First of all, you are definitely not a power user. A "power user" would know how to google, and find out how to set Linux to run "ifdown eth0, ifup eth0" at bootup (via/etc/rc.local). Secend, if you were, you would know that Mandrake is very much a "newbie" OS. It DOES hide some things, or put them under advanced menus. If you don't like that, there are many distros that are much more sutable for advanced users. See Gentoo, Debian, Slackware.
RH is NOT dropping consumers. They directly support (and even control) the Fedora project. The only real difference is that Fedora is more community orientated than RH was, and has a new name.
Put all M$ products in the public domain. Since anyone can do anything with things in the public domain, nobody that needs M$ products would suffer, but M$ would.
Think about it: anyone could redistrobute M$ stuff, anyone could reverse engineer any DRM scheems that M$ does, and projects like WINE would benefit greatly. Yes, that would still be illegal in the US. Still, doing so could devestate M$.
After the SCO execs dump their stock and become rich, the SEC will come after them. So they decide to do some completely insane things with SCO, so that they can maybe get off under a claim of temporary insanity.
After all, I don't think there any drugs that can mess up someone's brain that bad...
The lack of good font support in X. But it's not just X. It's applications too. There's no unified way to use fonts, or to use the "right" fonts.
By now, most major KDE/GNOME apps have it right. There are some apps that don't, but they are getting less and less common.
Lack of good clipboard support in X: Perhaps it isn't X that's the problem. But most applications cannot agree on what clipboard format they are using. Forget about copying an image in Konqueror or Mozilla and pasting it into OpenOffice. Or even formatted text for that matter. Sheesh!
Except that that isn't even true. In Mozilla, I can copy an image to OpenOffice just fine. And, yes, I do mean the full image, not just a link to the image. Konqueror cannot, simply because it cannot select a image to copy.
Number of Linux distributions: There's no way to make a good installer that will install a commercial app on Linux and have everything work. There are too many dependencies for specific versions of libraries and things that would make this sort of thing worse than any kind of Windows DLL hell.
Sure you can. I've seen people do it. The only problem, is that you must include all the libraries with the program, or hope that they have them already installed. Most people opt for the latter, as it makes for a smaller package. BTW, modern systems such as urpmi and apt-get make dependency hell a thing of the past.
Drivers: Linux intentionally makes it difficult for people to release binary-only drivers. Of course, Binary only drivers are a bad idea anyway, some vendors will insist on it such as NVidia.
I don't quite get that... By "intentionally making it harder", do you mean enforcing the GPL? Other than that, yes Linux does have problems with driver support, though it is getting better. At the moment, the only hardware not supported on my computer is an old Sidewinder gamepad.
As for the rest of your post, you are basically right. Especially about games, although there are some nice commercial games for Linux, there are far too few.
One thing, though, is that for those of us who don't want to pay $1,000+ dollars for a system (and like taking the ones that we already have to use the still good parts), Macs are not an option. Yes, a $1K Mac is as good as a $1K PC, but you can't get a Mac for 500 or less even (my quite decent self built system only cost $400)
And for God sake don't let the GNOME/Gtk people start changing X without some oversight from people who *really* understand X. Remember, Gtk was started by a guy who "wanted to learn how to write a GUI". Yes, that's right, and boy does it show.
Linux was started by a guy who "wanted to learn how to write a OS".
Now look where it is. It has beaten the *NIXes that the people who "really" know OSes made.
Acutually, Canopy == SCO. They own and support it. They could stop the BS forom SCO if they wanted to. It is true, however, that Canopy != Trolltech.
Second, Trolltech developes QT. QT is GPLed, so it could be independent of Trolltech if needed, but for now it isn't. And, if you wanna do a closed source app with QT, Trolltech == QT.
Finally, QT == KDE. No QT, no KDE.
More accuratly, it would be: Canopy == SCO != (Trolltech == closed source QT || Trolltech != GPL QT). GPL QT == KDE.
Additionally, the reason the "weapons" filter would block the NRA but not anti-gun sites is simply the reason it exists - it's what parents want blocked - weapons-promoting sites.
No, parents want to block site that tell you how to build illegal guns/ammo or how to use them to kill people. The NRA site does neither. They tell you two main things:
1) How to handle guns SAFELY, and where to get training on how to do so
2) About hunting or target tournaments and such
3) Why keeping guns legal is a Good Thing (tm)
That is not something most/any parents want blocked.
I generally agree with you. But one thing that is worth noting: some liberal politica; sites deal with things such as sexual orientation rights (and use the term gay, homosexual, and/or sex), and thus trigger the anti-porn filters.
So some of the nannyware programs do it unintentionally.
Linux already has "a complete Web Authoring System for Linux Desktop users to rival programs like FrontPage and Dreamweaver". It's called vim. And it p0wns FP and Dreamweaver.
DISCLAIMER: It's a joke. Laugh.
Re:Wow, those guys sure are behind the times!
on
FreeBSD 4.9 Released
·
· Score: 1
Oopsies... I meant FreeBSD...
Re:Wow, those guys sure are behind the times!
on
FreeBSD 4.9 Released
·
· Score: 1
Pffft... If you rhink that is bad, wait till you hear this: Linux is only on version 2.6! They need 2.5 versions just to catch up to NetBSD -current! And then, they need to go up 8.4 versions to be even close to Apple! Seriously, why do they Linux fanboys bother?
BTW, Windows doesn't count. They cheat. Bad. Going form v3.1 to v95, then from v98 to v2000? WTF!
DISCLAMER: This is what is commonly known as a joke. Laugh. Oh, and I use Linux.
I work as a consultant for several fortune 500 companies, and I think I can shed a little light on the climate of the open source community at the moment. I believe that part of the reason that open source based startups are failing left and right is not an issue of marketing as it's commonly believed but more of an issue of the underlying technology.
I know that that's a strong statement to make, but I have evidence to back it up! At one of the major corps(5000+ employees) that I consult for, we wanted to integrate the shareware version of Linux into our server pool. The allure of not having to pay any restrictive licensing fees was too great to ignore. I reccomended the nstallation of several boxes running the new 2.4.9 kernel, and my hopes were high that it would perform up to snuff with the Windows 2k boxes which were(and still are!) doing an AMAZING job at their respective tasks of serving HTTP requests, DNS, and fileserving.
Riiiiiiiiiight. That also happens to be what all trolls say. Why should I believe you?
I consider myself to be very technically inclined having programmed in VB for the last 8 years doing kernel level programming. I don't believe in C programming because contrary to popular belief, VB can go
just as low level as C and the newest VB compiler generates code that's every bit as fast.
Uh huh... Kernel level programming with VB? How does this kernel of yours manage to run the VB whithout loading the dll to run the VB first? Oh, and VB is nowhere near as fast as C. VB can't touch C in low-levelness. It is, and was designed to be, a high level programming language.
I took it upon myself to configure the system from scratch and even used an optimised version of gcc 3.1 to increase the execution speed of the binaries.
First of all, there is no such thing as as "optimized version of GCC 3.1". The closest you can come to is using optimizatin flags. Oh, and I highly doubt you actually compiled your own kernel and set up everything from scratch as you say. That's quite the task, even for the experienced. You, as a Linux newbie, probably would fail.
fter running for less than 24 hours, 2 of them had experienced kernel panics caused by Bind and Apache crashing!
Uh, OK. Guess what, you either have fucked up hardware, or you horribly messed up your system when you "configured your system from scratch". For the record, I have never seens kernel panic.
Not to mention the fact that
the Linux kernel itself lacks any support for any type of journaled filesystem, memory protection, SMP support, etc,
Pure BS here. I am running Linux with a journeling filesystem (ex3fs). Linux also had journeling filesystems for longer than Windows. I also see a Kernel version to download with SMP support (I opted for one w/o, since my box has only 1 CPU). And Linux does have beter memory protection than Windows ever had.
but I thought that since Linux is based on such "old" technology that it would run with some level of stability.
Linux happens to be newer than Windows, buddy. And Linux is constantly being imporved on.
The rest of this comment is pure BS, expecially the part about Windown 98 being better for the server enviroment.
Actually, he's not all that wrong. According to the "Linux Counter" site (Google for it, if you don't believe me), there are 138637 Linux users who have registered. Assuming Linux has been around 10 years (3,650 days), 38 people switch to Linux per day.
In some cases, if you get s NXDOMAIN responce, Mozilla Firebird will do a Google "I'm feeling lucky" search. In some cases, Web1000 happens to be the site that Google turns up. Thus Firebird goes and sends you to that site.
Slashdot Mirror
First of all, you are definitely not a power user. A "power user" would know how to google, and find out how to set Linux to run "ifdown eth0, ifup eth0" at bootup (via /etc/rc.local). Secend, if you were, you would know that Mandrake is very much a "newbie" OS. It DOES hide some things, or put them under advanced menus. If you don't like that, there are many distros that are much more sutable for advanced users. See Gentoo, Debian, Slackware.
RH is NOT dropping consumers. They directly support (and even control) the Fedora project. The only real difference is that Fedora is more community orientated than RH was, and has a new name.
Put all M$ products in the public domain. Since anyone can do anything with things in the public domain, nobody that needs M$ products would suffer, but M$ would.
Think about it: anyone could redistrobute M$ stuff, anyone could reverse engineer any DRM scheems that M$ does, and projects like WINE would benefit greatly. Yes, that would still be illegal in the US. Still, doing so could devestate M$.
Supremely excellent post. It is always good to see true Americans. I only wish you had logged in so I could have added you to my friends list.
After the SCO execs dump their stock and become rich, the SEC will come after them. So they decide to do some completely insane things with SCO, so that they can maybe get off under a claim of temporary insanity.
After all, I don't think there any drugs that can mess up someone's brain that bad...
So basically they're ripping off the *NIX ".program" config files...
The lack of good font support in X. But it's not just X. It's applications too. There's no unified way to use fonts, or to use the "right" fonts.
By now, most major KDE/GNOME apps have it right. There are some apps that don't, but they are getting less and less common.
Lack of good clipboard support in X: Perhaps it isn't X that's the problem. But most applications cannot agree on what clipboard format they are using. Forget about copying an image in Konqueror or Mozilla and pasting it into OpenOffice. Or even formatted text for that matter. Sheesh!
Except that that isn't even true. In Mozilla, I can copy an image to OpenOffice just fine. And, yes, I do mean the full image, not just a link to the image. Konqueror cannot, simply because it cannot select a image to copy.
Number of Linux distributions: There's no way to make a good installer that will install a commercial app on Linux and have everything work. There are too many dependencies for specific versions of libraries and things that would make this sort of thing worse than any kind of Windows DLL hell.
Sure you can. I've seen people do it. The only problem, is that you must include all the libraries with the program, or hope that they have them already installed. Most people opt for the latter, as it makes for a smaller package. BTW, modern systems such as urpmi and apt-get make dependency hell a thing of the past.
Drivers: Linux intentionally makes it difficult for people to release binary-only drivers. Of course, Binary only drivers are a bad idea anyway, some vendors will insist on it such as NVidia.
I don't quite get that... By "intentionally making it harder", do you mean enforcing the GPL? Other than that, yes Linux does have problems with driver support, though it is getting better. At the moment, the only hardware not supported on my computer is an old Sidewinder gamepad.
As for the rest of your post, you are basically right. Especially about games, although there are some nice commercial games for Linux, there are far too few.
One thing, though, is that for those of us who don't want to pay $1,000+ dollars for a system (and like taking the ones that we already have to use the still good parts), Macs are not an option. Yes, a $1K Mac is as good as a $1K PC, but you can't get a Mac for 500 or less even (my quite decent self built system only cost $400)
Linux was started by a guy who "wanted to learn how to write a OS".
Now look where it is. It has beaten the *NIXes that the people who "really" know OSes made.
Acutually, Canopy == SCO. They own and support it. They could stop the BS forom SCO if they wanted to. It is true, however, that Canopy != Trolltech.
Second, Trolltech developes QT. QT is GPLed, so it could be independent of Trolltech if needed, but for now it isn't. And, if you wanna do a closed source app with QT, Trolltech == QT.
Finally, QT == KDE. No QT, no KDE.
More accuratly, it would be: Canopy == SCO != (Trolltech == closed source QT || Trolltech != GPL QT). GPL QT == KDE.
Additionally, the reason the "weapons" filter would block the NRA but not anti-gun sites is simply the reason it exists - it's what parents want blocked - weapons-promoting sites.
No, parents want to block site that tell you how to build illegal guns/ammo or how to use them to kill people. The NRA site does neither. They tell you two main things:
1) How to handle guns SAFELY, and where to get training on how to do so
2) About hunting or target tournaments and such
3) Why keeping guns legal is a Good Thing (tm)
That is not something most/any parents want blocked.
I generally agree with you. But one thing that is worth noting: some liberal politica; sites deal with things such as sexual orientation rights (and use the term gay, homosexual, and/or sex), and thus trigger the anti-porn filters.
So some of the nannyware programs do it unintentionally.
Linux already has "a complete Web Authoring System for Linux Desktop users to rival programs like FrontPage and Dreamweaver". It's called vim. And it p0wns FP and Dreamweaver. DISCLAIMER: It's a joke. Laugh.
Oopsies... I meant FreeBSD...
Pffft... If you rhink that is bad, wait till you hear this: Linux is only on version 2.6! They need 2.5 versions just to catch up to NetBSD -current! And then, they need to go up 8.4 versions to be even close to Apple! Seriously, why do they Linux fanboys bother?
BTW, Windows doesn't count. They cheat. Bad. Going form v3.1 to v95, then from v98 to v2000? WTF!
DISCLAMER: This is what is commonly known as a joke. Laugh. Oh, and I use Linux.
Is there *nix spyware?
Why not?
Simple. Unless the user is stupid enough to give the spyware his/her root password or run it as root, it would be a sinch to kill. Permanently.
Yeah, but this is a completely diffenet type of damage. It has nothing to do with firmware.
Well, actually, a *NIX zealot will send you yo /dev/null.
The one that really kills me is that there are people who design a system that can be destroyed by reattaching a mouse.
Or, even worse, is people who design a mother board that sometimes starts to boot up when you insert a PCI card, unless you have it unplugged.
"That's insane."
No, its French.
That's what he just said.
Riiiiiiiiiight. That also happens to be what all trolls say. Why should I believe you?
Uh huh... Kernel level programming with VB? How does this kernel of yours manage to run the VB whithout loading the dll to run the VB first? Oh, and VB is nowhere near as fast as C. VB can't touch C in low-levelness. It is, and was designed to be, a high level programming language.
First of all, there is no such thing as as "optimized version of GCC 3.1". The closest you can come to is using optimizatin flags. Oh, and I highly doubt you actually compiled your own kernel and set up everything from scratch as you say. That's quite the task, even for the experienced. You, as a Linux newbie, probably would fail.
Uh, OK. Guess what, you either have fucked up hardware, or you horribly messed up your system when you "configured your system from scratch". For the record, I have never seens kernel panic.
Pure BS here. I am running Linux with a journeling filesystem (ex3fs). Linux also had journeling filesystems for longer than Windows. I also see a Kernel version to download with SMP support (I opted for one w/o, since my box has only 1 CPU). And Linux does have beter memory protection than Windows ever had.
Linux happens to be newer than Windows, buddy. And Linux is constantly being imporved on.
The rest of this comment is pure BS, expecially the part about Windown 98 being better for the server enviroment.
Or, even better:
su
<enter root password>
ping -f -s 30000 www.ataconnect.org
Don't dis Notepad. It was the best piece of software to ever come out of MS. Period.
Besides, if all you need is a simple test editor, why not?
Actually, he's not all that wrong. According to the "Linux Counter" site (Google for it, if you don't believe me), there are 138637 Linux users who have registered. Assuming Linux has been around 10 years (3,650 days), 38 people switch to Linux per day.
138637 / 3650 == 38 (approx)
Actually they all end in "matrix", not "trix". They just added a prefix to "matrix" to make the new title. Animatrix, Fanimatrix
About Mozilla Firebird:
In some cases, if you get s NXDOMAIN responce, Mozilla Firebird will do a Google "I'm feeling lucky" search. In some cases, Web1000 happens to be the site that Google turns up. Thus Firebird goes and sends you to that site.