I'm not ignoring absolutely anything. You are the one who is shifting to a totally different problem. This has absolutely nothing to do with binary drivers versus open source ones. Philosophical questions aside, if a manufacturer provides a working driver, binary or open source, that works, people will use it in Linux. If they don't, Linux users will most likely buy something else. I use Linux and first of all, I don't think that anyone has the moral high ground to tell me "I should go back to using Windows" because they subscribe to the GNU philosophy, but most importantly, I use whatever allows me to get the job done. I use Winex for games, Crossover Office for running a couple of apps that do not exist in Linux or are not up to the standard of the ones I am used to using over the years and I happily use ATI's binary drivers. I think your objection is that my OS is not longer "free" but that is the least of my worries since I paid about 150USD for it. For you, an unustomised, GNU-only distro might do the job, I, and many others, like to have a choice.
Also, I think that you, as well as the Debian community as a whole, are moving further away every day from where Linus wants Linux to go. He does not have problems with binary kernel modules, and the GPL is not a religion neither is it a philosophy. It is a useful licence that works for some kind of development. When the market or the customers want something else, it will appear. Accept it.
Spoken like a true Debian zealot. Also, I "help" Linux by paying good money for distros that give me what I want, while in my opinion you hinder Linux advancement by linking technological development with a quasi-religious view that I find wrong.
Also, please do sit down for a second and think of the fallacy and complacency of your "argument" about twenty year old PCs. Frankly,calling it an argument is too much. But hey, whatever, if you think you're on some kind of a crusade, who am I to argue. I just use Linux because it's superior for what I'm doing. When it's not, I won't use it.
Thanks. I also found something called "linrar", so I guess there ARE alternatives. Oh well, I still try to close windows by double-clicking the icon on the top left corner and do sums in excel by sum(a1..a5), so I guess old habits die hard...
I'm really wondering what kind of world you live in. Debian a major product? When? Where? Maybe in Slashdot, but, kids, remember, Slashdot is not the real world. With Linux in 3% of desktop computers and Debian an enthusiasts distro, what with their "philosophy" and all, we are talking of AT MOST 1% of desktop computers, and that is assuming that one third of Linux PCs run Debian which is overly optimistic.
As a desktop Linux user I find this kind of argument tiring and irrelevant. I want an OS that works, and I really do not care if RMS approves it, I don't care about the "tainted kernel" messages, nor about binary-only drivers. THIS is the real world, my dear friend. You might think this philosophy of yours is very noble and might change the world, but wait until you REALLY need to work on a PC rather than own it to to apt-get upgrade every 2 minutes and we'll see who's right.
Also, your argument about what would happen in 20 years is simplistic. In 20 years you would not dream of installing a modern OS on an ancient machine. You'd either emulate whatever OS you wanted to use or you'd take out the PC from the closet and load the ancient, 20 year old OS. Why a simple thing like that would need to be complicated in such a way I do not understand but, then again, I favour the BSD way of doing things rather than the simplistic and outworldly RMS "philosophy".
Yes, I know exactly what you mean. I still have winrar running through cx office as well as some other small programs because I'm used to them. If you're serious to changing to Linux, I'd strongly advise you to take a look at xandros business 2.0 since things work as they're supposed to and it comes with versions of cx office and plugin already installed. It's truly a drop-in replacement of Windows without the stupidly annoying philosophy of lindows. And the user forums are actually helpful. Yes, it costs 150$ but it's the best money you'll spend and it will actually save you a lot of time you'd be better off spending actually doing things...
As you grow older you'll regretably see that, all things considered, you learn as much working for two years as you do at University. Plus, you probably pick other things up, like not writing "if I had went".:-)
Your analysis is very good, however, I have to disagree on a very fine point. Actually, I'd like to point you to this, a journal by a guy who is trying to find an "easy" Linux distribution. I think by reading his journal you'll see he know his way around unix, however, the process of trying to find a purely "desktop" Linux distribution is not easy at all. My experience with Suse, his current choice, is there, basically I had to go through hell to configure it, and then other things broke. Your argument might be "don't buy ATI". Well, I did, that's a done deal. You might say "it's well known in the Linux world that nforce motherboards do not play well with ATI AGP cards". I don't think that a hardware combination that mainstream should have problems with any distribution. And I also don't think it is fair for pointing the finger to ATI. They DO provide the drivers, and they DO work. The problem is you need to recompile the kernel without dri support for it to work. Now comes the question - is there any kind of user other than the one who really does nothing productive with his Linux PC than play around/ program/learn unix who is going to install sources, headers, make, etc, go through menuconfigs and compiles etc.? Answer? No. At least I did not.
My problem with Linux is that the mainstream distros (and by that, really, I mean the only two left, Mandrake and Suse), pass the problem to the developer of the package that has the problem. This is unacceptable. Distributions should make sure things work. If they don't, it's the distribution's problem.
I am currently using Xandros and I think it should get much more credit than it is given. It is truly perfect for my needs and I truly wish I had heard of it as a real alternative a bit before. I got the business version that comes with Staroffice and the Crossover programs, making it really worth it. PLUS everything just works out of the box. You really only need the one cd for the installation, and on rebooting you have a fully working system. And it has a task-based approach to doing things, wizards everywhere, sharing folders through smb is done EXACTLY like Windows. Right click, sharing, share. That's it.
The other huge problem is the Linux omnipresent philosophy that "Windows is bad". No it's not. Main tasks are done through wizards and the interface is more or less intuitive. Therefore, there is this tendency for making things different in Linux. While this is a fair argument to make while speaking of Linux (and other Unices) as a techie tool, while speaking of Linux as a drop-in replacement for Windows, it just doesn't work. And let me make myself more clear - the problem is not the design, it's the overall philosophy. Try, for example, using Thunderbird, the new mozilla mail component. I did, just to waste time. I have five accounts, and thunderbird treats each one of them as, basically, a separate process. Might as well have five different mailers open. I have to create separate filters for each account, etc. etc. Evolution does things well, it is one step above Outlook in terms of design and basic functionalities, and it doesn't choke on my 1Gb mailbox, imported without a problem once I found a way. But it is a copy of Outlook, and that's a fact.
My point, to wrap things up, is that you can't have it all. You can't have the simplicity with the hidden power model that an office user, grandma and a power user wants and has in Windows while having a 5 cd install with 5000 different programs. You also cannot please the hard-core techie crowd who think that anything but compiling from source is crap and they cringe when seeing someone run a Windows app in Linux because "it hinders development of Linux apps". You can already see it, Lindows and Xandros are here, yet the slashdot crowd ignores them even though they are superior distributions. Why? They are not free. I DON'T CARE, and Linux is here to provide an alternative to Windows, not necessarily a free alternative. It is utopic to think that a freshly installed Debian Linux PC will be usably by grandma. It won't.
I'd like to thank you, first of all for your informed and calm commentary, as opposed to the couple of Linux zealots I usually have running after me as soon as I post my views. First of all, my distro is Suse 9.0, running a minimally patched (nvidia's agpgart) 2.4.20. As standard as they come, I suppose. I also run Windows 2003 server patched to be a workstation. The experience I have running Windows is different to running Linux. Different, not better. *I* am able to solve problems I have with Linux, but my arguments were that the average guy cannot. Nothing more, nothing less. And drivers is, at this point, the bigger problem with Linux on the desktop. I've gone through hell to install an ATI card on an nforce motherboard and, tbh, the argument that I shouldn't buy ATI because it's not as well supported is a bit weird. It works fine on windows and the average guy or girl does not really care about the politics of Linux or open source software, they just want their PC to work as well on Linux as on Windows.
I also don't think the "driver model thing" is marketing talk. It is truly something there to help developers build a driver quickly and with the minimum of fuss. And a WDM driver works not only on W2k, w2k3 and xp, it also works (except graphics drivers, that is), on W98. Not bad, I think. There's no such thing as even a graphics driver for the 2.4.20 kernel. Do you have dri installed in your kernel? Yes? Well, you need to re-compile. Or vice-versa...
My argument is that once properly configured, a Linux workstation is of equal quality to a Windows PC. But most people don't see properly configuring Linux as a challenge, like I do and probably you do as well. They see it as something that should not happen.
I have been reading most of your posts in this discussion and let me say this: you haven't got a clue what being a user means. I shall analyse my position:
1. Hardware WORKS in windows. You download the driver, doubleclick, next, next, finish, reboot, it works. Full stop. Now compare to linux. Download driver. rpm -Uvh *.rpm, perhaps a --force in there, notice the errors because the bin package is not compatible with your distro. Download tgz. Make, make install. depmod, vim modules.conf. Reboot. Pray. It works UNLESS you upgrade your kernel (and have suse). Now THAT is a good user experience. I cannot understand how you can say Linux is superior in this matter, but anyway... And don't you dare say apt-get or emerge are superior. They are not. Once you go outside the approved.deb or whatever depositories, you are treading on dangerous ground. And you WILL need to go there if you want multimedia support.
2. "Look, there is plenty of downloaded Windows software that fucks up when you install it."... Big huge hairy bollocks. Unless you are doing something really wrong like messing with the registry or installing seriously buggy applications it's not really normal that something like that happens. For the normal user who has 10-20 apps installed and doesn't install/uninstall things, it just works. How about when you do a rpm -i --force (which you HAVE to do sometimes) and it just completely fucks up your system? Oh, I'm sorry, it really is my fault, I shouldn't have "forced" the installation.
3. "The only problem Linux has that is significant is when new hardware needs to be installed that is not directly supported by the kernel and for which there are no drivers. The solution? Don't buy that hardware". Really? So I should buy what I consider an inferior and overpriced nvidia card rather than an ati for playing games in my Windows partition because nvidia drivers are easier to install? Or I should buy a via mobo rather than a nforce one because via nic drivers are pre-compiled in the kernel? Do you think that hardware companies do not support Linux as well as windows because there are more windows users out there than Linux users and it doesn't make economic sense? No. They don't support Linux as much because the linux userbase is fragmented as hell and there is no "Linux Driver Model". They develop one driver for Windows and they package, I don't know, 5 plus a src.tgz for Linux. Whose fault is that? Is it the Microsoft monopoly or the pigheaded Linux developers that have been resisting the push to standardised binary kernel modules?
4. People want stuff that is standard, user-friendly and just work. Standard, contrary to/.'s opinion does not mean "approved by an international standards body". It's what everyone uses. Can oo or staroffice or hancomoffice or kwhatever open the excel-macro-ridden xls documents I use at work? No? Can I open, manipulate.psd files in a color-calibrated environment? No? Then, my dear friend Linux is not ready, full stop, however much you might think that Linux is a superior solution to Windows - which it isn't, it's a different, more elegant philosophy. Accept it.
Linux has its places. It's my desktop, it's your desktop but it is NOT grandma's desktop. If you make people choose whether to use a free OS that would make them work twice as hard or even 10% as hard or to spend 100 euros and use a troublefree and standard OS, guess what they would choose. Why do I use Linux? I like the challenge. Not everyone does. And I STILL use Windows for the things that are impossible to do in Linux.
So please kindly stop trolling your uninformed views, it gets truly annoying to see such blatant zealotry even in a forum as unbalanced as slashdot is.
Legislating against something does not solve the problem, especially if there is a lot of money to be made, as is the case with spam. Ask yourself this question: are you receiving less spam since the CAN-SPAM act passed?
You, sir, are suffering of an extreme lack of humor, an apparent inability to take criticism and an obvious crassness in your expression. I suggest yoga, reading a good book and sex, not necessarily in that order.
Nearing 500 messages, it's the first time I'm called a troll, by the way.
I absolutely LOVE the way that you analyse, evaluate and eventually reject a position in THREE lines. Congratulations, I can't wait to read your treatise of such subjects as quantum mechanics, nanotechnology and the Ben and Jerry relationship.
You assume something as the basis for your thesis that is not necessarily true: that spamming is a crime. It is not. It might be obnoxious, it might even advocate illegal services or products but mass mailing is not an illegal activity, obnoxious as it is. The only realistic solution is for us geeks to install spam blockers, bayesian if possible, to as many friends' computers as possible, thus rendering mass mailings ineffective.
Interestingly enough, more and more spam seem to sieve through my spam-filters. I guess we need something better? Or is spamassassin not the dog's bollocks any longer?
and still looking to benefit from the extra-low US dollar, I wholeheartidly and unreservedly suggest they try a forwarding agent. I use MyUS myself and they have flawlessly delivered everything I ordered from the US whereever I happened to be. It's great for these bargains that only seem to available to US citizens - I got an extra-cheap Zaurus from amazon.com last month for what is half the price of its price in Europe.
It goes without saying I'm not affiliated with them in any way, just an extremely happy customer. The inicial cost might appear steep but it's offset by your first major spend, really.
Slashdot Mirror
DVDShrink does it admirably, and does more than that even. It is free and runs fine in Linux through Crossover, maybe even Wine.
Also, I think that you, as well as the Debian community as a whole, are moving further away every day from where Linus wants Linux to go. He does not have problems with binary kernel modules, and the GPL is not a religion neither is it a philosophy. It is a useful licence that works for some kind of development. When the market or the customers want something else, it will appear. Accept it.
Spoken like a true Debian zealot. Also, I "help" Linux by paying good money for distros that give me what I want, while in my opinion you hinder Linux advancement by linking technological development with a quasi-religious view that I find wrong.
Also, please do sit down for a second and think of the fallacy and complacency of your "argument" about twenty year old PCs. Frankly,calling it an argument is too much. But hey, whatever, if you think you're on some kind of a crusade, who am I to argue. I just use Linux because it's superior for what I'm doing. When it's not, I won't use it.
Thanks. I also found something called "linrar", so I guess there ARE alternatives. Oh well, I still try to close windows by double-clicking the icon on the top left corner and do sums in excel by sum(a1..a5), so I guess old habits die hard...
As a desktop Linux user I find this kind of argument tiring and irrelevant. I want an OS that works, and I really do not care if RMS approves it, I don't care about the "tainted kernel" messages, nor about binary-only drivers. THIS is the real world, my dear friend. You might think this philosophy of yours is very noble and might change the world, but wait until you REALLY need to work on a PC rather than own it to to apt-get upgrade every 2 minutes and we'll see who's right.
Also, your argument about what would happen in 20 years is simplistic. In 20 years you would not dream of installing a modern OS on an ancient machine. You'd either emulate whatever OS you wanted to use or you'd take out the PC from the closet and load the ancient, 20 year old OS. Why a simple thing like that would need to be complicated in such a way I do not understand but, then again, I favour the BSD way of doing things rather than the simplistic and outworldly RMS "philosophy".
Where? The only file I can find in rarlabs.com is the command line one. I'd be extremely grateful if you could provide me with a direct link.
Yes, I know exactly what you mean. I still have winrar running through cx office as well as some other small programs because I'm used to them. If you're serious to changing to Linux, I'd strongly advise you to take a look at xandros business 2.0 since things work as they're supposed to and it comes with versions of cx office and plugin already installed. It's truly a drop-in replacement of Windows without the stupidly annoying philosophy of lindows. And the user forums are actually helpful. Yes, it costs 150$ but it's the best money you'll spend and it will actually save you a lot of time you'd be better off spending actually doing things...
As you grow older you'll regretably see that, all things considered, you learn as much working for two years as you do at University. Plus, you probably pick other things up, like not writing "if I had went". :-)
My problem with Linux is that the mainstream distros (and by that, really, I mean the only two left, Mandrake and Suse), pass the problem to the developer of the package that has the problem. This is unacceptable. Distributions should make sure things work. If they don't, it's the distribution's problem.
I am currently using Xandros and I think it should get much more credit than it is given. It is truly perfect for my needs and I truly wish I had heard of it as a real alternative a bit before. I got the business version that comes with Staroffice and the Crossover programs, making it really worth it. PLUS everything just works out of the box. You really only need the one cd for the installation, and on rebooting you have a fully working system. And it has a task-based approach to doing things, wizards everywhere, sharing folders through smb is done EXACTLY like Windows. Right click, sharing, share. That's it.
The other huge problem is the Linux omnipresent philosophy that "Windows is bad". No it's not. Main tasks are done through wizards and the interface is more or less intuitive. Therefore, there is this tendency for making things different in Linux. While this is a fair argument to make while speaking of Linux (and other Unices) as a techie tool, while speaking of Linux as a drop-in replacement for Windows, it just doesn't work. And let me make myself more clear - the problem is not the design, it's the overall philosophy. Try, for example, using Thunderbird, the new mozilla mail component. I did, just to waste time. I have five accounts, and thunderbird treats each one of them as, basically, a separate process. Might as well have five different mailers open. I have to create separate filters for each account, etc. etc. Evolution does things well, it is one step above Outlook in terms of design and basic functionalities, and it doesn't choke on my 1Gb mailbox, imported without a problem once I found a way. But it is a copy of Outlook, and that's a fact.
My point, to wrap things up, is that you can't have it all. You can't have the simplicity with the hidden power model that an office user, grandma and a power user wants and has in Windows while having a 5 cd install with 5000 different programs. You also cannot please the hard-core techie crowd who think that anything but compiling from source is crap and they cringe when seeing someone run a Windows app in Linux because "it hinders development of Linux apps". You can already see it, Lindows and Xandros are here, yet the slashdot crowd ignores them even though they are superior distributions. Why? They are not free. I DON'T CARE, and Linux is here to provide an alternative to Windows, not necessarily a free alternative. It is utopic to think that a freshly installed Debian Linux PC will be usably by grandma. It won't.
I also don't think the "driver model thing" is marketing talk. It is truly something there to help developers build a driver quickly and with the minimum of fuss. And a WDM driver works not only on W2k, w2k3 and xp, it also works (except graphics drivers, that is), on W98. Not bad, I think. There's no such thing as even a graphics driver for the 2.4.20 kernel. Do you have dri installed in your kernel? Yes? Well, you need to re-compile. Or vice-versa...
My argument is that once properly configured, a Linux workstation is of equal quality to a Windows PC. But most people don't see properly configuring Linux as a challenge, like I do and probably you do as well. They see it as something that should not happen.
You mean Real has been dragging Microsoft through courts therefore Microsoft would never make a deal with them? Just like they didn't with Sun, then?
1. Hardware WORKS in windows. You download the driver, doubleclick, next, next, finish, reboot, it works. Full stop. Now compare to linux. Download driver. rpm -Uvh *.rpm, perhaps a --force in there, notice the errors because the bin package is not compatible with your distro. Download tgz. Make, make install. depmod, vim modules.conf. Reboot. Pray. It works UNLESS you upgrade your kernel (and have suse). Now THAT is a good user experience. I cannot understand how you can say Linux is superior in this matter, but anyway... And don't you dare say apt-get or emerge are superior. They are not. Once you go outside the approved .deb or whatever depositories, you are treading on dangerous ground. And you WILL need to go there if you want multimedia support.
2. "Look, there is plenty of downloaded Windows software that fucks up when you install it."... Big huge hairy bollocks. Unless you are doing something really wrong like messing with the registry or installing seriously buggy applications it's not really normal that something like that happens. For the normal user who has 10-20 apps installed and doesn't install/uninstall things, it just works. How about when you do a rpm -i --force (which you HAVE to do sometimes) and it just completely fucks up your system? Oh, I'm sorry, it really is my fault, I shouldn't have "forced" the installation.
3. "The only problem Linux has that is significant is when new hardware needs to be installed that is not directly supported by the kernel and for which there are no drivers. The solution? Don't buy that hardware". Really? So I should buy what I consider an inferior and overpriced nvidia card rather than an ati for playing games in my Windows partition because nvidia drivers are easier to install? Or I should buy a via mobo rather than a nforce one because via nic drivers are pre-compiled in the kernel? Do you think that hardware companies do not support Linux as well as windows because there are more windows users out there than Linux users and it doesn't make economic sense? No. They don't support Linux as much because the linux userbase is fragmented as hell and there is no "Linux Driver Model". They develop one driver for Windows and they package, I don't know, 5 plus a src.tgz for Linux. Whose fault is that? Is it the Microsoft monopoly or the pigheaded Linux developers that have been resisting the push to standardised binary kernel modules?
4. People want stuff that is standard, user-friendly and just work. Standard, contrary to /.'s opinion does not mean "approved by an international standards body". It's what everyone uses. Can oo or staroffice or hancomoffice or kwhatever open the excel-macro-ridden xls documents I use at work? No? Can I open, manipulate .psd files in a color-calibrated environment? No? Then, my dear friend Linux is not ready, full stop, however much you might think that Linux is a superior solution to Windows - which it isn't, it's a different, more elegant philosophy. Accept it.
Linux has its places. It's my desktop, it's your desktop but it is NOT grandma's desktop. If you make people choose whether to use a free OS that would make them work twice as hard or even 10% as hard or to spend 100 euros and use a troublefree and standard OS, guess what they would choose. Why do I use Linux? I like the challenge. Not everyone does. And I STILL use Windows for the things that are impossible to do in Linux.
So please kindly stop trolling your uninformed views, it gets truly annoying to see such blatant zealotry even in a forum as unbalanced as slashdot is.
Can you offer LEGAL proof that ALL "spamvertised" products are illegal and / or fraudulent? Because THAT exactly is my point.
Legislating against something does not solve the problem, especially if there is a lot of money to be made, as is the case with spam. Ask yourself this question: are you receiving less spam since the CAN-SPAM act passed?
Nearing 500 messages, it's the first time I'm called a troll, by the way.
I wasn't aware the CAN-SPAM act was valid in the EU or anywhere outside the US for that matter.
I absolutely LOVE the way that you analyse, evaluate and eventually reject a position in THREE lines. Congratulations, I can't wait to read your treatise of such subjects as quantum mechanics, nanotechnology and the Ben and Jerry relationship.
Interestingly enough, more and more spam seem to sieve through my spam-filters. I guess we need something better? Or is spamassassin not the dog's bollocks any longer?
I wasn't aware I was asking *myself*.
If it's such a stupid / boring idea (which it properly is), why the hell is it in the front page of slashdot?
The LSL series was in NO way an RPG. It was an adventure game series.
It goes without saying I'm not affiliated with them in any way, just an extremely happy customer. The inicial cost might appear steep but it's offset by your first major spend, really.
Why buy a second one? Just mod the one you have. Be careful to install a mod-chip that can be turned off for when you log-in to Live and you're set.
Everquest was fun? Really??
Thank you comrade.