Even though it's probably not the real reason (they just want to keep the materials for themselves, obviously, which is the smart thing to do), but in politics it's often advantageous to use your opponent's rhetoric--they risk making themselves look bad if they disagree with something they themselves said earlier.
I recently bought a Touchpad, so I use WebOS. I quickly discovered that WebOS is not just a toy operating system like I thought it might be; it really works, and I actually use it. There is vibrant user development for it, it's ridiculously easy to hack and customize, and I have full root access to the Linux base. It only took me minutes to unlock everything and install the power utilities I wanted. The UI is just as good as enthusiasts have been saying it is, with an unparalleled window management and multitasking experience. The included system applications work very well (e-mail client, chat client, calendar, contacts), and synergy integration was painless to setup and works without a hitch; it took about a minute to be fully synced with my Google account, no need to customize settings on the e-mail client or anything like that.
WebOS seems to shine on devices with larger screens and that can spend more power on keeping the apps and services running (as of yet it lacks push messaging). That means it would be an ideal fit for netbooks/laptops/nettops/desktops with touchscreens, and it also is a nice fit for a tablet. On handsets, Android seems to have a clear advantage in the mobility arena, but the fact that WebOS and Android can fill different niches is vital to WebOS.
I definitely plan to continue using WebOS, and I fully support HP establishing it as an open source project as well as pledging continued support for the system. WebOS is alive and it still has plenty of places to go before it's time will end.
I was pretty much weened on FOSS since the time I was a young teenager. For a while I was stuck using both Windows and Linux due to issues regarding hardware support, but things changed rapidly so that by the time I was in college I hadn't really used Windows on any of my personal computers until Windows 7 came out (occasionally I'd dual boot XP just to play with Windows). I was and still am a free software ideologue and all-around social/economic activist.
When I finally got my first real IT job, boy was I in for a surprise. In school I and everyone I knew used Linux; we also used Linux on school servers and in computer labs (we were the comp sci students so we generally had out own computing facilities separate from the main student body). At work I discovered, naturally, that all systems ran Windows. A few execs had Macbooks because they thought they were fancy and needed an upper class image.
Company management wasn't even against using Linux. Frankly they would have done anything to cut corners on cost, including using free software (some of their commercial software was pirated anyway). The problem is we just couldn't deploy Linux. Over the years the company had developed a software infrastructure that was so heavily based on Microsoft products, we literally couldn't function without them. I used Linux whenever I could, mainly in computer maintenance, backup, diagnostics, and repair, where Linux live CDs/USBs performed spectacularly well (if you're handy with the CLI tools).
In the end, I got used to administrating a Windows environment. In many ways it's an awful thing to have to deal with, but at the end of the day you get the job done. There are many times when Windows would fail for inexplicable reasons, and you either a) had to be a programming genius to isolate and repair the problem, or b) you could just do system restore and forget about it. Worst case scenario involved doing a factory restore. Windows is severely lacking in facilities for system maintenance and repair; you basically set it up and pray that nothing goes wrong, and then when it breaks you look for a workaround. This was totally different from what I was used to administering Linux at home, where I was totally unaccustomed to any type of system failures.
That's the thing about software and businesses--the software is not the pinnacle of computing; it just has a strong institutional backing where there's always someone else working on it so you don't have to. Software doesn't work? Call the vendor. For every problem there exists an official, textbook solution that you can just follow without having to really apply yourself. This is bound to drive computing purists nuts, but a job's a job. If a company is willing to pay you full wages for handling their Windows infrastructure, it's better to just shut up and take the money. Having secure employment and working on programs you dislike is rather important compared to using only programs that you like and not having a job. You don't have to like the programs--it's called work for a reason.
Carriers were too eager to get the iPhone, so they naturally found themselves in a disadvantageous position. What they should do is stop carrying the iPhone, and if too many carriers drop it then Apple will start losing sales and start getting desperate, then they'll be forced to offer their phone at a lower cost.
Your comment about Islam is one of the stupidest things I've ever read. Before Islam came to Arabia, they were making 0 scientific advances and their civilization was in a state of wretchedness. In Arab society, tribes were constantly going to war with one another; they viewed women as property (as did Europeans), and it was popular for fathers to bury their female babies alive because they felt female children were too much of a burden.
Islam arrived with a specific platform of demanding respect toward women and expanded rights for them, forbidding the murder of female children, asserting that women are not property and have legal rights, including the right to receive inheritance and own property. One of Islam's main appeal to people is its high regard for women, which not only asks that men respect women, but also asks that women respect themselves and dress and behave modestly for the good of society. It was not until the advent of Islam that Arabs were known for having a successful and progressive civilization, which is when all the scientific advances that you are attributing to them occurred. In Muslim-majority countries where women are having their rights infringed upon (eg Saudi Arabia), Muslim women campaign for their rights not on the platform of fighting Islam, but rather their platform is that they are demanding their Islamic rights from an oppressive government that only pays lip service to Islam but isn't owning up.
I find it hilarious how women are only valued for their bodies and their sexuality in the West. Just look at your comment: "Women also wear better looking clothes, smell nicer, and have a penchant for adding things to the physical environment that make the workplace more pleasant." We're having a serious discussion about women in the workplace and already you're sexualizing them. Women go to work so they can work, not so creeps like you can admire their clothing, smell them, and feel pleasure from them being there.
Breaking news... Fedora project leader has a vagina.
Honestly I'm tired of sexism in our society. I don't give a damn if someone is a man or a woman. Period. It doesn't mean anything--it's not some amazing, wonderful thing to have a female in a position of leadership or power, nor can the same be said for a male. They're all just human beings.
Dell sold computers with FreeDOS because they had an agreement with Microsoft that they would not sell computers without an operating system, which might have meant that Dell could not have sold any personal computers without including Windows with them. Shipping computers with FreeDOS was just a loophole for people who wanted to buy cheaper computers and put Linux on them or unlicensed copies of Windows.
This is quite simply about monopolization. Free market economic systems are purported to offer the lowest prices on goods and services, but the major flaw in free market economies is that they tend to form monopolies. When a monopoly forms, then the price is no longer "fair" because it can be raised and people will still buy it because there is nowhere else to get it.
This key concept of "you can't get this anywhere else" is what makes intellectual property tick. For example, if I sell a book and other publishers produce copies of that book, the price of the book will be very low on the street because competition between publishers will force it to be near the cost of production (which, for a book, is very little). Copyright comes along and says, hey, only one publisher is allowed to print this book; now that publisher can jack up the price because competition is eliminated, making the publishing business much more profitable. The free market comes up with all kinds of loopholes to resist this; for example people buy the book, read it, then sell it to someone else to try to regain some of the cost; people buy the book used and save some of the expense. Libraries buy books and lend them to people willing to wait. This effectively reduces demand for the production of the book and very (smartly) economically ensures the best use of the product with the fewest wasted resources.
Publishers, like in this case, are eyeing the used market covetously, because they only see "sales" out of context and think, "those sales must be mine." It's greed, pure and simple, and it hurts the economy/society, frankly. They want to make it so "you only buy this from me" so they can squeeze more money out of the economy. Granted, video games are not that important to society to worry if the market is being monopolized or not, but imagine if this happened with more important products? School textbook publishers try to accomplish this by frequently revising their texts and bribing schools/teachers to keep changing to the newest edition so that the older editions (used books) reduce their value or become worthless. You want to know who is worthless? Textbook publishers.
Seriously, I don't care. Open software is great, and anyone who wants to write it can go ahead and write it. Do you honestly expect me to worry about whether or not the person who wrote my software has a penis or a vagina? It's not going to make the code better.
Besides, having both genders involved will lead to more interaction between open source programmers and members of the opposite sex, which would be disastrous. Before you know it they'll be having sex with each other and producing children, and the more time they spend copulating and raising their children, the less time they will have to code. I would hate to see such great talent go to waste.
I quickly looked at the home page of each major BSD variant. OpenBSD's website was by far the ugliest. If I had to pick the best looking one I'd say NetBSD, although FreeBSD is pretty good too.
NetBSD and FreeBSD seem to be run by fairly responsible organizations of people, whereas OpenBSD is chiefly the product of one very insane man. All are great systems.:)
Java could have been so much more than it is. If Sun had GPL'd the whole thing in the 90's, Java could have become a programming platform pervasively used in Linux environments for application development, perhaps even the primary one. However, other languages came along like Python and stole all the attention, and Java is forever doomed to play second fiddle. If it wasn't for Android and its new language they call "Java", I'd say Java is dead. Yes, it's wormed its way onto all sorts of commercial devices and platforms, but get too comfy--it could easily be dumped and replaced with a number of software.
Java still has a chance to be revived, but the open source community has to take the lead and make the free software Java the real, official Java. Oracle might just get fed up with Java eventually and wish to dump it, in which case they might just GPL everything they have or spin off the project as a type of community-based foundation. Either way Java must be free software.
...install it on my netbook? Like many Slashdotters, I bought a fist generation EeePC way back when the whole netbook idea was new. I got a "surf" model that only came with 4 gigs of flash storage and nothing more, so finding an adequately small operating system to put on it was rather difficult without doing some tedious custom configurations, when all I wanted was to just surf the web. Moblin/Meego was the perfect thing because I could just download the image from their site, load it up, and boot up with wifi and web browsing. I'm hoping to get the same thing with Tizen, but I'm a little bit apprehensive about whether or not I'm still going to get that kind of support now that the project's been refactored. If they're making a source release now, then I expect to seem some builds!
First of all, I'm aware of Iran's Internet censorship and policies. Iran is a unique case because they have a very soft form of Internet censorship; they block sites using a weak blocking method, whose weakness I'm sure they are well aware of. In terms of realpolitik this works well for Iran, because it gives the veneer of tough moral policy ensuring public welfare, and yet doesn't really stop anyone from getting access to what they want. This is not at all unlike the public policy debate in Western countries regarding topics such as to what lengths a society ought to go to protect the innocent (eg minors viewing porn) from content deemed socially or morally unacceptable, except in Iran it's openly acknowledged that the censorship covers content opposing the government's rule, whereas in the US such political designs are discretely hidden to maintain a sort of cultural illusion of "free society", a game that must be played in the US and other Western nations which may not exist in other cultures.
Iran has a policy which conforms to cultural norms, and is not meant to be a totalitarian control mechanism a la China. China takes its Internet and information control very seriously--much more seriously than Iran. China takes it to a whole other level, so let's not be fooled into thinking Iran is some kind of a totalitarian commie regime. Yes, they are staunchly theocratic, but personal freedom in Iran far exceeds a long list of modern nation-states in the world, some of which you will be surprised to find (or not) being strong allies of the US.
Having a strong domestic intranet is very good for a country's national interest and security. Any country should have robust domestic network that can serve as an alternative to foreign services. If the Internet had been invented in Iran and the majority of all Internet traffic in the world went through Iran (like it does through the US today), the US would have conniption fit. Do you have any idea how nationalistic the US is and hostile to other nations? US politicians openly state we must have the most powerful military in the world to maintain global dominance; the Internet in the US is mainly domestic and the US wants to keep it that way. Who are we to blame Iran for wanting to foster its own alternative, even if it's stated purpose is to censor foreign influence? We wouldn't like Iranians trying to change our culture, and they don't like it when we do it to them.
On a broader scale of human interest, international politics aside, local intranets are an important tool to counteracting authority. If I'm Joe Bob living in Arkansas and I'm upset that the government is imposing on me through the Internet and other media, what can I do? Use my own network--network with my peers. The little guy is Joe Bob, and big brother is the guv'mint. Let's go back to international politics. Iran has the little guy complex; the US is big brothering it up the world over. See how the logic works? The principle remains the same.
If the API for something is open and well document, that's already one major step toward implementation. I think open API's are a good thing, because when that kind of information is out in the open, proprietary services may exist, but also open source developers are more free to implement their replacements for those services or systems. This is much better than, say, having to deal with software systems that have secret and closed API's, to the extent that you can't make anything that's even compatible with it.
I became an accidental smartphone user when I was a teenager because my father worked for a wireless service provider, so it was basically cheap for us to own one. I was lucky enough to be able to own various phones at different stages of smartphone development (my first smartphone was a fat, heavy Treo, and I had owned a Palm Pilot even before having a cell phone, which, ironically, was sleek and slim since the hardware was more spartan). Since I had used PDA's like the Palm Pilot, smartphones weren't anything new or amazing to me except that they were always connected to the Internet.
As other posters have mentioned, if you are doing work that is heavily communication intensive and especially if you're traveling a lot or on the go, then smartphones are worth the money. Sometimes it's imperative that when someone sends you a text, you e-mail that text to three people, call one of them, reply to the text, go to a website and enter the information, and then look up directions to your new destination on Google Maps, all while you're sitting in your car in a parking lot with no nearby Internet access.
Now, if you're looking to save money, dumping your smartphone can easily save you a chunk of cash throughout the year. You can cut corners in various ways; if you need Internet access while traveling, take your laptop to a cafe with a hot spot or your hotel. I used to have a 3G modem for my laptop, but I ended up getting rid of it because wifi was available in so many places that it didn't justify the additional expense. Or, if it's really not necessary, just do without Internet access for a bit and wait until you get home or to the office. The Internet can wait. Get a GPS that works offline (Lenovo IdeaPad A1 tablets do this, by the way).
If you really just love mobile technology and want to play with it, get a nice wifi device such as an Android Tablet, iPad, iPod Touch, or something similar that gives you the functionality without the monthly bill. Use it at home or carry it with you and log on to hotspots.
When I was in high school and was a budding sysadmin, I was really fascinated with operating systems. I didn't just want to use Linux, but I wanted to try every OS that I could get my hands on. I tried all kinds of Linux distros, and I also spent a lot of time running FreeBSD. I also tried BeOS, but it was dead by the time I got to it.
What would be really neat is if students had access to a variety of OS's that they could play with and learn to work with, such as Linux, OpenSolaris, BSD, and of course even Windows and Mac OS. You might even try getting some of the oddball systems to run like SkyOS, Syllable, ReactOS, Haiku, FreeDOS--the more the better.
Of course, computer labs are for more than just OS experimentation, but if you set aside a couple of older boxes with multiboot or maybe just install some nice VM software somewhere I think you'll attract some inquisitive students and inspire them to learn.
Chrome does consume more memory than Firefox tab for tab, but one important thing to note about Chrome's memory usage is that even though it can take a bit of memory, you are more likely to get it back. Open up 50 tabs and close all but 1, and Chrome will shed the resources almost instantaneously.. Firefox will take longer to free up memory and won't give all of it back. This works great for me because, while I usually go long periods of time between closing the browser completely, I open and close tabs constantly, so each new tab in Chrome is like a fresh start, whereas with Firefox it's all still running in the same process.
Chrome's modular design is the real reason I use Chrome. It not only makes it faster but more reliable and efficient as well.
The only thing I don't like about Chrome is that the Linux port is not as good as the (presumably native) Windows build. I'd stick with Firefox just because it's more free and it runs beautifully on Linux.
Oh how you assume that Press TV is for US citizens... sure, they broadcast in English and are critical of the United States, but then again most of the world speaks English and is critical of the United States as well. Therefore, Press TV is generally well received worldwide; I don't really think how Americans feel about them matters that much to them.
I expect Press TV be biased, but I also expect bias from the BBC, Reuters, Associated Press, New York Times, Al Jazeera, Russia Today, and many others. Sometimes Press TV has the kind of bias that is worth paying attention to. Sometimes it doesn't.
First I should say that we ought to know a little bit more about this story before we can make a complete analysis, but as a Muslim, I will be the first to say that there is no problem with evolution. I'm not going to go into all the details of the argument about whether or not evolution explains the biological origins of man; there are mountains of evidence supporting evolution and no other plausible alternative explanations. What I would like to say is there is really no inherent conflict between believing in a Creator and accepting evolution. In Islam especially the case for conflict is weak because the Qur'an lacks a creation story as detailed as the one laid out in Genesis. Yes, the Qur'an has references to creation and even Adam and Eve (the first humans), but conspicuously absent from the Qur'an are any statements that defy the scientific view of evolution. Does the Qur'an say that Adam and Eve were put on the Earth right after the Earth was created? No. Does it say no other creatures existed or preceded humans? No. In fact, one verse of the Qur'an talks about God breathing His spirit into Adam, which some scholars have read to mean that Adam was alive prior to becoming human (in a spiritual sense), and that Adam may even have had parents instead of being materialized spontaneously. Either way there is really no timeline for creation, and Islamic theology suggests that God is *active* in creation, meaning that God didn't just create everything all at once and stopped, but that creation is a current and ongoing process (in line with evolution).
I do believe that there is no basis in Islamic tradition and culture for rejecting evolution--on the contrary, Islamic emphasis on science and knowledge would make Muslims more receptive to the idea. To me this habit of denying evolution is something that Muslim communities learned from Christian communities, and the article actually does a good job of pointing this out.
As for the lectures, what I want to know is if it's really the mere idea of evolution that is offending the students, or if the lectures contain unnecessary statements that are specifically hostile to God and religion. If the course material or the professor is unfairly preaching atheism or making wild assumptions like "God has nothing to do with evolution" then I'd say the students have some legitimate grounds to object. The article doesn't make this part of the story very clear, but at least in one way suggests that this may be what's happening.
If I were you I would not wait for Tizen or take the project seriously. Back when I bought my first netbook around 2009, my expectation was that I would use it to run Moblin, since I had read about the system and seen the demos. My expectation was that it was pretty much going to be the most awesome thing ever, and I thought it was interesting that the project was backed by Intel (now I think that it was stupid). In retrospect, Intel probably saw the project as a cheap way to get people to buy more Atom chips, but had no real interest in actually investing in the software.
Anyway, Moblin actually did make releases, which I eagerly gobbled up and loaded onto my netbook with anticipation. Every release sucked badly; it was just a shitty Linux distro hastily thrown together by a bunch of buffoons that didn't know what they were doing. The project was all hype and no elbow grease; the window manager was cool, but the overall environment was barren. My optimistic self was saying, it's OK, these are just initial releases! They're working hard on it! The project died abruptly, and Intel decided to dump the thing on Nokia, who thought that somehow it was a good idea to just merge the system with Maemo and call it Meego. I thought, "Ah, finally, the project has been rebooted and we'll see some results." I eagerly gobbled up the subsequent Meego releases. It was, in fact, no different Moblin... it has just been rebranded. They did smooth out enough of the bugs to actually make the system usable and implement some internal changes, but ultimately the system was still pitifully stagnant.
Lo and behold, they finally decided to throw in the towel, and one morning I visit Meego's website to check for a new release only to find an announcement that the project was canceled. Meego is no more, but wait! They want all the Moblin/Meego people to go follow Tizen now! It's backed by the Linux Foundation! The Linux Foundation has already proven that they can't develop shit. They're just a marketing organization that knows how to make nice little web pages.
Seeing Meego going and Tizen coming is like listening to the HURD project talking about why it switched from Mach to L4. OK, so you decided to cancel development of an unfinished project and radically redesign it and start over from scratch. We should care why? The people behind Tizen are probably right now flying to a conference to meet with the teams from HURD and Duke Nukem Forever to share development strategies.
The question is, why do we need Tizen? Every description I've read describing what Tizen is supposed to be looks like it was just copied and pasted from Palm press releases when they began developing webOS. webOS is now a mature, complete, functioning system running on big name hardware. Sure, HP royally screwed things up, but my faith is that webOS will live on. In the mean time, Android is pretty much unstoppable. Neither Android nor webOS are as open source to the extent that Tizen would be, which will probably be the one thing that keeps me following Tizen regardless, but I don't have much hope for it.
Sometimes USB boot just works too... granted, I'm not an expert on everything that makes USB booting tick, but I used work for a company with about 100 workstations that were a few years old, and all of them were able to boot what was apparently a standard USB boot disk (SystemRescueCD, to be exact). I thought, yeah, but those are new-ish machines. What are the chances that it'll boot on older machines? Well, it just so happened that we had about 30 boxes in our inventory that were of the previous generation (they were in-house-assembled Pentium 4 machines with whatever cheapo motherboard in them). All of them booted my flash stick just fine, and these machines had AGP slots, mind you. I mean, holy cow, when was the last time you saw one of those? They even had ethernet cards with coax connectors on them.
In addition to all these machines, I used the same USB boot disk with laptops of various makes and years as well as any other random box we came across. They all worked. The first computer I owned that I know for sure can boot from USB I purchased in 2004, and the machine I had before that may very well have been able to, but I had never bothered to check or try because nobody was doing it back then. Heck, even in 2004 I was still installing operating systems using floppy disks (eg FreeBSD network install).
I hear you that some older systems don't support USB boot, but nowadays there's no excuse for machines not to be able to do that. I honestly wouldn't even want to try running Ubuntu 12 on a system that was too old to support USB boot (it probably lacks the memory, cpu strength, and disk space for it). Such old machines are quickly becoming a curiosity, kind of like my old Windows 95 laptop or the Apple ][e in my closet.
When I started using USB to do Linux installs a couple years ago, I starting thinking, "Well, it's about damn time. Why wasn't I doing this 5 years ago?" When you're the kind of guy who installs Linux every 6 months and has a knee-high stack of old Linux distro CD's that are good for absolutely nothing because they became obsolete months after you burned them, well you'd probably do just about anything to stop using CD's for this kind of stuff. I probably right now, somewhere in my room, have Fedora discs whose version numbers are in the single digits just sitting there collecting dust. I'm saving them for the next time I go skeet shooting.
Nowadays 1gb flash drives are basically free, so if distros could pack their images under a gig, I'd find that efficient; speedier download times and low cost availability are a little more attractive to me than multi gigabyte images that are DVD-worthy.
Don't forget the OLPC XO-1. I got one of the original XO-1 units sold to the public, and its firmware was locked pretty good and would only load signed code. In order to just gain access to the firmware, I had to electronically send my laptop's serial number to the OLPC project, and they had to send me back a special code that would unlock the firmware *temporarily* (this happened whenever the code was present on a removable storage device during boot). Upon doing that, I then further had to modify an environment variable in the firmware to disable boot security on the device once and for all. Of course, that couldn't stop someone from simply booting into the firmware prompt and re-enabling it with a single command, causing the headache all over again. And guess what? I don't even have the unlock code anymore!
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Even though it's probably not the real reason (they just want to keep the materials for themselves, obviously, which is the smart thing to do), but in politics it's often advantageous to use your opponent's rhetoric--they risk making themselves look bad if they disagree with something they themselves said earlier.
I recently bought a Touchpad, so I use WebOS. I quickly discovered that WebOS is not just a toy operating system like I thought it might be; it really works, and I actually use it. There is vibrant user development for it, it's ridiculously easy to hack and customize, and I have full root access to the Linux base. It only took me minutes to unlock everything and install the power utilities I wanted. The UI is just as good as enthusiasts have been saying it is, with an unparalleled window management and multitasking experience. The included system applications work very well (e-mail client, chat client, calendar, contacts), and synergy integration was painless to setup and works without a hitch; it took about a minute to be fully synced with my Google account, no need to customize settings on the e-mail client or anything like that.
WebOS seems to shine on devices with larger screens and that can spend more power on keeping the apps and services running (as of yet it lacks push messaging). That means it would be an ideal fit for netbooks/laptops/nettops/desktops with touchscreens, and it also is a nice fit for a tablet. On handsets, Android seems to have a clear advantage in the mobility arena, but the fact that WebOS and Android can fill different niches is vital to WebOS.
I definitely plan to continue using WebOS, and I fully support HP establishing it as an open source project as well as pledging continued support for the system. WebOS is alive and it still has plenty of places to go before it's time will end.
I was pretty much weened on FOSS since the time I was a young teenager. For a while I was stuck using both Windows and Linux due to issues regarding hardware support, but things changed rapidly so that by the time I was in college I hadn't really used Windows on any of my personal computers until Windows 7 came out (occasionally I'd dual boot XP just to play with Windows). I was and still am a free software ideologue and all-around social/economic activist.
When I finally got my first real IT job, boy was I in for a surprise. In school I and everyone I knew used Linux; we also used Linux on school servers and in computer labs (we were the comp sci students so we generally had out own computing facilities separate from the main student body). At work I discovered, naturally, that all systems ran Windows. A few execs had Macbooks because they thought they were fancy and needed an upper class image.
Company management wasn't even against using Linux. Frankly they would have done anything to cut corners on cost, including using free software (some of their commercial software was pirated anyway). The problem is we just couldn't deploy Linux. Over the years the company had developed a software infrastructure that was so heavily based on Microsoft products, we literally couldn't function without them. I used Linux whenever I could, mainly in computer maintenance, backup, diagnostics, and repair, where Linux live CDs/USBs performed spectacularly well (if you're handy with the CLI tools).
In the end, I got used to administrating a Windows environment. In many ways it's an awful thing to have to deal with, but at the end of the day you get the job done. There are many times when Windows would fail for inexplicable reasons, and you either a) had to be a programming genius to isolate and repair the problem, or b) you could just do system restore and forget about it. Worst case scenario involved doing a factory restore. Windows is severely lacking in facilities for system maintenance and repair; you basically set it up and pray that nothing goes wrong, and then when it breaks you look for a workaround. This was totally different from what I was used to administering Linux at home, where I was totally unaccustomed to any type of system failures.
That's the thing about software and businesses--the software is not the pinnacle of computing; it just has a strong institutional backing where there's always someone else working on it so you don't have to. Software doesn't work? Call the vendor. For every problem there exists an official, textbook solution that you can just follow without having to really apply yourself. This is bound to drive computing purists nuts, but a job's a job. If a company is willing to pay you full wages for handling their Windows infrastructure, it's better to just shut up and take the money. Having secure employment and working on programs you dislike is rather important compared to using only programs that you like and not having a job. You don't have to like the programs--it's called work for a reason.
Carriers were too eager to get the iPhone, so they naturally found themselves in a disadvantageous position. What they should do is stop carrying the iPhone, and if too many carriers drop it then Apple will start losing sales and start getting desperate, then they'll be forced to offer their phone at a lower cost.
Your comment about Islam is one of the stupidest things I've ever read. Before Islam came to Arabia, they were making 0 scientific advances and their civilization was in a state of wretchedness. In Arab society, tribes were constantly going to war with one another; they viewed women as property (as did Europeans), and it was popular for fathers to bury their female babies alive because they felt female children were too much of a burden.
Islam arrived with a specific platform of demanding respect toward women and expanded rights for them, forbidding the murder of female children, asserting that women are not property and have legal rights, including the right to receive inheritance and own property. One of Islam's main appeal to people is its high regard for women, which not only asks that men respect women, but also asks that women respect themselves and dress and behave modestly for the good of society. It was not until the advent of Islam that Arabs were known for having a successful and progressive civilization, which is when all the scientific advances that you are attributing to them occurred. In Muslim-majority countries where women are having their rights infringed upon (eg Saudi Arabia), Muslim women campaign for their rights not on the platform of fighting Islam, but rather their platform is that they are demanding their Islamic rights from an oppressive government that only pays lip service to Islam but isn't owning up.
I find it hilarious how women are only valued for their bodies and their sexuality in the West. Just look at your comment: "Women also wear better looking clothes, smell nicer, and have a penchant for adding things to the physical environment that make the workplace more pleasant." We're having a serious discussion about women in the workplace and already you're sexualizing them. Women go to work so they can work, not so creeps like you can admire their clothing, smell them, and feel pleasure from them being there.
Breaking news... Fedora project leader has a vagina.
Honestly I'm tired of sexism in our society. I don't give a damn if someone is a man or a woman. Period. It doesn't mean anything--it's not some amazing, wonderful thing to have a female in a position of leadership or power, nor can the same be said for a male. They're all just human beings.
Dell sold computers with FreeDOS because they had an agreement with Microsoft that they would not sell computers without an operating system, which might have meant that Dell could not have sold any personal computers without including Windows with them. Shipping computers with FreeDOS was just a loophole for people who wanted to buy cheaper computers and put Linux on them or unlicensed copies of Windows.
I prefer to think of this as Firefox 4.10 (or 3.10?)
This is quite simply about monopolization. Free market economic systems are purported to offer the lowest prices on goods and services, but the major flaw in free market economies is that they tend to form monopolies. When a monopoly forms, then the price is no longer "fair" because it can be raised and people will still buy it because there is nowhere else to get it.
This key concept of "you can't get this anywhere else" is what makes intellectual property tick. For example, if I sell a book and other publishers produce copies of that book, the price of the book will be very low on the street because competition between publishers will force it to be near the cost of production (which, for a book, is very little). Copyright comes along and says, hey, only one publisher is allowed to print this book; now that publisher can jack up the price because competition is eliminated, making the publishing business much more profitable. The free market comes up with all kinds of loopholes to resist this; for example people buy the book, read it, then sell it to someone else to try to regain some of the cost; people buy the book used and save some of the expense. Libraries buy books and lend them to people willing to wait. This effectively reduces demand for the production of the book and very (smartly) economically ensures the best use of the product with the fewest wasted resources.
Publishers, like in this case, are eyeing the used market covetously, because they only see "sales" out of context and think, "those sales must be mine." It's greed, pure and simple, and it hurts the economy/society, frankly. They want to make it so "you only buy this from me" so they can squeeze more money out of the economy. Granted, video games are not that important to society to worry if the market is being monopolized or not, but imagine if this happened with more important products? School textbook publishers try to accomplish this by frequently revising their texts and bribing schools/teachers to keep changing to the newest edition so that the older editions (used books) reduce their value or become worthless. You want to know who is worthless? Textbook publishers.
Seriously, I don't care. Open software is great, and anyone who wants to write it can go ahead and write it. Do you honestly expect me to worry about whether or not the person who wrote my software has a penis or a vagina? It's not going to make the code better.
Besides, having both genders involved will lead to more interaction between open source programmers and members of the opposite sex, which would be disastrous. Before you know it they'll be having sex with each other and producing children, and the more time they spend copulating and raising their children, the less time they will have to code. I would hate to see such great talent go to waste.
I quickly looked at the home page of each major BSD variant. OpenBSD's website was by far the ugliest. If I had to pick the best looking one I'd say NetBSD, although FreeBSD is pretty good too.
NetBSD and FreeBSD seem to be run by fairly responsible organizations of people, whereas OpenBSD is chiefly the product of one very insane man. All are great systems. :)
Knife Oracle, fork Java. It's that simple.
Java could have been so much more than it is. If Sun had GPL'd the whole thing in the 90's, Java could have become a programming platform pervasively used in Linux environments for application development, perhaps even the primary one. However, other languages came along like Python and stole all the attention, and Java is forever doomed to play second fiddle. If it wasn't for Android and its new language they call "Java", I'd say Java is dead. Yes, it's wormed its way onto all sorts of commercial devices and platforms, but get too comfy--it could easily be dumped and replaced with a number of software.
Java still has a chance to be revived, but the open source community has to take the lead and make the free software Java the real, official Java. Oracle might just get fed up with Java eventually and wish to dump it, in which case they might just GPL everything they have or spin off the project as a type of community-based foundation. Either way Java must be free software.
...install it on my netbook? Like many Slashdotters, I bought a fist generation EeePC way back when the whole netbook idea was new. I got a "surf" model that only came with 4 gigs of flash storage and nothing more, so finding an adequately small operating system to put on it was rather difficult without doing some tedious custom configurations, when all I wanted was to just surf the web. Moblin/Meego was the perfect thing because I could just download the image from their site, load it up, and boot up with wifi and web browsing. I'm hoping to get the same thing with Tizen, but I'm a little bit apprehensive about whether or not I'm still going to get that kind of support now that the project's been refactored. If they're making a source release now, then I expect to seem some builds!
For you anyone following this thread, I happened upon this article today through Digg: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2398527,00.asp
First of all, I'm aware of Iran's Internet censorship and policies. Iran is a unique case because they have a very soft form of Internet censorship; they block sites using a weak blocking method, whose weakness I'm sure they are well aware of. In terms of realpolitik this works well for Iran, because it gives the veneer of tough moral policy ensuring public welfare, and yet doesn't really stop anyone from getting access to what they want. This is not at all unlike the public policy debate in Western countries regarding topics such as to what lengths a society ought to go to protect the innocent (eg minors viewing porn) from content deemed socially or morally unacceptable, except in Iran it's openly acknowledged that the censorship covers content opposing the government's rule, whereas in the US such political designs are discretely hidden to maintain a sort of cultural illusion of "free society", a game that must be played in the US and other Western nations which may not exist in other cultures.
Iran has a policy which conforms to cultural norms, and is not meant to be a totalitarian control mechanism a la China. China takes its Internet and information control very seriously--much more seriously than Iran. China takes it to a whole other level, so let's not be fooled into thinking Iran is some kind of a totalitarian commie regime. Yes, they are staunchly theocratic, but personal freedom in Iran far exceeds a long list of modern nation-states in the world, some of which you will be surprised to find (or not) being strong allies of the US.
Having a strong domestic intranet is very good for a country's national interest and security. Any country should have robust domestic network that can serve as an alternative to foreign services. If the Internet had been invented in Iran and the majority of all Internet traffic in the world went through Iran (like it does through the US today), the US would have conniption fit. Do you have any idea how nationalistic the US is and hostile to other nations? US politicians openly state we must have the most powerful military in the world to maintain global dominance; the Internet in the US is mainly domestic and the US wants to keep it that way. Who are we to blame Iran for wanting to foster its own alternative, even if it's stated purpose is to censor foreign influence? We wouldn't like Iranians trying to change our culture, and they don't like it when we do it to them.
On a broader scale of human interest, international politics aside, local intranets are an important tool to counteracting authority. If I'm Joe Bob living in Arkansas and I'm upset that the government is imposing on me through the Internet and other media, what can I do? Use my own network--network with my peers. The little guy is Joe Bob, and big brother is the guv'mint. Let's go back to international politics. Iran has the little guy complex; the US is big brothering it up the world over. See how the logic works? The principle remains the same.
If the API for something is open and well document, that's already one major step toward implementation. I think open API's are a good thing, because when that kind of information is out in the open, proprietary services may exist, but also open source developers are more free to implement their replacements for those services or systems. This is much better than, say, having to deal with software systems that have secret and closed API's, to the extent that you can't make anything that's even compatible with it.
I became an accidental smartphone user when I was a teenager because my father worked for a wireless service provider, so it was basically cheap for us to own one. I was lucky enough to be able to own various phones at different stages of smartphone development (my first smartphone was a fat, heavy Treo, and I had owned a Palm Pilot even before having a cell phone, which, ironically, was sleek and slim since the hardware was more spartan). Since I had used PDA's like the Palm Pilot, smartphones weren't anything new or amazing to me except that they were always connected to the Internet.
As other posters have mentioned, if you are doing work that is heavily communication intensive and especially if you're traveling a lot or on the go, then smartphones are worth the money. Sometimes it's imperative that when someone sends you a text, you e-mail that text to three people, call one of them, reply to the text, go to a website and enter the information, and then look up directions to your new destination on Google Maps, all while you're sitting in your car in a parking lot with no nearby Internet access.
Now, if you're looking to save money, dumping your smartphone can easily save you a chunk of cash throughout the year. You can cut corners in various ways; if you need Internet access while traveling, take your laptop to a cafe with a hot spot or your hotel. I used to have a 3G modem for my laptop, but I ended up getting rid of it because wifi was available in so many places that it didn't justify the additional expense. Or, if it's really not necessary, just do without Internet access for a bit and wait until you get home or to the office. The Internet can wait. Get a GPS that works offline (Lenovo IdeaPad A1 tablets do this, by the way).
If you really just love mobile technology and want to play with it, get a nice wifi device such as an Android Tablet, iPad, iPod Touch, or something similar that gives you the functionality without the monthly bill. Use it at home or carry it with you and log on to hotspots.
When I was in high school and was a budding sysadmin, I was really fascinated with operating systems. I didn't just want to use Linux, but I wanted to try every OS that I could get my hands on. I tried all kinds of Linux distros, and I also spent a lot of time running FreeBSD. I also tried BeOS, but it was dead by the time I got to it.
What would be really neat is if students had access to a variety of OS's that they could play with and learn to work with, such as Linux, OpenSolaris, BSD, and of course even Windows and Mac OS. You might even try getting some of the oddball systems to run like SkyOS, Syllable, ReactOS, Haiku, FreeDOS--the more the better.
Of course, computer labs are for more than just OS experimentation, but if you set aside a couple of older boxes with multiboot or maybe just install some nice VM software somewhere I think you'll attract some inquisitive students and inspire them to learn.
Chrome does consume more memory than Firefox tab for tab, but one important thing to note about Chrome's memory usage is that even though it can take a bit of memory, you are more likely to get it back. Open up 50 tabs and close all but 1, and Chrome will shed the resources almost instantaneously.. Firefox will take longer to free up memory and won't give all of it back. This works great for me because, while I usually go long periods of time between closing the browser completely, I open and close tabs constantly, so each new tab in Chrome is like a fresh start, whereas with Firefox it's all still running in the same process.
Chrome's modular design is the real reason I use Chrome. It not only makes it faster but more reliable and efficient as well.
The only thing I don't like about Chrome is that the Linux port is not as good as the (presumably native) Windows build. I'd stick with Firefox just because it's more free and it runs beautifully on Linux.
Oh how you assume that Press TV is for US citizens... sure, they broadcast in English and are critical of the United States, but then again most of the world speaks English and is critical of the United States as well. Therefore, Press TV is generally well received worldwide; I don't really think how Americans feel about them matters that much to them.
I expect Press TV be biased, but I also expect bias from the BBC, Reuters, Associated Press, New York Times, Al Jazeera, Russia Today, and many others. Sometimes Press TV has the kind of bias that is worth paying attention to. Sometimes it doesn't.
First I should say that we ought to know a little bit more about this story before we can make a complete analysis, but as a Muslim, I will be the first to say that there is no problem with evolution. I'm not going to go into all the details of the argument about whether or not evolution explains the biological origins of man; there are mountains of evidence supporting evolution and no other plausible alternative explanations. What I would like to say is there is really no inherent conflict between believing in a Creator and accepting evolution. In Islam especially the case for conflict is weak because the Qur'an lacks a creation story as detailed as the one laid out in Genesis. Yes, the Qur'an has references to creation and even Adam and Eve (the first humans), but conspicuously absent from the Qur'an are any statements that defy the scientific view of evolution. Does the Qur'an say that Adam and Eve were put on the Earth right after the Earth was created? No. Does it say no other creatures existed or preceded humans? No. In fact, one verse of the Qur'an talks about God breathing His spirit into Adam, which some scholars have read to mean that Adam was alive prior to becoming human (in a spiritual sense), and that Adam may even have had parents instead of being materialized spontaneously. Either way there is really no timeline for creation, and Islamic theology suggests that God is *active* in creation, meaning that God didn't just create everything all at once and stopped, but that creation is a current and ongoing process (in line with evolution).
I do believe that there is no basis in Islamic tradition and culture for rejecting evolution--on the contrary, Islamic emphasis on science and knowledge would make Muslims more receptive to the idea. To me this habit of denying evolution is something that Muslim communities learned from Christian communities, and the article actually does a good job of pointing this out.
As for the lectures, what I want to know is if it's really the mere idea of evolution that is offending the students, or if the lectures contain unnecessary statements that are specifically hostile to God and religion. If the course material or the professor is unfairly preaching atheism or making wild assumptions like "God has nothing to do with evolution" then I'd say the students have some legitimate grounds to object. The article doesn't make this part of the story very clear, but at least in one way suggests that this may be what's happening.
If I were you I would not wait for Tizen or take the project seriously. Back when I bought my first netbook around 2009, my expectation was that I would use it to run Moblin, since I had read about the system and seen the demos. My expectation was that it was pretty much going to be the most awesome thing ever, and I thought it was interesting that the project was backed by Intel (now I think that it was stupid). In retrospect, Intel probably saw the project as a cheap way to get people to buy more Atom chips, but had no real interest in actually investing in the software.
Anyway, Moblin actually did make releases, which I eagerly gobbled up and loaded onto my netbook with anticipation. Every release sucked badly; it was just a shitty Linux distro hastily thrown together by a bunch of buffoons that didn't know what they were doing. The project was all hype and no elbow grease; the window manager was cool, but the overall environment was barren. My optimistic self was saying, it's OK, these are just initial releases! They're working hard on it! The project died abruptly, and Intel decided to dump the thing on Nokia, who thought that somehow it was a good idea to just merge the system with Maemo and call it Meego. I thought, "Ah, finally, the project has been rebooted and we'll see some results." I eagerly gobbled up the subsequent Meego releases. It was, in fact, no different Moblin... it has just been rebranded. They did smooth out enough of the bugs to actually make the system usable and implement some internal changes, but ultimately the system was still pitifully stagnant.
Lo and behold, they finally decided to throw in the towel, and one morning I visit Meego's website to check for a new release only to find an announcement that the project was canceled. Meego is no more, but wait! They want all the Moblin/Meego people to go follow Tizen now! It's backed by the Linux Foundation! The Linux Foundation has already proven that they can't develop shit. They're just a marketing organization that knows how to make nice little web pages.
Seeing Meego going and Tizen coming is like listening to the HURD project talking about why it switched from Mach to L4. OK, so you decided to cancel development of an unfinished project and radically redesign it and start over from scratch. We should care why? The people behind Tizen are probably right now flying to a conference to meet with the teams from HURD and Duke Nukem Forever to share development strategies.
The question is, why do we need Tizen? Every description I've read describing what Tizen is supposed to be looks like it was just copied and pasted from Palm press releases when they began developing webOS. webOS is now a mature, complete, functioning system running on big name hardware. Sure, HP royally screwed things up, but my faith is that webOS will live on. In the mean time, Android is pretty much unstoppable. Neither Android nor webOS are as open source to the extent that Tizen would be, which will probably be the one thing that keeps me following Tizen regardless, but I don't have much hope for it.
Sometimes USB boot just works too... granted, I'm not an expert on everything that makes USB booting tick, but I used work for a company with about 100 workstations that were a few years old, and all of them were able to boot what was apparently a standard USB boot disk (SystemRescueCD, to be exact). I thought, yeah, but those are new-ish machines. What are the chances that it'll boot on older machines? Well, it just so happened that we had about 30 boxes in our inventory that were of the previous generation (they were in-house-assembled Pentium 4 machines with whatever cheapo motherboard in them). All of them booted my flash stick just fine, and these machines had AGP slots, mind you. I mean, holy cow, when was the last time you saw one of those? They even had ethernet cards with coax connectors on them.
In addition to all these machines, I used the same USB boot disk with laptops of various makes and years as well as any other random box we came across. They all worked. The first computer I owned that I know for sure can boot from USB I purchased in 2004, and the machine I had before that may very well have been able to, but I had never bothered to check or try because nobody was doing it back then. Heck, even in 2004 I was still installing operating systems using floppy disks (eg FreeBSD network install).
I hear you that some older systems don't support USB boot, but nowadays there's no excuse for machines not to be able to do that. I honestly wouldn't even want to try running Ubuntu 12 on a system that was too old to support USB boot (it probably lacks the memory, cpu strength, and disk space for it). Such old machines are quickly becoming a curiosity, kind of like my old Windows 95 laptop or the Apple ][e in my closet.
When I started using USB to do Linux installs a couple years ago, I starting thinking, "Well, it's about damn time. Why wasn't I doing this 5 years ago?" When you're the kind of guy who installs Linux every 6 months and has a knee-high stack of old Linux distro CD's that are good for absolutely nothing because they became obsolete months after you burned them, well you'd probably do just about anything to stop using CD's for this kind of stuff. I probably right now, somewhere in my room, have Fedora discs whose version numbers are in the single digits just sitting there collecting dust. I'm saving them for the next time I go skeet shooting.
Nowadays 1gb flash drives are basically free, so if distros could pack their images under a gig, I'd find that efficient; speedier download times and low cost availability are a little more attractive to me than multi gigabyte images that are DVD-worthy.
Not a compressed partition, but rather a compressed file system contained in a file on the uncompressed file system!
Don't forget the OLPC XO-1. I got one of the original XO-1 units sold to the public, and its firmware was locked pretty good and would only load signed code. In order to just gain access to the firmware, I had to electronically send my laptop's serial number to the OLPC project, and they had to send me back a special code that would unlock the firmware *temporarily* (this happened whenever the code was present on a removable storage device during boot). Upon doing that, I then further had to modify an environment variable in the firmware to disable boot security on the device once and for all. Of course, that couldn't stop someone from simply booting into the firmware prompt and re-enabling it with a single command, causing the headache all over again. And guess what? I don't even have the unlock code anymore!