One wonders if Linus would've chosen a BSD license when he released Linux.
Really, tivoisation doesn't hurt Linux now because it's too big to kill that way, but it's an important point to consider. That, and the PS2/PS3 Linux, are examples of where I think the GPLv3 would help to capture the spirit of GPLv2. It's not that we care about DRM so much, it's that we don't want a corporation to be able to make a product based on Linux which doesn't allow the customer to make any changes at all. Having source code without being able to make useful changes and redistribute them makes such a Linux about as open as Java.
Which brings us to BSD -- Linus has said that he honestly doesn't care what anyone does with Linux. He really couldn't care if Tivo makes millions because they had access to his software. Which makes me wonder, again and again -- why didn't he use the BSD license, or worse, public domain it all? Because that really seems to be his attitude, and the attitude of these Linux developers.
...but I would suggest that playing by their rules may help to expose the insane number of patents that should not have been granted, should not have even been considered, should have been shredded for Fatmouse bedding long ago.
After gathering enough evidence (while, at the same time, actually protecting people from lawsuits), we will win either by actually educating patent officers to the point where it's no longer fashionable to patent a system for swinging on a swing, or something even more ridiculous in software, or we win by banning software patents. As it is, we only really have RMS rambling, which hasn't yet been enough to get people to stop using the terms "intellectual property"...
WPA is not easy. Why make it difficult on yourself?
But 99% of my headaches have been solved by simply adding networks I like to "preferred networks". Once I do that, all I have to do is "Turn AirPort On", and I'm connected.
And while I was travelling with my father, he was using XP, I was using OS X, and I could get on the hotel network in three clicks: wireless menu, Comfort Inn (or whatever), then click "yes" to the agreement from a web browser. It took him a bit more time, and my mother's computer can't seem to connect to anything without being set up to always connect to that network...
And then there's the fact that, yes, OS X is still much more secure than Windows. Ironic to say here, unless you RTFA -- the exploit seems to affect Windows, also. So, all around, OS X seems to be the best OS for wireless, at least until I find a nice gui for Linux wireless.
Ethernet cable: $5, tops. You may even be able to use the one that currently connects it to the Internet, temporarily. Call linksys and find out how to reset the router -- it's going to be a huge pain in the ass, something like "Tuck the antenna under your arm, stick the power cable up your nose, click your heels three times, and say 'There's no place like Slashdot!'" But it will work. Then turn it on, plug your laptop in directly via network cable, and reset. Set a unique name, then throw away the network cable and unwire.
Also: If you add it to the preferred networks, I'm pretty sure it'll remember by mac address (or something similar), and not by SSID.
You know, I wish I could type perfect code every time, and sometimes I get lucky, but like many, I do rely on feedback from my software. If I misplace a semicolon, the compiler will tell me, and usually it will tell me which line it's on.
This is important. The compiler telling me "Error on line 176: Expected semicolon" or something similar, even if the actual semicolon should go on line 159, is a hell of a lot better than "Whoops! Error SOMEWHERE in your 10k lines of code. Have fun!"
So, someone telling them "Security bug in your wireless driver" is a hell of a lot easier than trying to audit every single line they ever produce, from Xnu to iTunes and everything in between.
And I do agree with you, sort of. Most of these kinds of problems should not happen, and there are, in fact, people who will develop perfectly secure, perfectly stable software for you -- for about twice the cost. So now the question becomes: Pay twice as much for your shiny new MacBook? Or download a patch every couple months? This patch was 1.5 megs, so I'm leaning heavily towards the patch.
I don't think this is really any better than Putty.
Think about it: If you carry around a USB key with Putty, an RSA key, and a.reg file maybe, along with a.bat file to clean up the registry when you're done, that means someone has to be specifically targeting Putty in order to 0wn you -- basically, wait for putty.exe to run, and find the key file. Or, keep some uber log of the contents of every file ever read from USB.
Now, if you're carrying around your Gumstick Linux, all they have to do is MITM you -- not exactly hard, since they're already on your box. Basically, as you ssh in, they grab your credentials and scp over all your files. Then you have the same scenario as grabbing every file from a USB key when you plug it in -- they can figure out what you were trying to do at their leisure.
No matter what you do, it's just an arms race, and the only thing that really makes you more secure than Putty is the price difference between an ordinary USB key and a gumstick Linux -- not many people will have this, compared to the people running putty off of USB.
You want a secure Linux computer to log into home from anywhere? Get a laptop. In fact, if all you need is SSH, you could probably borrow or steal an old Thinkpad from someone and buy a wireless card, and not be spending too much more money than the guy who had this USB stick.
How could they make this (more) secure? Give you a couple of cables to carry around in your pocket, to enable you to borrow someone's mouse and monitor. Or imagine -- I know you can buy a device that projects a "keyboard" onto a surface. You type on the desk, it uses motion tracking to watch you. So, couple that with a simple video projector (about as sophisticated as the keyboard projector was) and this gumstick, and you have a Linux terminal that you can use on any flat surface, that's about the size of a gumstick and a couple of pens.
At which point, I'll be happily using a laptop (OSX, Ubuntu, or Gentoo), and my coworkers will be using their Pocket PCs, and we'll be looking at your gumstick thinking "Cool, but what's the point?"
Everyone re-posting the exact same arguments without understanding the whole issue should read the Wikipedia entry before posting. If you really don't see your argument represented, add it.
I am so sick of reading the exact same arguments over and over about net neutrality. "But the federal government never gets anything right! Boo regulation! Yay free market!" Or worse: "Net neutrality is just a plot by Google to get free Internet!" Or still worse: "Don't you want your Internet to be fast?"
Look, people. We know that Government Regulation is bad. We also know that government regulation is a necessary evil when there are practical monopolies afoot, even moreso when censorship is an issue. We know VOIP needs QoS to compete with BitTorrent, and we also know that ISPs should be actually giving us the bandwidth we're paying for, and not BS it by calling it "burst" bandwidth. And furthermore, we all know Google pays for their Internet just the same as anyone else, and we know that the Telecoms have gotten plenty of money from the government to build infrastructure that they aren't delivering. We know the telecoms claim that it's a "solution in search of a problem", and we know specific examples of where it has been a problem in the past.
OK? Can we all stop this stupid debate and get back to our lives?
Net neutrality, OSes (Linux/Windows/Mac/BSD/other), UK spy cams, NSA wiretapping, and probably a few other topics I'll remember 10 seconds after I post this -- all of these seem to inspire about 50% of the comments that are rehashes of the same exact BS we've been spewing for awhile. We should come up with a list of required reading, and we should all read it, before posting the same moronic bullshit every time. That way, the only moronic bullshit left can all be slammed with -1 Astroturf, and we'll actually be having an intelligent, new debate.
Just saw this concept in Ultraviolet -- you could buy a phone from a vending machine, and it would be "printed", ready to go. It usually takes much longer for a concept like this to go from scifi to reality!
...It's everything that gets too big without scaling.
Look at the Portage tree. Once upon a time, I'm sure bandwidth was at a premium and it made sense to just use rsync. Now, I'm guessing that rsync is slowing things down more at both ends, and ultimately costing more money, than the Debian way of doing things -- just split it into 10-20 small downloads, and use HTTP.
But that's a technical thing, and it's been worked on. Regenerating metadata takes much less time now, for one thing.
What bugs me is, in the early days, I could send a mail to something like gentoo@gentoo.org and get a response, even before I tried out the distro. Later, when I tried it out, just about any question in irc.freenode.net#gentoo would either get me an immediate answer, or someone willing to spend 10-20 minutes on my own problem.
Debian, on the other hand, was downright unhelpful, down to their IRC channel. RTFM all around.
Nowadays, there's Ubuntu, which is both extremely helpful with support and extremely easy to figure out even without support. I had a boss teach me Debian, so learning curve isn't a huge deal anymore. And maybe it's just that I'm asking tougher questions now, but I frequently will ask something in #gentoo and get absolutely no response, ever. Worse, I've submitted a few bug reports, got a couple of users saying "me too", but the bug still hasn't been assigned after a couple weeks of just sitting there.
I used to think OSS was more responsive than corporations, and it used to be true, but I'm guessing Apple will respond to my bug report before Gentoo does.
The community can also be downright hostile now. Usually it's nice to newbies, but I remember an incident where I reported a bug in documentation -- there was a mention of Reiser4 as alpha, untested, unstable, unreleased, or some other such nonsense. I was suggesting that the wording be changed so it's at least factually accurate -- Reiser4 has actually been released, even if Hans Reiser is the first to admit that until it's hammered on by thousands of users, it probably won't be stable enough for production servers. The person handling the bug kept saying "That's your opinion," and closing the bug. I think it got pretty personal, but even the majority of Slashdot seems to be able to distinguish between facts and opinions. Whether you think Vista is even Alpha quality now is irrelevant, it would be innacurate to call it anything other than Release Candidate, except in jest, or when making it clear that it's your opinion that it's Alpha, and MS actually calls it RC.
I think we need a truly community distro. I'm trying to remember who gave me this idea, it was over IRC, but we need a distro and a package management system that reflects the structure of the Internet.
As far as I can tell, stopping things in the right order would be roughly the same as starting them in the right order -- just have a set of events for when things stop. They do differentiate between starting, stopping, and just running a script, so that certain scripts (check the filesystems) would be run on startup, and other scripts (sync, unmount) would be run on shutdown.
I wonder if it will implement an svscan?
And yes, I want to see it too, otherwise I'm sticking with Gentoo's init system. Initng is nice, but I like having the distro-wide standard -- every single package has a way of fitting into it somehow.
Whatever you use, you're going to have to if you want it to be reasonably fast. It depends on just how old these machines are, but I'm hearing a lot of people imagining Firefox in 8 megs of RAM.
Don't. If you just need Internet, links2 is damn small and supports enough graphics and form controls to get by. It's clumsy, but it's better than nothing, and it'll even do the graphics on a framebuffer -- no X to worry about. You can try to teach them to use mutt for email, or just use webmail.
The list goes on. Selecting a lightweight WM is only the first step, and that's assuming you give them a GUI.
On the other hand, don't over-optimize. If Firefox will run acceptably, and you can get the machines booted to whatever app you need in 5-10 mins, then go for it. You'll probably want AbiWord, but again, if OpenOffice works, use that. In other words, make the switch if you're saving a hugely significant amount of boot time, and RAM usage to avoid thrashing when you switch applications. You don't want it to feel slower than Win95 did (OpenOffice is still a bit fatter than Office), but you don't want to make them feel like they're in the bad old DOS days -- it should "feel" modern.
And finally, considering the way apps tend to bloat today, your first upgrade, if you do upgrade, will probably be RAM.
If I had the time and skill to install and maintain Linux, I'd do that. It'd be worth a lot more than me trying to be, say, a debate team coach. Which isn't to say that it's an either-or choice, but don't be a luddite just because there are other needs.
Oh, and the Intarweb is a hell of a book. Give them Google before you give them books.
I've slowly watched all of the reasons I prefer Gentoo be eliminated by other distros. Here's the original list:
USE flags. This was cool because, among other things, X takes forever to compile, so I don't compile it on a server. Unfortunately, I end up wanting it anyway (some stupid little app to run over ssh forwarding), and many other customizations -- which plugins do I compile for gaim and xmms? -- become completely irrelevant when other distros simply take the plugin and wrap it up in a separate package. What's more, if I do decide I want mp3 support after all, I can just install it, I don't have to recompile all of XMMS, Xine, mplayer, and everything under the sun for a USE flag change.
Customizability. I still want to be able to dig under the hood, and I'll probably be compiling custom kernels for awhile. Still, USE flags are a perfect example of what I hate about Gentoo -- insanely too much to customize, but you'll regret it later if you don't.
Nice package manager. Unfortunately, both the lack of a decent frontend (at least to demonstrate the concept to newbies) and the way/usr/portage exploded has made the whole process much, much slower. Ubuntu still seems to take too long to find dependencies, but it's nowhere near as bad as Portage.
Init scripts. Simple, intuitive, reflect the old sysvinit scripts, yet provide dependencies, and even parallization now. However, Ubuntu is poised to introduce something called "upstart", which will likely kick initng's ass, which already kicks Gentoo's ass.
Unmolested packages. Your'e compiling from source, and aside from your own customizations, it should be a default setup as provided by upstream -- the idea is that Gentoo does the absolute bare minimum to make it work on Gentoo, and doesn't do any of the rebranding or customization that other distros do. This is no longer either desirable or a practical reality -- Gentoo customizes the hell out of everything, which is nice sometimes (the init system, various patches), but not always, when you just want it to work.
Maintenance. On Ubuntu/Debian, upgrading a package will likely restart it -- if there are config differences, you'll have been prompted for them during the upgrade, before the restart. On Gentoo, installing a package doesn't automatically start it. I used to like this -- I could install a server and play with it later, and have it not added to the boot init scripts. But now, I'd much rather have a way to handle this automatically.
Speed of updates. I remember reading an announcement on Slashdot of a new version of some package, or checking its website, or some such, and finding it already in Portage. Turnaround time from upstream source release to actually using the new version on my box could be a couple of hours. I used to laugh at how far behind Debian Stable was. Now, I'm finding more and more cool packages that are completely neglected by Portage, that Ubuntu and others have a recent, working version of -- and not only that, but since it's a binary package, it would install faster!
Community. irc.freenode.net#gentoo is still a nice place to hang out, but it's no longer as responsive as it used to be. Bugs especially -- it used to be, the few times I saw bugs, there'd be a fix in a new, unstable version, or on bugzilla. Now, I have ridiculous bugs that stay open for months, with absolutely no response from maintainers.
Speed. I have seen Ubuntu, and it's fast. I used to believe even arch-specific optimizations would help, but now that I'm on amd64, there's really no point. Just compiling for x86_64 should be enough to give a performance boost -- or not, in some cases. So, Ubuntu for x86_64 should be ready to go.
Here's what still keeps me on Gentoo:
Customizability. Mainly transparency. Just about any part of Portage, Gentoo's init, or anything else about my system is all text, and easily hackable. I'll already have the source tarballs from upstream.
So how has it been proven that there's no evidence?
I already asked you this. You said that since no one has been able to prove it so far, it must not be true. I pointed out that absence of proof doesn't prove a thing, unless you're willing to apply that same argument everywhere. I didn't do it, and you can't prove it yet, therefore I prove I didn't do it?
So, according to you, trees never fall in the forest with no one to see it, there is no God, and there was no universal force of gravity until Newton proved it.
This is not a partisan attack, it's an attack on your logic. Yours is entirely inconsistent, and you refuse to see it. Furthermore, every time one of your pieces of rhetoric fails, you fall back on the other, and it's really fucking annoying.
I hope you're joking, because when we all cheat, the game flattens out and gets boring. This has happened to Xbox Live -- last I checked, so many people were cheating using the "bridging" technique that the only way to reliably play against non-cheaters is to either play only with your friends, or "bridge" yourself, even if you aren't planning to cheat. This also means that anyone who was not cheating would almost certainly end up playing against the cheaters, and that the cheaters would spend 5, 10, 20 minutes just sitting there waiting to find someone to prey on.
But man, it's amazing this guy can't put two of his responses together:
The people at Bungie are the worst. How can they complain about people like me. They should have built a anti-cheating engine in the game to prevent it.
Ok, ignoring for the moment that they did do that (they put it on a freakin' console, for one), even ignoring that banning cheaters is an "anti-cheating engine" of sorts, when asked how game designers should stop cheaters (since he suggested that they do), he says:
Give Up! There is no way to stop us.
So, damned if they do, and damned if they don't.
Still, this has got to be my favorite quote:
The other players are just jealous p***ys who wish they had the ability to cheat.
Funny, I think this guy cheats (not hard!) because he's a jealous pussy who wishes he had the ability to play fairly.
I can play each and every game I cheat at very well.
I call BS. The people I know who can play a game "very well" -- some of them could be tournament-level if they practiced just a bit more -- would all much rather play fair. Oh, they have fun with new cheats and exploits, for about 10 seconds, and we're talking about things like Warthog jumping. The rest of the time, they are the ones who will be winning anyway, by knifing the aimbotter in the back.
But I suppose it's like trying to teach a Ferengi about honor, or a Klingon about restraint, or a Trekkie about the Real World. He'll always cheat, and he'll always suck, and nothing I say will change that.
I do wonder if the iTunes store makes money on its own. I imagine it's not just audiophiles -- a DJ, for instance, might just need a single track for a one-hit wonder, but want it in reasonably high quality to play in a club. Even for the iPod, if you buy some headphones, you can hear the difference.
This post makes the point very clearly that "getting over it" is the worst thing we could possibly do, if, in fact, it was stolen. You replied to that with "But there's no proof!" Looks like you can't really argue that anymore, so you're back to your original BS -- "Move on, you sore losers."
Right, unless we didn't lose.
You have a right to free speech and a right to vote. That's important, and I wouldn't take it away from you, but I do believe people like you are dangerous to the democratic process, and to the American ideal.
Live free or die -- unless we're terrorized by terrorists, or unless it's too damned inconvenient to check if we're really still free.
A recount isn't really possible anymore, you know. Absence of proof doesn't prove a thing, it's just more circular reasoning.
Now, if people like you hadn't stopped any thought of a recount or investigation right there on election night, who knows? And yes, I remember Kerry conceded, he didn't want to look like a sore loser -- and whose fault is it that anyone wanting to see through the full process of democracy is a "sore loser"?
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One wonders if Linus would've chosen a BSD license when he released Linux.
Really, tivoisation doesn't hurt Linux now because it's too big to kill that way, but it's an important point to consider. That, and the PS2/PS3 Linux, are examples of where I think the GPLv3 would help to capture the spirit of GPLv2. It's not that we care about DRM so much, it's that we don't want a corporation to be able to make a product based on Linux which doesn't allow the customer to make any changes at all. Having source code without being able to make useful changes and redistribute them makes such a Linux about as open as Java.
Which brings us to BSD -- Linus has said that he honestly doesn't care what anyone does with Linux. He really couldn't care if Tivo makes millions because they had access to his software. Which makes me wonder, again and again -- why didn't he use the BSD license, or worse, public domain it all? Because that really seems to be his attitude, and the attitude of these Linux developers.
...but I would suggest that playing by their rules may help to expose the insane number of patents that should not have been granted, should not have even been considered, should have been shredded for Fatmouse bedding long ago.
After gathering enough evidence (while, at the same time, actually protecting people from lawsuits), we will win either by actually educating patent officers to the point where it's no longer fashionable to patent a system for swinging on a swing, or something even more ridiculous in software, or we win by banning software patents. As it is, we only really have RMS rambling, which hasn't yet been enough to get people to stop using the terms "intellectual property"...
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(Yeah, the lameness filter works. That was pretty lame. Why don't articles have to go through a lameness filter?)
WPA is not easy. Why make it difficult on yourself?
But 99% of my headaches have been solved by simply adding networks I like to "preferred networks". Once I do that, all I have to do is "Turn AirPort On", and I'm connected.
And while I was travelling with my father, he was using XP, I was using OS X, and I could get on the hotel network in three clicks: wireless menu, Comfort Inn (or whatever), then click "yes" to the agreement from a web browser. It took him a bit more time, and my mother's computer can't seem to connect to anything without being set up to always connect to that network...
And then there's the fact that, yes, OS X is still much more secure than Windows. Ironic to say here, unless you RTFA -- the exploit seems to affect Windows, also. So, all around, OS X seems to be the best OS for wireless, at least until I find a nice gui for Linux wireless.
Ethernet cable: $5, tops. You may even be able to use the one that currently connects it to the Internet, temporarily. Call linksys and find out how to reset the router -- it's going to be a huge pain in the ass, something like "Tuck the antenna under your arm, stick the power cable up your nose, click your heels three times, and say 'There's no place like Slashdot!'" But it will work. Then turn it on, plug your laptop in directly via network cable, and reset. Set a unique name, then throw away the network cable and unwire.
Also: If you add it to the preferred networks, I'm pretty sure it'll remember by mac address (or something similar), and not by SSID.
You know, I wish I could type perfect code every time, and sometimes I get lucky, but like many, I do rely on feedback from my software. If I misplace a semicolon, the compiler will tell me, and usually it will tell me which line it's on.
This is important. The compiler telling me "Error on line 176: Expected semicolon" or something similar, even if the actual semicolon should go on line 159, is a hell of a lot better than "Whoops! Error SOMEWHERE in your 10k lines of code. Have fun!"
So, someone telling them "Security bug in your wireless driver" is a hell of a lot easier than trying to audit every single line they ever produce, from Xnu to iTunes and everything in between.
And I do agree with you, sort of. Most of these kinds of problems should not happen, and there are, in fact, people who will develop perfectly secure, perfectly stable software for you -- for about twice the cost. So now the question becomes: Pay twice as much for your shiny new MacBook? Or download a patch every couple months? This patch was 1.5 megs, so I'm leaning heavily towards the patch.
I don't think this is really any better than Putty.
.reg file maybe, along with a .bat file to clean up the registry when you're done, that means someone has to be specifically targeting Putty in order to 0wn you -- basically, wait for putty.exe to run, and find the key file. Or, keep some uber log of the contents of every file ever read from USB.
Think about it: If you carry around a USB key with Putty, an RSA key, and a
Now, if you're carrying around your Gumstick Linux, all they have to do is MITM you -- not exactly hard, since they're already on your box. Basically, as you ssh in, they grab your credentials and scp over all your files. Then you have the same scenario as grabbing every file from a USB key when you plug it in -- they can figure out what you were trying to do at their leisure.
No matter what you do, it's just an arms race, and the only thing that really makes you more secure than Putty is the price difference between an ordinary USB key and a gumstick Linux -- not many people will have this, compared to the people running putty off of USB.
You want a secure Linux computer to log into home from anywhere? Get a laptop. In fact, if all you need is SSH, you could probably borrow or steal an old Thinkpad from someone and buy a wireless card, and not be spending too much more money than the guy who had this USB stick.
How could they make this (more) secure? Give you a couple of cables to carry around in your pocket, to enable you to borrow someone's mouse and monitor. Or imagine -- I know you can buy a device that projects a "keyboard" onto a surface. You type on the desk, it uses motion tracking to watch you. So, couple that with a simple video projector (about as sophisticated as the keyboard projector was) and this gumstick, and you have a Linux terminal that you can use on any flat surface, that's about the size of a gumstick and a couple of pens.
At which point, I'll be happily using a laptop (OSX, Ubuntu, or Gentoo), and my coworkers will be using their Pocket PCs, and we'll be looking at your gumstick thinking "Cool, but what's the point?"
Well, true, it is the kind of movie you'd expect to get from a vending machine...
Everyone re-posting the exact same arguments without understanding the whole issue should read the Wikipedia entry before posting. If you really don't see your argument represented, add it.
I am so sick of reading the exact same arguments over and over about net neutrality. "But the federal government never gets anything right! Boo regulation! Yay free market!" Or worse: "Net neutrality is just a plot by Google to get free Internet!" Or still worse: "Don't you want your Internet to be fast?"
Look, people. We know that Government Regulation is bad. We also know that government regulation is a necessary evil when there are practical monopolies afoot, even moreso when censorship is an issue. We know VOIP needs QoS to compete with BitTorrent, and we also know that ISPs should be actually giving us the bandwidth we're paying for, and not BS it by calling it "burst" bandwidth. And furthermore, we all know Google pays for their Internet just the same as anyone else, and we know that the Telecoms have gotten plenty of money from the government to build infrastructure that they aren't delivering. We know the telecoms claim that it's a "solution in search of a problem", and we know specific examples of where it has been a problem in the past.
OK? Can we all stop this stupid debate and get back to our lives?
Net neutrality, OSes (Linux/Windows/Mac/BSD/other), UK spy cams, NSA wiretapping, and probably a few other topics I'll remember 10 seconds after I post this -- all of these seem to inspire about 50% of the comments that are rehashes of the same exact BS we've been spewing for awhile. We should come up with a list of required reading, and we should all read it, before posting the same moronic bullshit every time. That way, the only moronic bullshit left can all be slammed with -1 Astroturf, and we'll actually be having an intelligent, new debate.
Well, new, anyway.
Just saw this concept in Ultraviolet -- you could buy a phone from a vending machine, and it would be "printed", ready to go. It usually takes much longer for a concept like this to go from scifi to reality!
...It's everything that gets too big without scaling.
Look at the Portage tree. Once upon a time, I'm sure bandwidth was at a premium and it made sense to just use rsync. Now, I'm guessing that rsync is slowing things down more at both ends, and ultimately costing more money, than the Debian way of doing things -- just split it into 10-20 small downloads, and use HTTP.
But that's a technical thing, and it's been worked on. Regenerating metadata takes much less time now, for one thing.
What bugs me is, in the early days, I could send a mail to something like gentoo@gentoo.org and get a response, even before I tried out the distro. Later, when I tried it out, just about any question in irc.freenode.net#gentoo would either get me an immediate answer, or someone willing to spend 10-20 minutes on my own problem.
Debian, on the other hand, was downright unhelpful, down to their IRC channel. RTFM all around.
Nowadays, there's Ubuntu, which is both extremely helpful with support and extremely easy to figure out even without support. I had a boss teach me Debian, so learning curve isn't a huge deal anymore. And maybe it's just that I'm asking tougher questions now, but I frequently will ask something in #gentoo and get absolutely no response, ever. Worse, I've submitted a few bug reports, got a couple of users saying "me too", but the bug still hasn't been assigned after a couple weeks of just sitting there.
I used to think OSS was more responsive than corporations, and it used to be true, but I'm guessing Apple will respond to my bug report before Gentoo does.
The community can also be downright hostile now. Usually it's nice to newbies, but I remember an incident where I reported a bug in documentation -- there was a mention of Reiser4 as alpha, untested, unstable, unreleased, or some other such nonsense. I was suggesting that the wording be changed so it's at least factually accurate -- Reiser4 has actually been released, even if Hans Reiser is the first to admit that until it's hammered on by thousands of users, it probably won't be stable enough for production servers. The person handling the bug kept saying "That's your opinion," and closing the bug. I think it got pretty personal, but even the majority of Slashdot seems to be able to distinguish between facts and opinions. Whether you think Vista is even Alpha quality now is irrelevant, it would be innacurate to call it anything other than Release Candidate, except in jest, or when making it clear that it's your opinion that it's Alpha, and MS actually calls it RC.
I think we need a truly community distro. I'm trying to remember who gave me this idea, it was over IRC, but we need a distro and a package management system that reflects the structure of the Internet.
As far as I can tell, stopping things in the right order would be roughly the same as starting them in the right order -- just have a set of events for when things stop. They do differentiate between starting, stopping, and just running a script, so that certain scripts (check the filesystems) would be run on startup, and other scripts (sync, unmount) would be run on shutdown.
I wonder if it will implement an svscan?
And yes, I want to see it too, otherwise I'm sticking with Gentoo's init system. Initng is nice, but I like having the distro-wide standard -- every single package has a way of fitting into it somehow.
Whatever you use, you're going to have to if you want it to be reasonably fast. It depends on just how old these machines are, but I'm hearing a lot of people imagining Firefox in 8 megs of RAM.
Don't. If you just need Internet, links2 is damn small and supports enough graphics and form controls to get by. It's clumsy, but it's better than nothing, and it'll even do the graphics on a framebuffer -- no X to worry about. You can try to teach them to use mutt for email, or just use webmail.
The list goes on. Selecting a lightweight WM is only the first step, and that's assuming you give them a GUI.
On the other hand, don't over-optimize. If Firefox will run acceptably, and you can get the machines booted to whatever app you need in 5-10 mins, then go for it. You'll probably want AbiWord, but again, if OpenOffice works, use that. In other words, make the switch if you're saving a hugely significant amount of boot time, and RAM usage to avoid thrashing when you switch applications. You don't want it to feel slower than Win95 did (OpenOffice is still a bit fatter than Office), but you don't want to make them feel like they're in the bad old DOS days -- it should "feel" modern.
And finally, considering the way apps tend to bloat today, your first upgrade, if you do upgrade, will probably be RAM.
If I had the time and skill to install and maintain Linux, I'd do that. It'd be worth a lot more than me trying to be, say, a debate team coach. Which isn't to say that it's an either-or choice, but don't be a luddite just because there are other needs.
Oh, and the Intarweb is a hell of a book. Give them Google before you give them books.
I've slowly watched all of the reasons I prefer Gentoo be eliminated by other distros. Here's the original list:
Here's what still keeps me on Gentoo:
So how has it been proven that there's no evidence?
I already asked you this. You said that since no one has been able to prove it so far, it must not be true. I pointed out that absence of proof doesn't prove a thing, unless you're willing to apply that same argument everywhere. I didn't do it, and you can't prove it yet, therefore I prove I didn't do it?
So, according to you, trees never fall in the forest with no one to see it, there is no God, and there was no universal force of gravity until Newton proved it.
This is not a partisan attack, it's an attack on your logic. Yours is entirely inconsistent, and you refuse to see it. Furthermore, every time one of your pieces of rhetoric fails, you fall back on the other, and it's really fucking annoying.
I hope you're joking, because when we all cheat, the game flattens out and gets boring. This has happened to Xbox Live -- last I checked, so many people were cheating using the "bridging" technique that the only way to reliably play against non-cheaters is to either play only with your friends, or "bridge" yourself, even if you aren't planning to cheat. This also means that anyone who was not cheating would almost certainly end up playing against the cheaters, and that the cheaters would spend 5, 10, 20 minutes just sitting there waiting to find someone to prey on.
Read it again. What they are talking about will almost certainly use XGL, it just doesn't mention it explicitly.
I hope I spelled that right...
But man, it's amazing this guy can't put two of his responses together:
Ok, ignoring for the moment that they did do that (they put it on a freakin' console, for one), even ignoring that banning cheaters is an "anti-cheating engine" of sorts, when asked how game designers should stop cheaters (since he suggested that they do), he says:
So, damned if they do, and damned if they don't.
Still, this has got to be my favorite quote:
Funny, I think this guy cheats (not hard!) because he's a jealous pussy who wishes he had the ability to play fairly.
I call BS. The people I know who can play a game "very well" -- some of them could be tournament-level if they practiced just a bit more -- would all much rather play fair. Oh, they have fun with new cheats and exploits, for about 10 seconds, and we're talking about things like Warthog jumping. The rest of the time, they are the ones who will be winning anyway, by knifing the aimbotter in the back.
But I suppose it's like trying to teach a Ferengi about honor, or a Klingon about restraint, or a Trekkie about the Real World. He'll always cheat, and he'll always suck, and nothing I say will change that.
I do wonder if the iTunes store makes money on its own. I imagine it's not just audiophiles -- a DJ, for instance, might just need a single track for a one-hit wonder, but want it in reasonably high quality to play in a club. Even for the iPod, if you buy some headphones, you can hear the difference.
So how are tabs better than submenus of a start menu?
Time to travel way, way back up the thread...
This post makes the point very clearly that "getting over it" is the worst thing we could possibly do, if, in fact, it was stolen. You replied to that with "But there's no proof!" Looks like you can't really argue that anymore, so you're back to your original BS -- "Move on, you sore losers."
Right, unless we didn't lose.
You have a right to free speech and a right to vote. That's important, and I wouldn't take it away from you, but I do believe people like you are dangerous to the democratic process, and to the American ideal.
Live free or die -- unless we're terrorized by terrorists, or unless it's too damned inconvenient to check if we're really still free.
A recount isn't really possible anymore, you know. Absence of proof doesn't prove a thing, it's just more circular reasoning.
Now, if people like you hadn't stopped any thought of a recount or investigation right there on election night, who knows? And yes, I remember Kerry conceded, he didn't want to look like a sore loser -- and whose fault is it that anyone wanting to see through the full process of democracy is a "sore loser"?
I'll bet you're an atheist, too.
So where's your proof that it's bullshit?
We are not bitching that we lost. We are asking if he really won.