With a K6 you really need a specific build (K6 is a brilliant processor standing on its own, but horrible at playing i386) and gentoo is how you get that build. Someone should build Debian for it, then.
That's the thing that I didn't like about Gentoo. I discovered that most of the flexibility advantage that I perceived over other distros boiled down to two things:
First, USE flags. Most of these are things like whether or not to compile Perl support for Vim, or gtk+ support for various packages, etc. I find that, for the most part, Debian-based distros solve this by splitting that functionality into separate packages -- often the extra functionality is in an optional library (plugin-like), which would be difficult to compile separately, so it's in the same Gentoo package -- but is fine for a binary distro.
Plus, I wasn't customizing them that much, other than turning them all on.
Second was, obviously, global optimizations. But the only safe global optimizations are things like -march=whatever. Ubuntu already optimizes for 686, and I have an amd64 -- there aren't going to be many optimizations I can turn on globally. The closest would be things like mplayer, which can autodetect my CPU at runtime anyway.
Most of the other advantages are completely negated by the nature of the beast. If there was a slight speed advantage, maybe -- but I pay for that by spending all those cycles compiling stuff, and besides, that speed advantage is mostly already had by using Ubuntu on amd64. Slight space advantage, maybe with -OS -- but I have to leave enough space to compile things (3 gigs for some things, like OpenOffice), and/usr/portage is bigger than it needs to be, even when I was on Reiser4.
There are things I miss about Gentoo, and I have a very long wish list for any package manager. I'm not saying this to bad-mouth Gentoo, just saying why I think a binary K6 would be useful -- especially when the machine is going to be slow enough that you don't want to be compiling all the time.
The last time I looked at the graphics scene, they were actually neck and neck. There were reviews for new cards from each, and depending on the publisher, they might go one way or another.
At no point do I remember ATI no longer being relevant.
So, do you have anything to back that statement up, or are you just going to keep parroting the nVidia party line?
Not the point. How is that not the point? Try reading the very next sentence. And the one after that. That's where I explain why it's not the point. Here, for your convenience:
Not the point. Some people will anyway. The question is, what do you do about it? And after that, try reading a few posts up -- whether copyright infringement is morally wrong is completely offtopic and beside the point for this thread.
I had a nice, thought out analysis of your comment -- nice flamebait with "piracy is theft" -- but I don't like to reply to people who don't read my post.
no business has morals when it comes to cash. Sorry, I call bullshit on that one.
It is a sad state that most businesses have obligations to shareholders, but to suggest that all businesses only care about cash must, by extension, mean that this is true of all people.
I'll grant you "most", but the way you (and others like you) are wording this makes it an excuse. It's not, especially for a company which claims "Don't Be Evil." Shame on Google, shame on YouTube, and shame on you for giving them an excuse.
Except that the whole reason you'd use one of these, instead of a much cheaper cluster of commodity hardware, is because you want to use shared memory and threads. There are problems which scale much better to shared memory than to shared-nothing -- or so I'm told.
Oh, and Erlang is wannabe-functional. Go play with Haskell if you want a purely-functional language. No side effects means, among other things, the ability to have the parallelism done for you, instead of having to explicitly spawn a thread -- or an Erlang "process".
Me, I'm working on a cute wrapper for Ruby objects to turn them into Erlang-style threads.
Consider an in-memory database. OK.
Instead, you'd like at most only partitions of the data where massive working-sets reside on each partition and do inter-data operations. Got it. Can't find a link, but I'm thinking specifically the hashing mechanism. Given a key, I can find which node should be caching that key.
Thus for certain problems that do not nicely break down into small messages, you are indeed limited to single-memory-space hardware. I'm not sure I've seen such a problem. For example, the CPU cache alone is an example of what happens when you break a problem down into smaller chunks.
I can see where a single memory space might do better, though.
a simultaneous 700 thread application is NOT hard to write in java at all. Once you know how, I suppose. Consider that most programmers who use threads find ways to deadlock on one or two cores.
The reason I'm drawn to message-passing systems is that pretty much any higher-level abstraction is a Good Thing, as far as threads are concerned. I've come to believe that threads are as harmful as GOTOs. Sure, we'll use them under the hood, but we really need something more structured on top of them.
Also: Message-passing and shared memory are not mutually exclusive. If the message is being passed between, say, two Erlang "processes" on the same machine, I see no reason the contents of that message need to be copied, even if those "processes" are in different OS threads.
it's not about how many CPUs you have or how fast they are, it's how fast the interlinks are between processors. That depends how well your project scales to a cluster, then. SETI or Folding, for example, won't really care how fast the interconnect is.
Of course, the same programming techniques used to build this are absolutely not going to scale to a cluster. Probably vice versa, but I'm not convinced of that yet.
10 cents for a now double-encoded (generational loss) lossy recording? Consider, also, that this is probably illegal, or against the TOS -- may as well get a torrent of flacs instead.
True that, but you can always make saving such an endeavor the vast majority of people will choose to buy instead of using whatever work around is available. But even then it's only a matter of time before ease of use would catch up... A matter of however long it takes for someone to write a Firefox addon or Greasemonkey script. Those are easy enough that if someone can do it by hand, they can probably write the script about as fast.
I'm still trying to see what makes this diffrent from some sort of personalized internet radio station Simple: Radio is free. This costs more than satellite radio.
It won't be any more legal to rent a song for 10 cents and save it than it is to just torrent the whole album in Flac format. And the latter is going to be higher quality, anyway.
Please, no one waste your time on this. Don't make this service appear any more valuable than it is.
it's likely the motherboard vendor will be listed on the box and it's not very hard to find a website. And if it's not, I'll be booting a Linux livecd to run lspci, to give me a head start.
manually grab a video driver, RAID or audio driver at most. Given that RAID (or just SATA, on some flavors of XP) will completely prevent the install, that's kind of a lot to ask. I could put it on a floppy... oh wait, I don't have a floppy drive anymore. Best bet is to slipstream it into the XP CD somehow...
It's likely going to need a few visits to the web to get the video running up to snuff. Or one click on the "yes, enable restricted drivers" box, if that's even still required.
It's going to take some monkey time with Wine to get applications working as well as they can, etc. Assuming they don't work out of the box, simply by clicking on them. Some do.
And this part really depends how much you rely on specific Windows apps. For many people, Ubuntu, out of the box, is actually going to have everything (pre-installed) that they need.
1. Install windows I have software RAID on an nVidia board, without a floppy drive. Your step 1 fails utterly.
The only real way I've been able to get this working is to burn a custom (nLite'd) XP install disc, with the appropriate drivers slipstreamed in.
2. Toss in the CD's for any hardware that windows didn't accept on the fly Assuming I still have those. I actually keep all of them, but most people don't have a clue.
(or download them from the manufacturers website). Which means figuring out who the manufacturer is -- not always trivial (Dell might not have all of them, and if it's custom built...) -- actually, I often pop in a Linux LiveCD to find out things like who made the onboard video. Know of any tools like Linux's lspci on Windows?
Also: What happens when the network card isn't supported out of the box? I've had this problem. Had to use a USB key and another machine.
Anyway, I respectfully disagree. If this is difficult, I am going to have to revoke your 4 digit geek card from someone. It's not so much difficult as a pain in the ass. Also, it is remarkably difficult compared to a modern Linux.
Are you upset that windows doesn't ship with drivers for every printer and accessory A bit, yes. Having no major releases for five years doesn't help with that. And again, we're not talking every printer and accessory, we're talking essential stuff like hard disk controllers and network cards.
or are you upset that Windows doesn't ship with 400 other programs pre-installed? It is fairly irritating how much is pre-installed, but actually, I much prefer Linux for this, too -- both because most distros come with most of what I need out of the box (including a working office suite), and because there's a package manager.
To install Firefox on Windows, I need to open IE, go to mozilla.com, click Firefox, click Download, click Open, wait for the download, then click next probably five or ten times. And Firefox is one of the easier ones.
To install Firefox on Ubuntu (if it wasn't pre-installed, which it is), I need to open a terminal and type "sudo apt-get install firefox". And then, maybe, I need to hit enter once. Or I can get to Add/Remove Programs in two clicks, select Firefox, hit Ok, and go -- not sure exactly how long this is, been awhile since I used the GUI for this.
Rinse and repeat for every other app I want to use. And apt will keep them up to date on Ubuntu -- on Windows, I'm on my own.
Never mind the inevitable twenty or thirty security updates, and maybe a service pack, for Windows. If I'm online when I install Ubuntu, it will be fully updated by the time it reboots.
Oh, one more, while I'm at it -- on Ubuntu, I get a livecd during the installation. I can browse the Web, IM, etc. Last time I installed XP, the best my brother was able to do was run Pinball, and he had to know some secret keyboard shortcut for it. And this isn't just a convenience feature -- if something goes wrong with the installation, I can actually go online and look for help.
Specifically, I very much doubt it has much to do with drivers. It seems to have a lot more to do with figuring out which keys correspond to what. Open up xev, and every key I press on my keyboard will create an event, whether or not that key actually does anything meaningful.
But yeah, latest Ubuntu upgrade, plus a trivial software tweak, and my Apple keyboard's function keys work exactly the way I'd expect -- monitor brightness, media control, volume control, etc.
Almost no manufacturers go out of their way to support Linux, and we're grateful for the few that do.
integrated video chipsets Never, ever had a problem getting those to work. Worst case, I don't get hardware acceleration, but then, if it's not at least an Intel chip of some kind, how much acceleration is there, really?
NICs and wlan cards A year ago, I'd agree with you. Maybe even six months ago. But now, there's a very high probability of "just working".
webcams Last time I tried a webcam, my roommate plugged it into his XP laptop, and had to install a ton of crapware that came with it -- and it ended up having a horrible green tint. Plugged it into my desktop, opened Kopete, and it worked.
sound cards etc. Occasionally, especially in laptops. This, too, is getting better -- last Ubuntu, I got no sound at all. This time, I get sound, but not on headphones.
often you end up having to manually configure ndiswrapper or whatnot. I haven't had to touch ndiswrapper in over a year. The last major wifi card that needed it was Broadcom wireless, and we've got that done, everything except the firmware. And if you have the Windows driver somewhere, there's exactly one command needed to slice out that firmware.
please don't go over linux hw support in a baloon, it's not that good. It is amazingly good, when you consider that 99% of it is reverse-engineered, with no help from hardware vendors at all. It's amazing that it boots at all, and yet, I can get a livecd to work well on almost every machine I've tried lately.
And for the last 5 years or so, it has at least been able to boot, and generally handle physical, wired networks, and a simple unaccelerated X, everywhere I've tried. It's things like the ndiswrapper hack you mention that have been steadily disappearing, especially over the last year or two.
Just grab the Ubuntu Alternate install CD, or start from Debian. Same principle, but no real point in getting Ubuntu Server -- you probably want the generic kernel anyway, not the server kernel.
Copyright infringer? Not a criminal offense, believe it or not. You could end up owing a lot of money, but it's not likely to actually put you behind bars.
Pot smoker? Not relevant; I'm not. And have either of them released statements saying anything about this? Maybe they're just going to leave it alone.
Violent video games? Far as I know, Hilary is the only one who's said anything. Maybe McCain has, I haven't been paying attention. But Obama seems very much in favor of freedom of speech.
Porn? Again, the only one I think likely to have an opinion would be Hilary. Obama is in favor of net neutrality, which would not only allow porn, it would force ISPs to deliver it every bit as fast as everything else.
Unfortunately there are a lot of people out there more sold on the "lesser of two evils" doctrine, than are sold on the "don't give your mandate to someone that wants to put you in jail!". Do you have someone else you'd rather vote for? No?
How about this: Would you rather vote for someone who would put Steve Ballmer in a cabinet position, ignore net neutrality and let Comcast take over, and has a former media exec as his technological adviser?
Or, would you rather vote for neither, and let that clown win?
Or would you rather vote for someone who, at least, is going to make things better, not worse?
He's from the Evil Big Media, and thus must be destroyed! He works with the Evil Rethuglicans and must be burned at the stake! Actually, I went and read the facts. He not only worked for Evil Big Media, but he's against net neutrality.
Contrast that to Obama's adviser, who's from MIT -- and supports net neutrality. That, and Obama's whole campaign shows quite a lot more technical savvy than anyone else's, on either side.
(To clarify: I'm using the proper definition of net neutrality; that is, I believe the network should be neutral, and that we should probably legislate this.)
While I'm at it, McCain did say that he'd pick Steve "The Chair" Ballmer for his cabinet. In an ambassadorial role. That does not inspire confidence.
Never mind that most media execs and participants - actors and reporters and the like - actively support the Democrat party, yet espouse the very "restrictions on my right to copy any material I want" that is so anethema here... You know, you are so right. From now on, I'm going to base my vote on who everyone else is voting for! Because it'd be bad to vote for the same guy that someone else likes...
*headdesk*
Maybe they like Obama for other reasons?
Maybe you don't have any statistics at all for that, and you'd rather scream against the (imaginary) Slashdot groupthink?
Personally, I see a win for a race as more important than a win for the party.
I suppose that would be a reason to go with Hilary, too -- a win for a gender vs a win for a race? -- but then it gets back to their actual politics, and I actually don't like Hilary.
Hatred, racism and bigotry don't just disappear in a generation. I've seen it happen.
I live in a small town of about 10k people. A bunch of people from the Transcendental Meditation Movement came here to start a university, and later a primary school -- it's now possible to go K-12 and college without leaving the same campus.
A lot of the older people in town ("Townies"), especially the more religious ones, have a pretty irrational dislike for the Movement -- or the "Rus", short for "Gurus". Part of it probably comes from being pretty normal Iowans until we came in here with all our weird hippie Hindu stuff. Part of it probably has more to do with the fact that we're a bunch of outsiders, moving in on their community.
Now, I don't know of any actual violence that's happened because of this, but there is certainly bigotry and discrimination. It gets weird -- Rus don't want to do business with Rus, and Townies don't want to do business with Rus, and that's a whole separate story -- my parents get most of their business from out of town.
But whatever there was, it's pretty much gone in my generation. Nobody cares where you came from, or what you believe -- that's your business.
Or take a better example -- Israeli and Palestinian children. A group of schoolchildren, to be precise -- brought together for some amount of time. By the time they went home, they were trying to teach their parents to be tolerant.
No one is born in hatred, racism, or bigotry. It has to be taught.
This should be true of any distro with a sufficiently advanced package manager and repository system.
Gentoo starts out the simplest, with nothing more than a livecd -- you have to format yourself, unpack a tarball, chroot, and do the bootstrapping, pretty much all by yourself.
Ubuntu has a variant which installs something about as minimal as Debian. You can always install everything else you need -- the bigger variants are as simple as "apt-get install ubuntu-desktop" and such.
Those are the ones I've used extensively. My guess is that the review is about how it all comes together for a specific lightweight UI and such, but I haven't read TFA yet.
By API you mean DirectX, right? Or OpenGL, yes.
"Register at base address+0x1010 is a command register. Write these commands to draw these polygons" Still not sure I see how that's a trade secret. Not disputing it, just over my head at this point.
If you know the instruction set of a Risc chip, an in order implementation is rather obvious. Wouldn't the same hold, though? There are fast implementations, and there are slow ones.
nVidia is a hardware company. I kind of wish they stuck to hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
That's the thing that I didn't like about Gentoo. I discovered that most of the flexibility advantage that I perceived over other distros boiled down to two things:
First, USE flags. Most of these are things like whether or not to compile Perl support for Vim, or gtk+ support for various packages, etc. I find that, for the most part, Debian-based distros solve this by splitting that functionality into separate packages -- often the extra functionality is in an optional library (plugin-like), which would be difficult to compile separately, so it's in the same Gentoo package -- but is fine for a binary distro.
Plus, I wasn't customizing them that much, other than turning them all on.
Second was, obviously, global optimizations. But the only safe global optimizations are things like -march=whatever. Ubuntu already optimizes for 686, and I have an amd64 -- there aren't going to be many optimizations I can turn on globally. The closest would be things like mplayer, which can autodetect my CPU at runtime anyway.
Most of the other advantages are completely negated by the nature of the beast. If there was a slight speed advantage, maybe -- but I pay for that by spending all those cycles compiling stuff, and besides, that speed advantage is mostly already had by using Ubuntu on amd64. Slight space advantage, maybe with -OS -- but I have to leave enough space to compile things (3 gigs for some things, like OpenOffice), and
There are things I miss about Gentoo, and I have a very long wish list for any package manager. I'm not saying this to bad-mouth Gentoo, just saying why I think a binary K6 would be useful -- especially when the machine is going to be slow enough that you don't want to be compiling all the time.
Down, fanboy.
The last time I looked at the graphics scene, they were actually neck and neck. There were reviews for new cards from each, and depending on the publisher, they might go one way or another.
At no point do I remember ATI no longer being relevant.
So, do you have anything to back that statement up, or are you just going to keep parroting the nVidia party line?
I had a nice, thought out analysis of your comment -- nice flamebait with "piracy is theft" -- but I don't like to reply to people who don't read my post.
It is a sad state that most businesses have obligations to shareholders, but to suggest that all businesses only care about cash must, by extension, mean that this is true of all people.
I'll grant you "most", but the way you (and others like you) are wording this makes it an excuse. It's not, especially for a company which claims "Don't Be Evil." Shame on Google, shame on YouTube, and shame on you for giving them an excuse.
Except that the whole reason you'd use one of these, instead of a much cheaper cluster of commodity hardware, is because you want to use shared memory and threads. There are problems which scale much better to shared memory than to shared-nothing -- or so I'm told.
Oh, and Erlang is wannabe-functional. Go play with Haskell if you want a purely-functional language. No side effects means, among other things, the ability to have the parallelism done for you, instead of having to explicitly spawn a thread -- or an Erlang "process".
Me, I'm working on a cute wrapper for Ruby objects to turn them into Erlang-style threads.
I can see where a single memory space might do better, though. a simultaneous 700 thread application is NOT hard to write in java at all. Once you know how, I suppose. Consider that most programmers who use threads find ways to deadlock on one or two cores.
The reason I'm drawn to message-passing systems is that pretty much any higher-level abstraction is a Good Thing, as far as threads are concerned. I've come to believe that threads are as harmful as GOTOs. Sure, we'll use them under the hood, but we really need something more structured on top of them.
Also: Message-passing and shared memory are not mutually exclusive. If the message is being passed between, say, two Erlang "processes" on the same machine, I see no reason the contents of that message need to be copied, even if those "processes" are in different OS threads.
Of course, the same programming techniques used to build this are absolutely not going to scale to a cluster. Probably vice versa, but I'm not convinced of that yet.
10 cents for a now double-encoded (generational loss) lossy recording? Consider, also, that this is probably illegal, or against the TOS -- may as well get a torrent of flacs instead.
It won't be any more legal to rent a song for 10 cents and save it than it is to just torrent the whole album in Flac format. And the latter is going to be higher quality, anyway.
Please, no one waste your time on this. Don't make this service appear any more valuable than it is.
And this part really depends how much you rely on specific Windows apps. For many people, Ubuntu, out of the box, is actually going to have everything (pre-installed) that they need.
The only real way I've been able to get this working is to burn a custom (nLite'd) XP install disc, with the appropriate drivers slipstreamed in. 2. Toss in the CD's for any hardware that windows didn't accept on the fly Assuming I still have those. I actually keep all of them, but most people don't have a clue. (or download them from the manufacturers website). Which means figuring out who the manufacturer is -- not always trivial (Dell might not have all of them, and if it's custom built...) -- actually, I often pop in a Linux LiveCD to find out things like who made the onboard video. Know of any tools like Linux's lspci on Windows?
Also: What happens when the network card isn't supported out of the box? I've had this problem. Had to use a USB key and another machine. Anyway, I respectfully disagree. If this is difficult, I am going to have to revoke your 4 digit geek card from someone. It's not so much difficult as a pain in the ass. Also, it is remarkably difficult compared to a modern Linux. Are you upset that windows doesn't ship with drivers for every printer and accessory A bit, yes. Having no major releases for five years doesn't help with that. And again, we're not talking every printer and accessory, we're talking essential stuff like hard disk controllers and network cards. or are you upset that Windows doesn't ship with 400 other programs pre-installed? It is fairly irritating how much is pre-installed, but actually, I much prefer Linux for this, too -- both because most distros come with most of what I need out of the box (including a working office suite), and because there's a package manager.
To install Firefox on Windows, I need to open IE, go to mozilla.com, click Firefox, click Download, click Open, wait for the download, then click next probably five or ten times. And Firefox is one of the easier ones.
To install Firefox on Ubuntu (if it wasn't pre-installed, which it is), I need to open a terminal and type "sudo apt-get install firefox". And then, maybe, I need to hit enter once. Or I can get to Add/Remove Programs in two clicks, select Firefox, hit Ok, and go -- not sure exactly how long this is, been awhile since I used the GUI for this.
Rinse and repeat for every other app I want to use. And apt will keep them up to date on Ubuntu -- on Windows, I'm on my own.
Never mind the inevitable twenty or thirty security updates, and maybe a service pack, for Windows. If I'm online when I install Ubuntu, it will be fully updated by the time it reboots.
Oh, one more, while I'm at it -- on Ubuntu, I get a livecd during the installation. I can browse the Web, IM, etc. Last time I installed XP, the best my brother was able to do was run Pinball, and he had to know some secret keyboard shortcut for it. And this isn't just a convenience feature -- if something goes wrong with the installation, I can actually go online and look for help.
My guess is, open source effort.
Specifically, I very much doubt it has much to do with drivers. It seems to have a lot more to do with figuring out which keys correspond to what. Open up xev, and every key I press on my keyboard will create an event, whether or not that key actually does anything meaningful.
But yeah, latest Ubuntu upgrade, plus a trivial software tweak, and my Apple keyboard's function keys work exactly the way I'd expect -- monitor brightness, media control, volume control, etc.
Almost no manufacturers go out of their way to support Linux, and we're grateful for the few that do.
And for the last 5 years or so, it has at least been able to boot, and generally handle physical, wired networks, and a simple unaccelerated X, everywhere I've tried. It's things like the ndiswrapper hack you mention that have been steadily disappearing, especially over the last year or two.
I had a Sharp MM10. Out of the box, it had 3 hours, maybe. When I upgraded the battery, it had 9-12 hours.
Of course, it was more than twice the weight with the new battery, but still a lot lighter than any laptop I've owned since.
Just grab the Ubuntu Alternate install CD, or start from Debian. Same principle, but no real point in getting Ubuntu Server -- you probably want the generic kernel anyway, not the server kernel.
Copyright infringer? Not a criminal offense, believe it or not. You could end up owing a lot of money, but it's not likely to actually put you behind bars.
Pot smoker? Not relevant; I'm not. And have either of them released statements saying anything about this? Maybe they're just going to leave it alone.
Violent video games? Far as I know, Hilary is the only one who's said anything. Maybe McCain has, I haven't been paying attention. But Obama seems very much in favor of freedom of speech.
Porn? Again, the only one I think likely to have an opinion would be Hilary. Obama is in favor of net neutrality, which would not only allow porn, it would force ISPs to deliver it every bit as fast as everything else. Unfortunately there are a lot of people out there more sold on the "lesser of two evils" doctrine, than are sold on the "don't give your mandate to someone that wants to put you in jail!". Do you have someone else you'd rather vote for? No?
How about this: Would you rather vote for someone who would put Steve Ballmer in a cabinet position, ignore net neutrality and let Comcast take over, and has a former media exec as his technological adviser?
Or, would you rather vote for neither, and let that clown win?
Or would you rather vote for someone who, at least, is going to make things better, not worse?
So what, exactly, are you proposing? That both of them have accepted it as a bribe?
Is it so hard to imagine that they've tried to bribe both, but only one (or neither) of them is going to actually act on it as a bribe?
Contrast that to Obama's adviser, who's from MIT -- and supports net neutrality. That, and Obama's whole campaign shows quite a lot more technical savvy than anyone else's, on either side.
(To clarify: I'm using the proper definition of net neutrality; that is, I believe the network should be neutral, and that we should probably legislate this.)
While I'm at it, McCain did say that he'd pick Steve "The Chair" Ballmer for his cabinet. In an ambassadorial role. That does not inspire confidence. Never mind that most media execs and participants - actors and reporters and the like - actively support the Democrat party, yet espouse the very "restrictions on my right to copy any material I want" that is so anethema here... You know, you are so right. From now on, I'm going to base my vote on who everyone else is voting for! Because it'd be bad to vote for the same guy that someone else likes...
*headdesk*
Maybe they like Obama for other reasons?
Maybe you don't have any statistics at all for that, and you'd rather scream against the (imaginary) Slashdot groupthink?
Personally, I see a win for a race as more important than a win for the party.
I suppose that would be a reason to go with Hilary, too -- a win for a gender vs a win for a race? -- but then it gets back to their actual politics, and I actually don't like Hilary.
I live in a small town of about 10k people. A bunch of people from the Transcendental Meditation Movement came here to start a university, and later a primary school -- it's now possible to go K-12 and college without leaving the same campus.
A lot of the older people in town ("Townies"), especially the more religious ones, have a pretty irrational dislike for the Movement -- or the "Rus", short for "Gurus". Part of it probably comes from being pretty normal Iowans until we came in here with all our weird hippie Hindu stuff. Part of it probably has more to do with the fact that we're a bunch of outsiders, moving in on their community.
Now, I don't know of any actual violence that's happened because of this, but there is certainly bigotry and discrimination. It gets weird -- Rus don't want to do business with Rus, and Townies don't want to do business with Rus, and that's a whole separate story -- my parents get most of their business from out of town.
But whatever there was, it's pretty much gone in my generation. Nobody cares where you came from, or what you believe -- that's your business.
Or take a better example -- Israeli and Palestinian children. A group of schoolchildren, to be precise -- brought together for some amount of time. By the time they went home, they were trying to teach their parents to be tolerant.
No one is born in hatred, racism, or bigotry. It has to be taught.
That's pretty fucking cowardly.
Because a lot of Americans might be racist, you have an excuse to be racist?
This should be true of any distro with a sufficiently advanced package manager and repository system.
Gentoo starts out the simplest, with nothing more than a livecd -- you have to format yourself, unpack a tarball, chroot, and do the bootstrapping, pretty much all by yourself.
Ubuntu has a variant which installs something about as minimal as Debian. You can always install everything else you need -- the bigger variants are as simple as "apt-get install ubuntu-desktop" and such.
Those are the ones I've used extensively. My guess is that the review is about how it all comes together for a specific lightweight UI and such, but I haven't read TFA yet.
nVidia is a hardware company. I kind of wish they stuck to hardware.