I worked for UK ISP Demon in the early 90s, had a 10Mb "baseband" connection to my bedroom direct from the NOC, and I was developing business, systems and network software for the corporate part of Demon. I gave various customers and friends at other ISPs a login on my home Linux box so that they would be able to do traceroutes and so on. Since.org domain is "kfs", my one requirement for anyone wanting a web directory was "come up with a name that uses the kfs initials" - e.g. the "Kite Fliers Site".
It became a sort of home-from-home on the 'net, and when I left Demon in 2000, they banded together and created "OurShack" (www.ourshack.com). I don't know if OurShack was the first NFP, but if you follow the people you can see the clear trail from the shack to our Aussie friends, whom I wish every luck in their efforts:)
I didn't say KDE needed a powerful computer, I chose my words carefully, and said that my computer is never powerful enough to run it smoothly.
I'd love to know why there is such a disparity between what people are always saying is the KDE experience and what those of us who turn to KDE hoping for salvation from only to find ourselves frustratedly falling back to .
You said "easy to set up a simple system"; maybe I've just not used the right distro yet.
KDE is the "workaround UI": every time a new feature creates a problem, they seem to solve it by adding workaround features such as 2-3 additional ways to access whatever was just obscured, a way to hide the new access, and etc.
KDE is contrary to almost every instinct of an Atari/Amiga/Windows/Early-Xer. I found my virginal experience of Mac OS with OS X 10.2 orders of magnitude easier than any of my forays into KDE.
I have always found KDE to be bloat incarnate: the only consistency is that things are konsistently different and awkward, plus my machine is some how never powerful enough to run KDE smoothly.
Over the last 15 years, my Linux and BSD desktop experience has repeatedly undergone the following cycle:
1. Install new distro/release with default desktop, 2. Try for 4-6 weeks, 3. Manually try a different window manager, 4. Get annoyed at all the glitches, 5. Try KDE, 6. Allow 1-2 days 7. Remove GUI and go back to ssh/X from Windows with a shake of my fist.
Ultimately it comes down to which UI you learn first. If you started with KDE, you probably have a good grasp of the basics. If you didn't, then the only times you're going to consider KDE are when you've already been annoyed by one UI, making KDE's confusing counter-intuitive concepts a wall of hurt waiting to get you to uninstall.
Yes, there is some extra inconvenience in accessing the IPMI interfaces of our servers, but each cab has a dedicated physical switch for the IPMI connections which blocks anything but IPMI-UDP packets. Each of our servers either has an IPMI card or a dedicated on-board IPMI NIC - and I don't mean we use one of the CPU-accessible NICs for it. Each cab's IPMI-switch is connected to a console box at the end of the row providing terminal-based IPMI access or you can remote console it.
Most important part of the sys-/security- admin role is to keep users from shooting themselves in the foot by denying them access to luxuries they don't really need, c.f. sudo - because root gives you everything so you don't NEED the root password. IPMI does not need to double as-/interact with- remote system management.
IPMI becomes most dangerous when SAs fail to apply those same rules and go for convenience features, like IPMI that doesn't have a dedicated port/wire, or IPMI that can talk to the bios.
So choose your IPMI sagely: Power status, power logs, sensor states via dedicated channels and NOT via bios backdoor, power on, power off, reset. You do NOT need backdoor BIOS access, that's what remote management consoles are for. You do NOT need boot order access. And you absolutely do NOT want the IPMI to expose itself to the CPU or main memory in any way that would allow the kernel or BIOS to talk with it any more than you want the root password in/etc/motd.
It's about tactile feedback: look at the "mixing desk" flavor in the animation cycle on their front page...
I suggested something like this back in 2009 when I saw '10 gui', I thinking: pick up where haptic displays (the ones that braile users use) left off, most especially multi-display situations where one or other display might serve largely as a control device with helpful visual feedback when you need to look at it: http://kfsone.wordpress.com/2009/10/22/touchy-feely-10gui/
On a phone: you finish typing your text message and the device drops back to music player mode; the buttons morph into volume slider, play/pause/fwd/etc.
And wouldn't it be nice if you had a tactile guide to where to put your thumb to take a picture when using the phone as a camera - better yet, where NOT to put your thumb while trying to get the shot;)
I've never played a DVD or Blu-Ray movie on my PC. I know very few people who play DVDs on their PCs, aside from people specifically using a Media PC or a Laptop - and in those cases, they ship with DVD playing software.
So why should MS raise the cost of Windows to maintain for free a rarely used component of the OS which conflicts so heavily with their own other interests (sales of Media PCs, sales of consoles, etc)? Or did you fail to read your own sig?
Perhaps you forgot, but this is a thread replying to a Slashdot article entitled "Why Desktop Linux hasn't taken off". Maybe you're mistaking me for Microsoft or someone who likes them.
Your "you can just jump ship" is exactly the underscore I'm talking about. Been there, done that. Can't remember how many window managers I've used, lost track of all the distros I've switched between. Ubuntu is merely the most recent and, probably, one of the most promising contenders: Unity makes a really nice netbook / laptop desktop.
No sooner had they gotten everyone calling Ubuntu the "rising star", the "desktop hopeful" than they lock sites on some specific target niche and leave everyone else with a "don't like it? just use a different distro/spin/flavor".
I'd be really happy to see the Mint team break the trend, but right now my hunch - based on everything I've seen - is that we'll see another Redhat/Fedora situation with Mint:(
It's a shame, I suspect Windows 8 is going to bomb worse than Vista did, at least on the desktop and for different reasons. This would be a great time for Canonical to refocus some of their efforts on their desktop support and be ready to catch some of the "I went back to Windows" types rebounding to Linux.
Linux desktops never endure - they become popular, gain prominence, and then they take a left turn. Mint is nice, but it is too dependent on Ubuntu, and Ubuntu is a sinking ship. As soon as Mint detaches from Ubuntu and becomes its own distro, they'll just do the same thing. It's what Linux distros do.
For a brief while, there, Ubuntu proffered a best-of-breed Linux desktop experience. Indeed, Unity is quite pleasant to use on a suitable device like a notebook or something. However, 'Nix-heads hate it because of the dearth of UI tweak options, the rest of us hate it because it's ceased to be a Desktop desktop.
In my experience, this is typical of the development of Linux desktops. They hook you and then turn a corner that makes you spit them right back out again.
Microsoft does the same thing - some folks run Windows 7 with Windows 2000 look and feel; others never made it past Win 98, but you don't quite get that "shafted-under-the-hood" feeling when Windows upgrades that you get when a new release of your distro comes out.
Cherryh (who is damned prolific, she was also a script writer on Lois & Clark), also has post-apocalyptic-psuedo-magic (Morgaine Saga) and fallen-earth (Angel With a Sword, Merovingen Nights series), and a huge array of other genres she takes a good try at -- the fantasy stuff, I've tried two of them and not gotten more than a dozen pages in.
If you decide to take a stab at her Chanur books, it's fair to warn you that when she first had these published, the publishers refused to believe a/woman/ could write scifi, and forced her to publish the book instead as three books. Make sure you get a Chanur Saga with all three books in one, and have a good chuckle when you realize you've just read the bridge between two enforced book divisions:)
"C. J. Cherryh"s stuff is pretty awesome, the aliens in Chanur may be a turn off for some folks, but in that case her "Alliance-Union" books are pretty excellent sci-fi: yes, she has FTL, but no they don't have dampening fields or subspace communications - and in several of her books she plays with the resulting mechanics - the proximity between an arriving ship's first contact data to a station and the ship itself breaking from a relativistic speed.
She does a pretty good alien world: I loved fading sun, and for some reason I'm one of the many hooked on the Foreigner series;)
Cyteen has a creepy edge to it that continually makes you wonder if you want to keep reading, but brilliant.
This is gonna be a fantastic one to watch: Will/. stone the guy for wanting money for software (we're all about FOSS, right?) or revile the/trade college/ for being frugal with its monies.
""I'm the Senior Systems administrator for a small trade college.""
So he doesn't work for some huge corporation that drips dollars from it's eyes, and I'm guessing his concern is that if he empowers them with the software, they'll have less of a need for someone who has so much down time they were able to automate themselves and his next pay check might be his last.
I'm pretty sure that most places have this case already covered with their "anything you do while you work here is the property of your employer" clause; it's a standard clause to clarify exactly this kind of situation, and given that it's a/trade college/ they'd be pretty failarific if they let employees start milking them for doing each others' jobs.
Unity isn't a problem; Unity is a really nice Linux skin for custom devices. It's not even terrible for the desktop, outside of the fact that if your desktop doesn't match their UI layout, yer borked.
Mark Shuttleworth has made it perfectly clear that people who have any kind of reason why the left-hand side of the screen is not the right place for a task bar are power users and should either (a) change the code themselves, (b) use a different distro.
Of course - we're all just responding to the/. synposis, though even that suggests that it is a patent for a particular set of technologies/methodologies for providing the experience and not the experience in general:
Windows Live Messenger, for instance, provides a "Watch this Together" link when you past a video or youtube URL to someone, which provides an API for synchronized viewing of the linked content. Obvious idea, sophisticated and non-trivial behind the scenes implementation.
Your first two paragraphs, word for word what I was about to post, but your average user is not only not interested in freedom, they don't want it.
This is true in just about every domain: from cars (how many American's want stick shift?) to people's choice of pets to computers to travel to healthcare (seriously - you pay someone to clean your teeth?).
This smacks of really poor - or deliberately biased - data analysis.
HOW the game ends doesn't matter, the problem is THAT it ends.
Red Dead is one of the few games that I HAVE finished in many years purely because I didn't realize I was finishing it. But in doing so, I was able to see how most people probably wouldn't finish it because the trigger for it would most likely be ignored by story followers.
Slashdot Mirror
I worked for UK ISP Demon in the early 90s, had a 10Mb "baseband" connection to my bedroom direct from the NOC, and I was developing business, systems and network software for the corporate part of Demon. I gave various customers and friends at other ISPs a login on my home Linux box so that they would be able to do traceroutes and so on. Since .org domain is "kfs", my one requirement for anyone wanting a web directory was "come up with a name that uses the kfs initials" - e.g. the "Kite Fliers Site".
It became a sort of home-from-home on the 'net, and when I left Demon in 2000, they banded together and created "OurShack" (www.ourshack.com). I don't know if OurShack was the first NFP, but if you follow the people you can see the clear trail from the shack to our Aussie friends, whom I wish every luck in their efforts :)
getting the [grammar] wrong means you can inadvertently sound like a dummy.
I didn't say KDE needed a powerful computer, I chose my words carefully, and said that my computer is never powerful enough to run it smoothly.
I'd love to know why there is such a disparity between what people are always saying is the KDE experience and what those of us who turn to KDE hoping for salvation from only to find ourselves frustratedly falling back to .
You said "easy to set up a simple system"; maybe I've just not used the right distro yet.
KDE is the "workaround UI": every time a new feature creates a problem, they seem to solve it by adding workaround features such as 2-3 additional ways to access whatever was just obscured, a way to hide the new access, and etc.
KDE is contrary to almost every instinct of an Atari/Amiga/Windows/Early-Xer. I found my virginal experience of Mac OS with OS X 10.2 orders of magnitude easier than any of my forays into KDE.
I have always found KDE to be bloat incarnate: the only consistency is that things are konsistently different and awkward, plus my machine is some how never powerful enough to run KDE smoothly.
Over the last 15 years, my Linux and BSD desktop experience has repeatedly undergone the following cycle:
1. Install new distro/release with default desktop,
2. Try for 4-6 weeks,
3. Manually try a different window manager,
4. Get annoyed at all the glitches,
5. Try KDE,
6. Allow 1-2 days
7. Remove GUI and go back to ssh/X from Windows with a shake of my fist.
Ultimately it comes down to which UI you learn first. If you started with KDE, you probably have a good grasp of the basics. If you didn't, then the only times you're going to consider KDE are when you've already been annoyed by one UI, making KDE's confusing counter-intuitive concepts a wall of hurt waiting to get you to uninstall.
Yes, there is some extra inconvenience in accessing the IPMI interfaces of our servers, but each cab has a dedicated physical switch for the IPMI connections which blocks anything but IPMI-UDP packets. Each of our servers either has an IPMI card or a dedicated on-board IPMI NIC - and I don't mean we use one of the CPU-accessible NICs for it. Each cab's IPMI-switch is connected to a console box at the end of the row providing terminal-based IPMI access or you can remote console it.
Most important part of the sys-/security- admin role is to keep users from shooting themselves in the foot by denying them access to luxuries they don't really need, c.f. sudo - because root gives you everything so you don't NEED the root password. IPMI does not need to double as-/interact with- remote system management.
IPMI becomes most dangerous when SAs fail to apply those same rules and go for convenience features, like IPMI that doesn't have a dedicated port/wire, or IPMI that can talk to the bios.
So choose your IPMI sagely: Power status, power logs, sensor states via dedicated channels and NOT via bios backdoor, power on, power off, reset. You do NOT need backdoor BIOS access, that's what remote management consoles are for. You do NOT need boot order access. And you absolutely do NOT want the IPMI to expose itself to the CPU or main memory in any way that would allow the kernel or BIOS to talk with it any more than you want the root password in /etc/motd.
It's about tactile feedback: look at the "mixing desk" flavor in the animation cycle on their front page...
I suggested something like this back in 2009 when I saw '10 gui', I thinking: pick up where haptic displays (the ones that braile users use) left off, most especially multi-display situations where one or other display might serve largely as a control device with helpful visual feedback when you need to look at it: http://kfsone.wordpress.com/2009/10/22/touchy-feely-10gui/
On a phone: you finish typing your text message and the device drops back to music player mode; the buttons morph into volume slider, play/pause/fwd/etc.
And wouldn't it be nice if you had a tactile guide to where to put your thumb to take a picture when using the phone as a camera - better yet, where NOT to put your thumb while trying to get the shot ;)
the UEFI secure-boot feature required to run Windows 8.
The only people affected by this are people who have supported MS by buying MS-spec hardware.
$99 for a keying license vs Sony's policy of simply not allowing other OSes ... I'd say, lesser of two evils.
They've been doing that ever since 1937...
Isn't there some way we can meta-moderate articles that made it thru the fire hose? Or once they're published, is that it?
I've never played a DVD or Blu-Ray movie on my PC. I know very few people who play DVDs on their PCs, aside from people specifically using a Media PC or a Laptop - and in those cases, they ship with DVD playing software.
So why should MS raise the cost of Windows to maintain for free a rarely used component of the OS which conflicts so heavily with their own other interests (sales of Media PCs, sales of consoles, etc)? Or did you fail to read your own sig?
Perhaps you forgot, but this is a thread replying to a Slashdot article entitled "Why Desktop Linux hasn't taken off". Maybe you're mistaking me for Microsoft or someone who likes them.
Your "you can just jump ship" is exactly the underscore I'm talking about. Been there, done that. Can't remember how many window managers I've used, lost track of all the distros I've switched between. Ubuntu is merely the most recent and, probably, one of the most promising contenders: Unity makes a really nice netbook / laptop desktop.
No sooner had they gotten everyone calling Ubuntu the "rising star", the "desktop hopeful" than they lock sites on some specific target niche and leave everyone else with a "don't like it? just use a different distro/spin/flavor".
I'd be really happy to see the Mint team break the trend, but right now my hunch - based on everything I've seen - is that we'll see another Redhat/Fedora situation with Mint :(
It's a shame, I suspect Windows 8 is going to bomb worse than Vista did, at least on the desktop and for different reasons. This would be a great time for Canonical to refocus some of their efforts on their desktop support and be ready to catch some of the "I went back to Windows" types rebounding to Linux.
Oops
Linux desktops never endure - they become popular, gain prominence, and then they take a left turn. Mint is nice, but it is too dependent on Ubuntu, and Ubuntu is a sinking ship. As soon as Mint detaches from Ubuntu and becomes its own distro, they'll just do the same thing. It's what Linux distros do.
Desktop Linux blossoms, and then perishes - hard.
For a brief while, there, Ubuntu proffered a best-of-breed Linux desktop experience. Indeed, Unity is quite pleasant to use on a suitable device like a notebook or something. However, 'Nix-heads hate it because of the dearth of UI tweak options, the rest of us hate it because it's ceased to be a Desktop desktop.
In my experience, this is typical of the development of Linux desktops. They hook you and then turn a corner that makes you spit them right back out again.
Microsoft does the same thing - some folks run Windows 7 with Windows 2000 look and feel; others never made it past Win 98, but you don't quite get that "shafted-under-the-hood" feeling when Windows upgrades that you get when a new release of your distro comes out.
The "CPP" file, for those interested: https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/blob/master/test/perf/perf.cpp
Cherryh (who is damned prolific, she was also a script writer on Lois & Clark), also has post-apocalyptic-psuedo-magic (Morgaine Saga) and fallen-earth (Angel With a Sword, Merovingen Nights series), and a huge array of other genres she takes a good try at -- the fantasy stuff, I've tried two of them and not gotten more than a dozen pages in.
If you decide to take a stab at her Chanur books, it's fair to warn you that when she first had these published, the publishers refused to believe a /woman/ could write scifi, and forced her to publish the book instead as three books. Make sure you get a Chanur Saga with all three books in one, and have a good chuckle when you realize you've just read the bridge between two enforced book divisions :)
"C. J. Cherryh"s stuff is pretty awesome, the aliens in Chanur may be a turn off for some folks, but in that case her "Alliance-Union" books are pretty excellent sci-fi: yes, she has FTL, but no they don't have dampening fields or subspace communications - and in several of her books she plays with the resulting mechanics - the proximity between an arriving ship's first contact data to a station and the ship itself breaking from a relativistic speed.
She does a pretty good alien world: I loved fading sun, and for some reason I'm one of the many hooked on the Foreigner series ;)
Cyteen has a creepy edge to it that continually makes you wonder if you want to keep reading, but brilliant.
This is gonna be a fantastic one to watch: Will /. stone the guy for wanting money for software (we're all about FOSS, right?) or revile the /trade college/ for being frugal with its monies.
""I'm the Senior Systems administrator for a small trade college.""
So he doesn't work for some huge corporation that drips dollars from it's eyes, and I'm guessing his concern is that if he empowers them with the software, they'll have less of a need for someone who has so much down time they were able to automate themselves and his next pay check might be his last.
I'm pretty sure that most places have this case already covered with their "anything you do while you work here is the property of your employer" clause; it's a standard clause to clarify exactly this kind of situation, and given that it's a /trade college/ they'd be pretty failarific if they let employees start milking them for doing each others' jobs.
... who stand to profit from the implementation of SOPA.
(Referring to the list of supporters)
Unity isn't a problem; Unity is a really nice Linux skin for custom devices. It's not even terrible for the desktop, outside of the fact that if your desktop doesn't match their UI layout, yer borked.
Mark Shuttleworth has made it perfectly clear that people who have any kind of reason why the left-hand side of the screen is not the right place for a task bar are power users and should either (a) change the code themselves, (b) use a different distro.
No, really! https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/668415
Wait - I should write that in French so we only lose the bad kind of Canadian.
Of course - we're all just responding to the /. synposis, though even that suggests that it is a patent for a particular set of technologies/methodologies for providing the experience and not the experience in general:
Windows Live Messenger, for instance, provides a "Watch this Together" link when you past a video or youtube URL to someone, which provides an API for synchronized viewing of the linked content. Obvious idea, sophisticated and non-trivial behind the scenes implementation.
Your first two paragraphs, word for word what I was about to post, but your average user is not only not interested in freedom, they don't want it.
This is true in just about every domain: from cars (how many American's want stick shift?) to people's choice of pets to computers to travel to healthcare (seriously - you pay someone to clean your teeth?).
This smacks of really poor - or deliberately biased - data analysis.
HOW the game ends doesn't matter, the problem is THAT it ends.
Red Dead is one of the few games that I HAVE finished in many years purely because I didn't realize I was finishing it. But in doing so, I was able to see how most people probably wouldn't finish it because the trigger for it would most likely be ignored by story followers.