No, it's really simple; Israel is occupying territory that officially belongs to Palestine (at least according to the United Nations). Israel has invaded Palestine, and that is why other nations tried to intervene.
Not only is it true that Israel is occupying Palestinian territory, but they are systematically destroying what's left of Palestine in order to expand their borders, which is explicitly illegal according to international law.
Well, that's just like saying that "Germany was reacting to threats of regular military attacks" after they occupied neighboring countries. Germany invades Poland, France, etc. Poland, France, etc and their allies fight back. Germany loses.
Fast forward, Israel invades Palestine. Palestine and its allies fight back. Israel wins.
As for ubermensch and undermensh, I'm pretty sure the idea behind the occupation of Palestine is to completely remove the Arab population and substitute them with a Jewish population. Not much of a difference there, eh buddy?
When you invade a neighboring country, a couple things happen: a) people start violently resisting the occupation and b) your other neighbors suddenly hate you and make a military move against you.
What's funny is that, Spanish grammar being different from English grammar, "no va" doesn't just mean "no go", but literally translates as "it DOES NOT go", which is a very clear statement, lol.
The Apache and BSD licenses are the purest form of what OSS stands for.
That has never been true, and that is why the GPL even exists. The GPL is saying that in order for freedom to be true/real, then the community should not share code with people who are going to close the code and essentially take the software away from the community. By binding people to give back what they contribute to open source, open source stops being a lost cause.
In case you haven't noticed, GNU/Linux gets insane levels of support from the community at large, with several major companies with vested interest in the software contributing enormous financial backing. It's OSS that works and freedom you can benefit from now and forever.
BSD and Apache are good products, but they get held back. The FreeBSD foundation slaves away to build a system that Apple will take and close after adding their own improvements. If FreeBSD wants those improvements, they have to write them themselves, which means lots of work being duplicated, and that is exactly what stifled innovation in the proprietary software market and stifles innovation with BSD, which could have gone leaps and bounds ahead with improvements from its proprietary derivations. Also, don't forget that BSD relies heavily on major components of GNU.
For being "purer" OSS, BSD is in many ways riding the wake of GNU, and sure they do lots of good, original work, but GNU gets there, and the popularity and completeness of GNU is what enables BSD to be a successful platform. If you don't think that's true, show me a BSD distribution that doesn't use GCC, or tell me why all the BSD systems actively maintain Linux binary compatibility and not vice versa.
That's not really true because the quest and puzzle data could just be proprietary data/modules/content/whatever that they store on the server and keep separate from the open source implementation of the game. That means anyone can be free to develop free content and create a game of their own based on the free code, which has already been done quite spectacularly with a number of games such as Quake.
Labeling a release based on the date is not as useful as some people think. Sure, it lets you know which releases are newer/older, and it gives you a reasonable idea of which ones might be the most up-to-date, but it has some major drawbacks.
One of the problems is, if people can't remember a number like 26, I'm not sure how they are going to remember a number like 2008-07-16. Also, it forces people who want to know about kernels to become a history expert. Does anyone actually know off the top of their heads when 2.2 was released? Do you know for how many successive months 2.2 kernels were released? What about times when 2.2 releases were still being made alongside releases of later kernel versions like 2.4? When you have an arbitrary number like 2.2, you get a basic idea for what the program is. If you're given a date, you start to lose your idea of what program exactly we are talking about.
That stereotypical "women's interests" are less valued and thus less rewarding than stereotypical "men's interests."
Personally I always thought of it as the other way around. Culture didn't force women to have less valuable interests, but rather it took interests that women already had and devalued them socially. So now you have a bunch of people running around and freaking out trying to force all of society into a "superior" masculine role.
In a male dominated society, of course you'd expect a widespread belief that male interests and are superior and therefore "more rewarding" and "valuable". So as you see, these gender quotas are just symptoms of a very deep rooted form of misogyny that is so pervasive that even women buy into it.
"Obviously, AOL's software is terrible and causes tons of issues whenever I need to fix their computer. Fortunately, the Mac version is better and doesn't take over the system as much as the Windows version does."
You know, there once was a time when I had no choice but to use AOL because my dad was too stubborn/backwards to change anything. One of the things I hated the most was the client.
Interestingly enough, a few months prior to leaving AOL, I got the chance to use an alternative client they had called "aol dialer" or something like that. It was a minimal client; it connected you and then sat in the tray (that's about all it did). I was super happy with this change, and I think that if your family finds it useful to have AOL service, aoldial is worth a look. All of their content seems to have been moved onto their web portal anyway, and considering that you can check your mail account with IMAP, there appears to be no reason to use their software anymore.
To be honest, I text while I'm behind the wheel (I do it all the time). I've never been in any near accidents because of it, so I never saw any kind of danger.
Here are some things to keep in mind:
First of all, you have to have the discipline to give the driving first priority over texting. That means you have to be patient enough to have long delays in the composition of your message, which might include stopping the process completely while you drive.
Second, you have to avoid looking at the phone as much as possible. This means you have to memorize the position of the letters and push them without looking if you can, or glance at the keys for only a moment to confirm the position. That means you're watching the road 98% of the time, and the other 2% is spent glancing at the phone. If this seems weird, consider that we often glance around while driving, usually for reasons not directly related to the task of safe driving (eg you see something on the side of the road, you're reading street signs). Using T9 is worse for this purpose since you have to check every word--try getting a QWERTY phone. Another note about this is that you should be holding your phone in front of you so that it's in your field of vision and the glancing takes as little time as possible (you can also still see the road with your peripheral vision).
There are plenty of opportunities to optimizing your texting, like sitting idly at stoplights, stuck in near 0 mph traffic jams, etc. You can also text important things immediately before you depart and right after you arrive at your destination.
TEXT WITH ONE HAND ONLY
If you practice safe text, everything should turn out OK in the end, and it's not nearly as dangerous as it sounds. Remember that when you are talking on the phone with someone, the act DEMANDS your attention since it feels wrong/rude to ignore the other person for a length of time or put them on hold constantly while you have to focus on driving. Texting demands no retention of your attention, so you can feel comfortable setting it aside whenever necessary.
There may be nothing quite like Photoshop, but there is actually Photoshop. Even though it's a Windows program, it runs just fine on Linux.:) Check the application database on winehq.org if you don't believe me; they purpose Photoshop CS2 to be 100% functional on wine with no special settings or configuration needed.
It's actually not that hard, although it probably seemed that way to us when we were kids.
As an adult I went back and played the original; it's a very different experience. My child self never got past level 2.
Even without knowledge of the rest of the game, I was able to play through at a normal pace in well under an hour. In reality the whole game reasonably takes 30-40 minutes.
Just to agree with some of the other posters; Windows 2000 was an amazingly fantastic time to be a windows user. Somebody on here stated that 2k was bad simply because Microsoft was trying to market ME to home users at around the same time, but I don't see how that makes 2k bad.
Lots of people here are discussing XP as the upgrade path from ME, but I don't believe that at all. EVERYBODY I knew who had used ME jumped ship years before XP came out. They either reverted to Windows 98 Second Edition or upgraded to Windows 2000. Don't forget that Windows 98 was selling very well at the time and was liked for its stability (compared to 95 and ME) and adored for its compatibility (lots of people were still avoiding NT at the time).
The way things worked out, it's as if ME never existed. People were upgrading from 98SE directly to XP, and that's only if they didn't have 2000 already (those who did avoided XP for a good couple years after it came out).
Looking back on all this, it strikes me as a bit humorous how, with the release of every MS Operating System, there seems to be this little game of "what can we do to avoid upgrading?"
It may be that Windows 95 really was their high point since it seemed to have the best reception.
This review is rather good on Fedora; I'm actually rather relieved to see that it doesn't mention very much about it. As a Fedora advocate, I like to think that Fedora makes an excellent, high quality general-purpose system, and part of fulfilling that role is not getting in the way of the user; the user shouldn't really have anything to complain about, and conversely doesn't necessarily need to find anything noteworthy about the system.
Also I hate to see nit-picky analysts pit one distro against one another (eg Ubuntu vs Fedora) for silly reasons. Not that it's bad to compare systems, but if you spend enough time on the Linux desktop you realize that all distros are the same--same kernel, same libraries, same programs. The only difference really is the presentation (including administrative tools).
Can't wait for Fedora 9, by the way... only a few days left to go.:-)
How long the battery lasts depends on what you are doing with the Laptop. When I'm chatting online over the wifi with the backlight on, the battery lasts about 4 hours.
Heck, you could reimplement email over this without massive difficulty.
In reality I think it was one of the first things they implemented in Jabber. A lot of clients, especially the hardcore jabber clients, have different messaging modes: one mode composes a single message, another mode opens up a little chatbox. If you examine the former, you'll find that it's exactly like e-mail, although really it's just a jabber message. Everybody ends up using the chatbox because that's what jabber is for, and many popular clients (eg Pidgin) have only that.
In terms of server and protocol, in my opinion Jabber is fully able to do e-mail. In fact, I'm sure Jabber servers already have e-mail gateways. You just need a client that operates in a manner that implements e-mail as we are used to; for example, most clients just pop up offline messages as soon as you connect, or mark them on your roster instead of presenting you with a stored list of messages that you can manipulate mailbox style.
This would be fantastic news if I were still downloading MP3's on a dialup connection. Nowadays the Internet is faster, hard drives are bigger, and I want FLAC. I don't think this law is going to help FLAC users.
I wonder how they would feel if a Muslim scholar asked to speak there. I have listened to lectures by quite a few scholars who had PhD's in hard sciences (such as biochemistry), and as a Muslim I'd say our attitude towards science is that science is invaluable and deserves serious attention; all of my peers are graduate students or professionals. Mostly doctors and engineers.
...if only to see the look on the faces of all those teenage girls who log in one day to find their page is missing its background, most of the images, and half their personal photographs due to the removal of "pornographic content."
I have to admit I'm a Fedora user, something that took my by surprise in recent years, but as far as Linux distributions go, Fedora leaves little to be desired.
I started using Linux way back in the day with RedHat 6.0, purchased in a box at Office Depot (back when such a thing were possible--they even had FreeBSD in a box). Actually, the first distributions I purchased was Mandrake because it "looked easy," but RedHat started looking easier after Mandrake's X server would never stop crashing, so I exchanged the two in the store.
I was pleased with RedHat. It was stable and robust--a solid, no-nonsense Unix clone. I used it faithfully for some time until I found out I could get SuSE through my school free of charge (back when SuSE came in a giant box and cost an arm). Getting excited about SuSE's advanced configuration tools and massive package repository (on CD), I never looked back. A year or two later I married BSD and only tried Linux distros occasionally.
I kept trying RedHat back when it was just RedHat, pining for the golden days of 6.0, when a full install was only half a gig and everything ran full speed on my 586 with 40mb of RAM. RedHat got huge faster than I was buying new computers, so I threw up my hands in resignation and basically never used any Linux distro again because of this perplexing resource-gobbling problem.
As I sat in my BSD bunker, I kept reading the news and seeing all the delicious looking technology advancements made by Linux. When 2.6 was released, I was frothing at the mouth--this was something to take seriously. I vowed to get back into Linux, but didn't do much about it for a long time.
One day I participated in a programming competition hosted by the ACM, and I noticed all the machines ran Fedora. I have to admit it was rather impressive to look at, and something about it felt rather nice and attractive, so I went ahead and downloaded it at home.
Fedora was a pleasant surprise to an old Linux expatriate. I frequently dabbled in other distros after that, but I always went back to Fedora. It wasn't until Ubuntu became fancy/popular that I was able to run another distro for months at a time, so I did the Fedora/Ubuntu shuffle, basically using them both based on whichever made a more recent release.
Just recently, after comparing Gutsy Gibbon on my laptop to Fedora 8, Fedora was just the clear winner. For an experimental technology distribution, Fedora seems to garner remarkable stability--I've had Ubuntu installations trip over their own feet and muck up everything, but no such problem with Fedora.
Fedora regularly offers things that other distros don't touch. The default setup uses LVM. Strong SELinux out of the box and a tough software firewall turned on by default. Hardened userland settings, like non-administrative users having no sbin in their path. Fedora may seem like "Linux for dummies" since their team focuses so much on ease of use and targetting a general Desktop audience, but don't be fooled... this is not your Grandpa's unix. Fedora 8 sweetens the deal with much improved desktop front end and including some GPL Java that isn't just freaking GCJ.
So, for those of you who are reading this and never once tried Fedora, or tried it several releases ago but not recently, I urge you to give it a look.
Proof that the GPL and BSD licenses are similar in spirit is that they both create a foundation for Free software; both are OSI approved. BSD and GPL lovers differ over how best to deliver the freedoms they are seeking, but that means the difference comes through implementation, not spirit.
Yeah, but mention Linux and all of the sudden there is something wrong with you. I used to spend a lot of time on the FreeBSD channel on Freenode (technically "unofficial", but the developers use it), and it's a joke. There is so much operator-sanctioned abuse of GNU/Linux users, and I've seen people who stand up to the abuse get banned.
In fact, your entire post is basically a targeted smear against GNU/FSF. If FreeBSD isn't your religion, then why are you bitching so much about specific clauses in GPLv3 and pandering to common misconceptions about GPL? Why do you extol the virtues of your own religion (aka software philosophy) while lying about it and saying the code is "no strings attached"? The BSD license is more lax than the GPL, but they're similar in spirit. There are some strings (namely, the attribution requirement).
FreeBSD is not boring. It's excellent--a complete operating system that is so well organized and documented that it is truly exciting. I've been a dedicated BSD user since I first discovered unix, and it's people like you that are poisoning our community by feeding this grudge match between us and one of our greatest supporters and allies (do you have any idea how much GPL code is distributed as a part of FreeBSD?). You're not insightful; you're a troll.
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No, it's really simple; Israel is occupying territory that officially belongs to Palestine (at least according to the United Nations). Israel has invaded Palestine, and that is why other nations tried to intervene.
Not only is it true that Israel is occupying Palestinian territory, but they are systematically destroying what's left of Palestine in order to expand their borders, which is explicitly illegal according to international law.
Well, that's just like saying that "Germany was reacting to threats of regular military attacks" after they occupied neighboring countries. Germany invades Poland, France, etc. Poland, France, etc and their allies fight back. Germany loses.
Fast forward, Israel invades Palestine. Palestine and its allies fight back. Israel wins.
As for ubermensch and undermensh, I'm pretty sure the idea behind the occupation of Palestine is to completely remove the Arab population and substitute them with a Jewish population. Not much of a difference there, eh buddy?
When you invade a neighboring country, a couple things happen: a) people start violently resisting the occupation and b) your other neighbors suddenly hate you and make a military move against you.
What's funny is that, Spanish grammar being different from English grammar, "no va" doesn't just mean "no go", but literally translates as "it DOES NOT go", which is a very clear statement, lol.
The Apache and BSD licenses are the purest form of what OSS stands for.
That has never been true, and that is why the GPL even exists. The GPL is saying that in order for freedom to be true/real, then the community should not share code with people who are going to close the code and essentially take the software away from the community. By binding people to give back what they contribute to open source, open source stops being a lost cause.
In case you haven't noticed, GNU/Linux gets insane levels of support from the community at large, with several major companies with vested interest in the software contributing enormous financial backing. It's OSS that works and freedom you can benefit from now and forever.
BSD and Apache are good products, but they get held back. The FreeBSD foundation slaves away to build a system that Apple will take and close after adding their own improvements. If FreeBSD wants those improvements, they have to write them themselves, which means lots of work being duplicated, and that is exactly what stifled innovation in the proprietary software market and stifles innovation with BSD, which could have gone leaps and bounds ahead with improvements from its proprietary derivations. Also, don't forget that BSD relies heavily on major components of GNU.
For being "purer" OSS, BSD is in many ways riding the wake of GNU, and sure they do lots of good, original work, but GNU gets there, and the popularity and completeness of GNU is what enables BSD to be a successful platform. If you don't think that's true, show me a BSD distribution that doesn't use GCC, or tell me why all the BSD systems actively maintain Linux binary compatibility and not vice versa.
That's not really true because the quest and puzzle data could just be proprietary data/modules/content/whatever that they store on the server and keep separate from the open source implementation of the game. That means anyone can be free to develop free content and create a game of their own based on the free code, which has already been done quite spectacularly with a number of games such as Quake.
Labeling a release based on the date is not as useful as some people think. Sure, it lets you know which releases are newer/older, and it gives you a reasonable idea of which ones might be the most up-to-date, but it has some major drawbacks.
One of the problems is, if people can't remember a number like 26, I'm not sure how they are going to remember a number like 2008-07-16. Also, it forces people who want to know about kernels to become a history expert. Does anyone actually know off the top of their heads when 2.2 was released? Do you know for how many successive months 2.2 kernels were released? What about times when 2.2 releases were still being made alongside releases of later kernel versions like 2.4? When you have an arbitrary number like 2.2, you get a basic idea for what the program is. If you're given a date, you start to lose your idea of what program exactly we are talking about.
That stereotypical "women's interests" are less valued and thus less rewarding than stereotypical "men's interests."
Personally I always thought of it as the other way around. Culture didn't force women to have less valuable interests, but rather it took interests that women already had and devalued them socially. So now you have a bunch of people running around and freaking out trying to force all of society into a "superior" masculine role.
In a male dominated society, of course you'd expect a widespread belief that male interests and are superior and therefore "more rewarding" and "valuable". So as you see, these gender quotas are just symptoms of a very deep rooted form of misogyny that is so pervasive that even women buy into it.
"Obviously, AOL's software is terrible and causes tons of issues whenever I need to fix their computer. Fortunately, the Mac version is better and doesn't take over the system as much as the Windows version does."
You know, there once was a time when I had no choice but to use AOL because my dad was too stubborn/backwards to change anything. One of the things I hated the most was the client.
Interestingly enough, a few months prior to leaving AOL, I got the chance to use an alternative client they had called "aol dialer" or something like that. It was a minimal client; it connected you and then sat in the tray (that's about all it did). I was super happy with this change, and I think that if your family finds it useful to have AOL service, aoldial is worth a look. All of their content seems to have been moved onto their web portal anyway, and considering that you can check your mail account with IMAP, there appears to be no reason to use their software anymore.
To be honest, I text while I'm behind the wheel (I do it all the time). I've never been in any near accidents because of it, so I never saw any kind of danger.
Here are some things to keep in mind:
First of all, you have to have the discipline to give the driving first priority over texting. That means you have to be patient enough to have long delays in the composition of your message, which might include stopping the process completely while you drive.
Second, you have to avoid looking at the phone as much as possible. This means you have to memorize the position of the letters and push them without looking if you can, or glance at the keys for only a moment to confirm the position. That means you're watching the road 98% of the time, and the other 2% is spent glancing at the phone. If this seems weird, consider that we often glance around while driving, usually for reasons not directly related to the task of safe driving (eg you see something on the side of the road, you're reading street signs). Using T9 is worse for this purpose since you have to check every word--try getting a QWERTY phone. Another note about this is that you should be holding your phone in front of you so that it's in your field of vision and the glancing takes as little time as possible (you can also still see the road with your peripheral vision).
There are plenty of opportunities to optimizing your texting, like sitting idly at stoplights, stuck in near 0 mph traffic jams, etc. You can also text important things immediately before you depart and right after you arrive at your destination.
TEXT WITH ONE HAND ONLY
If you practice safe text, everything should turn out OK in the end, and it's not nearly as dangerous as it sounds. Remember that when you are talking on the phone with someone, the act DEMANDS your attention since it feels wrong/rude to ignore the other person for a length of time or put them on hold constantly while you have to focus on driving. Texting demands no retention of your attention, so you can feel comfortable setting it aside whenever necessary.
There may be nothing quite like Photoshop, but there is actually Photoshop. Even though it's a Windows program, it runs just fine on Linux. :) Check the application database on winehq.org if you don't believe me; they purpose Photoshop CS2 to be 100% functional on wine with no special settings or configuration needed.
It's actually not that hard, although it probably seemed that way to us when we were kids.
As an adult I went back and played the original; it's a very different experience. My child self never got past level 2.
Even without knowledge of the rest of the game, I was able to play through at a normal pace in well under an hour. In reality the whole game reasonably takes 30-40 minutes.
Just to agree with some of the other posters; Windows 2000 was an amazingly fantastic time to be a windows user. Somebody on here stated that 2k was bad simply because Microsoft was trying to market ME to home users at around the same time, but I don't see how that makes 2k bad.
Lots of people here are discussing XP as the upgrade path from ME, but I don't believe that at all. EVERYBODY I knew who had used ME jumped ship years before XP came out. They either reverted to Windows 98 Second Edition or upgraded to Windows 2000. Don't forget that Windows 98 was selling very well at the time and was liked for its stability (compared to 95 and ME) and adored for its compatibility (lots of people were still avoiding NT at the time).
The way things worked out, it's as if ME never existed. People were upgrading from 98SE directly to XP, and that's only if they didn't have 2000 already (those who did avoided XP for a good couple years after it came out).
Looking back on all this, it strikes me as a bit humorous how, with the release of every MS Operating System, there seems to be this little game of "what can we do to avoid upgrading?"
It may be that Windows 95 really was their high point since it seemed to have the best reception.
Step 1: Install Fedora 9
OK, all done!
This review is rather good on Fedora; I'm actually rather relieved to see that it doesn't mention very much about it. As a Fedora advocate, I like to think that Fedora makes an excellent, high quality general-purpose system, and part of fulfilling that role is not getting in the way of the user; the user shouldn't really have anything to complain about, and conversely doesn't necessarily need to find anything noteworthy about the system. Also I hate to see nit-picky analysts pit one distro against one another (eg Ubuntu vs Fedora) for silly reasons. Not that it's bad to compare systems, but if you spend enough time on the Linux desktop you realize that all distros are the same--same kernel, same libraries, same programs. The only difference really is the presentation (including administrative tools). Can't wait for Fedora 9, by the way... only a few days left to go. :-)
Good to hear... I got tired of looking at partially unique ones.
How long the battery lasts depends on what you are doing with the Laptop. When I'm chatting online over the wifi with the backlight on, the battery lasts about 4 hours.
Aren't A, B, and D the same?
You may not know this, but RMS actually speaks Spanish.
Heck, you could reimplement email over this without massive difficulty.
In reality I think it was one of the first things they implemented in Jabber. A lot of clients, especially the hardcore jabber clients, have different messaging modes: one mode composes a single message, another mode opens up a little chatbox. If you examine the former, you'll find that it's exactly like e-mail, although really it's just a jabber message. Everybody ends up using the chatbox because that's what jabber is for, and many popular clients (eg Pidgin) have only that.
In terms of server and protocol, in my opinion Jabber is fully able to do e-mail. In fact, I'm sure Jabber servers already have e-mail gateways. You just need a client that operates in a manner that implements e-mail as we are used to; for example, most clients just pop up offline messages as soon as you connect, or mark them on your roster instead of presenting you with a stored list of messages that you can manipulate mailbox style.
This would be fantastic news if I were still downloading MP3's on a dialup connection. Nowadays the Internet is faster, hard drives are bigger, and I want FLAC. I don't think this law is going to help FLAC users.
I wonder how they would feel if a Muslim scholar asked to speak there. I have listened to lectures by quite a few scholars who had PhD's in hard sciences (such as biochemistry), and as a Muslim I'd say our attitude towards science is that science is invaluable and deserves serious attention; all of my peers are graduate students or professionals. Mostly doctors and engineers.
...if only to see the look on the faces of all those teenage girls who log in one day to find their page is missing its background, most of the images, and half their personal photographs due to the removal of "pornographic content."
I have to admit I'm a Fedora user, something that took my by surprise in recent years, but as far as Linux distributions go, Fedora leaves little to be desired.
I started using Linux way back in the day with RedHat 6.0, purchased in a box at Office Depot (back when such a thing were possible--they even had FreeBSD in a box). Actually, the first distributions I purchased was Mandrake because it "looked easy," but RedHat started looking easier after Mandrake's X server would never stop crashing, so I exchanged the two in the store.
I was pleased with RedHat. It was stable and robust--a solid, no-nonsense Unix clone. I used it faithfully for some time until I found out I could get SuSE through my school free of charge (back when SuSE came in a giant box and cost an arm). Getting excited about SuSE's advanced configuration tools and massive package repository (on CD), I never looked back. A year or two later I married BSD and only tried Linux distros occasionally.
I kept trying RedHat back when it was just RedHat, pining for the golden days of 6.0, when a full install was only half a gig and everything ran full speed on my 586 with 40mb of RAM. RedHat got huge faster than I was buying new computers, so I threw up my hands in resignation and basically never used any Linux distro again because of this perplexing resource-gobbling problem.
As I sat in my BSD bunker, I kept reading the news and seeing all the delicious looking technology advancements made by Linux. When 2.6 was released, I was frothing at the mouth--this was something to take seriously. I vowed to get back into Linux, but didn't do much about it for a long time.
One day I participated in a programming competition hosted by the ACM, and I noticed all the machines ran Fedora. I have to admit it was rather impressive to look at, and something about it felt rather nice and attractive, so I went ahead and downloaded it at home.
Fedora was a pleasant surprise to an old Linux expatriate. I frequently dabbled in other distros after that, but I always went back to Fedora. It wasn't until Ubuntu became fancy/popular that I was able to run another distro for months at a time, so I did the Fedora/Ubuntu shuffle, basically using them both based on whichever made a more recent release.
Just recently, after comparing Gutsy Gibbon on my laptop to Fedora 8, Fedora was just the clear winner. For an experimental technology distribution, Fedora seems to garner remarkable stability--I've had Ubuntu installations trip over their own feet and muck up everything, but no such problem with Fedora.
Fedora regularly offers things that other distros don't touch. The default setup uses LVM. Strong SELinux out of the box and a tough software firewall turned on by default. Hardened userland settings, like non-administrative users having no sbin in their path. Fedora may seem like "Linux for dummies" since their team focuses so much on ease of use and targetting a general Desktop audience, but don't be fooled... this is not your Grandpa's unix. Fedora 8 sweetens the deal with much improved desktop front end and including some GPL Java that isn't just freaking GCJ.
So, for those of you who are reading this and never once tried Fedora, or tried it several releases ago but not recently, I urge you to give it a look.
Proof that the GPL and BSD licenses are similar in spirit is that they both create a foundation for Free software; both are OSI approved. BSD and GPL lovers differ over how best to deliver the freedoms they are seeking, but that means the difference comes through implementation, not spirit.
We dont give a shit if you like Vista.
Yeah, but mention Linux and all of the sudden there is something wrong with you. I used to spend a lot of time on the FreeBSD channel on Freenode (technically "unofficial", but the developers use it), and it's a joke. There is so much operator-sanctioned abuse of GNU/Linux users, and I've seen people who stand up to the abuse get banned.
In fact, your entire post is basically a targeted smear against GNU/FSF. If FreeBSD isn't your religion, then why are you bitching so much about specific clauses in GPLv3 and pandering to common misconceptions about GPL? Why do you extol the virtues of your own religion (aka software philosophy) while lying about it and saying the code is "no strings attached"? The BSD license is more lax than the GPL, but they're similar in spirit. There are some strings (namely, the attribution requirement).
FreeBSD is not boring. It's excellent--a complete operating system that is so well organized and documented that it is truly exciting. I've been a dedicated BSD user since I first discovered unix, and it's people like you that are poisoning our community by feeding this grudge match between us and one of our greatest supporters and allies (do you have any idea how much GPL code is distributed as a part of FreeBSD?). You're not insightful; you're a troll.