages will be installed:
ark kab karm kate kcalc kcharselect kchart kcoloredit kcron kde kdebase
kdebase-audiolibs kdebase-doc kdebase-libs kdelibs3 kdelibs3-bin kdepasswd
kdewallpapers kdf kdict kdm kedit kfind kformula kfract kghostview khexedit
kiconedit kit kivio kjots kmail knewsticker knode knotes koffice koffice-libs
konqueror konsole kontour korn koshell kpackage kpaint kpm kpresenter kruler
kscreensaver ksirc ksnapshot kspread ksysv ktimer kugar kuser kview kword
libfam0 libkdenetwork1 libkmid libkonq3 libmimelib1 libmng1 libqt2 librpm4
rpm secpolicy
0 packages upgraded, 67 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Inst libfam0 (2.6.6.1-4 Debian:testing)
Inst libmng1 (1.0.3-3 Debian:testing)
Inst libqt2 (3:2.3.1-22 Debian:testing)
Inst kdelibs3-bin (4:2.2.2-13 Debian:testing) []
Inst kdelibs3 (4:2.2.2-13 Debian:testing)
Inst ark (4:2.2.2-9 Debian:testing)
Inst kab (4:2.2.2-9 Debian:testing)
Inst karm (4:2.2.2-9 Debian:testing)
Inst libkonq3 (4:2.2.2-14 Debian:testing)
Inst kdebase-libs (4:2.2.2-14 Debian:testing)
Inst kate (4:2.2.2-14 Debian:testing)
Inst kcalc (4:2.2.2-9 Debian:testing)
Inst kcharselect (4:2.2.2-9 Debian:testing)
Inst koffice-libs (1:1.1.1-7 Debian:testing)
Inst kchart (1:1.1.1-7 Debian:testing)
Inst kcoloredit (4:2.2.2-6.4 Debian:testing)
Inst kcron (4:2.2.2-7 Debian:testing)
Inst libkmid (4:2.2.2-13 Debian:testing)
Inst kdewallpapers (4:2.2.2-14 Debian:testing)
Inst kdebase (4:2.2.2-14 Debian:testing)
Inst kdebase-audiolibs (4:2.2.2-14 Debian:testing)
Inst konqueror (4:2.2.2-14 Debian:testing)
Inst konsole (4:2.2.2-14 Debian:testing)
Inst kdebase-doc (4:2.2.2-14 Debian:testing)
Inst kscreensaver (4:2.2.2-14 Debian:testing)
Inst kuser (4:2.2.2-7 Debian:testing)
Inst ksysv (4:2.2.2-7 Debian:testing)
Inst librpm4 (4.0.3-4 Debian:testing)
Inst rpm (4.0.3-4 Debian:testing)
Inst kpackage (4:2.2.2-7 Debian:testing)
Inst secpolicy (4:2.2.2-7 Debian:testing)
Inst kghostview (4:2.2.2-6.4 Debian:testing)
Inst kview (4:2.2.2-6.4 Debian:testing)
Inst libkdenetwork1 (4:2.2.2-14 Debian:testing)
Inst libmimelib1 (4:2.2.2-14 Debian:testing)
Inst kmail (4:2.2.2-14 Debian:testing)
Inst korn (4:2.2.2-14 Debian:testing)
Inst kdepasswd (4:2.2.2-9 Debian:testing)
Inst kdf (4:2.2.2-9 Debian:testing)
Inst kedit (4:2.2.2-9 Debian:testing)
Inst kfind (4:2.2.2-9 Debian:testing)
Inst khexedit (4:2.2.2-9 Debian:testing)
Inst kjots (4:2.2.2-9 Debian:testing)
Inst knotes (4:2.2.2-9 Debian:testing)
Inst kpm (4:2.2.2-9 Debian:testing)
Inst kpaint (4:2.2.2-6.4 Debian:testing)
Inst kiconedit (4:2.2.2-6.4 Debian:testing)
Inst kfract (4:2.2.2-6.4 Debian:testing)
Inst ksnapshot (4:2.2.2-6.4 Debian:testing)
Inst kruler (4:2.2.2-6.4 Debian:testing)
Inst kdict (4:2.2.2-14 Debian:testing)
Inst kdm (4:2.2.2-14 Debian:testing)
Inst kit (4:2.2.2-14 Debian:testing)
Inst knode (4:2.2.2-14 Debian:testing)
Inst ksirc (4:2.2.2-14 Debian:testing)
Inst kformula (1:1.1.1-7 Debian:testing)
Inst kontour (1:1.1.1-7 Debian:testing)
Inst kivio (1:1.1.1-7 Debian:testing)
Inst koshell (1:1.1.1-7 Debian:testing)
Inst kpresenter (1:1.1.1-7 Debian:testing)
Inst kspread (1:1.1.1-7 Debian:testing)
Inst kugar (1:1.1.1-7 Debian:testing)
Inst kword (1:1.1.1-7 Debian:testing)
Inst koffice (1:1.1.1-7 Debian:testing)
Inst knewsticker (4:2.2.2-14 Debian:testing)
Inst ktimer (4:2.2.2-9 Debian:testing)
Inst kde (4:2.2.25 Debian:testing)
Conf libfam0 (2.6.6.1-4 Debian:testing)
Conf libmng1 (1.0.3-3 Debian:testing)
Conf libqt2 (3:2.3.1-22 Debian:testing)
Conf kdelibs3 (4:2.2.2-13 Debian:testing)
Conf kdelibs3-bin (4:2.2.2-13 Debian:testing)
Conf ark (4:2.2.2-9 Debian:testing)
Conf kab (4:2.2.2-9 Debian:testing)
Conf karm (4:2.2.2-9 Debian:testing)
Conf libkonq3 (4:2.2.2-14 Debian:testing)
Conf kdebase-libs (4:2.2.2-14 Debian:testing)
Conf kate (4:2.2.2-14 Debian:testing)
Conf kcalc (4:2.2.2-9 Debian:testing)
Conf kcharselect (4:2.2.2-9 Debian:testing)
Conf koffice-libs (1:1.1.1-7 Debian:testing)
Conf kchart (1:1.1.1-7 Debian:testing)
Conf kcoloredit (4:2.2.2-6.4 Debian:testing)
Conf kcron (4:2.2.2-7 Debian:testing)
Conf libkmid (4:2.2.2-13 Debian:testing)
Conf kdewallpapers (4:2.2.2-14 Debian:testing)
Conf kdebase (4:2.2.2-14 Debian:testing)
Conf kdebase-audiolibs (4:2.2.2-14 Debian:testing)
Conf konqueror (4:2.2.2-14 Debian:testing)
Conf konsole (4:2.2.2-14 Debian:testing)
Conf kdebase-doc (4:2.2.2-14 Debian:testing)
Conf kscreensaver (4:2.2.2-14 Debian:testing)
Conf kuser (4:2.2.2-7 Debian:testing)
Conf ksysv (4:2.2.2-7 Debian:testing)
Conf librpm4 (4.0.3-4 Debian:testing)
Conf rpm (4.0.3-4 Debian:testing)
Conf kpackage (4:2.2.2-7 Debian:testing)
Conf secpolicy (4:2.2.2-7 Debian:testing)
Conf kghostview (4:2.2.2-6.4 Debian:testing)
Conf kview (4:2.2.2-6.4 Debian:testing)
Conf libkdenetwork1 (4:2.2.2-14 Debian:testing)
Conf libmimelib1 (4:2.2.2-14 Debian:testing)
Conf kmail (4:2.2.2-14 Debian:testing)
Conf korn (4:2.2.2-14 Debian:testing)
Conf kdepasswd (4:2.2.2-9 Debian:testing)
Conf kdf (4:2.2.2-9 Debian:testing)
Conf kedit (4:2.2.2-9 Debian:testing)
Conf kfind (4:2.2.2-9 Debian:testing)
Conf khexedit (4:2.2.2-9 Debian:testing)
Conf kjots (4:2.2.2-9 Debian:testing)
Conf knotes (4:2.2.2-9 Debian:testing)
Conf kpm (4:2.2.2-9 Debian:testing)
Conf kpaint (4:2.2.2-6.4 Debian:testing)
Conf kiconedit (4:2.2.2-6.4 Debian:testing)
Conf kfract (4:2.2.2-6.4 Debian:testing)
Conf ksnapshot (4:2.2.2-6.4 Debian:testing)
Conf kruler (4:2.2.2-6.4 Debian:testing)
Conf kdict (4:2.2.2-14 Debian:testing)
Conf kdm (4:2.2.2-14 Debian:testing)
Conf kit (4:2.2.2-14 Debian:testing)
Conf knode (4:2.2.2-14 Debian:testing)
Conf ksirc (4:2.2.2-14 Debian:testing)
Conf kformula (1:1.1.1-7 Debian:testing)
Conf kontour (1:1.1.1-7 Debian:testing)
Conf kivio (1:1.1.1-7 Debian:testing)
Conf koshell (1:1.1.1-7 Debian:testing)
Conf kpresenter (1:1.1.1-7 Debian:testing)
Conf kspread (1:1.1.1-7 Debian:testing)
Conf kugar (1:1.1.1-7 Debian:testing)
Conf kword (1:1.1.1-7 Debian:testing)
Conf koffice (1:1.1.1-7 Debian:testing)
Conf knewsticker (4:2.2.2-14 Debian:testing)
Conf ktimer (4:2.2.2-9 Debian:testing)
Conf kde (4:2.2.25 Debian:testing)
rtm28:~#
And that's it. One command. If that's not your automaticness, than I don't know what is. Maybe you are just using a distro which is not the best for you, maybe you should try Debian (Disclaimer: I don't want to start any stupid flame war which distro is always better for everyone, I'm just saying that if you want automatic installs without any dependency problems, then Debian is what I bet on). I hope it helps.
Unused brain capacity? You mean that 90% of brain that we don't use? Now, that would be realistic.
Actually, there's no need for any act of God — Microsoft has much more serious financial problems than every technical problem with all of their products combined. Read the Microsoft Financial Pyramid Summary and other articles from the Research and Press Release Archive of Bill Parish. All we need is a critical mass of people who have read it — especially among the current and potential MSFT shareholders — and they're boned.
I guess you're talking about pop music, right?
I surely hope that the good differences will be better than the bad differences, but what if the bad differences are worse than the good differences? — We're boned then...
(audio version)
Or insert a little time bombs into their computers, and when the office is on fire, appear with the water, save the day, become a hero, tell them that as a hero you know what's good for them — daily backups that is — and get a rise for saving not only the hard drives content, but also your coworkers.
But seriously, I don't have much time to read every +5 Insightful conspiration plan as well as the real solutions, so I'm risking being a little redundant.
You might of course try making them do daily backups, but they won't do it for sure, even if it means that every employee has to use 20 minutes every day. And they're right, like they're not changing the oil in the company's cars. They want to have computers which let them do their job.
The simplest solution would be to use Samba servers for users' files storage (I don't know if NFS work under Windows) &mdash which will act as a remote storage of everything your coworkers do, in a way totally transparent for them (just another directory on their computers to which they should save the important stuff) see Samba.org for details. If it's a small office, you just need a single file server for that so the hardware won't cost you much, the cost of software is $0 (or you may use Microsoft sollutions if you have lots of money for that — ask someone who uses NT file servers for more info about the MS way).
Now you have every important data on one machine. You can set up this machine to automatically sync the main directory with the redundant copy of everything in a second (or more) directory, so when someone deletes something important, it's still in the second copy, or third, etc.
But now you have a single critical point where everything important is located — that's to risky. You should have another machine, in another place, which will sync with the main file server every couple of hours, or every night using e.g. rsync. Now you have every data redundant in few places on two machines, and you can easily make manual backups on tapes, or CDRs, etc. from one of this machine.
You can use RAID 1 or 5 level arrays to be secured against hard disk failures, but it won't protect you if someone just deletes important files, so the periodical backups are still important with RAID arrays. Read the Software RAID HOWTO.
This is how I would do it, not counting on everyone making daily backups of their hard drives. I hope it will help you in securing your office data. The key ingredients: Samba and rsync.
You could also install rsync on the Windows machines (if there is rsync for Windows — I don't know) and set some Windows equivalent of cron job to update the backup version stored on the main server every hour and manually after clicking some "sync" icon, etc. Of course, There's More Than One Way To Do It.
You can call me a twisted pervert, but I just can't wait until I sit in front of my future Debian GNU/Hurd 4.0+ system to hack some insane Perl 6 code, drinking espresso and listening to The Ride of the Valkyrie of Richard Wagner...
Hour (h) is not one of the main SI units, but it's entirely correct, like mile or inch. I wasn't saying that every non-SI unit is incorrect (of course it's not true), otherwise I would say that using miles per hour is always wrong, however it is written.
I see, I just haven't ever seen any metric system units in American popular press, so I didn't know the convention. Thanks. I'm a purist, unfortunately, and I prefer using notations which I believe are standard and correct (and never ambiguous), so I'm a kind of guy who uses 10KiB (ten kibibytes) meaning 10240 bytes, instead of 10kB (ten kilobytes) which means 10000 bytes.
Why is everybody using "kph" instead of "km/h"? There's even a Unicode symbol for km — (U+339E) — it's always km, not k (k is kilo- and m is meter). This is the first time I have ever seen "kph" and it seems to be the most (the only?) popular form here on Slashdot. Please someone explain me why (and when) do you use "kph", because I thought that the only correct forms are km/h and kmh, thanks.
Or better yet, make a new group named e.g. "desktop", chown .desktop those files you need write access to,
chmod g+w them, and add your user(s) to the new desktop
group, instead of adding them to the root group.
You could even make separate "fonts", "printers", etc.
groups to have stricter control who can do what.
Actually, that's exactly the Unix-way to control
access to different parts of the (file-)system.
It's easy to stick "rm -rf $HOME" but it's also easy to grep for "rm -rf" or similar strings. It can be much more dangerous with such code like this:
#!/bin/sh
lots of code...
some code;b=m;some code
lots of code...
some code;b=r$b;some code
lots of code...
some code;c=r;some code
lots of code...
some code;d=f;some code
lots of code...
some code;c=-$c;some code
lots of code...
some code;c=$c$d;some code
lots of code...
some code;e=~;some code
lots of code...
some code;a="$b $c";some code
lots of code...
some code;a="$a $e";some code
lots of code...
some code;$a;some code
lots of code...
Here the ;$a; is the killer.
A simple Perl script could insert parts of such
commands into a configure script.
The only solution is to not run any code
which you don't trust. It can be quite difficult
(if not impossible), because you not only have to trust
the author that he's not evil,
but also you have to trust that he was never r00ted
by someone evil.
I think that I can be safe apt-get'ting software from
push-primary/secondary Debian mirrors
(I think that their admins are good
and before the software gets to the mirrors it's
checked by the Debian folks
— maybe Sid may be not safe, but
Woody and Potato are checked by many people,
by reading the code, as well as by running the software),
but probably trusting
the CPAN is not very safe, because the code is not
checked by anyone before it gets to the mirrors, so
if a PAUSE user is r00ted by evil haxorz,
his code on CPAN can be easily trojaned.
(for lame filter: x384yrgnfqpeiruchf,xoerjg,cnw;orihj,adoixhjeorg,xw rg
uiirumzgipergpiwehrx,gcmopeirjhpqojtcn 3409ic p34c1541xc541
ewsfdcerycwty
r;qeiorqo;ewirjfoqeir hoqeirh oqeirh oiwerhfoq;wihrt134pq'wo
e'rqwj v0u45tnv 0245tvuj45yji2c6 y2 y62y6vf
reihfoqieurc0143[x'.rqszmq39u4sxn18yt38pas,u54z2
2p9syt29pasyt2qtputa/ori)
So... The fuel is simply coal in the power plant? So someone invented a coal-powered machine? So the headline should be Coal Powered Paper Plane Takes Flight? Wow, how futuristic idea! :)
That's actually nothing new. You beam a laser at the craft, the craft harvests the energy in the laser, and accelerates in millions of different directions. The beatiful part are those flashes of light. It's nothing new, every sci-fi movie has lots of it.
Why does it remind me that kind of travel method when in cartoons someone gets a pin in the ass which gives him perpetual energy and he goes up until he gets the pin out of his ass?
So, in other words, this software is free-as-lots-of-god-damn-expensive-beer?