How exactly is he a luddite? According to wikipedia a luddite is someone who protests a certain technology in fear of said technology undercutting their job. It originated, according to wikipedia, from nitters and textile worker being in fear for their job as the industrial revolution took hold in england. The grandparent is simply fearing for his safety. This is not the same as luddism! Personally, I would call the industry behind nuclear power luddites - they constantly lobby against researching real green, sustainable technologies for fear of losing what's left of their foothold in the western power community. Burrying waste is NOT a technological innovation, it's a kludge!
That said, I'm all for research more efficient re-seeding nuclear fission plants. I'm not for nuclear fission as an end-all solution, rather a bridge between our current non-sustainable mode of energy production and whatever future technologies we figure out (fusion, hydrogren-based power infrastructure, etc). Keep in mind, nuclear fission is just as non-sustainable as coal, oil, or natural gas - there are finite supplies of fissionable material on earth.
In my experience, Gnome works find from ports in FreeBSD. I really haven't noticed any major differences between my Gentoo portage gnome install and my freebsd gnome install since 2.4.
Really that hard? As far as the rest of the complaints go, I agree 95.342%. Microsoft's decision to not show extensions, even though their system of file recognition relies on extentions was something i never understood...well...i can understand it...but i don't like it. They start with big folders because they want to show off their improved thumbnail view. They want you to say, "ooo...pretty..." I don't see that much resemblence between the spacial nautilus and explorer. Oh, if you want the "classic" explorer, go to run, then type explorer. You'll have tree view, list of files, etc.
which is what bugs me most about anybody thinking that gays or autistic people are "normal"
Depending on your sample. If your sample includes only west hollywood, gay is going to be the norm. If your sample includes some autistic commune in northern california, then autism is going to be the norm. If your sample includes urban china, then doing tai chi every morning is going to be the norm. If you take the entire world as a sample, there's not going to much of an identifiable norm outside of being a member of the species homo sapiens and general actions/habits associated with that. (i.e, "Well...walking seems normal...and eating...and breathing). However, Gays and Autistic people would definitely not be normal. But then again...neither would being from Texas. Honestly, I think being from Texas is a bigger mental disorder than autism.
I think the problem with the word normal and how society uses it these days is that normal is more and more being used to mean "ideal" rather than "average". And when average is the ideal...we kinda have nothing to shoot for.
"Apple didn't do it, and because they made that decision, it's the right one. Let me rationalize my brand loyalty..."
The point is providing a better product for the consumer at minimal additional cost - that's the goal of capitalism, right? I bet if they did include ogg and/or FLAC support, less geeks would poo-poo them as a heavy-handed proprietary company and they would have sunk even deeper into the geek niche. Right now they still kind of stradle that niche awkwardly, one foot firmly in the elitist mac-camp, and the other slightly in the open-source *nix camp. They would solidify the geek market even more.
You're not in the demographic for this player. You're an apple fan boy - you subscribed (based soley upon your response here) to the whole iLife bullshit that Jobs is pushing. While it's a neat idea, it's a highly marginalized utopian dream that will only be reality for elitists. A real digital life style would enable all things electronic to sync and talk to each other - not just apple producs. To Apple's defense, though, we have the opening of Rendezvous...and...little else.
Assuming you really DO want an mp3 player that does all that, but only with a small percentage of computers out there, then the iPod is the only answer for you. Personally, I wanted an mp3 player that was cheaper, didn't look like a large gel-cap full of milk, and i could transfer songs to from any computer using just about any operating system i wanted, without any hastle. So i got the Rio Karma. It was the right solution for my problem. Not to mention it's ability to play more Codecs (MP3, Ogg, FLAC, and WMA), with better sound quality than the iPod (google around, the actual tests are out there). As i am not a slave to one operating system, one brand, one codec, and certainly not one single computer, the iPod just ain't my cup 'o tea.
And as far as the iTunes Music Store goes...fuck that noise. I don't want DRM-encumbered filth on my comp. audiolunchbox for me. Better artists there, anyway.
What you'll see if you look a little deeper is that Mr. Marcus, as with most arm-chair libertarian economists, has nothing of the sort, this is from his blog:
About Me
bkMarcus is an amateur political economist with no formal education in the subject. He is a house husband, a faculty spouse, a dilettante, and a layabout. Once upon a time, he made a fair living as a web developer. If you accuse him of being descended from entrenched Establishment Keynesians, he will deny it!
That said, I don't think this discounts what he says. He makes some very interesting points. I always wonder what this country would be like if we had a true open market...not sure if it would be better or worse.
Because no one group of people is actually normal. Normal will most likely always be a relative term: relative to an individual, which will be relative to culture, which will be relative to the reactions of society to itself, which is constantly changing. The idea of normality doesn't actually exist outside of statistics, it just a social invention to guage one experience against another.
Define "nerd". Then define "geek". I'll help you out a little here, and take webster's definition:
nerd - an unstylish, unattractive, or socially
inept person; especially : one slavishly devoted to intellectual or academic pursuits
geek - 1 : a carnival performer often billed as a wild man whose act usually includes biting the head off a live chicken or snake
2 : a person often of an intellectual bent who is disapproved of
Personally, I would rather be a nerd than a geek. According to websets, a geek is only often intelecual, whereas a nerd is especially academic/intellectual. And we all know being unstylish is TOTALLY in right now. So you can be a nerd, be totally unstylish, and be completely hip!! It's a win-win-win situation! THREE WINS!!!
just once i want to sit my mom down in front of a solaris machine and video tape her trying to bring up netscape or mozilla. I bet it would be hiarious. Does that make me a geek? A mean Geek? Just mean?
You know...I've got the same mouse...and i love it...but looking at it...it really does look like a breast. wtf. Now...as far as filling your hand goes...i guess you have smaller hands than me. Good mouse, though.
Solaris is actually a fun mix of BSD and Sys V! As far as i know, AIX and HP/UX are pretty much as pure Sys V as you can get, though i'm sure they have some BSD additions as well, like TCP/IP and whatnot.
Speaking of which, did this strike anyone else as a two-button, non-translucent version of the mac mouse? Well...with a racing stripe and a scroll wheel.
I'm using the logitech MX 500, and it's mouse buttons also run the length of the mouse. The only actual clicky part, though, is at your fingertips. However, the buttons are just one homogenous length of plastic from the front of the mouse, to the back. Damn fine mouse, though - definitely recommend it.
I would imagine this microsoft mouse is probably similar. It would make no sense to have the entire button be clickable. Microsoft may be corrupt, but they're not stupid.
I'm also on gentoo, i get the same "The image "http://www.navarre.com/admaterials/artwork/805529/805529762251-072-sRGB.jpg" cannot be displayed, because it contains errors." But i'm also using the binary version of firefox (opteron here, and i wanted a working flash pluggin, so the bin is the only way to go). Gotta be a library issue.
When was the last time you broke a gentoo system? Is this personal dogma built upon one encounter two years ago, or is the recent? A broken package simply won't install. It does not, by itself, break a system. I'm actually running gentoo on an amd64, and i've hand-keyworded many programs to get them to install (i.e. add ~amd64 to the arch line). The system's solid. I would not think twice about installing it on my mom's computer. However...fedora would drive her insane. Anything RPM based would drive her insane. I think there are far more broken, decentralized, home-rolled RPM builds out there that could potentially mess things up. Atleast with gentoo you have a centralized repository for programs - not quite as well tested as debian's - but quite thoroughly tested. I would say there are more broken RPMs (in a relative sense, that is, % of broken RPMs relative to the total number of RPMs available on the internet) than there are broken ebuilds (again, % broken ebuilds relative to number to ebuilds around, including those on break my gentoo - to be fair).
You'll be accepted by the truely skilled, sure. But there's an aristocratic element to geekdom as well. Actually i differentiate the skilled (nerds, nerdom) with the unskilled, aristocrats (geeks, geekdom). Geeks are more willing to discount you simply because you threaten their place in the subculture, nerds will respect your skills. Example: Debian users discount gentoo users as knowledgable simply beacuse they use gentoo. Any reasonable person can conclude that they see Gentoo as a technological threat to Debian's throne. So, instead of looking at it's merits, they say it's the "ricer distro" or complain that it's impossible to keep up to date, no one should use it, if you use it you're a fucktard, etc. Same thing with geeks who use linux looking down their nose at geeks who use macs. Or vice versa. Quite frankly, I know some pretty brilliant computer scientists who use macs, and some brilliant computer scientists who use linux, and some who use both - even *gasp* windows. A nerd sees a computer as a way to get work done, a geek sees a computer as a way to enlarge their penis and climb up the ladder of their covetted little subculture.
As a scientist, i trust in particles, atoms, and general physical relativity to explain, in terms that make sense to me, how the world works. But these very don't go very far beyond the imagination. They are mental models that we use to represent whatever really is out there, beyond our eye. The first thing you learn in general chemistry is that molecules do NOT really look like they do in your book. Elections are not really in neat little concentric circles, and do not follow each other in a line. These are just how we represent them. For some reason, it all fits with everything else we've learned and have been taught. Why? Because that's what we've learned and been taught. Relativity is the key here, and it's precisely why the argument over the existence of a deity is completely futile. The answer will always be an individual thing because it relies completely on the individual. Truth relies entirely on the individual. If God is Truth, and Truth certainly does exist, there are as many different truths are there are individuals and perceptions. To argue that there is not a God is just as militant and mindless as arguing that there is a God. Who can be right, if everyone is wrong - to slightly butcher a song. That's the Agnostic argument, and the most thoroughly thought-out, in my opinion.
Compiling from source is right out if only because it takes so long to upgrade the system (think security updates).
On gentoo, I emerge sync daily, and emerge -u world daily (read: update my system daily). It takes 15 minutes a day, and my system is completely usable while it's happening. It would be *extremely* simple to write a graphical front end, or even a gnome applet/KDE applet to do this in the background, or even check/etc/ for config file changes when a user logs in (the only real user intervention needed when you're updating the system), and have emerge -u world happen every day, at some arbitrary time, as a cron job. The only flaw in this system is updating the kernel (like you said, security updates). That requires an expert, still, for Gentoo at least.
I don't think I should be giving non-technical users a desktop which has menu items labelled "smbUmount" and a preference in the file manager called "Minimize memory usage".
What? My file manager is called Nautilus. In my gnome menu, it's labeled, "Browse Filesystem", and has no preference called, "Minimize memory usage". As far as SMB goes, when installed on gentoo, with gnome-vfs-extras emerged, it works flawlessly, without configuation. It just prompts you for a username and password when you try to connect to a server.
Unfortunately Fedora doesn't have many packages, and those packages it does have are often out of date. The moment a new Fedora is released, you have to upgrade too because all the packagers are now targetting the newest release. This is a pain. Often packages are broken, out of date, missing, or only in conflicting repositories. These issues are hard-wired into the system and cannot be solved by throwing manpower at it, despite what some think.
emerge -u world, or the equivalent apt command is starting to look more attractive, i think. Upgrading the system simply because of package dependencies seems a lot less user-friendly than a package management system that is meant to keep the system, day-by-day, as up to date and stable as possible.
That does not exclude apt type "one command installs", that can easily be layered on top once the fundamental infrastructure is in place.
Here, I agree - this is what unix is. It's a collection of tools that can be easily strung together to complete complex tasks. Personally I'm completely enamoured with system like ports, portage, apt-*, and so on. The just make things so damned easy, and the gui frontends for them are really starting to mature. When it comes down to it, if i wanted to set a friend up with a good linux desktop system, I would use gentoo. I'm familar with it, it's easy to install programs, and in my opinion there's no better way to keep an up to date system. Of course...unless they actually wanted to know how linux works, I would set it up for them.
Slashdot Mirror
How exactly is he a luddite? According to wikipedia a luddite is someone who protests a certain technology in fear of said technology undercutting their job. It originated, according to wikipedia, from nitters and textile worker being in fear for their job as the industrial revolution took hold in england. The grandparent is simply fearing for his safety. This is not the same as luddism! Personally, I would call the industry behind nuclear power luddites - they constantly lobby against researching real green, sustainable technologies for fear of losing what's left of their foothold in the western power community. Burrying waste is NOT a technological innovation, it's a kludge!
That said, I'm all for research more efficient re-seeding nuclear fission plants. I'm not for nuclear fission as an end-all solution, rather a bridge between our current non-sustainable mode of energy production and whatever future technologies we figure out (fusion, hydrogren-based power infrastructure, etc). Keep in mind, nuclear fission is just as non-sustainable as coal, oil, or natural gas - there are finite supplies of fissionable material on earth.
In my experience, Gnome works find from ports in FreeBSD. I really haven't noticed any major differences between my Gentoo portage gnome install and my freebsd gnome install since 2.4.
Start -> My Computer
Really that hard? As far as the rest of the complaints go, I agree 95.342%. Microsoft's decision to not show extensions, even though their system of file recognition relies on extentions was something i never understood...well...i can understand it...but i don't like it. They start with big folders because they want to show off their improved thumbnail view. They want you to say, "ooo...pretty..." I don't see that much resemblence between the spacial nautilus and explorer. Oh, if you want the "classic" explorer, go to run, then type explorer. You'll have tree view, list of files, etc.
sure.
which is what bugs me most about anybody thinking that gays or autistic people are "normal"
Depending on your sample. If your sample includes only west hollywood, gay is going to be the norm. If your sample includes some autistic commune in northern california, then autism is going to be the norm. If your sample includes urban china, then doing tai chi every morning is going to be the norm. If you take the entire world as a sample, there's not going to much of an identifiable norm outside of being a member of the species homo sapiens and general actions/habits associated with that. (i.e, "Well...walking seems normal...and eating...and breathing). However, Gays and Autistic people would definitely not be normal. But then again...neither would being from Texas. Honestly, I think being from Texas is a bigger mental disorder than autism.
I think the problem with the word normal and how society uses it these days is that normal is more and more being used to mean "ideal" rather than "average". And when average is the ideal...we kinda have nothing to shoot for.
"Apple didn't do it, and because they made that decision, it's the right one. Let me rationalize my brand loyalty..."
The point is providing a better product for the consumer at minimal additional cost - that's the goal of capitalism, right? I bet if they did include ogg and/or FLAC support, less geeks would poo-poo them as a heavy-handed proprietary company and they would have sunk even deeper into the geek niche. Right now they still kind of stradle that niche awkwardly, one foot firmly in the elitist mac-camp, and the other slightly in the open-source *nix camp. They would solidify the geek market even more.
You're not in the demographic for this player. You're an apple fan boy - you subscribed (based soley upon your response here) to the whole iLife bullshit that Jobs is pushing. While it's a neat idea, it's a highly marginalized utopian dream that will only be reality for elitists. A real digital life style would enable all things electronic to sync and talk to each other - not just apple producs. To Apple's defense, though, we have the opening of Rendezvous...and...little else.
Assuming you really DO want an mp3 player that does all that, but only with a small percentage of computers out there, then the iPod is the only answer for you. Personally, I wanted an mp3 player that was cheaper, didn't look like a large gel-cap full of milk, and i could transfer songs to from any computer using just about any operating system i wanted, without any hastle. So i got the Rio Karma. It was the right solution for my problem. Not to mention it's ability to play more Codecs (MP3, Ogg, FLAC, and WMA), with better sound quality than the iPod (google around, the actual tests are out there). As i am not a slave to one operating system, one brand, one codec, and certainly not one single computer, the iPod just ain't my cup 'o tea.
And as far as the iTunes Music Store goes...fuck that noise. I don't want DRM-encumbered filth on my comp. audiolunchbox for me. Better artists there, anyway.
What you'll see if you look a little deeper is that Mr. Marcus, as with most arm-chair libertarian economists, has nothing of the sort, this is from his blog:
About Me
bkMarcus is an amateur political economist with no formal education in the subject. He is a house husband, a faculty spouse, a dilettante, and a layabout. Once upon a time, he made a fair living as a web developer. If you accuse him of being descended from entrenched Establishment Keynesians, he will deny it!
That said, I don't think this discounts what he says. He makes some very interesting points. I always wonder what this country would be like if we had a true open market...not sure if it would be better or worse.
Because no one group of people is actually normal. Normal will most likely always be a relative term: relative to an individual, which will be relative to culture, which will be relative to the reactions of society to itself, which is constantly changing. The idea of normality doesn't actually exist outside of statistics, it just a social invention to guage one experience against another.
I had no idea Ginger was a whore.
Whoa whoa whoa wait a minute. A nerd, redefining terms to suit his own prefered use?! HOLY SHIT, THIS NEEDS TO BE SUBMITTED TO SLASHDOT!!
Personally, I would rather be a nerd than a geek. According to websets, a geek is only often intelecual, whereas a nerd is especially academic/intellectual. And we all know being unstylish is TOTALLY in right now. So you can be a nerd, be totally unstylish, and be completely hip!! It's a win-win-win situation! THREE WINS!!!
It's also said all the fucking time. It seems like the majority of posts on slashdot complain about slashdot.
kVirc is much better than x-chat, mIrc, or Pirch. In your opinon. I can't stand the interface, myself.
just once i want to sit my mom down in front of a solaris machine and video tape her trying to bring up netscape or mozilla. I bet it would be hiarious. Does that make me a geek? A mean Geek? Just mean?
You know...I've got the same mouse...and i love it...but looking at it...it really does look like a breast. wtf. Now...as far as filling your hand goes...i guess you have smaller hands than me. Good mouse, though.
Solaris is actually a fun mix of BSD and Sys V! As far as i know, AIX and HP/UX are pretty much as pure Sys V as you can get, though i'm sure they have some BSD additions as well, like TCP/IP and whatnot.
Speaking of which, did this strike anyone else as a two-button, non-translucent version of the mac mouse? Well...with a racing stripe and a scroll wheel.
I'm using the logitech MX 500, and it's mouse buttons also run the length of the mouse. The only actual clicky part, though, is at your fingertips. However, the buttons are just one homogenous length of plastic from the front of the mouse, to the back. Damn fine mouse, though - definitely recommend it.
I would imagine this microsoft mouse is probably similar. It would make no sense to have the entire button be clickable. Microsoft may be corrupt, but they're not stupid.
clicky
I'm also on gentoo, i get the same "The image "http://www.navarre.com/admaterials/artwork/805529 /805529762251-072-sRGB.jpg" cannot be displayed, because it contains errors." But i'm also using the binary version of firefox (opteron here, and i wanted a working flash pluggin, so the bin is the only way to go). Gotta be a library issue.
When was the last time you broke a gentoo system? Is this personal dogma built upon one encounter two years ago, or is the recent? A broken package simply won't install. It does not, by itself, break a system. I'm actually running gentoo on an amd64, and i've hand-keyworded many programs to get them to install (i.e. add ~amd64 to the arch line). The system's solid. I would not think twice about installing it on my mom's computer. However...fedora would drive her insane. Anything RPM based would drive her insane. I think there are far more broken, decentralized, home-rolled RPM builds out there that could potentially mess things up. Atleast with gentoo you have a centralized repository for programs - not quite as well tested as debian's - but quite thoroughly tested. I would say there are more broken RPMs (in a relative sense, that is, % of broken RPMs relative to the total number of RPMs available on the internet) than there are broken ebuilds (again, % broken ebuilds relative to number to ebuilds around, including those on break my gentoo - to be fair).
You'll be accepted by the truely skilled, sure. But there's an aristocratic element to geekdom as well. Actually i differentiate the skilled (nerds, nerdom) with the unskilled, aristocrats (geeks, geekdom). Geeks are more willing to discount you simply because you threaten their place in the subculture, nerds will respect your skills. Example: Debian users discount gentoo users as knowledgable simply beacuse they use gentoo. Any reasonable person can conclude that they see Gentoo as a technological threat to Debian's throne. So, instead of looking at it's merits, they say it's the "ricer distro" or complain that it's impossible to keep up to date, no one should use it, if you use it you're a fucktard, etc. Same thing with geeks who use linux looking down their nose at geeks who use macs. Or vice versa. Quite frankly, I know some pretty brilliant computer scientists who use macs, and some brilliant computer scientists who use linux, and some who use both - even *gasp* windows. A nerd sees a computer as a way to get work done, a geek sees a computer as a way to enlarge their penis and climb up the ladder of their covetted little subculture.
Exactly.
As a scientist, i trust in particles, atoms, and general physical relativity to explain, in terms that make sense to me, how the world works. But these very don't go very far beyond the imagination. They are mental models that we use to represent whatever really is out there, beyond our eye. The first thing you learn in general chemistry is that molecules do NOT really look like they do in your book. Elections are not really in neat little concentric circles, and do not follow each other in a line. These are just how we represent them. For some reason, it all fits with everything else we've learned and have been taught. Why? Because that's what we've learned and been taught. Relativity is the key here, and it's precisely why the argument over the existence of a deity is completely futile. The answer will always be an individual thing because it relies completely on the individual. Truth relies entirely on the individual. If God is Truth, and Truth certainly does exist, there are as many different truths are there are individuals and perceptions. To argue that there is not a God is just as militant and mindless as arguing that there is a God. Who can be right, if everyone is wrong - to slightly butcher a song. That's the Agnostic argument, and the most thoroughly thought-out, in my opinion.
first, let me put aside some miss-information:
/etc/ for config file changes when a user logs in (the only real user intervention needed when you're updating the system), and have emerge -u world happen every day, at some arbitrary time, as a cron job. The only flaw in this system is updating the kernel (like you said, security updates). That requires an expert, still, for Gentoo at least.
Compiling from source is right out if only because it takes so long to upgrade the system (think security updates).
On gentoo, I emerge sync daily, and emerge -u world daily (read: update my system daily). It takes 15 minutes a day, and my system is completely usable while it's happening. It would be *extremely* simple to write a graphical front end, or even a gnome applet/KDE applet to do this in the background, or even check
I don't think I should be giving non-technical users a desktop which has menu items labelled "smbUmount" and a preference in the file manager called "Minimize memory usage".
What? My file manager is called Nautilus. In my gnome menu, it's labeled, "Browse Filesystem", and has no preference called, "Minimize memory usage". As far as SMB goes, when installed on gentoo, with gnome-vfs-extras emerged, it works flawlessly, without configuation. It just prompts you for a username and password when you try to connect to a server.
Unfortunately Fedora doesn't have many packages, and those packages it does have are often out of date. The moment a new Fedora is released, you have to upgrade too because all the packagers are now targetting the newest release. This is a pain. Often packages are broken, out of date, missing, or only in conflicting repositories. These issues are hard-wired into the system and cannot be solved by throwing manpower at it, despite what some think.
emerge -u world, or the equivalent apt command is starting to look more attractive, i think. Upgrading the system simply because of package dependencies seems a lot less user-friendly than a package management system that is meant to keep the system, day-by-day, as up to date and stable as possible.
That does not exclude apt type "one command installs", that can easily be layered on top once the fundamental infrastructure is in place.
Here, I agree - this is what unix is. It's a collection of tools that can be easily strung together to complete complex tasks. Personally I'm completely enamoured with system like ports, portage, apt-*, and so on. The just make things so damned easy, and the gui frontends for them are really starting to mature. When it comes down to it, if i wanted to set a friend up with a good linux desktop system, I would use gentoo. I'm familar with it, it's easy to install programs, and in my opinion there's no better way to keep an up to date system. Of course...unless they actually wanted to know how linux works, I would set it up for them.
Cash Register doesn't work?