I'm in a union and I wouldn't have it any other way. I don't agree with everything the union does (protecting dead weight that deserves to be fired, valueing seniority more than competence), but it protects us from abuses. On balance, it's definitely good for the workers.
What scares me the most is that the police and military would be robots too. Right now, if a government loses the support of two many of its people it will be overthrown. But robotic soldiers would do an effective job of crushing any resistance, and they would not question their orders. So we would indeed be at the mercy of the 50 rich people who controlled the robots.
Maybe I can get a job in Paris Hilton's entourage.
My experience with Mandrake was that the tools were easy to use, but if they failed, they didn't give any usable error messages so you were SOL. It wouldn't handle my printer or network my two computers so I got rid of it.
Knoppix is easier to install than Mandrake, but the installer doesn't give you a lot of control. As I recall, it installed everything on one partition with the default user "knoppix", and it had a weird mix of testing and unstable packages which sometimes gave me trouble when upgrading. Maybe the situation has improved since then. The Debian installer gives the user more power, at the cost of being a pain in the ass to use.
I'd still tell any newbie to install Knoppix to the hard drive, because it has the best hardware detection of any distro I've tried and sets things up in the most sensible manner.
I would be interested in that. My wife complains about Linux and I don't want Windows. So a desktop Unix that just works would be a perfect compromise if you didn't have to blow a fortune on proprietary hardware when we already have perfectly good hardware.
Maybe someday when I have $1300 burning a hole in my pocket...
Wal-mart offers cheap prices to its customers. Windows rips them off. Wal-mart forces its partners to innovate, at least in terms of increasing productivity (UPC barcodes, RFID), Microsoft clones their product, runs them out of business, and then lets the product stagnate. How is Wal-mart far worse?
A lot of Mac zealots make the prediction that Macs will bite into MS's market share, but it never seems to happen. And it's not gonna happen - Macs are too expensive, too different from what people already know, and most users don't really give a crap about the advantages Macs offer. They'll outsell Windows about the same time Porsches outsell Camrys.
Linux systems are easy to use. They're not always easy to setup, but once they're set up there's nothing to it. It's just like using Windows, except that you have to type a password to do root activities. Presumably the Walmart systems are already set up when you get them.
I've let people who've never heard of Linux use my system, with KDE Desktop, and once I show them which icon fires up the browser, they don't need my help.
Trouble rendering some pages? Trouble rendering an awful lot of pages is more like it. I'll use dillo to browse locally stored html documentation and stuff like that (because it really is fast and small), but it's not ready for prime time yet.
You're free to write code with any license you want, and you're equally free to let code with a license you don't like languish in disuse and obscurity. That's freedom.
I've put Windows users in front of my machine running KDE. I have to tell them that the little "M" is the web browser and a few things like that, and they're fine after that.
Anyone who can handle Windows could probably handle using Linux.
If the GUI tools work for your particular hardware and OS setup, that's great. For me (last year, Mandrake 9.1) they failed - the printer wouldn't print. There was nothing to do but dig around online forums and Google. Mandrake is supposed to be an easy to use newbie distro, but when their slick GUI tools fail (and they do) you're stuck sysadminning on the command line. For me, this led to a 2:00 AM trip to Kinkos to print out a school paper and an angry girlfriend. I've had similar Linux experiences, but this was the worst.
With Knoppix that printer worked for me as easily as it did for you, btw. But things still come up that require mucking around the command-line (digital camera setup, for example). And you find yourself googling for an hour to solve a problem that could have been solved automatically.
There are good distros and there are bad distros, but a newbie can't tell which ones are which. I tried 4 distros, not counting different versions of the same one, before installing Knoppix on the hard drive. None of the other ones would auto-configure my sound card or printer, for example. And most people would actually be better of shelling out the money for Windows than wasting the time I wasted.
That's still a lot better than CUPS. At least you didn't have to become root, read files in/etc, guess which options to change, and restart the CUPS server from the command-line. My experiences with CUPS, and Linux printing in general, are the most harrowing I've had with computers.
Anyone who's techie enough to give a shit about a relational database would not be confused by a web browser with the same name. They would be referred to in totally different contexts. So the Firebird people gave a lot of crap to the Mozilla people, and made us go through another confusing name change for no good reason.
I'm using Linux on the desktop too. I've had several other people use it (with KDE), and nobody had any trouble except for one extremely technically disinclined liberal arts type. The real problem arises when they visit a website that doesn't work without IE, or they have some software that doesn't work with Linux (like the CD from a textbook, or the install CD from my DSL provider), or they have trouble with a.doc file.
The real problem is interoperability with the outside world, which means the Windows world. My wife wants MS Windows back, not because she has any problems with Linux (she likes Linux), but because she can't watch the videos at VH1's website and other problems like that.
It looks like Linux will be adopted first by big institutions.. governments and big companies (see Munich and Brazil). The employees of these institutions may not have heard of Linux, but they're not the ones who pick the OS their employer uses.
Note that the article doesn't make any claims about average people installing Linux on their computers, and it ony makes a claim that Linux adoption will be 6% in 2007. That's a long way from claiming that 2004 is The Year Of The Linux Desktop (imagine that in with the blink tag). That may not happen, but it's not absurd zealotry to predict that it will.
I do have to wonder where they got the idea that Linux is about to overtake Apple, though. Maybe they're counting servers, or counting every free Linux download.
Or Gnumeric? It's better than the Open Office spreadsheet, and I recall reading that it has all of the features that Excel does. For a user at my level, it's 100% as good as Excel.
I wasn't so thrilled with the Open Office spreadsheet and didn't even know there was a Kspread.
If the knoppix live cd is too slow, maybe they could try starting fluxbox or icewm instead of the default KDE. On a slower computer, Knoppix on CD with KDE is utterly hopeless but fluxbox is okay (in my experience).
The guy who wrote the article never even INSTALLED LINUX, and the slashdot story reads "Makes you wonder if current Linux PVR apps are just too much of a pain to get working well?"
Yeah, like it's MythTV's fault that Fedora Linux didn't recognize his lack of a floppy drive.
I have to wonder if Knoppix would have successfully automagically configured his hardware.
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I have the same book. I was wondering why they were reviewing a four year old title.
You're an idiot. Please cut off your balls so you don't contaminate the next generation.
I'm in a union and I wouldn't have it any other way. I don't agree with everything the union does (protecting dead weight that deserves to be fired, valueing seniority more than competence), but it protects us from abuses. On balance, it's definitely good for the workers.
Maybe I can get a job in Paris Hilton's entourage.
My experience with Mandrake was that the tools were easy to use, but if they failed, they didn't give any usable error messages so you were SOL. It wouldn't handle my printer or network my two computers so I got rid of it.
I'd still tell any newbie to install Knoppix to the hard drive, because it has the best hardware detection of any distro I've tried and sets things up in the most sensible manner.
Maybe someday when I have $1300 burning a hole in my pocket...
Wal-mart offers cheap prices to its customers. Windows rips them off. Wal-mart forces its partners to innovate, at least in terms of increasing productivity (UPC barcodes, RFID), Microsoft clones their product, runs them out of business, and then lets the product stagnate. How is Wal-mart far worse?
A lot of Mac zealots make the prediction that Macs will bite into MS's market share, but it never seems to happen. And it's not gonna happen - Macs are too expensive, too different from what people already know, and most users don't really give a crap about the advantages Macs offer. They'll outsell Windows about the same time Porsches outsell Camrys.
No, script kiddie, real hackers hook cat-5 cable directly to their nutsack and read the electron stream.
I've let people who've never heard of Linux use my system, with KDE Desktop, and once I show them which icon fires up the browser, they don't need my help.
Trouble rendering some pages? Trouble rendering an awful lot of pages is more like it. I'll use dillo to browse locally stored html documentation and stuff like that (because it really is fast and small), but it's not ready for prime time yet.
You're free to write code with any license you want, and you're equally free to let code with a license you don't like languish in disuse and obscurity. That's freedom.
Anyone who can handle Windows could probably handle using Linux.
..And that's why you should always use the preview button.
But my printers (this actually happened with 2 printers) are listed as supported by linuxprinting.org>. One of them came with a CD that has a GUI install tool for Linux, supported by the manufacturer (Samsung), just like Windows. Their tool successfully configured my printer, but I tried CUPS first and it failed. You can't blame the hardware when the manufacturer officially supports Linux. You can't blame Linux either - just the lack of thought or effort that goes into the UI design of a lot of free software.
With Knoppix that printer worked for me as easily as it did for you, btw. But things still come up that require mucking around the command-line (digital camera setup, for example). And you find yourself googling for an hour to solve a problem that could have been solved automatically.
There are good distros and there are bad distros, but a newbie can't tell which ones are which. I tried 4 distros, not counting different versions of the same one, before installing Knoppix on the hard drive. None of the other ones would auto-configure my sound card or printer, for example. And most people would actually be better of shelling out the money for Windows than wasting the time I wasted.
That's still a lot better than CUPS. At least you didn't have to become root, read files in /etc, guess which options to change, and restart the CUPS server from the command-line. My experiences with CUPS, and Linux printing in general, are the most harrowing I've had with computers.
Anyone who's techie enough to give a shit about a relational database would not be confused by a web browser with the same name. They would be referred to in totally different contexts. So the Firebird people gave a lot of crap to the Mozilla people, and made us go through another confusing name change for no good reason.
The real problem is interoperability with the outside world, which means the Windows world. My wife wants MS Windows back, not because she has any problems with Linux (she likes Linux), but because she can't watch the videos at VH1's website and other problems like that.
Note that the article doesn't make any claims about average people installing Linux on their computers, and it ony makes a claim that Linux adoption will be 6% in 2007. That's a long way from claiming that 2004 is The Year Of The Linux Desktop (imagine that in with the blink tag). That may not happen, but it's not absurd zealotry to predict that it will.
I do have to wonder where they got the idea that Linux is about to overtake Apple, though. Maybe they're counting servers, or counting every free Linux download.
I wasn't so thrilled with the Open Office spreadsheet and didn't even know there was a Kspread.
If the knoppix live cd is too slow, maybe they could try starting fluxbox or icewm instead of the default KDE. On a slower computer, Knoppix on CD with KDE is utterly hopeless but fluxbox is okay (in my experience).
Yeah, like it's MythTV's fault that Fedora Linux didn't recognize his lack of a floppy drive.
I have to wonder if Knoppix would have successfully automagically configured his hardware.