I thought all you gen X libertarians lived and died by the bitchslapping magical invisible free hand of commerce. If Danes don't want to have jobs, no one will force them.
For promoting this kind of crackhead lesbo communism. Next thing ya know people will object, object I tell you, to our crawling up their asses for the sheer fucking thrill of complaining how bad it smells. Got to nip this in the bud.
That's certainly true from a security perspective but people don't really think that way otherwise they'd install functional software on the windows boxes they have and take at least rudimentary steps. Most commercial Windows boxes are loaded down with tons of security software now, McAfee, Symantec and others preload their stuff on and all you have to do is pay for a real licence after the 60 day trial period is up. But nearly no one does that nor do they bother to look for or download a free product nor would they understand how to do that or how to install it. Hell my kids alternatively ignore or click w/o thinking ZA popups all the time. They regularly manage to have all sorts of crap autoinstall that they claim they didn't know how it got there. My family doesn't actually understand the difference between a)the browser b) the computer c) the internet. Seriously, it's all the same thing.
So here's the point. If people cared about security they'd do something. So giving them a Linux box and telling them it's more secure has almost no value. Telling them they'll have to babysit it less has no value because they don't do that now. You do. The only thing you can sell them on is a) popups (which you can do with Firefox/Netscape on Windows and b) some kind of spin on identity theft as in not letting strangers into your box to steal something. What might work is if you can sell them on the idea for getting as good or better 'security' for far less money. If you let them buy a maching for their kids it's going to have to serve a very schizophrenic set of requirements. It will have to play games and it will have to protect the wittle kiddies from pictures of penises and vaginas. And it will have to run all of the file formats they use in school and it will have to burn CDs with zero effort and, and this is little noted, it will have to boot in under 2 minutes. More than that and you will hear an endless littany of "The computer's broken again..." You also need to build the system that will be able to restart from an abrupt shutdown very quickly and it can't ask the user any questions like 'do you want to fsck?'
I've seen people throw away new computers after they were massively infected with viruses and spyware, have highly fragmented drives or suffered a minor object corruption in an office suite rendering it buggy or inoperable even though they had the installation media. I don't mean have someone tear it down and rebuild the software from scratch I mean unplug it and move it to the basement will all of Dad's other toys in the Museum of Bad Ideas. And go out and but a new one only to have the same thing happen in a year or less. They are left with the conclusion that all computers are shitty little toys that no one should ever bother to learn how to use.
I think this is the sweetspot that Apple is shooting for. It's one that's probably out of MS grasp forever having surrendered reliability on the altar of whatever the hell is good for MS's bottom line. Linux needs to shoot for that middle space between expensive mindless Mac reliability cheap useless high maintenance PCs. It has to look and feel like Windows or Apple and it has to run w/o any human intervention and it has to run without glitches or problems or delays or pages of boot up messages and it has to mask the filesystem from the user and instead use folders or Mac like containers. It has to recover quickly and gracefully and it has to report errors or problems in clear stupid partially informative messages that do more handholding than instruction.
That's not really the point. The point is, some of the larger players, the one's most likely to survive should begin to take the best features and functions of other distros and incorporate them. If a distro does great hardware detection, grab that. If one has spent a great deal of time with wireless NICs grab that. If one works particularly well with SMB, clustering, installation and so on and so on. There really isn't a lot of practical benefit in chucking together yet another distro which doesn't obiously differentiate itself. Ok so its interesting to the people who are working on it, but that's about it. Most distros circle around partial completion forever because they can't gather enough time and money to finish anything. What occurs then is that a given distro sort of goes nowhere or, gets abandoned by its own developers who go on to create a commercial version for someone else. And yet another fork is born.
Dogs scrapping over a piece of meat is what it looks like. RH and the 'first tier' Linux vendors want to differentiate themselves from fat goofy weird trekkie Linux (fgwtL) vendors which want to differentiate themselves from 'fake/newbie' Linux vendors like Linspire and so on. In the meantime SCO wants to litigate with everyone and maybe just maybe RH has either swung or thinks it can swing a deal with SCO which would require them to divorce themselves from fgwtL and all the others, except EyeBeeEm.
It's really start to look ridiculously fragmented out there in Penguin/Devil land isn't it? The last time I checked there were 250 listings on Distrowatch. Isn't it time for some massive consolidation or least an acknowledgement that there are commerically viable distros, academically viable distros, home/desktop/soho distros and everything else distros? At least let the propective customer or user peruse the selections based on that simple taxonomy. Otherwise this insanely complex Cambrian Epoch ecology chockfull of geeks and freaks most of whom are destined for evolutionary dead ends is just sucking up valuable time and resources.
At least I think it is. After all XP really is a pretty good desktop all other things aside. The problems are a) cost b) security c) adminsistrative overhead. Linux addresses two out of three. Administrative overhead is still pretty high, at least if you're the guy doing it because no one else will be able to. In either case Linux also suffers from a few distinct disadvantages: a) installation complexity b) inability to run Windows apps without introducing another layer of complexity in Wine, etc. c) It really doesn't run well in a desktop environment in hardware that is significantly cheaper or underpowered compared to Windows. XP requires quite a bit of juice to run well whereas W2K runs rather nice on my P2-400 with 288MB RAM. Similarly ANY good Linux desktop really does need 256MB RAM and at least that much processor. Installation disk requirements for Linux are somewhat higher but disk is practically free.
So instead of playing to Windows strengths why not play to Linux strengths? Make a desktop that can run Windows apps when it needs to but runs the machine in a highly configured, locked down, no spyware, no virus no end user ability to change anything configuration? And run it on cheap hardware? In fact a Linux terminal server starts to look like a nice alternative for a home LAN.
Other than that I'd ask for better support and much much cleaner functional installs of devices that are no longer exotic, like Wireless NICs, scanners, multifunction printer/scanner/fax machines, drawing tablets and USB devices of all kinds. Instead of building the 19th most popular UI for Linux why dont' we build better integrated support for LAN bootable 802.11G NICs?
Doesn't that kind of defeat the purpose? I mean here we have a desktop that requires more or less the same horsepower as Windows to run. Is slightly less functional than Windows to use strictly as a desktop and costs slightly less than windows to own? It doesn't seem like a wonderful bargain. Perhaps something like ELX or Vectorlinux which can be had for free and install on cheap hardware is the way to go instead of trying to reverse engineer the functionality of windows.
I think the Linux folks need to accept that Windows really is a better choice for some functions at least from a simple "I just need to do what I do PoV" and if you go the Linux route it's not to replicate Windows functionality but instead to do someother thing, introduce some other function. Of course in a corporate environment the support costs of maintaining a Linux desktop evironment appear less in light of fewer security problems and an inherent ability to push updates to desktops but that has to be weighed against the skills of the user base and the questions and problems they will have. On the other hand unless your own time is free and you don't like managing the innumerable security patches, personal firewall, AV update, spyware circus that is home LAN administration for Windows then why not get a bunch of Macs? It's BSD based, pretty tough, industrial strength Unix under the covers and the price point of a MiniMac or an iMac make it pretty attractive.
For the most part, that is. If you like bittwiddling and really want to build a something and that's your hobby then fine, have at it. But it really doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to struggle with a Linux desktop that isn't designed specifically around ease of installation and ease of use AND lower cost. If you need the same brand new high powered PC hardware to run it AND installation is still problematic AND configuration is still a chore AND you still have to struggle with NTFS volume mounts, Wine and Windows applications then what have you solved?
And I suspect you organization is the same. Internal networks are victims of strange political forces, ridiculous budgets and a crippling blindness that expensive boxes that protect us from the evil commie internets is all we need.
A pretty large percentage of the distros we use are some kind of sub-1.0 or another and they never or almost never reach '1.0' status. Usually this is the decision of the developer his/herself because they believe there isn't any time or money for QA, documentation, better bugfix, fit&finish to achieve 1.0 status. But on the other hand every developer carries around in his/her head a lis of features they'd like to implement someday but either it's technically over their head or takes too much time. Yesterday I was installing various desktop distros like ELX which failed once for an no obvious reason, and a couple of Vector versions which didn't have partition and hardware detection bugs completely worked out. And these were versions named much higher than beta. So clearly the difference between this distro at 'version 4' and that distro at version '0.6a beta' is pretty abtract. No need to worry unless you rely on it and you know it has the same persistant bug which makes it unstable time after time.
When I heard the head of the John Locke foundation giving Michael Barone a tongue bath on CSPAN today I realized they're just Republicans who smoke better weed.
Why does this shock anyone, that the soft tacit support of every hatemongering pile of nutcases finds a home even here among the self professed 'everything is everything' libertarians of/. too? Orkut is an environment built on the premise that self interest is itself a virtue and the only so called community worth exploring is that which mirrors your own narrow interests is perfect fertile ground for this kind of bigotry. Aren't you the people who believe there are no bad values just bad people? Aren't you the people wearing anarchy t-shirts?
In that the octopus has a brain hierarchy. The central brain sends a 'go get that food' command to a sub brain in the tentacle which executes commands in the completion of that goal on its own. The main brain doesn't have to think about controlling the mechanics of each arm.
Flacks and partisans' opinions are worthless. The only metrics that matter are security audits and compiance to legislative standards like Sarbanes-Oxley.
When MS's 'Man-Ho de Jure' can point to specific audited results that back up his claim then I'll believe him. Until then he's just another pretty boy on the garbage strewn beach of security.
No doubt. Just remember that an unpredictable unbalanced third world tyrannical despot has the capability if not the intent to kill you. I grew up all through the cold war and the notion that you could go to sleep because if anyone tried to kill us they would get the same AND THEY UNDERSTOOD that was meaningful balance to maintain. today we have lunatics in Korea and Iran who openly say "I don't care what you do - my ideology of destroying you is far more important to me than any restraint or failsafes or political gains and games that might accrue to me by merely threatening you."
Lemme ask you oh oracle of fucking wisdom. I have say, 300,000 desktops and another 100,000 servers running Symantec code. My licencing costs are close to the GDP of an African nation.
A software vendor with product on each and every one of them comes to me and says - hey we have this massive problem with 100% coverage and we honestly don't know how it's been there or been your problem because to tell you the truth we never do any post hoc failure analysis and if we did you'd suspect us of boning you anyhow and making up things just to sell you more product which you probably feel is the case right now anyway.....
I mean after alll what with the circle jerk of 'it's alllllll our own damn fault' I was just wondering aloud what radicals would say if their own house was the target? Hmmm? Or is coffehouse Marxism as radical as you posers get?
Slashdot Mirror
https://addons.update.mozilla.org/extensions/morei nfo.php?application=firefox&version=1.0&os=Windows &id=451
I thought all you gen X libertarians lived and died by the bitchslapping magical invisible free hand of commerce. If Danes don't want to have jobs, no one will force them.
For promoting this kind of crackhead lesbo communism. Next thing ya know people will object, object I tell you, to our crawling up their asses for the sheer fucking thrill of complaining how bad it smells. Got to nip this in the bud.
Steps will be taken.
That's certainly true from a security perspective but people don't really think that way otherwise they'd install functional software on the windows boxes they have and take at least rudimentary steps. Most commercial Windows boxes are loaded down with tons of security software now, McAfee, Symantec and others preload their stuff on and all you have to do is pay for a real licence after the 60 day trial period is up. But nearly no one does that nor do they bother to look for or download a free product nor would they understand how to do that or how to install it. Hell my kids alternatively ignore or click w/o thinking ZA popups all the time. They regularly manage to have all sorts of crap autoinstall that they claim they didn't know how it got there. My family doesn't actually understand the difference between a)the browser b) the computer c) the internet. Seriously, it's all the same thing.
So here's the point. If people cared about security they'd do something. So giving them a Linux box and telling them it's more secure has almost no value. Telling them they'll have to babysit it less has no value because they don't do that now. You do. The only thing you can sell them on is a) popups (which you can do with Firefox/Netscape on Windows and b) some kind of spin on identity theft as in not letting strangers into your box to steal something. What might work is if you can sell them on the idea for getting as good or better 'security' for far less money. If you let them buy a maching for their kids it's going to have to serve a very schizophrenic set of requirements. It will have to play games and it will have to protect the wittle kiddies from pictures of penises and vaginas. And it will have to run all of the file formats they use in school and it will have to burn CDs with zero effort and, and this is little noted, it will have to boot in under 2 minutes. More than that and you will hear an endless littany of "The computer's broken again..." You also need to build the system that will be able to restart from an abrupt shutdown very quickly and it can't ask the user any questions like 'do you want to fsck?'
I've seen people throw away new computers after they were massively infected with viruses and spyware, have highly fragmented drives or suffered a minor object corruption in an office suite rendering it buggy or inoperable even though they had the installation media. I don't mean have someone tear it down and rebuild the software from scratch I mean unplug it and move it to the basement will all of Dad's other toys in the Museum of Bad Ideas. And go out and but a new one only to have the same thing happen in a year or less. They are left with the conclusion that all computers are shitty little toys that no one should ever bother to learn how to use.
I think this is the sweetspot that Apple is shooting for. It's one that's probably out of MS grasp forever having surrendered reliability on the altar of whatever the hell is good for MS's bottom line. Linux needs to shoot for that middle space between expensive mindless Mac reliability cheap useless high maintenance PCs. It has to look and feel like Windows or Apple and it has to run w/o any human intervention and it has to run without glitches or problems or delays or pages of boot up messages and it has to mask the filesystem from the user and instead use folders or Mac like containers. It has to recover quickly and gracefully and it has to report errors or problems in clear stupid partially informative messages that do more handholding than instruction.
That's not really the point. The point is, some of the larger players, the one's most likely to survive should begin to take the best features and functions of other distros and incorporate them. If a distro does great hardware detection, grab that. If one has spent a great deal of time with wireless NICs grab that. If one works particularly well with SMB, clustering, installation and so on and so on. There really isn't a lot of practical benefit in chucking together yet another distro which doesn't obiously differentiate itself. Ok so its interesting to the people who are working on it, but that's about it. Most distros circle around partial completion forever because they can't gather enough time and money to finish anything. What occurs then is that a given distro sort of goes nowhere or, gets abandoned by its own developers who go on to create a commercial version for someone else. And yet another fork is born.
Dogs scrapping over a piece of meat is what it looks like. RH and the 'first tier' Linux vendors want to differentiate themselves from fat goofy weird trekkie Linux (fgwtL) vendors which want to differentiate themselves from 'fake/newbie' Linux vendors like Linspire and so on. In the meantime SCO wants to litigate with everyone and maybe just maybe RH has either swung or thinks it can swing a deal with SCO which would require them to divorce themselves from fgwtL and all the others, except EyeBeeEm.
It's really start to look ridiculously fragmented out there in Penguin/Devil land isn't it? The last time I checked there were 250 listings on Distrowatch. Isn't it time for some massive consolidation or least an acknowledgement that there are commerically viable distros, academically viable distros, home/desktop/soho distros and everything else distros? At least let the propective customer or user peruse the selections based on that simple taxonomy. Otherwise this insanely complex Cambrian Epoch ecology chockfull of geeks and freaks most of whom are destined for evolutionary dead ends is just sucking up valuable time and resources.
Who'd a thought that the MPAA would actually become the technology arm of the FBI. Goodbye 4th ammendment.
At least I think it is. After all XP really is a pretty good desktop all other things aside. The problems are a) cost b) security c) adminsistrative overhead. Linux addresses two out of three. Administrative overhead is still pretty high, at least if you're the guy doing it because no one else will be able to. In either case Linux also suffers from a few distinct disadvantages: a) installation complexity b) inability to run Windows apps without introducing another layer of complexity in Wine, etc. c) It really doesn't run well in a desktop environment in hardware that is significantly cheaper or underpowered compared to Windows. XP requires quite a bit of juice to run well whereas W2K runs rather nice on my P2-400 with 288MB RAM. Similarly ANY good Linux desktop really does need 256MB RAM and at least that much processor. Installation disk requirements for Linux are somewhat higher but disk is practically free.
So instead of playing to Windows strengths why not play to Linux strengths? Make a desktop that can run Windows apps when it needs to but runs the machine in a highly configured, locked down, no spyware, no virus no end user ability to change anything configuration? And run it on cheap hardware? In fact a Linux terminal server starts to look like a nice alternative for a home LAN.
Other than that I'd ask for better support and much much cleaner functional installs of devices that are no longer exotic, like Wireless NICs, scanners, multifunction printer/scanner/fax machines, drawing tablets and USB devices of all kinds. Instead of building the 19th most popular UI for Linux why dont' we build better integrated support for LAN bootable 802.11G NICs?
Doesn't that kind of defeat the purpose? I mean here we have a desktop that requires more or less the same horsepower as Windows to run. Is slightly less functional than Windows to use strictly as a desktop and costs slightly less than windows to own? It doesn't seem like a wonderful bargain. Perhaps something like ELX or Vectorlinux which can be had for free and install on cheap hardware is the way to go instead of trying to reverse engineer the functionality of windows.
I think the Linux folks need to accept that Windows really is a better choice for some functions at least from a simple "I just need to do what I do PoV" and if you go the Linux route it's not to replicate Windows functionality but instead to do someother thing, introduce some other function. Of course in a corporate environment the support costs of maintaining a Linux desktop evironment appear less in light of fewer security problems and an inherent ability to push updates to desktops but that has to be weighed against the skills of the user base and the questions and problems they will have. On the other hand unless your own time is free and you don't like managing the innumerable security patches, personal firewall, AV update, spyware circus that is home LAN administration for Windows then why not get a bunch of Macs? It's BSD based, pretty tough, industrial strength Unix under the covers and the price point of a MiniMac or an iMac make it pretty attractive.
For the most part, that is. If you like bittwiddling and really want to build a something and that's your hobby then fine, have at it. But it really doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to struggle with a Linux desktop that isn't designed specifically around ease of installation and ease of use AND lower cost. If you need the same brand new high powered PC hardware to run it AND installation is still problematic AND configuration is still a chore AND you still have to struggle with NTFS volume mounts, Wine and Windows applications then what have you solved?
It's not reduced ANYTHING, it's bolted on media and media they will charge you dearly for. That's why it was created; to ELIMINATE piracy.
And I suspect you organization is the same. Internal networks are victims of strange political forces, ridiculous budgets and a crippling blindness that expensive boxes that protect us from the evil commie internets is all we need.
A pretty large percentage of the distros we use are some kind of sub-1.0 or another and they never or almost never reach '1.0' status. Usually this is the decision of the developer his/herself because they believe there isn't any time or money for QA, documentation, better bugfix, fit&finish to achieve 1.0 status. But on the other hand every developer carries around in his/her head a lis of features they'd like to implement someday but either it's technically over their head or takes too much time. Yesterday I was installing various desktop distros like ELX which failed once for an no obvious reason, and a couple of Vector versions which didn't have partition and hardware detection bugs completely worked out. And these were versions named much higher than beta. So clearly the difference between this distro at 'version 4' and that distro at version '0.6a beta' is pretty abtract. No need to worry unless you rely on it and you know it has the same persistant bug which makes it unstable time after time.
When I heard the head of the John Locke foundation giving Michael Barone a tongue bath on CSPAN today I realized they're just Republicans who smoke better weed.
Quick let's declare war on it.
Why does this shock anyone, that the soft tacit support of every hatemongering pile of nutcases finds a home even here among the self professed 'everything is everything' libertarians of /. too? Orkut is an environment built on the premise that self interest is itself a virtue and the only so called community worth exploring is that which mirrors your own narrow interests is perfect fertile ground for this kind of bigotry. Aren't you the people who believe there are no bad values just bad people? Aren't you the people wearing anarchy t-shirts?
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2001/09/09 07_octoarm.html
In that the octopus has a brain hierarchy. The central brain sends a 'go get that food' command to a sub brain in the tentacle which executes commands in the completion of that goal on its own. The main brain doesn't have to think about controlling the mechanics of each arm.
Flacks and partisans' opinions are worthless. The only metrics that matter are security audits and compiance to legislative standards like Sarbanes-Oxley.
When MS's 'Man-Ho de Jure' can point to specific audited results that back up his claim then I'll believe him. Until then he's just another pretty boy on the garbage strewn beach of security.
No doubt. Just remember that an unpredictable unbalanced third world tyrannical despot has the capability if not the intent to kill you. I grew up all through the cold war and the notion that you could go to sleep because if anyone tried to kill us they would get the same AND THEY UNDERSTOOD that was meaningful balance to maintain. today we have lunatics in Korea and Iran who openly say "I don't care what you do - my ideology of destroying you is far more important to me than any restraint or failsafes or political gains and games that might accrue to me by merely threatening you."
Lemme ask you oh oracle of fucking wisdom. I have say, 300,000 desktops and another 100,000 servers running Symantec code. My licencing costs are close to the GDP of an African nation.
A software vendor with product on each and every one of them comes to me and says - hey we have this massive problem with 100% coverage and we honestly don't know how it's been there or been your problem because to tell you the truth we never do any post hoc failure analysis and if we did you'd suspect us of boning you anyhow and making up things just to sell you more product which you probably feel is the case right now anyway.....
that is all muthachuckas
that is all.
Because it proves that tool vendors are really some of our worst enemies and closed source tool vendors are the worst of all.
They have their hand out day after day for maintenance and updates and yet never REALLY bother to check if their own crap is working correctly.
I mean after alll what with the circle jerk of 'it's alllllll our own damn fault' I was just wondering aloud what radicals would say if their own house was the target? Hmmm? Or is coffehouse Marxism as radical as you posers get?
But I'm not sure that when Berkeley is a smoky glass crater he'll still call the victims "Little Eichmanns".
And brilliance is uneven fragile and unpredictable.
We've known that for what? 3000 years?