I have a feeling they might be trying to give out updates and patches without telling us what they are.
They already are, more or less.
The explanations that go with the updates are hardly explanatory. And even after looking up stuff like the related KB article, I already find myself unable to find enough information to know whether to trust what they're wanting to do to my system.
If they do go this root, then they run the risk of making the situation worse. Already you get people that don't install patches until they're sure they don't break anything. This could just make even more people dismiss the patches out of hand.
Unless I'm 100% confident of what's being changed, I won't install updates already. And yes, I know that it means I'm taking somewhat of a risk. The simple fact is that I don't trust Microsoft not to do something unwanted.
Hell, I trust spam mroe than I do Windows Updates.
At least with spam I know it's potentially harmful and stuff that I don't want. But with MS there's always the chance that there updates are actually important. But they're already so obfuscated that I can't tell the gold from the shite.
I've noticed other people's flippant replies to this, but it is a big issue.
12) I kept getting "Access Denied" or something along the lines of insufficient permissions even though I believe I gave myself full rights over the system. On Windows 2000 this can be seen even if you are logged in as Administrator.
Administrator is supposed to be the Windows functional equivalent to root - so why the hell do I keep getting told "Insufficient Privelidgeds" when I'm running Admin?
I always though the idea of Superuser permissions was so that you could override the OS if you had to.
Actually, I want to know if anyone knows yet if the exploits affect RealAlternative or not.
Won't stop me using it, though. 'Cos at least I can stop it from misbehabing and actually deinstall the damn thing if I need to. I don't trust RealOne to even get the latter right.
Slashdot moderators should mod down laughing comments about how inconvenienced Mr. McBride is.
Although I can see where you're coming from here, I'm not sure it's gonna catch on.
I'm sure somewhere in the Moderator FAQ is says you're supposed to moderate based on your genuine opinions, not based on an agenda.
And (rightly or wrongly) there are going to be comments than, although highly inappropriate, genuinely make you laugh out loud.
Maybe the best way would be if Funny moderations added the "Funny" tag, but didn't increment an article's score. After all, it doesn't affect your Karma, either.
So when someone who doesn't log in sees the comments, they won't see Funny posts marked higher (unless they've also received other positive mods). But, as always, individual users can set Funny as having a modifier.
So we all believe the MyDoom virus attacking SCO was a coincidence?
Not really. The timing is too suspicious for it to be pure coincidence.
I still think it's all misdirection though. The SCO/DDoS/"It must be a Linux geek" angle has dominated the media coverage of MyDoom. The backdoor aspect keeps getting forgotten. And the fact that, whoever wrote it, the important thing is to regularly check your computer for viruses and never click strange attachments is being all-but-ignored. 'Cos that's all old-news, whereas the SCO angle is new. Problem is the SCO angle is more speculation than facts - but we all know (cynical preconceptions, I know...) which one journalists tend to favour when trying to get their story heard.
But by targetting SCO's website, speculation is so rife and out of control, the chance of the real author and motive geting found any time soon looks rather remote.
Yeah, right. Face the facts kids, it had disgruntled Linux geek written all over it.
Maybe yes, maybe no. But even if it was, it doesn't meake him/her in any way representative of the real feelings of the Free/OSS/Linux communities.
Sure, we may joke on Slashdot (and maybe that's ill-advised), but in all seriousness the majority of us probably know that it's a bad thing - even if SCO do seem to have painted "target" on their heads.
The majority of them that we could see were +5: Funny - a fact that people keep seeming to forget. Of course the diea of getting purposefully infected to help DDoS someone like SCO will be seen as a funny concept. Not smart, sure as hell not the right thing to do, but worthy of a damn good laugh. (Especially first this in the day, when you're reading Slashdot to help cope with a day of work)
Plus I woudln't be surprised if just as many were modded down as Troll or Flamebait.
Just for some strange reason, many of us don't browse with a Flamebait+5 modifier for general browsing. So we'd not see those.
That said, it can backfire when non Slashdotters browse Slashdot. Anything modded down won't show - meaning that you lose the impact of dumb comments being rated negatively. But anything modded funny will show, and with nothing except a single word to show that it's got a high score for humour not 'cos it's making a serious point.
If the BBC Techies are anything like the rest of us, I can imagine them thinking "Who is this asshat?" when putting the page up. Sadly they'll probably have little-to-no say about what new stories actually go up.
It would be amusing (though unprofessional, childish, and counter-productive) if someone on the BBC webteam had altered the image of the author and put in a toungue-in-cheek geek-reference like swapping "BBC North America Business Correspondent" for from the can't-tell-ass-from-elbow dept.
But it wouldn't surprise me if one of their Techies wishes they could do something like that.
I'm mostly pro-BBC-journalism. They always seem to me to be the least biased of the media[*] - at least, in stuff that they know about. [*]Though sometimes the phrase "Best of a Bad bunch" does spring to mind.
Problem in this case is that the article's obviously written by someone who doesn't really understand what they're talking about. And whilst that's not "against the rules", and whilst everyone entitled to state their opinions, people do tend to assume that if it's in the media (especially the BBC) then it must be true.
And yes, I do think that MyDoom is something to do with Linux. OK, not a "concerted statement by the Open Source Community" (like some media outlets would have us believe), but either by some lone person who think they're helping, or by someone who just wanted to write a virus and knew that by targetting SCO that Linux would be a scapegoat, SCo would be a focus of speculation, and that the actual backdoor aspects of the virus would be overlooked by many.
And the media reactions seem to support this. So much is focussed on the DDoS od SCo and MS, and about speculation about who wrote it and why. I've hardly heard any media mention about the fact that the backdoor will stay in place long after the DDoS stops.
It comes with the kernel Sources. But it only came with 2.2.17 - it took me a while (finally, today!!) to find Mandrake RPMs of the source and headers of 2.2.25.
For one thing, you'd knwo that a prepackaged binary for your specific distribution would cater for any ideosincracies that the particular distro would have.
In my case, being able to download a prepackaged binary of 2.2.25 specifically tailored for Mandrake 7.2 would be cool.
Though, to be honest, I think I'd prefer a sources package including anything specific for the Mandrake 7.2 configuration, but with the freedom of being able to recompile the bugger myself.
There's nothing at all wrong with that sort of political gesture, but it's essentially the equivalent of the pig blood you speak of.
Not really. Showering out pig's blood is unhygienic and more than a little bit digusting. Handing out free copies of Knoppix is not. Handing out free copies of any (legimitately free...) software CDs is not anywhere near as tasteless. (no gags about pr0nware please, you know what I'm trying to get at.)
People might look at the discs, and try using them. They might ignore them. Some of the Linux-using crowd might keep the disc around to show to other people (saves them burning a copy). All in all it's easier and less unpleasant to dispose of - and if nothing else give the recipients something to put a coffee-mug or beerglass on.
So political gesture it may be, but it's one of the more polite ones i've seen of late.
Seriously though, do people not compile kernels anymore? I mean I haven't in a while, but thats because my only linux box currently is used for running DiabloII for my brother and for me to attempt to cross compile Open Watcom.
I guess it depends very much what people use Linux for, and how they use their actual machines.
My Linux Box is running Mandrake 7.2 with the (mostly) same 2.2 Kernel that it came with. It doesn't need anything more. Last time I tried a new Kernel (2.2.25, I think) it broke half the stuff I needed. (And I didn't have the time to track it all down)
(I did, however succesfully tweak the settings on the supplied Kernel, so I know how to go through the process without breaking the system - it's been up about a month solid since)
The box sits as a basic fileserver and gateway/firewall, so taking it down to compile a Kernel isn't really an option at the moment. And I'm sure other people have their main (or only) Linux box doing stuff that it's fine doing.
Now if I had a spare machine for testing stuff on, well it'd be a whole different story.
Actually, the bank I use (both off-and on-line) is the Halifax, and their online banking works pefectly under Mozilla.
However, at work I am forced to use IE for one or two things. Nothing to do with "Policy" in the slightest. It's that our e-mail is through OWA (I'm off main-site, so there is no alternative - gits!). And not only is the slimmed-down non-IE interface really really bad, but something in the way the techies over at mainsite (mis-)configured Exchange Server means that unless you use IE, it constantly asks for your password every damn time you even change panel.
Hell, even under IE on my family laptop (only machine of "mine" that doesn't use Moz), it still does it this way.
But yeah, there's the simple fact that many web-developers only ever support IE. And a lot of things MS-based just don't seem to work under Mozilla.
For most people, whatever ships with the hardware is probably fine. But it's nice to have an alternative possible for if you knwo what you're doing.
PalmOS has a few limitations. Still no proper filesystem, as far as I know, and no bundled decent WP package (unless things've moved on in the past couple years.
And Windows is, well, Windows. It does a good job, but like on a desktop sometimes you just want an alternative, y'know?
Plus there's the beauty of Open Source. If something goes wrong consistentaly, you can try having a look at the code and giving a shot at fixing it.
(Although, in my case, it'd be more "tweak the code, try to compile, and discover new ways to break it...")
Plus there is the simple fact that if you've got all of your main systems running Linux, having a Linux-based PDA means your own setup is more internally standardised.
What printer do you use? I've never had problems running BJ Pritners under Linux - then again, my equipment's usually old enough to be well-known and long-supported under just abnout any OS.:P
As to the keyboard/mouse problem, that is ratehr more annoying. I do wish that the people who made these thigns would port their enhanced functionality applications and drivers to Linux.
If anything, I can think of more uses for my multimedia/internet keyboard under Linux than under Windows.
Big deal! The "boss" is going to want a list of popular applications that are compatible with it, proof that setting up security permissions and file/folder/printer sharing to Windows workstations is easy, and so on.
Well on the file/folder/printer sharing, Samba's pretty damn easy to manage. If I can get Samba working a home as a mini fileserver, then it shouldn't be too hard for a corporate IT-department to set it up for their company.
As the the "Popular Applications" angle, that's trickier. There are several programs around which are either funcitonally equivalent or fileformat-compatible, but I think we're still quite a way before "Management Mindset" can get away from the 'We Have To Use This Particular Program I've Heard About' syndrome.
But if nothing else, the article's a start. We now have the BBC giving a basic overview as to why some businesses are switching to Linux, and giving a not-too-inaccurate look at what Linux actually is and how distribution works.
And many bosses (at least here in the UK) are more likely to pay attention to an article by the BBC than something on/. or some other technological news outlet.
Yeah, but that's the good thing about the front-ends to many Linux/Unix software these days.
A lot of them are basically "front end" programs to either existing software, or to system calls or directories.
So although you can use a graphical tool, it's usually just calling or displaying something you can do via the command line. It doesn't replace the CLI equivalent - like so many Windows programs do.
Also what it means is that several front-end interfaces can be used to invoke the same actual program. But as they're actually accessing the program (or directory, or whatever) itself, it reduces potential incompatibilities.
OK, I can't speak for "Joe Sixpack" or "Joe Hardcore-Programmer", but I know that personally I like being able to use a GUI for quick or easy access to something, but can switch to the CLI for more low-level control over what I'm doing.
At the very least any complaints about "Those damn hobbits singing ever couple of scenes" could be stated as being in the original source. (Unlike, say, the story of Snow White)
When you have a hugely popular book, it's usually popular for a reason - so sure, you have to make changes to adapt to the movie format (and make it less than 20 hours long) but you keep the impact of those changes to a minimum, especially when it comes to changing the characters.
This is much easier said than done. Take any book, and look at your favourite character. Then go through the story and see what bits you think really make that character. Chances are your list will differ from someone else's.
The effect that this has is that even one-liners and tiny scenes can be, to at least one fan, something which shows the inrtrinsic nature of a given character.
What this means for a film-to-book conversion is that without making it 20 hours long, there is probably no way to make chances that don't have a significant impact to some of the viewers.
Really most of the chances are going to be down to the differences in book and film. You lose the narrative element. Three pages can easily describe a minute, but it's damn hard to take a minute of screen-time and try to accurately depict three pages.
"Lossy Compression", as it were.
And trying to compress several hundred pages into only a few hours? Exercise in futility to my mind. It just doesn't make sense to anyone - except the people looking at how much a theatrical release, DVD/VHS release, box-set, and merchandising rights will add up to.
Long books like the LoTR trilogy and the Harry Potter series are just that. Long. You're right in saying that if a story is popular, it'll be for a reason. And that by shortening/compressing the story you're going to risk changing what made it popular.
So why make movies? It really is a different medium, and one that makes it very much harder to do justice to the original source material.
My personal thoughts on this are that LoTR is one of those stories that would suit television better than movies.
Spread the three books over a series of 30+ hours total and you've got something that's likely to be more faithful. You don't have to speed through longer scenes. You don't lose the momentum that a one-year wait between releases inevitably slows down. And not only do you get more time to flesh out the characters (by not having to cut out slower segments of the story), but if a journey (or setup) is supposed to take a long time to occur, you can switch focus to another group for an episode or so. So you lose the 'They journeyed for a month, in ten minutes of screen-time' effect.
Oops. Rambling.
But really, making movies of these books simply isn't going to work without making some pretty major changes. I don't like that they choose to do it this way, and I usually hate the changes that get made, but I accept them as a necessity evil of trying to compress a novel into a few-hour film.
All you can really do is accept a film as what it is (a hopefully-good adaptation of a known story), rather than lamenting what it could have been.
A lot easier said than done, I know!
Set up a torrent seed on your grandma's computer, sharing a distro or something. Limit her upload to 5k. Let it run. She'll be doing her part to help make the world a better place.
It's easy to be an altruist. Get kazaa. Or edonkey. Or go to suprnova. Share some linux distros. It's fun, and it will make you feel warm fuzzies inside knowing you're helping the internet grow.
Although your post does sound slightly tongue-in-cheek you do raise some very valid points here. Especially seeing that, really,what the companies probably want is to maximise profit from "Middle ground" users. Anyone else they can either recoup from either unused capacity (low-bandwidth users) or these extortionate charges (high-bandwidth users).
But if the "average user" majority starts using more of the capacity, then the companies will have to catch up. But whilst it's only the "Power Users" who use the extra bandwidth, then of course they're going to use them to skim off the extra money.
But unlike some people who'd say "Use more bandwidth by sharing music and movies", which would only validate the claims that "High bandwidth usage is mainly used for illegal filesharing", you're actually suggesting that people share things like Linux distros.
And it's rather harder for the companies to complain about people seeding the latest Linux ISO than to complain about people seeding copies of the Matrix or Eminem's albums.
Both ISPs who offer cable have caps on their service, and they do tell you what that cap is.
You want more capacity, you buy more.
At least they tell you what the cap is. The problem with Caomcast, according to the article, is that not only do they not tell you what the cap is, they don't even tell you what you've actually been using.
That just seems unfair, as without knowing what limits you're exceeding and by how much, how do you know what to cut down by?
Not sure whether it'd work. I don't entirely understand the business world, but with Disney working with Square-Enix on the Kingdom hearts games, wouldn't it run the risk of Disney leaning rather hard against them teaming up with Pixar?
Except that they do make the core Darwin source open. And Darwin itself is available for the x86 platform.
Plus from what I can tell (Darwin FAQ and BSD press-releases) they do also release their alterations to the BSD core back to the BSD projects.
in fact, from what I can tell of the BSD license, they don't even have to do that much, but they still choose to. So although they're not perfect, you can't really accuse them of thing they aren't guilty of.
Though I firmly believe Mac OSX is far superior to Linux when it come to my desktop needs, I feel that the quality of Apple's hardware is suspect. Though I really want to use OSX, I dismay that Apple is only vendor that can offer the computers for it.
This is defintiely a problem. with the way Microsoft is going with Windows I am extremely reluctant to go the Windows route when my 2K box finally dies. But there are still some aspects of computer that a Commercial Home OS has advantages over Linux in.
This means that, ideally, my next non-OSS computer will be a Mac. But the hardware price is rather inhibiting, as it the rather static-seeming nature of the hardware. (I can only assume that it can't be tweaked as easily as "PC" hardware - please correct me if I'm wrong).
Now if Apple either allowed third-parties to create hardware, or made an x86-compatible wersion of Mac OS X (surely not totaly impossible if the Darwin core has an x86 release) they'd probably be serious competition for MS.
Sure for some things (like professional graphics or video editing) actual Apple hardware would still be preferable, but it'd be nice if it wasn't locked into proprietary hardware.
I just wish that it wasn't so likely that this is all a pipedream.
Slashdot Mirror
They already are, more or less.
The explanations that go with the updates are hardly explanatory. And even after looking up stuff like the related KB article, I already find myself unable to find enough information to know whether to trust what they're wanting to do to my system.
If they do go this root, then they run the risk of making the situation worse. Already you get people that don't install patches until they're sure they don't break anything. This could just make even more people dismiss the patches out of hand.
Unless I'm 100% confident of what's being changed, I won't install updates already. And yes, I know that it means I'm taking somewhat of a risk. The simple fact is that I don't trust Microsoft not to do something unwanted.
Hell, I trust spam mroe than I do Windows Updates.
TiggsAt least with spam I know it's potentially harmful and stuff that I don't want. But with MS there's always the chance that there updates are actually important. But they're already so obfuscated that I can't tell the gold from the shite.
But that's exactly what SiteFinder is!
Some wannabe's trying to fuck as many people as they can in public.
TiggsI've noticed other people's flippant replies to this, but it is a big issue.
Administrator is supposed to be the Windows functional equivalent to root - so why the hell do I keep getting told "Insufficient Privelidgeds" when I'm running Admin?
TiggsI always though the idea of Superuser permissions was so that you could override the OS if you had to.
Actually, I want to know if anyone knows yet if the exploits affect RealAlternative or not.
TiggsWon't stop me using it, though. 'Cos at least I can stop it from misbehabing and actually deinstall the damn thing if I need to. I don't trust RealOne to even get the latter right.
Although I can see where you're coming from here, I'm not sure it's gonna catch on.
I'm sure somewhere in the Moderator FAQ is says you're supposed to moderate based on your genuine opinions, not based on an agenda.
And (rightly or wrongly) there are going to be comments than, although highly inappropriate, genuinely make you laugh out loud.
Maybe the best way would be if Funny moderations added the "Funny" tag, but didn't increment an article's score. After all, it doesn't affect your Karma, either.
TiggsSo when someone who doesn't log in sees the comments, they won't see Funny posts marked higher (unless they've also received other positive mods). But, as always, individual users can set Funny as having a modifier.
Not really. The timing is too suspicious for it to be pure coincidence.
I still think it's all misdirection though. The SCO/DDoS/"It must be a Linux geek" angle has dominated the media coverage of MyDoom. The backdoor aspect keeps getting forgotten. And the fact that, whoever wrote it, the important thing is to regularly check your computer for viruses and never click strange attachments is being all-but-ignored. 'Cos that's all old-news, whereas the SCO angle is new. Problem is the SCO angle is more speculation than facts - but we all know (cynical preconceptions, I know...) which one journalists tend to favour when trying to get their story heard.
But by targetting SCO's website, speculation is so rife and out of control, the chance of the real author and motive geting found any time soon looks rather remote.
Maybe yes, maybe no. But even if it was, it doesn't meake him/her in any way representative of the real feelings of the Free/OSS/Linux communities.
TiggsSure, we may joke on Slashdot (and maybe that's ill-advised), but in all seriousness the majority of us probably know that it's a bad thing - even if SCO do seem to have painted "target" on their heads.
The majority of them that we could see were +5: Funny - a fact that people keep seeming to forget. Of course the diea of getting purposefully infected to help DDoS someone like SCO will be seen as a funny concept. Not smart, sure as hell not the right thing to do, but worthy of a damn good laugh. (Especially first this in the day, when you're reading Slashdot to help cope with a day of work)
Plus I woudln't be surprised if just as many were modded down as Troll or Flamebait.
Just for some strange reason, many of us don't browse with a Flamebait+5 modifier for general browsing. So we'd not see those.
That said, it can backfire when non Slashdotters browse Slashdot. Anything modded down won't show - meaning that you lose the impact of dumb comments being rated negatively. But anything modded funny will show, and with nothing except a single word to show that it's got a high score for humour not 'cos it's making a serious point.
TiggsIf the BBC Techies are anything like the rest of us, I can imagine them thinking "Who is this asshat?" when putting the page up. Sadly they'll probably have little-to-no say about what new stories actually go up.
It would be amusing (though unprofessional, childish, and counter-productive) if someone on the BBC webteam had altered the image of the author and put in a toungue-in-cheek geek-reference like swapping "BBC North America Business Correspondent" for from the can't-tell-ass-from-elbow dept.
TiggsBut it wouldn't surprise me if one of their Techies wishes they could do something like that.
I'm mostly pro-BBC-journalism. They always seem to me to be the least biased of the media[*] - at least, in stuff that they know about.
[*] Though sometimes the phrase "Best of a Bad bunch" does spring to mind.
Problem in this case is that the article's obviously written by someone who doesn't really understand what they're talking about. And whilst that's not "against the rules", and whilst everyone entitled to state their opinions, people do tend to assume that if it's in the media (especially the BBC) then it must be true.
And yes, I do think that MyDoom is something to do with Linux. OK, not a "concerted statement by the Open Source Community" (like some media outlets would have us believe), but either by some lone person who think they're helping, or by someone who just wanted to write a virus and knew that by targetting SCO that Linux would be a scapegoat, SCo would be a focus of speculation, and that the actual backdoor aspects of the virus would be overlooked by many.
TiggsAnd the media reactions seem to support this. So much is focussed on the DDoS od SCo and MS, and about speculation about who wrote it and why. I've hardly heard any media mention about the fact that the backdoor will stay in place long after the DDoS stops.
It comes with the kernel Sources. But it only came with 2.2.17 - it took me a while (finally, today!!) to find Mandrake RPMs of the source and headers of 2.2.25.
TiggsFor one thing, you'd knwo that a prepackaged binary for your specific distribution would cater for any ideosincracies that the particular distro would have.
In my case, being able to download a prepackaged binary of 2.2.25 specifically tailored for Mandrake 7.2 would be cool.
TiggsThough, to be honest, I think I'd prefer a sources package including anything specific for the Mandrake 7.2 configuration, but with the freedom of being able to recompile the bugger myself.
Not really. Showering out pig's blood is unhygienic and more than a little bit digusting. Handing out free copies of Knoppix is not. Handing out free copies of any (legimitately free...) software CDs is not anywhere near as tasteless. (no gags about pr0nware please, you know what I'm trying to get at.)
People might look at the discs, and try using them. They might ignore them. Some of the Linux-using crowd might keep the disc around to show to other people (saves them burning a copy). All in all it's easier and less unpleasant to dispose of - and if nothing else give the recipients something to put a coffee-mug or beerglass on.
So political gesture it may be, but it's one of the more polite ones i've seen of late.
TiggsI guess it depends very much what people use Linux for, and how they use their actual machines.
My Linux Box is running Mandrake 7.2 with the (mostly) same 2.2 Kernel that it came with. It doesn't need anything more. Last time I tried a new Kernel (2.2.25, I think) it broke half the stuff I needed. (And I didn't have the time to track it all down)
(I did, however succesfully tweak the settings on the supplied Kernel, so I know how to go through the process without breaking the system - it's been up about a month solid since)
The box sits as a basic fileserver and gateway/firewall, so taking it down to compile a Kernel isn't really an option at the moment. And I'm sure other people have their main (or only) Linux box doing stuff that it's fine doing.
Now if I had a spare machine for testing stuff on, well it'd be a whole different story.
TiggsActually, the bank I use (both off-and on-line) is the Halifax, and their online banking works pefectly under Mozilla.
However, at work I am forced to use IE for one or two things. Nothing to do with "Policy" in the slightest. It's that our e-mail is through OWA (I'm off main-site, so there is no alternative - gits!). And not only is the slimmed-down non-IE interface really really bad, but something in the way the techies over at mainsite (mis-)configured Exchange Server means that unless you use IE, it constantly asks for your password every damn time you even change panel.
Hell, even under IE on my family laptop (only machine of "mine" that doesn't use Moz), it still does it this way.
But yeah, there's the simple fact that many web-developers only ever support IE. And a lot of things MS-based just don't seem to work under Mozilla.
TiggsFor most people, whatever ships with the hardware is probably fine. But it's nice to have an alternative possible for if you knwo what you're doing.
PalmOS has a few limitations. Still no proper filesystem, as far as I know, and no bundled decent WP package (unless things've moved on in the past couple years.
And Windows is, well, Windows. It does a good job, but like on a desktop sometimes you just want an alternative, y'know?
Plus there's the beauty of Open Source. If something goes wrong consistentaly, you can try having a look at the code and giving a shot at fixing it.
(Although, in my case, it'd be more "tweak the code, try to compile, and discover new ways to break it...")
Plus there is the simple fact that if you've got all of your main systems running Linux, having a Linux-based PDA means your own setup is more internally standardised.
TiggsWhat printer do you use? I've never had problems running BJ Pritners under Linux - then again, my equipment's usually old enough to be well-known and long-supported under just abnout any OS. :P
As to the keyboard/mouse problem, that is ratehr more annoying. I do wish that the people who made these thigns would port their enhanced functionality applications and drivers to Linux.
If anything, I can think of more uses for my multimedia/internet keyboard under Linux than under Windows.
Well on the file/folder/printer sharing, Samba's pretty damn easy to manage. If I can get Samba working a home as a mini fileserver, then it shouldn't be too hard for a corporate IT-department to set it up for their company.
As the the "Popular Applications" angle, that's trickier. There are several programs around which are either funcitonally equivalent or fileformat-compatible, but I think we're still quite a way before "Management Mindset" can get away from the 'We Have To Use This Particular Program I've Heard About' syndrome.
But if nothing else, the article's a start. We now have the BBC giving a basic overview as to why some businesses are switching to Linux, and giving a not-too-inaccurate look at what Linux actually is and how distribution works. /. or some other technological news outlet.
TiggsAnd many bosses (at least here in the UK) are more likely to pay attention to an article by the BBC than something on
Yeah, but that's the good thing about the front-ends to many Linux/Unix software these days.
A lot of them are basically "front end" programs to either existing software, or to system calls or directories.
So although you can use a graphical tool, it's usually just calling or displaying something you can do via the command line. It doesn't replace the CLI equivalent - like so many Windows programs do.
Also what it means is that several front-end interfaces can be used to invoke the same actual program. But as they're actually accessing the program (or directory, or whatever) itself, it reduces potential incompatibilities.
OK, I can't speak for "Joe Sixpack" or "Joe Hardcore-Programmer", but I know that personally I like being able to use a GUI for quick or easy access to something, but can switch to the CLI for more low-level control over what I'm doing.
TiggsPerhaps it shoult have been a Disney Film then.
At the very least any complaints about "Those damn hobbits singing ever couple of scenes" could be stated as being in the original source. (Unlike, say, the story of Snow White)
TiggsThis is much easier said than done. Take any book, and look at your favourite character. Then go through the story and see what bits you think really make that character. Chances are your list will differ from someone else's.
The effect that this has is that even one-liners and tiny scenes can be, to at least one fan, something which shows the inrtrinsic nature of a given character.
What this means for a film-to-book conversion is that without making it 20 hours long, there is probably no way to make chances that don't have a significant impact to some of the viewers.
Really most of the chances are going to be down to the differences in book and film. You lose the narrative element. Three pages can easily describe a minute, but it's damn hard to take a minute of screen-time and try to accurately depict three pages.
"Lossy Compression", as it were.
And trying to compress several hundred pages into only a few hours? Exercise in futility to my mind. It just doesn't make sense to anyone - except the people looking at how much a theatrical release, DVD/VHS release, box-set, and merchandising rights will add up to.
Long books like the LoTR trilogy and the Harry Potter series are just that. Long. You're right in saying that if a story is popular, it'll be for a reason. And that by shortening/compressing the story you're going to risk changing what made it popular.
So why make movies? It really is a different medium, and one that makes it very much harder to do justice to the original source material.
My personal thoughts on this are that LoTR is one of those stories that would suit television better than movies.
Spread the three books over a series of 30+ hours total and you've got something that's likely to be more faithful. You don't have to speed through longer scenes. You don't lose the momentum that a one-year wait between releases inevitably slows down. And not only do you get more time to flesh out the characters (by not having to cut out slower segments of the story), but if a journey (or setup) is supposed to take a long time to occur, you can switch focus to another group for an episode or so. So you lose the 'They journeyed for a month, in ten minutes of screen-time' effect.
Oops. Rambling.
But really, making movies of these books simply isn't going to work without making some pretty major changes. I don't like that they choose to do it this way, and I usually hate the changes that get made, but I accept them as a necessity evil of trying to compress a novel into a few-hour film.
All you can really do is accept a film as what it is (a hopefully-good adaptation of a known story), rather than lamenting what it could have been.
TiggsA lot easier said than done, I know!
Although your post does sound slightly tongue-in-cheek you do raise some very valid points here. Especially seeing that, really,what the companies probably want is to maximise profit from "Middle ground" users. Anyone else they can either recoup from either unused capacity (low-bandwidth users) or these extortionate charges (high-bandwidth users).
But if the "average user" majority starts using more of the capacity, then the companies will have to catch up. But whilst it's only the "Power Users" who use the extra bandwidth, then of course they're going to use them to skim off the extra money.
But unlike some people who'd say "Use more bandwidth by sharing music and movies", which would only validate the claims that "High bandwidth usage is mainly used for illegal filesharing", you're actually suggesting that people share things like Linux distros.
TiggsAnd it's rather harder for the companies to complain about people seeding the latest Linux ISO than to complain about people seeding copies of the Matrix or Eminem's albums.
At least they tell you what the cap is. The problem with Caomcast, according to the article, is that not only do they not tell you what the cap is, they don't even tell you what you've actually been using.
TiggsThat just seems unfair, as without knowing what limits you're exceeding and by how much, how do you know what to cut down by?
Not sure whether it'd work. I don't entirely understand the business world, but with Disney working with Square-Enix on the Kingdom hearts games, wouldn't it run the risk of Disney leaning rather hard against them teaming up with Pixar?
TiggsExcept that they do make the core Darwin source open. And Darwin itself is available for the x86 platform.
Plus from what I can tell (Darwin FAQ and BSD press-releases) they do also release their alterations to the BSD core back to the BSD projects.
in fact, from what I can tell of the BSD license, they don't even have to do that much, but they still choose to. So although they're not perfect, you can't really accuse them of thing they aren't guilty of.
TiggsThis is defintiely a problem. with the way Microsoft is going with Windows I am extremely reluctant to go the Windows route when my 2K box finally dies. But there are still some aspects of computer that a Commercial Home OS has advantages over Linux in.
This means that, ideally, my next non-OSS computer will be a Mac. But the hardware price is rather inhibiting, as it the rather static-seeming nature of the hardware. (I can only assume that it can't be tweaked as easily as "PC" hardware - please correct me if I'm wrong).
Now if Apple either allowed third-parties to create hardware, or made an x86-compatible wersion of Mac OS X (surely not totaly impossible if the Darwin core has an x86 release) they'd probably be serious competition for MS.
Sure for some things (like professional graphics or video editing) actual Apple hardware would still be preferable, but it'd be nice if it wasn't locked into proprietary hardware.
I just wish that it wasn't so likely that this is all a pipedream.
Tiggs