The focus of the rumor is not the name iPhone, that's just the popular name for the rumor because Apple prefixes everything with a lowercase I. The point of the rumor is the idea that Apple might make a cell phone. It'd be essentially the same rumor whether it's called the iCell, the MacPhone, the PhoneBook Pro, or even if the phone were going to be called the iChat and Apple's instant messaging client were going to just be renamed Bonjour AV or something.
Macs can dual boot OS X and Windows with Boot Camp.
And yes, buying a new computer does cost money. That would admittedly be very prohibitive for me. But I don't know if that's the same case for anyone else around here.
I don't know about the car libraries in all those games, but I do know that Gran Turismo features a whole lot of cars from a *lot* of manufacturers, far more than I've seen in any other game that features real cars. And for GT to include a damage model, they'd have to get all of those manufacturers to agree to it. It might not be a big deal for some of the smaller or less popular manufacturers, but if it's Honda or Toyota that's digging in their heels on the subject, I can see where that would easily be enough to keep Polyphony from including a damage model.
Understood that the original question was asking about dual booting, but my opinion on Ask Slashdot is that the disucssion might as well be for everybody, not just the person who asked. Since it is a public forum and all.
And I'm not so sure that suggestions to try OS X don't take into account that you have to buy a Mac to use it. It's more that there's an implicit assumption that that detail is obvious enough that it doesn't need to be mentioned.
I'm thinking what you're talking about is a misnomer. There's left-foot braking, where you use your left foot to work the brake and your right foot to work the gas. This is a fairly common thing in racing, for the reasons you mentioned. I can't really imagine many people, even seasoned drivers, are good enough to manipulate the full range of the brake and gas pedal consistently (and safeily) with one foot while going around a turn. (This isn't really an issue with heel-toe because you're really just giving a little tap to the gas pedal while braking, so it doesn't require nearly as much coordination.)
Also, I'm wondering how you match RPMs without something like heel-toe. Do you push the gas pedal with a broom handle or something?
Well, that really depends on why the person is looking for a Linux system. If it's someone who's looking to get into desktop Unix (or just looking for an alternative to Windows) and doesn't realize that Linux isn't the only player in town, then it may be worth mentioning OS X or FreeBSD. At the moment, OS X is my current favorite desktop Unix in all respects except politics so I think it does deserve mention.
Now if the person needs to have something that works with existing hardware or specifically wants Linux for political reasons, then it's different and it's not worthwhile to mention other OSes.
The entire explanation he provided actually explains exactly why you don't need it in the game. Have you ever had a poorly-executed downshift in the middle of a turn throw your car out of control while playing GT?
It's not that there's no gears or shifting in the GT series. It's that there's no clutch, or any of the interface complexity that comes with operating a real manual transmission. Not only is the phenomenon that heel-and-toe is designed to handle not simulated in the game, but one of the key controls necessary for executing it (namely, a clutch pedal) is also absent.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but I thought heel-toe braking was a technique for downshifting while braking where you brake with your heel, take the car out gear, tap the gas a little bit (while braking) to get the engine speed matched with the wheel speed, and downshift. (It allows a smooth downshift so drivers can keep better control of the car.) Given that Gran Turismo doesn't do anything like simulating a clutch pedal, how could it possibly give you a way to do heel-toe braking in the game?
My guess on why they wouldn't have analog control for the gas/brake is that it simplifies the controls for players, and if you're going for the best times then ideally your only three "speed settings" should be full brake (before turn), nothing (in the turn), and full gas (the rest of the time), so analog control isn't really necessary. That and with the analog buttons on the PS2 (and, I assume, PS3) controllers, one doesn't really lose the ability to fine-tune gas and brake without the analog stick.
Seems like a good philosophy. I applied the same policy and waited before making a decision on the PSP, and I'm glad I did. Everyone I know who bought one right away is now letting it collect dust, apparently because there just aren't any great games coming out for it.
Honestly, given my experience, you haven't listed anything that Linux wasn't doing six years ago. Yes, a GUI was thrown on top of package management, but package managers that take care of dependencies for you have been around since the Linux stone age; it's just a relatively new thing for the RPM-based side of the distro world.
Hardware configuration, again, a GUI was thrown on top of it, but that is all.
So I don't really take your list as a counter-argument because, like I said, the only improvements have been in terms of GUI. There are still fundamental issues with the way Linux work that need to be addressed. Some of it is technically easy and we just need to agree to standardize on it. For example, unless distros have changed a lot in the past year (haven't updated to the latest version of anything in about that long; I usually use FreeBSD), then there's still a bit of an issue with handling binary kernel modules; sometimes a module that is compiled for one version of the kernel won't work with others. A year ago I had to compile a module to get my network card working. This isn't a simple case of there not being support - my card isn't too common, but it is supported, so there is no reason why I should _ever_ have to do this, no matter how uncommon the card is.
The arrangement of data on the filesystem is another issue. I don't care how much progress the various desktop environments have made in smoothing over the directory tree, it still manages to show up and confuse my mother (who I have running Ubuntu on her computer) every so often. Linux could take a huge cue from Mac OS X on this front.
You're right, that is a little bit off. Much better to make inferences on the general trend of desktop Linux based on the sole development being window managers.
Comparing 6 years ago to today, Linux has made just about zero progress on improving user experience when it comes to hardware configuration, software installation, and system maintenance. (You know, the stuff that people who are honestly evaluating Linux as a desktop OS always complain about.) The only thing I've really seen move forward is the desktop environments, and even then the only one I've seen make what I'd personally call a whole lot of valuable progress is Xfce. Every time I take another look at GNOME or KDE my first thought is "Meh, I already have a Windows box."
I can't help but think that the past several years of Linux-on-the-desktop development are best described as "cargo cult OS design." Great strides have been made in making the whole mess look similar to the two most popular OSes, but nobody has grasped the real nature of the problem: It still behaves like Unix.
The term free will has two meanings. In the vernacular, it is shorthand for the possibility that a person might take any course of action. It's a hard concept to pin down, but it's generally understood to be slightly different from the more rigorous definition of free will that's used in philosophy and AI discussions.
This second free will is the question of whether, if we could figure out all the rules, the human mind is just a by-product of a deterministic system.* To me, this is an important if subtle distinction because it is entirely common for people to hold that humans have the former kind of free will but also believe that the latter kind of free will is a physical impossibility. (For example, if the Church-Turing thesis holds true, then the human mind must be the product of a detrministic system.)
And by the way without God there is no meaning to life. I don't really see that as a problem, for two reasons. First, as Douglas Adams so cleverly observed, nobody really knows what they mean when they say "meaning of life," anyway. Second, I completely fail to see why life needs to have any Great Purpose. I've always thought that it stands remarkably well on its own merit.
*The question of whether or not we have free will, when posed in this way, really has little to say at this point about whether or not we should have a justice system or hold people accountable for their actions. If the mind is indeed deterministic, then a justice system would just be a way of providing input to one of these automata. In the end, it's functionally no different from the current general attitude about how to deal with people.
This is a silly concept and one that any person with any sense of logic could shoot down. No, robots will never demand rights unless they are explicitly programmed to do so. Even if they did so on their own they should not be granted rights. Robots do not suffer, they are not alive. They are made to serve a function and nothing else. Granting a robot rights would be akin to granting the right front tire on my car rights. What would be the point?
Never's a dangerous word. 100 years ago, there were pundits who were saying that we had reached the limits of technology, that basically every discovery that could be made had been made. Instead, the pace of technological development has only continued to increase.
Right now it's impossible to know whether strong AI will ever be developed. However, the future is a very long time, and, while there are still a lot of holes in our knowledge, everything that we do know about that squishy thing inside our heads currently suggests that consicousness is not so special that it can't be implemented on a machine of human device.
Verbosity and density really aren't all that closely related to readability and maintainability. I submit as evidence the fillowing: assembly language, C, Perl, and Haskell.
My sense is that, if two languages are about equally readable, the one that is more dense ("expressive") will produce more maintainable code simply because there's less to read and keep track of.
I can't remember who said it and this is mostly paraphrase, but here goes. . .
I've often heard people talk about famous authors and wonder aloud how much greater their bodies of work would have been had they not been drunkards. This is silly. It's like wondering how many more cases a great lawyer would have taken on had he not been a moneygrubbing weasel.
I don't believe this new rule would say that copilots don't need any flight experience. You'd still need to have a lot of real cockpit time. It's just that right now you need to have a whole lot of cockpit time, and that's prohibitively expensive even in a wealthy country like the USA. Allowing people to trade some of that for simulators may actually be an improvement - while you can learn all the basics in a single engine plane and that should certainly be done, spending more of your hours getting used to the controls and handling characteristics of a jumbo jet in a simulator might actually make for co-pilots who have a more valuable body of experience when they go on their first real commercial flight.
The issue with DRM restrictions is on file formats, software that creates files in that format, and music stores. Not the player. If your Creative Zen plays encumbered WMA or AAC files, it is no more or less DRM-encumbered than any other device that plays encumbered WMA or AAC files.
A player that is untouched by DRM is a player that will not play any DRM-encumbered formats. To the best of my knowledge, there is not a single hard drive based player on the market that fits this category.
Zune has squirting, iPod doesn't. Zune has a subscription service on their music store. iPod has a larger music store that also includes video podcasts, TV shows, and movies. iPod has toys like the calendar, notepad, and some games. Zune has a built-in FM radio receiver. iPod has the click wheel (which probably looks like a small thing to most people, but having used both an iPod and a music player without one with my rather large music library, to me it is absolutely the most important distinction).
But you really shouldn't just compare the iPod to the Zune. Right now if I were looking for a new music player I'd be paying some serious attention to what Creative is selling.
While ZFS might be useful for supporting Time Machine, it's not necessary and I would think that if Apple were including it by default on all Leopard distributions (as they'd have to if it were the underlying technology for Time Machine), they'd probably be talking it up a little bit more right now.
ZFS is still overkill for most home computing needs, so I'm not sold on it being the default filesystem for OS X installs. My first guess is that it's going to be an option for network-acceccible storage. Something like this would be really killer on an Xsan volume.
The problem isn't actually right-clicking. Right click is easy to get to on a Mac, either with the two-finger click (which isn't available on my computer) or with option-click.
The problem is that a lot of X11 apps require a THIRD mouse button. On a two-button mouse you can at least click both buttons to simulate a third one. The X11 server for OS X will also allow you to option-click to simulate a third button click.
But then, let's suppose you're using an image editing program that makes liberal use of combining modifier keys with left clicks in order to access extra functionality. There's no way you can use this stuff on a Mac with a one-button mouse because option-left click isn't option-left click, it's middle click.
Even more annoying is the #$@#% Mighty Mouse, which has buttons out the wazoo but was designed in such a boneheaded way that it's no different from a one-button mouse from the perspective of someone who uses UNIX apps on their Mac. There's no way to left and right click at the same time, and none of the additional buttons register as a third mouse button to the operating system.
I realize that having only one mouse button is nice from various high-and-lofty perspectives, but there at least needs to be the option to buy a MacBook with more than one mouse button for those of us who really do need it for our day-to-day work. I imagine that just that would make a lot of Unix geeks a lot more willing to move over to the Mac. Right now I have a Powerbook and for the most part I love it, but it's supreme pain in the ass that I have to carry a mouse everywhere I go to be able to do some tasks.
I do a lot of training Windows users to use OS X at my job.
I've discovered that the primary roadblock for most people is that they assume that if you can't do it the same way you do on Windows, then there's no way to do it.
This is as much a problem for skilled users such as developers and administrators as it is for folks who can barely operate a mouse.
I hate the fact that I can never find *anything* I'm looking for. I spend entirely too long searching around for applications, their support files, and system configuration options. I realize that Apple designs these things for people who aren't familiar with computers, but fuck, it makes it hard for someone that is quite comfy with Linux and Windows configurations.
You're searching WAY too hard. All the apps are in a directory that's conveniently named "Applications." Their support files might be in the app's bundle, depending on what you're looking for, but most of them are in ~/Library. Preferences are in a directory that's conveniently named ~/Library/Preferences. Actual support files are in a directory that's conveniently called ~/Library/Application Support.
I really fail to understand why that could be harder for you to manage than Linux. Possibly the way that every app, distro, and person in Linux has to put their application support files in a different place has warped your mind. Or you've only been using that Mac for three days. But a Mac's hard disk organization being too complicated for you is not something that I would consider to be within the realm of possibility if you're comfortable with Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
The focus of the rumor is not the name iPhone, that's just the popular name for the rumor because Apple prefixes everything with a lowercase I. The point of the rumor is the idea that Apple might make a cell phone. It'd be essentially the same rumor whether it's called the iCell, the MacPhone, the PhoneBook Pro, or even if the phone were going to be called the iChat and Apple's instant messaging client were going to just be renamed Bonjour AV or something.
Macs can dual boot OS X and Windows with Boot Camp.
And yes, buying a new computer does cost money. That would admittedly be very prohibitive for me. But I don't know if that's the same case for anyone else around here.
I don't know about the car libraries in all those games, but I do know that Gran Turismo features a whole lot of cars from a *lot* of manufacturers, far more than I've seen in any other game that features real cars. And for GT to include a damage model, they'd have to get all of those manufacturers to agree to it. It might not be a big deal for some of the smaller or less popular manufacturers, but if it's Honda or Toyota that's digging in their heels on the subject, I can see where that would easily be enough to keep Polyphony from including a damage model.
Understood that the original question was asking about dual booting, but my opinion on Ask Slashdot is that the disucssion might as well be for everybody, not just the person who asked. Since it is a public forum and all.
And I'm not so sure that suggestions to try OS X don't take into account that you have to buy a Mac to use it. It's more that there's an implicit assumption that that detail is obvious enough that it doesn't need to be mentioned.
I'm thinking what you're talking about is a misnomer. There's left-foot braking, where you use your left foot to work the brake and your right foot to work the gas. This is a fairly common thing in racing, for the reasons you mentioned. I can't really imagine many people, even seasoned drivers, are good enough to manipulate the full range of the brake and gas pedal consistently (and safeily) with one foot while going around a turn. (This isn't really an issue with heel-toe because you're really just giving a little tap to the gas pedal while braking, so it doesn't require nearly as much coordination.)
Also, I'm wondering how you match RPMs without something like heel-toe. Do you push the gas pedal with a broom handle or something?
Well, that really depends on why the person is looking for a Linux system. If it's someone who's looking to get into desktop Unix (or just looking for an alternative to Windows) and doesn't realize that Linux isn't the only player in town, then it may be worth mentioning OS X or FreeBSD. At the moment, OS X is my current favorite desktop Unix in all respects except politics so I think it does deserve mention.
Now if the person needs to have something that works with existing hardware or specifically wants Linux for political reasons, then it's different and it's not worthwhile to mention other OSes.
The entire explanation he provided actually explains exactly why you don't need it in the game. Have you ever had a poorly-executed downshift in the middle of a turn throw your car out of control while playing GT?
It's not that there's no gears or shifting in the GT series. It's that there's no clutch, or any of the interface complexity that comes with operating a real manual transmission. Not only is the phenomenon that heel-and-toe is designed to handle not simulated in the game, but one of the key controls necessary for executing it (namely, a clutch pedal) is also absent.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but I thought heel-toe braking was a technique for downshifting while braking where you brake with your heel, take the car out gear, tap the gas a little bit (while braking) to get the engine speed matched with the wheel speed, and downshift. (It allows a smooth downshift so drivers can keep better control of the car.) Given that Gran Turismo doesn't do anything like simulating a clutch pedal, how could it possibly give you a way to do heel-toe braking in the game?
My guess on why they wouldn't have analog control for the gas/brake is that it simplifies the controls for players, and if you're going for the best times then ideally your only three "speed settings" should be full brake (before turn), nothing (in the turn), and full gas (the rest of the time), so analog control isn't really necessary. That and with the analog buttons on the PS2 (and, I assume, PS3) controllers, one doesn't really lose the ability to fine-tune gas and brake without the analog stick.
Seems like a good philosophy. I applied the same policy and waited before making a decision on the PSP, and I'm glad I did. Everyone I know who bought one right away is now letting it collect dust, apparently because there just aren't any great games coming out for it.
Honestly, given my experience, you haven't listed anything that Linux wasn't doing six years ago. Yes, a GUI was thrown on top of package management, but package managers that take care of dependencies for you have been around since the Linux stone age; it's just a relatively new thing for the RPM-based side of the distro world.
Hardware configuration, again, a GUI was thrown on top of it, but that is all.
So I don't really take your list as a counter-argument because, like I said, the only improvements have been in terms of GUI. There are still fundamental issues with the way Linux work that need to be addressed. Some of it is technically easy and we just need to agree to standardize on it. For example, unless distros have changed a lot in the past year (haven't updated to the latest version of anything in about that long; I usually use FreeBSD), then there's still a bit of an issue with handling binary kernel modules; sometimes a module that is compiled for one version of the kernel won't work with others. A year ago I had to compile a module to get my network card working. This isn't a simple case of there not being support - my card isn't too common, but it is supported, so there is no reason why I should _ever_ have to do this, no matter how uncommon the card is.
The arrangement of data on the filesystem is another issue. I don't care how much progress the various desktop environments have made in smoothing over the directory tree, it still manages to show up and confuse my mother (who I have running Ubuntu on her computer) every so often. Linux could take a huge cue from Mac OS X on this front.
You're right, that is a little bit off. Much better to make inferences on the general trend of desktop Linux based on the sole development being window managers.
Comparing 6 years ago to today, Linux has made just about zero progress on improving user experience when it comes to hardware configuration, software installation, and system maintenance. (You know, the stuff that people who are honestly evaluating Linux as a desktop OS always complain about.) The only thing I've really seen move forward is the desktop environments, and even then the only one I've seen make what I'd personally call a whole lot of valuable progress is Xfce. Every time I take another look at GNOME or KDE my first thought is "Meh, I already have a Windows box."
I can't help but think that the past several years of Linux-on-the-desktop development are best described as "cargo cult OS design." Great strides have been made in making the whole mess look similar to the two most popular OSes, but nobody has grasped the real nature of the problem: It still behaves like Unix.
What's this hay-bee-us cor-puss you speak of?
-a yank
The term free will has two meanings. In the vernacular, it is shorthand for the possibility that a person might take any course of action. It's a hard concept to pin down, but it's generally understood to be slightly different from the more rigorous definition of free will that's used in philosophy and AI discussions.
This second free will is the question of whether, if we could figure out all the rules, the human mind is just a by-product of a deterministic system.* To me, this is an important if subtle distinction because it is entirely common for people to hold that humans have the former kind of free will but also believe that the latter kind of free will is a physical impossibility. (For example, if the Church-Turing thesis holds true, then the human mind must be the product of a detrministic system.)
And by the way without God there is no meaning to life.
I don't really see that as a problem, for two reasons. First, as Douglas Adams so cleverly observed, nobody really knows what they mean when they say "meaning of life," anyway. Second, I completely fail to see why life needs to have any Great Purpose. I've always thought that it stands remarkably well on its own merit.
*The question of whether or not we have free will, when posed in this way, really has little to say at this point about whether or not we should have a justice system or hold people accountable for their actions. If the mind is indeed deterministic, then a justice system would just be a way of providing input to one of these automata. In the end, it's functionally no different from the current general attitude about how to deal with people.
Do you think you can "download you consciousness" into a machine and that it will be the same as if it was in your brain?
Where the hell are you pulling that from!? I was talking about creating self-aware machines, not dumping my mind into a computer.
This is a silly concept and one that any person with any sense of logic could shoot down. No, robots will never demand rights unless they are explicitly programmed to do so. Even if they did so on their own they should not be granted rights. Robots do not suffer, they are not alive. They are made to serve a function and nothing else. Granting a robot rights would be akin to granting the right front tire on my car rights. What would be the point?
Never's a dangerous word. 100 years ago, there were pundits who were saying that we had reached the limits of technology, that basically every discovery that could be made had been made. Instead, the pace of technological development has only continued to increase.
Right now it's impossible to know whether strong AI will ever be developed. However, the future is a very long time, and, while there are still a lot of holes in our knowledge, everything that we do know about that squishy thing inside our heads currently suggests that consicousness is not so special that it can't be implemented on a machine of human device.
But he's now in jail, where his chances of reproducing are virtually nil. So from a natural selection perspective, he didn't survive.
Verbosity and density really aren't all that closely related to readability and maintainability. I submit as evidence the fillowing: assembly language, C, Perl, and Haskell.
My sense is that, if two languages are about equally readable, the one that is more dense ("expressive") will produce more maintainable code simply because there's less to read and keep track of.
I can't remember who said it and this is mostly paraphrase, but here goes. . .
I've often heard people talk about famous authors and wonder aloud how much greater their bodies of work would have been had they not been drunkards. This is silly. It's like wondering how many more cases a great lawyer would have taken on had he not been a moneygrubbing weasel.
I don't believe this new rule would say that copilots don't need any flight experience. You'd still need to have a lot of real cockpit time. It's just that right now you need to have a whole lot of cockpit time, and that's prohibitively expensive even in a wealthy country like the USA. Allowing people to trade some of that for simulators may actually be an improvement - while you can learn all the basics in a single engine plane and that should certainly be done, spending more of your hours getting used to the controls and handling characteristics of a jumbo jet in a simulator might actually make for co-pilots who have a more valuable body of experience when they go on their first real commercial flight.
The issue with DRM restrictions is on file formats, software that creates files in that format, and music stores. Not the player. If your Creative Zen plays encumbered WMA or AAC files, it is no more or less DRM-encumbered than any other device that plays encumbered WMA or AAC files.
A player that is untouched by DRM is a player that will not play any DRM-encumbered formats. To the best of my knowledge, there is not a single hard drive based player on the market that fits this category.
Zune has squirting, iPod doesn't. Zune has a subscription service on their music store. iPod has a larger music store that also includes video podcasts, TV shows, and movies. iPod has toys like the calendar, notepad, and some games. Zune has a built-in FM radio receiver. iPod has the click wheel (which probably looks like a small thing to most people, but having used both an iPod and a music player without one with my rather large music library, to me it is absolutely the most important distinction).
But you really shouldn't just compare the iPod to the Zune. Right now if I were looking for a new music player I'd be paying some serious attention to what Creative is selling.
While ZFS might be useful for supporting Time Machine, it's not necessary and I would think that if Apple were including it by default on all Leopard distributions (as they'd have to if it were the underlying technology for Time Machine), they'd probably be talking it up a little bit more right now.
ZFS is still overkill for most home computing needs, so I'm not sold on it being the default filesystem for OS X installs. My first guess is that it's going to be an option for network-acceccible storage. Something like this would be really killer on an Xsan volume.
The problem isn't actually right-clicking. Right click is easy to get to on a Mac, either with the two-finger click (which isn't available on my computer) or with option-click.
The problem is that a lot of X11 apps require a THIRD mouse button. On a two-button mouse you can at least click both buttons to simulate a third one. The X11 server for OS X will also allow you to option-click to simulate a third button click.
But then, let's suppose you're using an image editing program that makes liberal use of combining modifier keys with left clicks in order to access extra functionality. There's no way you can use this stuff on a Mac with a one-button mouse because option-left click isn't option-left click, it's middle click.
Even more annoying is the #$@#% Mighty Mouse, which has buttons out the wazoo but was designed in such a boneheaded way that it's no different from a one-button mouse from the perspective of someone who uses UNIX apps on their Mac. There's no way to left and right click at the same time, and none of the additional buttons register as a third mouse button to the operating system.
I realize that having only one mouse button is nice from various high-and-lofty perspectives, but there at least needs to be the option to buy a MacBook with more than one mouse button for those of us who really do need it for our day-to-day work. I imagine that just that would make a lot of Unix geeks a lot more willing to move over to the Mac. Right now I have a Powerbook and for the most part I love it, but it's supreme pain in the ass that I have to carry a mouse everywhere I go to be able to do some tasks.
I do a lot of training Windows users to use OS X at my job.
I've discovered that the primary roadblock for most people is that they assume that if you can't do it the same way you do on Windows, then there's no way to do it.
This is as much a problem for skilled users such as developers and administrators as it is for folks who can barely operate a mouse.
I hate the fact that I can never find *anything* I'm looking for. I spend entirely too long searching around for applications, their support files, and system configuration options. I realize that Apple designs these things for people who aren't familiar with computers, but fuck, it makes it hard for someone that is quite comfy with Linux and Windows configurations.
You're searching WAY too hard. All the apps are in a directory that's conveniently named "Applications." Their support files might be in the app's bundle, depending on what you're looking for, but most of them are in ~/Library. Preferences are in a directory that's conveniently named ~/Library/Preferences. Actual support files are in a directory that's conveniently called ~/Library/Application Support.
I really fail to understand why that could be harder for you to manage than Linux. Possibly the way that every app, distro, and person in Linux has to put their application support files in a different place has warped your mind. Or you've only been using that Mac for three days. But a Mac's hard disk organization being too complicated for you is not something that I would consider to be within the realm of possibility if you're comfortable with Linux.