I haven't actually read TFA, but it seems that while there are open source drivers for everything, and probably open specs for everything, I'm not sure that you can actually plug it into a chip fab and make your own just yet.
I also remember the OpenMoko guys actually refusing to support certain features because they couldn't obtain an open driver for them.
desktop users couldn't care less about 'hard coded nice levels' if it means their 3d games and/or X apps work better
Fair enough.
But tell me this: If it really is just "hard coded nice levels", why should we hardcode them in the kernel, rather than putting them in scripts in userspace?
If it really is just hard coded nice levels, it should be done in userspace, not in the kernel. Therefore, the kernel is right to refuse inclusion. No matter how much the users might want a broken solution, we won't give it to them, especially when we have a good solution already there.
There is a problem with the FPS client-server model: if your server dies you're screwed.
Yeah. And?
It's a fact of life. If your ISP dies, you're screwed. If your network card dies, you're screwed. If the batteries in your wireless keyboard die, you're screwed.
Nobody wants to connect to a dedicated server for a quick dirty RTS match
Not a big deal. Halo manages to create quick pick-up games with the simple model of, if at least one of the players is visible from the Internet, they get to be the server. Downside is that player can cheat, and no one else can -- but without the one server, everyone can cheat anyway.
The beauty of the original Starcraft was that a player could drop and the rest could keep playing as if nothing happened.
The beauty of a single server, dedicated or not, is that you only need one Internet-facing computer. The original Starcraft is pretty useless behind a NAT without some port-forwarding tricks, but everyone had to do that, not just one "server" player.
Oh, by the way -- try Natural Selection. It uses the FPS model, because it is an FPS -- but it's also an RTS. (Or, if you don't have Half-Life, try Tremulous.) It's not Starcraft, but it's an example of the direction this might go to support a more centrallized model.
They were created by the GNU Project for the specific purpose of serving as components of the GNU System. This is the key thing you seem to be missing - all these pieces didn't just arbitrarily show up - they are the results of a project specifically intended to create a complete operating system.
So, they're an operating system because the project intended to create an operating system?
Cool, I'll write a Hello World app that's also an operating system, because I want it to be!
Sure. I'll start talking about GNU/X.org (or GNU/Linux/X.org) the minute you start talking about Solaris/X.org and FreeBSD/X.org.
Thanks, you've just made my point for me.
The GNU Project has created a complete OS (as complete as Solaris or *BSD, which are generally recognized as complete operating systems).
By now, yes. When Linux came out, no, it wasn't complete -- they had everything except the kernel, so still not an operating system. And even now,
In fact, if we take everything GNU except the kernel, and port it to Solaris or *BSD, or even Mac OS X, we generally still call it Solaris or *BSD or Mac OS X with a few GNU tools sprinkled in. We don't call it GNU/Solaris, just because someone installed glibc, gcc, etc.
The GNU Project would like to be given credit for their work.
They have credit. They have their name all over it. Every time I look up a manpage for one of the GNU tools, I see "GNU Make". Many of the more visible GUI tools have a "g" in them, and a quick look at the "about" tab will at least tell me what it stands for, and may even provide a list of individual people who have contributed to the project. When I open GNU Screen, for instance, I get a mention of the GNU General Public License and an email address to send bug reports and pizza to.
What they don't have is a mention of their name as part of the OS name itself, any more than we have Solaris/X.org (or GNU/Solaris/X.org).
As others have mentioned, they even had a golden opportunity to do this: They could have distributed a complete operating system. As far as I can tell, they still don't do this. HURD is distributed as source code, which seems common for GNU projects, and they don't even provide source packages. There is no distribution called GNU. And by the way: I can't think of another thing that wants to call itself an operating system, that's distributed exclusively in source form.
One final point: Should OS X have to call itself BSD/OS X? It is, after all, as much a BSD OS with other stuff running on it as my Linux system is a GNU OS with other stuff running on it.
I'm tempted to start referring to GNU/Linux systems as simply GNU, and then when people ask "What about Linux?" respond "Oh, that's just some drivers - not worthy of mention".
Ignoring the fact that drivers are likely harder to maintain today than the rest of the GNU system (hardware is constantly changing) -- I'll ignore that mostly because I haven't actually worked on either, so I'm not overly qualified to make that judgment.
But at this point, you'd be unnecessarily fragmenting the namespace, and driving people away from a GNU system. You see, when I google for "Ubuntu", the first thing that comes up is ubuntu.com, and the "Download" link is visible enough that it's included right there in the Google search. When I google for "Linux", Ubuntu is still there, but farther down, and the first result is for Linux.org, which introduces the user to the concept of the "Linux distribution".
However, when I google for GNU, I don't even find Debian until maybe several pages in. I find absolutely no information about distributions -- I just find disparate projects, like the GNU/HURD, which is available for download in source form -- and that's hardly what you want a newbie to see.
Fair enough, but what I want is to be able to say with confidence that we've either decided to standardize on one physics engine, or we've got several which are as similar as nVidia's OpenGL implementation is to ATI's OpenGL implementation.
It's not so much a question of difficulty of porting, I'm thinking back to this being an alternative to proprietary lockin to physics hardware, should it ever be useful.
In that case, I don't have as much of a problem with iTunes, just countering your point about not caring what a song is named.
And the fact that iTunes organizes it so well does kind of illustrate my point about AOL keywords quite nicely, I think. Even if you don't think the filename is relevant, apparently iTunes does.
Although I'm speaking with clock speed, not benchmarks, and it doesn't have a shared cache -- not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing, performance-wise -- but it's 512k per core, which adds up to 1 meg.
(Pure speculation, but I imagine a shared L2 cache would make it slower for both cores (due to locking issues), with the gain being much easier switching of threads from one core to another, and theoretically better performance if one thread from one core ends up hogging the entire L2 cache. But my understanding at this level is limited.)
I'd have to see some review site with benchmarks to say this with authority, but unofficially, based on the only specs I understand, AMD wins this one, hands down. I remember researching this earlier and finding the motherboard was some $10 cheaper on the AMD side, but I'm not sure. Even so, it saves me $10 on the CPU alone, for 2 ghz instead of 1.6.
Then again, things may have changed. I don't remember finding that $75 option when I looked earlier. Maybe I was only looking for Core2 Duos?
I'd be curious to know if "calculating" is actually slowing things down, as opposed to, say, estimating download times. But I use the commandline because I actually prefer the interface, so I don't really know, it's been awhile since I've tried to drag'n'drop anything.
Also: You back up an iPod to a Win 2k3 Server??
Again, nothing wrong with that, it just strikes me as bizarre.
Yes, I was. I wanted to acknowledge, up front, that I was quoting / linking to something I don't really understand.
I guess that answers the question of an open API -- I'll bet ODE and Bullet are not drop-in replacements for each other, meaning we have a ways to go before we can do this as generically as we do graphics (OpenGL).
Every usable OS, maybe, although I could probably find some niche OS written in Java or something.
Oh, and they aren't all written in C. I'm not sure if Windows is entirely C, or some combination of C/C++, and the same may be true of OS X, sort of (it'd be objective C). But honestly, any modern OS is also going to need significant chunks written in assembly. If you're going to have to do some low-level stuff and some high-level stuff, why not use C/asm only where needed, and use another language for the rest of the system?
But never mind. I shouldn't argue too hard, mostly because while I'm convinced a good, entirely non-C OS can be written, even without memory segmentation (see Microsoft's Singularity), I haven't done it, and to my knowledge, no one has.
As long as you keep thinking about the output of GNU Project as just "the GNU tools - maybe tar and some other stuff", you're going to continue to see things from a warped perspective and draw unreasonable conclusions. The GNU Project has developed a complete operating system - the GNU system.
Complete by what respects?
DOS is a "complete operating system", by some definitions.
A basic GNU system, among many other things, does not include a windowing system.
Like any other modern Unix-like OS, it uses X.org as its windowing system.
X.org is no more a part of the "GNU OS" than any other application -- it runs on many other systems, including non-GNU ones. (For example, Mac OS X includes XFree86, and now X.org. Various other BSDs use it -- Solaris probably does. There might even be a Windows port that doesn't rely on Cygwin.)
However, the "GNU OS" likely includes other tools that are really applications, like grep. So what is the magic that ties these together and makes them uniquely GNU?
I suppose it would have to be a common license (GPL), and a common organization producing them and holding the copyrights (FSF). Neither of these apply to the X.org project.
A request from the founder of the GNU Project that people recognize their effort when they talk about systems that incorporate and rely on the vast majority of their work should seem entirely reasonable.
As I've shown, X.org can exist independent of the GNU OS. However, a modern GNU OS would be hard-pressed to find a windowing system to replace X.org.
Therefore, I request that, when talking about a GNU OS which includes graphical components, you refer to it by its proper name: GNU/X.org.
Do you really want to start down that road? Next up: KDE. I believe most of that has been ported to non-GNU systems as well, and a Windows port is in the works.
Responding by denigrating the GNU System as "just some tools" is insulting at best.
Then it would seem you know even less about OS design than I credited you with.
Any operating system that is not a collection of tools must, by necessity, be one monolithic tool. Thus, referring to a system -- any system, OS or not -- as a "collection of tools" is high praise -- it means the system is flexible. It can be adapted and re-used. New things can be incorporated into it, and it can be incorporated into other things, without breaking.
It's called "modularity", and it's widely recognized as a good thing. "Best practice" is the phrase.
Being insulted when your system is called "just" a collection of tools is like trying to insult evolutionary science by calling evolution "just" a theory.
Of course, if you accept this explanation, then you must also accept that while every module should be given credit somewhere, they need not be given credit in everyday speech. To suggest otherwise, while it may be "fair" in some abstract sense of you getting the credit you're due, it's not fair in a practical sense, because I really don't want to say GNU/TrollTech/KDE/X.org/Perl/Apache/Postgres/Ubuntu/Kubuntu/iLinux, just to refer to my operating system.
(Yes, iLinux -- there's a very good chance that the next version of Konqueror, my preferred web browser, will incorporate code from Apple.)
Now, maybe you're right, and picking "Linux" out of that bunch is not the most fair choice that could have been made, if I had to choose one name. But as I said in my earlier post, there is actually a solid reason why I feel "Ubuntu Linux" is the clearest, most accurate representation to the end-user.
IF parents don't want a child to play a game, then by all means, involve the village. Have the parent go to that Gamestop with their child (or a photo of them, if the child won't come), and specifically ask the store not to sell any games to this particular kid without going through the parent first.
However, what this guy was doing was restraining the child not based on the wishes of the parent, but based on his own idea of what the child needs. It's not his place.
If the parent brought in documentation saying that their kid had bad grades, and that it coincided with him playing more games, you might still have a case -- of course, correlation is not causation, but it'd be better than "Them video games be promotin' bad grades, y'hear?"
We haven't even decided whether games cause violence, let alone bad grades. I know, as a kid, that it wasn't the games -- take away the games, and I'd watch TV. Take that away, and I'd read a book. If I wasn't motivated to get the grades, I wouldn't, and the games just happened to be what was there.
What's more, grades aren't everything, as has been clearly shown in other posts. Take this guy as an example.
Oh, now that I've presented a valid argument (I think), here's a relevant strawman for you: Would you take away other toys? Say you've got a 3rd-grader who's not doing so well in math. Do you refuse to sell his parents a toy train set for Christmas?
For about $60, I can get a dual-core 64-bit processor at something like 2 ghz. Maybe I wasn't looking in the right place, but the cheapest Core 2 Duo I saw was over $100.
Also, you're absolutely right that we should hope AMD doesn't get gobbled up. The current Intel stuff, it seems to me, is a direct result of AMD dominating the price/performance ratios for so long, and even, recently, doing well with performance/watt. So even if you don't end up buying AMD, having them as a constant threat means Intel will be forced to compete.
There's no logic to supprot "Linux" as a name, and there's actually relatively little logic to support a desktop environment or a distro as a name.
At least if we're talking about who should be credited in the name, the logical answer really comes down to this: Everyone has an equal claim. However, you don't see X.org throwing fits and refusing talks or interviews with people who refuse to call it X.org/Linux, even though X.org is arguably as much code and as much a necessity of a modern Linux desktop as the GNU tools are.
(Yes, X.org probably requires gcc and glibc. However, no one would care enough to continue developing either if they had to do so without a GUI.)
Actually, there is one very, very good reason for using "Linux" as a name: It tells you what's compatible. A clueless person who buys, say, UT2004 or Quake 4, knows that it's compiled to run on a Linux kernel. Most of the other things aren't as relevant -- X.org just happens to be the best X server, but it could theoretically run under something else. Ubuntu is slightly more relevant, but these games are proof that you can distribute a distro-neutral binary.
As far as many applications are concerned, Linux is the operating system, the rest are just applications. Yes, some of them are required, but this is also the case on Windows -- sometimes you need a particular video codec installed, for example, to play pre-rendered cinematics in a game. The codec might be part of Windows Media Player, but isn't part of Windows. There are also things like Steam -- you need Steam installed to play Half-Life 2, but we don't consider Steam to be part of the operating system.
So, when you get right down to it, I would call Linux the OS, and a particular distro would be like a version or "flavor" of other OSes (like XP vs Vista, or Ultimate vs Home Basic). Not out of any logic for who should get credit, but because it tells customers what they need to know about application support and customer support, which are really the only two places the customer would care about the specific OS they're running.
Yes, I really do like having well-named MP3s -- it means I can look them up in any app, without having to use some database specific to that app. (Sometimes it's a proprietary database, sometimes it's open, but there's still not much chance of communication.)
What iTunes is doing here is essentially adding another naming/indexing system on top of the one you've already got -- the filesystem (and simple, text-only playlists). There's no reason for it -- I'm sure someone could make a system which was as easy as iTunes, yet actually exposed the filesystem and cleaned it up as you organized your music. (Yes, you do still have to organize your music. Filename or id3 tag, someone's still going to screw it up.)
Think back to DNS. I'm sold on DNS. I'm not sold on AOL Keywords. 90% of the time, they're exactly the same as the domain name, only without a.com or whatever, because the drooling idiots who actually use AOL can't handle.com, let alone a decent search engine. They're duplicating DNS -- and they don't even replace dns, because you can bet that AOL keyword foo resolves to foo.com, and not directly to foo.com's IP. It'd be stupid if it did, because then foo.com would have to maintain two separate mappings to that IP.
Having a database to manage your fucking music is the AOL Keyword system of the 21st century.
I don't think Apple is punishing anyone, but why the fuck should they care about putting QA money into making sure a NON-SUPPORTED OS for a product works?
They don't have to care.
But why the fuck should they care about putting QA money into making sure a non-supported OS doesn't work? This isn't accidental -- they are deliberately trying not to interoperate here, when it would have been cheaper and easier just to leave everything the way it was.
It looks like there is actually a Linux app that will manage your iPod for you -- basically doing this automatically on every sync. Here's the wiki page.
I hate PlaysForSure, too, but at least there's competition on the hardware. But suppose I don't want to use DRM -- where's the standard for easy docking stations? Seems to me like the closest we have is USB and headphone jacks...
No, guys. Things should be usable in a natural state. You should be comfortable with something as soon as you start using it. If you're not, then the products usability has failed you.
Say I can't read, and I pick up a book. Has the book's usability failed me?
No, it's either me, or my education, or my parents. The book works for anyone who can read; it's not the book's fault, or the book's failure, that I can't read it.
Now, in the case of Linux, if Linux does something in a different way, one that's not natural to you... It could actually be a failure, like the nightmare that is configuring X, on the occasions where it doesn't just work. (I've gotten good at it, but whenever I get someone's graphics working, I tell them to save the xorg.conf, because I don't want to go through that again.)
Or, it could be something that was a conscious design decision, that many people -- including non-programmers -- find to be much more usable. Only it's not as usable to you, because it's not Windows. Windows is usable, because you've used it so much that so many things are second nature to you.
In this case, Linux is damned if it does, damned if it doesn't. If it's more like Windows, it's easier to use, but it gets accused of being a copycat, not innovative, no point in using it when you can just use the real thing (real Windows). If it innovates, it gets accused of being hard to use, because people who've used nothing but Windows all their lives can't adapt to a new interface.
So, sometimes, it is actually Linux that's unusable. But sometimes, Linux is actually doing the right thing, even if it's unusable to you. In these cases, I suggest you try to swallow your pride and listen to what these people are trying to tell you -- even if you're right, showing some humility is a lot more likely to get you help, even from people who were behaving like assholes a moment before.
Slashdot Mirror
I haven't actually read TFA, but it seems that while there are open source drivers for everything, and probably open specs for everything, I'm not sure that you can actually plug it into a chip fab and make your own just yet.
I also remember the OpenMoko guys actually refusing to support certain features because they couldn't obtain an open driver for them.
OpenMoko is based on GTK+.
Qtopia is (obviously) based on Qt.
I like KDE and Qt. I don't like GNOME and GTK+. So, other considerations aside, I already want to like Qtopia.
(I'll be the first to admit that not all of the above are based on rational thoughts.)
Fair enough.
But tell me this: If it really is just "hard coded nice levels", why should we hardcode them in the kernel, rather than putting them in scripts in userspace?
If it really is just hard coded nice levels, it should be done in userspace, not in the kernel. Therefore, the kernel is right to refuse inclusion. No matter how much the users might want a broken solution, we won't give it to them, especially when we have a good solution already there.
Yeah. And?
It's a fact of life. If your ISP dies, you're screwed. If your network card dies, you're screwed. If the batteries in your wireless keyboard die, you're screwed.
Not a big deal. Halo manages to create quick pick-up games with the simple model of, if at least one of the players is visible from the Internet, they get to be the server. Downside is that player can cheat, and no one else can -- but without the one server, everyone can cheat anyway.
The beauty of a single server, dedicated or not, is that you only need one Internet-facing computer. The original Starcraft is pretty useless behind a NAT without some port-forwarding tricks, but everyone had to do that, not just one "server" player.
Oh, by the way -- try Natural Selection. It uses the FPS model, because it is an FPS -- but it's also an RTS. (Or, if you don't have Half-Life, try Tremulous.) It's not Starcraft, but it's an example of the direction this might go to support a more centrallized model.
So, they're an operating system because the project intended to create an operating system?
Cool, I'll write a Hello World app that's also an operating system, because I want it to be!
Thanks, you've just made my point for me.
By now, yes. When Linux came out, no, it wasn't complete -- they had everything except the kernel, so still not an operating system. And even now,
In fact, if we take everything GNU except the kernel, and port it to Solaris or *BSD, or even Mac OS X, we generally still call it Solaris or *BSD or Mac OS X with a few GNU tools sprinkled in. We don't call it GNU/Solaris, just because someone installed glibc, gcc, etc.
They have credit. They have their name all over it. Every time I look up a manpage for one of the GNU tools, I see "GNU Make". Many of the more visible GUI tools have a "g" in them, and a quick look at the "about" tab will at least tell me what it stands for, and may even provide a list of individual people who have contributed to the project. When I open GNU Screen, for instance, I get a mention of the GNU General Public License and an email address to send bug reports and pizza to.
What they don't have is a mention of their name as part of the OS name itself, any more than we have Solaris/X.org (or GNU/Solaris/X.org).
As others have mentioned, they even had a golden opportunity to do this: They could have distributed a complete operating system. As far as I can tell, they still don't do this. HURD is distributed as source code, which seems common for GNU projects, and they don't even provide source packages. There is no distribution called GNU. And by the way: I can't think of another thing that wants to call itself an operating system, that's distributed exclusively in source form.
One final point: Should OS X have to call itself BSD/OS X? It is, after all, as much a BSD OS with other stuff running on it as my Linux system is a GNU OS with other stuff running on it.
Ignoring the fact that drivers are likely harder to maintain today than the rest of the GNU system (hardware is constantly changing) -- I'll ignore that mostly because I haven't actually worked on either, so I'm not overly qualified to make that judgment.
But at this point, you'd be unnecessarily fragmenting the namespace, and driving people away from a GNU system. You see, when I google for "Ubuntu", the first thing that comes up is ubuntu.com, and the "Download" link is visible enough that it's included right there in the Google search. When I google for "Linux", Ubuntu is still there, but farther down, and the first result is for Linux.org, which introduces the user to the concept of the "Linux distribution".
However, when I google for GNU, I don't even find Debian until maybe several pages in. I find absolutely no information about distributions -- I just find disparate projects, like the GNU/HURD, which is available for download in source form -- and that's hardly what you want a newbie to see.
Now, you'll be happy to know, GNU's Wikiped
Fair enough, but what I want is to be able to say with confidence that we've either decided to standardize on one physics engine, or we've got several which are as similar as nVidia's OpenGL implementation is to ATI's OpenGL implementation.
It's not so much a question of difficulty of porting, I'm thinking back to this being an alternative to proprietary lockin to physics hardware, should it ever be useful.
In that case, I don't have as much of a problem with iTunes, just countering your point about not caring what a song is named.
And the fact that iTunes organizes it so well does kind of illustrate my point about AOL keywords quite nicely, I think. Even if you don't think the filename is relevant, apparently iTunes does.
Price and performance.
Although I'm speaking with clock speed, not benchmarks, and it doesn't have a shared cache -- not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing, performance-wise -- but it's 512k per core, which adds up to 1 meg.
(Pure speculation, but I imagine a shared L2 cache would make it slower for both cores (due to locking issues), with the gain being much easier switching of threads from one core to another, and theoretically better performance if one thread from one core ends up hogging the entire L2 cache. But my understanding at this level is limited.)
I'd have to see some review site with benchmarks to say this with authority, but unofficially, based on the only specs I understand, AMD wins this one, hands down. I remember researching this earlier and finding the motherboard was some $10 cheaper on the AMD side, but I'm not sure. Even so, it saves me $10 on the CPU alone, for 2 ghz instead of 1.6.
Then again, things may have changed. I don't remember finding that $75 option when I looked earlier. Maybe I was only looking for Core2 Duos?
I'd be curious to know if "calculating" is actually slowing things down, as opposed to, say, estimating download times. But I use the commandline because I actually prefer the interface, so I don't really know, it's been awhile since I've tried to drag'n'drop anything.
Also: You back up an iPod to a Win 2k3 Server??
Again, nothing wrong with that, it just strikes me as bizarre.
Yes, I was. I wanted to acknowledge, up front, that I was quoting / linking to something I don't really understand.
I guess that answers the question of an open API -- I'll bet ODE and Bullet are not drop-in replacements for each other, meaning we have a ways to go before we can do this as generically as we do graphics (OpenGL).
Sad, though.
Every usable OS, maybe, although I could probably find some niche OS written in Java or something.
Oh, and they aren't all written in C. I'm not sure if Windows is entirely C, or some combination of C/C++, and the same may be true of OS X, sort of (it'd be objective C). But honestly, any modern OS is also going to need significant chunks written in assembly. If you're going to have to do some low-level stuff and some high-level stuff, why not use C/asm only where needed, and use another language for the rest of the system?
But never mind. I shouldn't argue too hard, mostly because while I'm convinced a good, entirely non-C OS can be written, even without memory segmentation (see Microsoft's Singularity), I haven't done it, and to my knowledge, no one has.
Complete by what respects?
DOS is a "complete operating system", by some definitions.
A basic GNU system, among many other things, does not include a windowing system.
X.org is no more a part of the "GNU OS" than any other application -- it runs on many other systems, including non-GNU ones. (For example, Mac OS X includes XFree86, and now X.org. Various other BSDs use it -- Solaris probably does. There might even be a Windows port that doesn't rely on Cygwin.)
However, the "GNU OS" likely includes other tools that are really applications, like grep. So what is the magic that ties these together and makes them uniquely GNU?
I suppose it would have to be a common license (GPL), and a common organization producing them and holding the copyrights (FSF). Neither of these apply to the X.org project.
As I've shown, X.org can exist independent of the GNU OS. However, a modern GNU OS would be hard-pressed to find a windowing system to replace X.org.
Therefore, I request that, when talking about a GNU OS which includes graphical components, you refer to it by its proper name: GNU/X.org.
Do you really want to start down that road? Next up: KDE. I believe most of that has been ported to non-GNU systems as well, and a Windows port is in the works.
Then it would seem you know even less about OS design than I credited you with.
Any operating system that is not a collection of tools must, by necessity, be one monolithic tool. Thus, referring to a system -- any system, OS or not -- as a "collection of tools" is high praise -- it means the system is flexible. It can be adapted and re-used. New things can be incorporated into it, and it can be incorporated into other things, without breaking.
It's called "modularity", and it's widely recognized as a good thing. "Best practice" is the phrase.
Being insulted when your system is called "just" a collection of tools is like trying to insult evolutionary science by calling evolution "just" a theory.
Of course, if you accept this explanation, then you must also accept that while every module should be given credit somewhere, they need not be given credit in everyday speech. To suggest otherwise, while it may be "fair" in some abstract sense of you getting the credit you're due, it's not fair in a practical sense, because I really don't want to say GNU/TrollTech/KDE/X.org/Perl/Apache/Postgres/Ubuntu/Kubuntu/iLinux, just to refer to my operating system.
(Yes, iLinux -- there's a very good chance that the next version of Konqueror, my preferred web browser, will incorporate code from Apple.)
Now, maybe you're right, and picking "Linux" out of that bunch is not the most fair choice that could have been made, if I had to choose one name. But as I said in my earlier post, there is actually a solid reason why I feel "Ubuntu Linux" is the clearest, most accurate representation to the end-user.
Burden's on the shopkeeper to show that the parent's out of line, as far as I'm concerned. Not the other way around.
Since when is getting grades even close to as important as not killing people?
IF parents don't want a child to play a game, then by all means, involve the village. Have the parent go to that Gamestop with their child (or a photo of them, if the child won't come), and specifically ask the store not to sell any games to this particular kid without going through the parent first.
However, what this guy was doing was restraining the child not based on the wishes of the parent, but based on his own idea of what the child needs. It's not his place.
If the parent brought in documentation saying that their kid had bad grades, and that it coincided with him playing more games, you might still have a case -- of course, correlation is not causation, but it'd be better than "Them video games be promotin' bad grades, y'hear?"
We haven't even decided whether games cause violence, let alone bad grades. I know, as a kid, that it wasn't the games -- take away the games, and I'd watch TV. Take that away, and I'd read a book. If I wasn't motivated to get the grades, I wouldn't, and the games just happened to be what was there.
What's more, grades aren't everything, as has been clearly shown in other posts. Take this guy as an example.
Oh, now that I've presented a valid argument (I think), here's a relevant strawman for you: Would you take away other toys? Say you've got a 3rd-grader who's not doing so well in math. Do you refuse to sell his parents a toy train set for Christmas?
If not, what makes video games especially bad?
For about $60, I can get a dual-core 64-bit processor at something like 2 ghz. Maybe I wasn't looking in the right place, but the cheapest Core 2 Duo I saw was over $100.
Also, you're absolutely right that we should hope AMD doesn't get gobbled up. The current Intel stuff, it seems to me, is a direct result of AMD dominating the price/performance ratios for so long, and even, recently, doing well with performance/watt. So even if you don't end up buying AMD, having them as a constant threat means Intel will be forced to compete.
There's no logic to supprot "Linux" as a name, and there's actually relatively little logic to support a desktop environment or a distro as a name.
At least if we're talking about who should be credited in the name, the logical answer really comes down to this: Everyone has an equal claim. However, you don't see X.org throwing fits and refusing talks or interviews with people who refuse to call it X.org/Linux, even though X.org is arguably as much code and as much a necessity of a modern Linux desktop as the GNU tools are.
(Yes, X.org probably requires gcc and glibc. However, no one would care enough to continue developing either if they had to do so without a GUI.)
Actually, there is one very, very good reason for using "Linux" as a name: It tells you what's compatible. A clueless person who buys, say, UT2004 or Quake 4, knows that it's compiled to run on a Linux kernel. Most of the other things aren't as relevant -- X.org just happens to be the best X server, but it could theoretically run under something else. Ubuntu is slightly more relevant, but these games are proof that you can distribute a distro-neutral binary.
As far as many applications are concerned, Linux is the operating system, the rest are just applications. Yes, some of them are required, but this is also the case on Windows -- sometimes you need a particular video codec installed, for example, to play pre-rendered cinematics in a game. The codec might be part of Windows Media Player, but isn't part of Windows. There are also things like Steam -- you need Steam installed to play Half-Life 2, but we don't consider Steam to be part of the operating system.
So, when you get right down to it, I would call Linux the OS, and a particular distro would be like a version or "flavor" of other OSes (like XP vs Vista, or Ultimate vs Home Basic). Not out of any logic for who should get credit, but because it tells customers what they need to know about application support and customer support, which are really the only two places the customer would care about the specific OS they're running.
You're on Linux. Why not cp -a?
Or drag and drop on either OS?
I mean, I realize it's a pointless debate, use whatever you want, I was just surprised to hear that anyone uses xcopy in this day and age.
Yes, I really do like having well-named MP3s -- it means I can look them up in any app, without having to use some database specific to that app. (Sometimes it's a proprietary database, sometimes it's open, but there's still not much chance of communication.)
.com or whatever, because the drooling idiots who actually use AOL can't handle .com, let alone a decent search engine. They're duplicating DNS -- and they don't even replace dns, because you can bet that AOL keyword foo resolves to foo.com, and not directly to foo.com's IP. It'd be stupid if it did, because then foo.com would have to maintain two separate mappings to that IP.
What iTunes is doing here is essentially adding another naming/indexing system on top of the one you've already got -- the filesystem (and simple, text-only playlists). There's no reason for it -- I'm sure someone could make a system which was as easy as iTunes, yet actually exposed the filesystem and cleaned it up as you organized your music. (Yes, you do still have to organize your music. Filename or id3 tag, someone's still going to screw it up.)
Think back to DNS. I'm sold on DNS. I'm not sold on AOL Keywords. 90% of the time, they're exactly the same as the domain name, only without a
Having a database to manage your fucking music is the AOL Keyword system of the 21st century.
I'm really tired of people whining about how ugly some GTK app is. Ok, it's brown, or whatever it is you don't like...
So here, knock yourself out. I'll bet it's easier than trying to skin Windows, and I'm not even sure you can skin OS X or iTunes.
They don't have to care.
But why the fuck should they care about putting QA money into making sure a non-supported OS doesn't work? This isn't accidental -- they are deliberately trying not to interoperate here, when it would have been cheaper and easier just to leave everything the way it was.
It looks like there is actually a Linux app that will manage your iPod for you -- basically doing this automatically on every sync. Here's the wiki page.
And that's what bugs me about the iPod.
I hate PlaysForSure, too, but at least there's competition on the hardware. But suppose I don't want to use DRM -- where's the standard for easy docking stations? Seems to me like the closest we have is USB and headphone jacks...
I don't know if English is your first language, but every language I've actually bothered to look at has the concept of a verb. Please remember that.
Perhaps you meant "iTunes may not have a real windows-like interface..."
Say I can't read, and I pick up a book. Has the book's usability failed me?
No, it's either me, or my education, or my parents. The book works for anyone who can read; it's not the book's fault, or the book's failure, that I can't read it.
Now, in the case of Linux, if Linux does something in a different way, one that's not natural to you... It could actually be a failure, like the nightmare that is configuring X, on the occasions where it doesn't just work. (I've gotten good at it, but whenever I get someone's graphics working, I tell them to save the xorg.conf, because I don't want to go through that again.)
Or, it could be something that was a conscious design decision, that many people -- including non-programmers -- find to be much more usable. Only it's not as usable to you, because it's not Windows. Windows is usable, because you've used it so much that so many things are second nature to you.
In this case, Linux is damned if it does, damned if it doesn't. If it's more like Windows, it's easier to use, but it gets accused of being a copycat, not innovative, no point in using it when you can just use the real thing (real Windows). If it innovates, it gets accused of being hard to use, because people who've used nothing but Windows all their lives can't adapt to a new interface.
So, sometimes, it is actually Linux that's unusable. But sometimes, Linux is actually doing the right thing, even if it's unusable to you. In these cases, I suggest you try to swallow your pride and listen to what these people are trying to tell you -- even if you're right, showing some humility is a lot more likely to get you help, even from people who were behaving like assholes a moment before.