Since Gimp is mostly a user interface to the GTK, it makes sense that it be skinnable. That way people who want simple one button redeye reduction, trivial scaling cropping and simple borders can do that with the Gimp-easy interface, and people who want all the other stuff can use Gimp-max. In fact, why not gimp-graph, gimp-cartoon, gimp-lolcats, and vector-gimp too?
and I agree with the opinion. I do believe Linus will eventually see that despite its flaws GPL3 and the inevitable GPLXR9 are necessary in a 1984 doublespeak world where "Office Open eXtensible Markup Language Standard" means "the proprietary and patented non-extensible nonstandard format for storing Microsoft Office documents that even Microsoft can't fully implement."
The future is open. Or free. Or whichever symbol in our set the mindshare dweebs haven't corrupted yet. Fight as they might they can't beat it because it has no arm to twist, no heart to strike - it is powerful as the wind and as difficult to control.
Why, oh, why can't we have a comment from the quintessential blurbmeister here? Rob, where are you in this historic moment to weigh the subtle issues and deliver some clarity in fifteen words or less?
Will you all please give him some hits on his blog at ITBE and let him know we need his insight at this trying time?
So let's see... you took $500 million in paid in equity and in nine short years managed to parley that into a princely sum less than $5 million. In the history of your company your only profitable quarter a judge has found that some if not all of your revenue was the proceeds of conversion that you have spent and can no longer pay back. Your liabilities include the counterclaims remaining from baseless lawsuits you have filed after your claims have been revealed to have no substance.
Liquidation cannot cure your victims, but it should help prevent you from finding any more.
There is a framebuffer. It's called persistence of vision. I agree with you about everything else though. Some people do wait for each letter or pair to come into focus. Others pattern match entire concepts and associate based on that and move on without taking the time to bring all the symbols into focus. Trouble can happen when what you expected to see is not what is written but the process is adaptive and you slow down on new ideas and clever turns of phrase. Interestingly the latter method is better for recall because the nature of memory in the time domain gives disadvantage to ideas spooled in slowly rather than swallowed whole.
You're right. There's no hope we can get Microsoft to make Windows secure enough for the least skilled 1% to use it without losing control of their machine to a botnet. After all, as yesterday's MOTD on slashdot said, "If you make a system simple enough an idiot can use it, only an idiot would want to."
We should just resign ourselves to the fact that there will always be 10-20 million bots under the control of anonymous evildoers because at least 1% of Windows users can't help but execute every program they can find. We should accept our DDOS'ing and our V14gr4 spam until someone comes up with an alternative plan.
Me, I'm liking the idea of an Alternet -- a vpn on IPV6 where the rest of us don't have to play this game and you can get your access suspended for sending spam or malware.
Guess I won't be rushing on out to the local Radio Shack to inflict myself,
Name address and phone number is all they ask from me when I buy stuff there, and they don't insist if I'm paying cash. They haven't demanded I let them implant a RFID chip yet.
With that in mind, the Storm Worm specifically doesn't infect Windows 2003 server...
yet.
I could stop there, but some tin-foil hat types might suggest that the storm worm is a Microsoft product designed to encourage people to purchase yet another version of the OS that left them vulnerable to this the last time. There are some reasons to believe this is not true:
The authors apparently understand networking, Windows internals and clustering.
The application is robust.
They're not charging you for a product that clearly co-opts your processing power for their own nefarious purposes.
The community is the people. The forum is the place where they meet. More to my point a forum is usually a place where the few educate or entertain the many, while in a community everyone participates, even if it's just to set the limit of what they'll tolerate before they leave.
if you really worked for a computer repairshop, why would you ever see a computer that was working?
Because I was done fixing it? Because it was my new one? Because I had just sold a replacement to a customer whose computer was beyond repair? You're really reaching here.
And some on-topic comment: Vista SP1 means nothing to me because there's no way it can pass validation with the enterprise customers who might ask me to deploy it. Every member of my family that eager to install Vista has already had me roll it back.
And now back to our regularly scheduled flamewar:
It just has to be done carefully, pointed toward obvious flaws and with good humor. I will agree that the Microsoft fanbois seem to have mod points these days -- I'm getting clearly biased downmods all the time. They're still not beating the upmods, though, so I'm winding up with mods like the ones to this post:
Starting Score: 1 point Moderation +4 80% Funny 20% Troll Extra 'Funny' Modifier +1 (Edit) Karma-Bonus Modifier +1 (Edit) Total Score: 5
I wind up with five votes up, one down. I loose a karma point because funny doesn't count, but usually someone will choose "interesting" to work around this. I get to feel good because the people who liked it enough to burn a mod point outnumbered the people who diliked it that much (and fanbois with modpoints) by a margin of five to one.
In all, I would say the system is working for me but not for twitter. Twitter's an easy target, and twitter posts a lot.
So yeah, if like me you were hoping for a laptop offering within a home user's price range with a linux distro installed from these guys, keep waiting.
I am waiting. And when it's offered, like you I'll be buying. Let's be patient.
It will take a while for a company the size of HP to come to terms with the idea that their biggest software partner wants to own the hardware sales in their biggest growth markets. They'll be along presently. Trust me, they're not dumb -- it just takes some time to turn a ship that size.
The newspaper I was working for when I predicted this is still available at its vestigal domain name here where I helped set it up.
At the end of a meeting to review a very expensive (>100K$) demographic survey in 1992, I spoke my mind. I told him a number of things, including that the toxic ink on dead tree business model wouldn't last forever, that communities were more important that forums, that the Internet wouldn't be male dominated forever and that user generated content was more important than expert generated content. He thought I was a flake. It cost me my job to tell him what I really thought, and I was right. It cost him >100K to hear what the demographer thought he wanted to hear.
I don't regret it at all. He was an idiot too and he deserved to miss out on the.boom billions he could have had.
The Fine Article is about HP selling consumer desktop PCs with Linux, though. I don't what your post has to do with that but you anonymous cowards aren't getting astroturf points off of me today. Instead I'll provide informative topical discussion and foil your evil plot.
The original source for this story is apcmag. From that article:
Hewlett-Packard, the world's largest PC manufacturer, has announced it will start selling Linux-based PCs from $AU600 in Australia.
I can only hope this is a pilot, with PCs for the US market to follow. Like many of the people leaving comments on that story, I would like to buy some Linux laptops from HP here in the US. I would also like to see a choice of processors. This is a nice start though.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Desktop also comes with OpenOffice preinstalled, Firefox for web browsing and Evolution for email.
That sounds like a full featured environment for the average user. Much better than Microsoft Works, a non-removable trial copy of Office and the usual collection of junkware that comes with a Windows PC. With compatible software vendors like this impressive list finding commercial software for your HP/Red Hat system should be no trouble. Dag has a whole bunch of free stuff available for it too. I imagine Windows users will have a hard time understanding that yes, you can just click on one of thousands of great free programs and it will install but it won't turn your PC into a spamzombie. It shouldn't take them long to get fond of it though. That's a significant change for people used to dealing with a software vendor that's proud that three quarters of a million of their customers were infested with root kits.
Windows gamers will be relieved to hear that for a measly $5/mo they can join Transgaming and play Windows games. If they have Windows programs they don't want to throw away like one of these, Wine will be a nice free addition to their Red Hat desktop. If they prefer a professionally maintained compatibility engine they might like Codeweavers'Crossover Linux which supports these programs and only costs $40.
Disclosure - I also don't work for anybody mentioned here or sell their stuff. My opinions belong to me and I'm not getting paid to have them. YMMV, yadda yadda.
The choice of Red Hat as a partner in this venture shows just how GNU/Linux
In some ways this is about price. Greeted on the way in, searched on the way out is becoming a nuisance I'm willing to pay more for products to avoid.
It is interesting that some stores act this way while other stores pile their goods outside the store without supervision and just expect people to carry them inside to pay. The implied trust makes shopping at the latter stores more fun.
Money is the only thing some organizations understand. Especially with law enforcement it's important that they be reminded from time to time not to overstep the limits of their authority. The risk of a big judgment can influence them to spend the time and money on proper training and management. On the other hand litigiousness is rude too. I don't associate with lawsuit happy people because you never know who they're going to sue next.
It does seem like some places are conditioning people to accept a search of their person as a trivial matter. I don't think that is a good thing.
An online vendor has never asked to inspect my personal effects on the way out of their store. This is yet another reason to buy online when you can. To get the full benefit though I would avoid buying from the online store of a company that acts this way in its brick and mortar stores.
That way they don't have the chicken/egg problem of how to download and burn the installation disc.
HP is very GNU/Linux savvy. They have a Linux landing page. They certify six different distributions. Their Insight Diagnostics are actually a custom Linux distro for performing system diagnostics and repair on their systems. HP supports open source software, and has for a long time. They support organizations such as the Free Software Foundation, Open Source Software Institute, and the Linux Foundation. The home of the Linux kernel, kernel.org runs on donated HP servers.
They often sponsor community events like the Linux Kernel Developer Summit, the Debian Conference, the International Free Software Forum, GNOME User and Developer European Conference, the Desktop Linux Summit, the Libre Graphics Meeting, and LinuxWorld. HP has not only supported Open Source projects, they have over 100 of their own. They have over 1,000 open source printer drivers. It's nice knowing you can plug in the HP printer and it will just go. Once upon a time printer drivers in Linux were a severe pain point.
So if you're considering buying a PC with Linux on it, apparently you could do worse than go with the HP one. (Full disclosure - I don't work for HP and I don't sell their stuff, but I do work in the business so of course I deal with their stuff somewhat. My opinions are my own, YMMV, yadda yadda.)
Now that Microsoft has decided to sell PCs it's natural for other PC sellers to consider their options. Every Windows + Office sale is a profit center Microsoft can use to subsidize their attack on the PC market much like they're funding their attack on the gameconsolemarket. If you're a company that is already in the business of selling PCs, subsidizing your competitor is a very bad idea -- especially if the competitor can offer themselves considerable discounts on software.
That page is a gem. What a ripe field of slashdot taglines...
In reduced functionality mode, you can only remain logged on to Windows Vista for one hour.
That doesn't sound too bad. We could all use frequent breaks.
Windows Vista premium features such as Aero Glass, ReadyBoost, and BitLocker are unavailable in reduced functionality mode.
BitLocker is Microsoft's full disk encryption. Let's just skip right over the fact that this is yet another established application ecosystem that is being crushed by the Microsoft monopoly. FDE is a good idea for notebooks but according to this if your disk is encrypted with it then as soon as you're marked ungenuine your data is inaccessible until the WGA server is back online. That sounds like a grand idea - we could all use an annual unscheduled holiday! Of course if the next problem with WGA prevents the service from restarting then all of your data will be safe forever, even from you. That wouldn't be too bad, would it?
Non-genuine reduced functionality mode
Windows Vista enters non-genuine reduced functionality mode if one of the following conditions is true:
The WGA program detects a blocked product key or a counterfeit product key.
The WGA program detects incorrect activation binary files or modified activation binary files.
Windows Vista is in out-of-grace reduced functionality mode.
Huh? If being in out-of-grace reduced functionality mode puts you in Non-genuine mode, why do you need two modes?
Slashdot Mirror
Since Gimp is mostly a user interface to the GTK, it makes sense that it be skinnable. That way people who want simple one button redeye reduction, trivial scaling cropping and simple borders can do that with the Gimp-easy interface, and people who want all the other stuff can use Gimp-max. In fact, why not gimp-graph, gimp-cartoon, gimp-lolcats, and vector-gimp too?
and I agree with the opinion. I do believe Linus will eventually see that despite its flaws GPL3 and the inevitable GPLXR9 are necessary in a 1984 doublespeak world where "Office Open eXtensible Markup Language Standard" means "the proprietary and patented non-extensible nonstandard format for storing Microsoft Office documents that even Microsoft can't fully implement."
The future is open. Or free. Or whichever symbol in our set the mindshare dweebs haven't corrupted yet. Fight as they might they can't beat it because it has no arm to twist, no heart to strike - it is powerful as the wind and as difficult to control.
Why, oh, why can't we have a comment from the quintessential blurbmeister here? Rob, where are you in this historic moment to weigh the subtle issues and deliver some clarity in fifteen words or less?
Will you all please give him some hits on his blog at ITBE and let him know we need his insight at this trying time?
So let's see... you took $500 million in paid in equity and in nine short years managed to parley that into a princely sum less than $5 million. In the history of your company your only profitable quarter a judge has found that some if not all of your revenue was the proceeds of conversion that you have spent and can no longer pay back. Your liabilities include the counterclaims remaining from baseless lawsuits you have filed after your claims have been revealed to have no substance.
Liquidation cannot cure your victims, but it should help prevent you from finding any more.
I installed WoW in cedega this weekend with the Burning crusade expansion. It runs great. Very playable.
Cable companies also oppose municipal fiber internet.
Cry me a river. You had your chance to help. Now get out of the way.
Recon
There is a framebuffer. It's called persistence of vision. I agree with you about everything else though. Some people do wait for each letter or pair to come into focus. Others pattern match entire concepts and associate based on that and move on without taking the time to bring all the symbols into focus. Trouble can happen when what you expected to see is not what is written but the process is adaptive and you slow down on new ideas and clever turns of phrase. Interestingly the latter method is better for recall because the nature of memory in the time domain gives disadvantage to ideas spooled in slowly rather than swallowed whole.
You're right. There's no hope we can get Microsoft to make Windows secure enough for the least skilled 1% to use it without losing control of their machine to a botnet. After all, as yesterday's MOTD on slashdot said, "If you make a system simple enough an idiot can use it, only an idiot would want to."
We should just resign ourselves to the fact that there will always be 10-20 million bots under the control of anonymous evildoers because at least 1% of Windows users can't help but execute every program they can find. We should accept our DDOS'ing and our V14gr4 spam until someone comes up with an alternative plan.
Me, I'm liking the idea of an Alternet -- a vpn on IPV6 where the rest of us don't have to play this game and you can get your access suspended for sending spam or malware.
They're solid state. To me that means that every bit is as close as every other, near enough.
It should be possible to deliver far more bandwidth from an SSD than through magnetic media.
But the best claims I've seen for SSD are about 10MB/sec.
Where's my pen drive that's capable of 480Mbps? Where's the SATA attached SSD capable of 3Gbps?
Name address and phone number is all they ask from me when I buy stuff there, and they don't insist if I'm paying cash. They haven't demanded I let them implant a RFID chip yet.
yet.
I could stop there, but some tin-foil hat types might suggest that the storm worm is a Microsoft product designed to encourage people to purchase yet another version of the OS that left them vulnerable to this the last time. There are some reasons to believe this is not true:
Therefore this one didn't come from Redmond.
This is just not so. Life is about choices. You've clearly made yours. Live with it. For me? No thanks.
The community is the people. The forum is the place where they meet. More to my point a forum is usually a place where the few educate or entertain the many, while in a community everyone participates, even if it's just to set the limit of what they'll tolerate before they leave.
Because I was done fixing it? Because it was my new one? Because I had just sold a replacement to a customer whose computer was beyond repair? You're really reaching here.
First, some news: osdn.com is down.
And some on-topic comment: Vista SP1 means nothing to me because there's no way it can pass validation with the enterprise customers who might ask me to deploy it. Every member of my family that eager to install Vista has already had me roll it back.
And now back to our regularly scheduled flamewar:
It just has to be done carefully, pointed toward obvious flaws and with good humor. I will agree that the Microsoft fanbois seem to have mod points these days -- I'm getting clearly biased downmods all the time. They're still not beating the upmods, though, so I'm winding up with mods like the ones to this post:
I wind up with five votes up, one down. I loose a karma point because funny doesn't count, but usually someone will choose "interesting" to work around this. I get to feel good because the people who liked it enough to burn a mod point outnumbered the people who diliked it that much (and fanbois with modpoints) by a margin of five to one.
In all, I would say the system is working for me but not for twitter. Twitter's an easy target, and twitter posts a lot.
YMMV.
I am waiting. And when it's offered, like you I'll be buying. Let's be patient.
It will take a while for a company the size of HP to come to terms with the idea that their biggest software partner wants to own the hardware sales in their biggest growth markets. They'll be along presently. Trust me, they're not dumb -- it just takes some time to turn a ship that size.
The newspaper I was working for when I predicted this is still available at its vestigal domain name here where I helped set it up.
At the end of a meeting to review a very expensive (>100K$) demographic survey in 1992, I spoke my mind. I told him a number of things, including that the toxic ink on dead tree business model wouldn't last forever, that communities were more important that forums, that the Internet wouldn't be male dominated forever and that user generated content was more important than expert generated content. He thought I was a flake. It cost me my job to tell him what I really thought, and I was right. It cost him >100K to hear what the demographer thought he wanted to hear.
I don't regret it at all. He was an idiot too and he deserved to miss out on the .boom billions he could have had.
Well, since you asked, Microsoft's ME II, better known as Vista, is causing unhappy faces everywhere I go. It isn't just that people don't want to use it, or that it's insecure and buggy or that the very word vista has "failure" attached to it. It isn't that Vista isn't even compatible with Microsoft's own SQL Server.
Most of the people that I know only care that it's not possible to deploy Vista with industry standard tools. A rollback is likely, and there are substantial unresolved issues preventing deployment.
Although I'm aware you don't appreciate twitter's attention to these matters, I do. I do appreciate twitter's attention to these things quite a lot.
Thanks, twitter.
Checkmate. Google owns the news. Game over for your local paper. I predicted this many years ago.
It's about time.
Microsoft has decided to compete in sales of computer systems direct to end users.
The negotiations will be short.
Hey, that's not fair. I stand up for Microsoft now and then. Were those posts not helpful?
The Fine Article is about HP selling consumer desktop PCs with Linux, though. I don't what your post has to do with that but you anonymous cowards aren't getting astroturf points off of me today. Instead I'll provide informative topical discussion and foil your evil plot.
The original source for this story is apcmag. From that article:
I can only hope this is a pilot, with PCs for the US market to follow. Like many of the people leaving comments on that story, I would like to buy some Linux laptops from HP here in the US. I would also like to see a choice of processors. This is a nice start though.
That sounds like a full featured environment for the average user. Much better than Microsoft Works, a non-removable trial copy of Office and the usual collection of junkware that comes with a Windows PC. With compatible software vendors like this impressive list finding commercial software for your HP/Red Hat system should be no trouble. Dag has a whole bunch of free stuff available for it too. I imagine Windows users will have a hard time understanding that yes, you can just click on one of thousands of great free programs and it will install but it won't turn your PC into a spam zombie. It shouldn't take them long to get fond of it though. That's a significant change for people used to dealing with a software vendor that's proud that three quarters of a million of their customers were infested with root kits.
Windows gamers will be relieved to hear that for a measly $5/mo they can join Transgaming and play Windows games. If they have Windows programs they don't want to throw away like one of these, Wine will be a nice free addition to their Red Hat desktop. If they prefer a professionally maintained compatibility engine they might like Codeweavers' Crossover Linux which supports these programs and only costs $40.
The list of hardware known to be compatible with RHEL 5 is impressive, as is the list of systems that are certified and supported.
Disclosure - I also don't work for anybody mentioned here or sell their stuff. My opinions belong to me and I'm not getting paid to have them. YMMV, yadda yadda.
The choice of Red Hat as a partner in this venture shows just how GNU/Linux
In some ways this is about price. Greeted on the way in, searched on the way out is becoming a nuisance I'm willing to pay more for products to avoid.
It is interesting that some stores act this way while other stores pile their goods outside the store without supervision and just expect people to carry them inside to pay. The implied trust makes shopping at the latter stores more fun.
Money is the only thing some organizations understand. Especially with law enforcement it's important that they be reminded from time to time not to overstep the limits of their authority. The risk of a big judgment can influence them to spend the time and money on proper training and management. On the other hand litigiousness is rude too. I don't associate with lawsuit happy people because you never know who they're going to sue next.
It does seem like some places are conditioning people to accept a search of their person as a trivial matter. I don't think that is a good thing.
An online vendor has never asked to inspect my personal effects on the way out of their store. This is yet another reason to buy online when you can. To get the full benefit though I would avoid buying from the online store of a company that acts this way in its brick and mortar stores.
That way they don't have the chicken/egg problem of how to download and burn the installation disc.
HP is very GNU/Linux savvy. They have a Linux landing page. They certify six different distributions. Their Insight Diagnostics are actually a custom Linux distro for performing system diagnostics and repair on their systems. HP supports open source software, and has for a long time. They support organizations such as the Free Software Foundation, Open Source Software Institute, and the Linux Foundation. The home of the Linux kernel, kernel.org runs on donated HP servers.
They often sponsor community events like the Linux Kernel Developer Summit, the Debian Conference, the International Free Software Forum, GNOME User and Developer European Conference, the Desktop Linux Summit, the Libre Graphics Meeting, and LinuxWorld. HP has not only supported Open Source projects, they have over 100 of their own. They have over 1,000 open source printer drivers. It's nice knowing you can plug in the HP printer and it will just go. Once upon a time printer drivers in Linux were a severe pain point.
So if you're considering buying a PC with Linux on it, apparently you could do worse than go with the HP one. (Full disclosure - I don't work for HP and I don't sell their stuff, but I do work in the business so of course I deal with their stuff somewhat. My opinions are my own, YMMV, yadda yadda.)
Now that Microsoft has decided to sell PCs it's natural for other PC sellers to consider their options. Every Windows + Office sale is a profit center Microsoft can use to subsidize their attack on the PC market much like they're funding their attack on the game console market. If you're a company that is already in the business of selling PCs, subsidizing your competitor is a very bad idea -- especially if the competitor can offer themselves considerable discounts on software.
That page is a gem. What a ripe field of slashdot taglines...
That doesn't sound too bad. We could all use frequent breaks.
BitLocker is Microsoft's full disk encryption. Let's just skip right over the fact that this is yet another established application ecosystem that is being crushed by the Microsoft monopoly. FDE is a good idea for notebooks but according to this if your disk is encrypted with it then as soon as you're marked ungenuine your data is inaccessible until the WGA server is back online. That sounds like a grand idea - we could all use an annual unscheduled holiday! Of course if the next problem with WGA prevents the service from restarting then all of your data will be safe forever, even from you. That wouldn't be too bad, would it?
Huh? If being in out-of-grace reduced functionality mode puts you in Non-genuine mode, why do you need two modes?
Anyway, thanks for the link. That's a funny page.