If a distribution requires people to go online and start asking questions before it works, it is a failed distribution.
Perhaps. But perhaps it's a different idea in software.
Consider this. Consider software that is designed by it's very nature to requiring humans to interact, and needs you to converse with other people in a 'community' to fully use it. To become a part of said 'community.'
If we look at the popular programs of the day (IM, most P2P, etc) we see the software is becoming increasingly a thing to try and bring people together to speak. Humans are social animals, but some need a bit of goading to get them to.
I know what your saying, 'but they paid money, why should they have to speak to someone,' and that's just the point. If they have to speak to people, they will then have a network of people, possibly even friends, who will all be using the same system, all be on the lookout for the same security bulletins, all having the same problems with a nasty upgrade, etc.. By requiring human interaction from day one, you have a network of people who will be able to help you when something goes wrong, instantly, and without feeling bad because your just some random passer-by, but rather because you would be asking people you are already familiar with.
Of course, I could be talking completely out my arse...
I did. The fun thing is that most stores won't let you even try it on their hardware. (After all, it could installed something, or destroy the demo unit, or eat the CEO's lunch, or cause baby Jesus to cry. Anything is possible) Brought a CD wallet with Knoppix and my Net and FreeBSD install disks with me just incase the employees weren't watching^W^W^W^W they let me try them and see a dmesg on 'em.;)
Which would have helped me avoid this laptop. PCMCIA slots cause system crashes unless I treat them with kid gloves, the USB seems to have problems, and it's way to fast.... Well, I guess it's not all bad.;)
Personally, if I get another desktop, it'd probably be a PegasosPPC based system. They list not only multiple GNU/Linux distros as supported, but QNX and OpenBSD, with a FreeBSD port in the works, so it helps keep down some of the guess work. If only they made laptops...
Looking at all the available computers, they all appear to list a OS X/YDL dual boot, and as you said your paying the same.
So, your still paying for OS X, just now your also letting someone else install YellowDog for you. Nice, if that's what you want, but still doesn't sound like a Apple sans OS X-tax.
And they are an ally of opensource. They've contributed code back to both KDE KHTML and the FreeBSD projects. Just because they're not another company supporting your One True OS doesn't mean they aren't supporting some opensource projects that they use.
Fedora is not RedHat. RedHat is RedHat, Fedora is a community distro that RedHat contributes to and points people towards so they don't have to deal with having it 'sullying' the name of their commercial products, nothing more, and it shows.
If I'm not mistaken, didn't RedHat also sell product updates for the lifetimes of RedHat 9.1 to people under the ruse of it being available? Isn't it now being pulled early? Wouldn't that have violated rule 2?
And what of rule 4? "A download version of Mandrake Linux, consisting entirely of Open Source software, will continue to be released, provided without cost, and supported." You can't even buy support for Fedora if you wanted to.
There's some thinly veiled FUD around here, but it's not coming from Mandrake, it's coming from you.
You see, as you couldn't find the article about the IE problem, what I did was humorously imply that MS was using IE to block your access to the information.
So, to keep Linux viable, we should make it so people who use it have a hard time?
I'm sorry, but as a user of free OSes and a coder, when I'm coding something I want to make it very easy to use, so it's easy for me to use, not some mythic end user. The fact that it's easy for them to use as well is a happy accident.
The good thing here is that many coders writting free and shared code are learning good UI skills. This makes it easier for the coders and users to use. And it's the natural progression of code.
User friendliness is a perceivable thing, and that the BSDs and GNU/Linux, using the major desktops or something like XFCE or ROX-Desktop, is easier to use in many ways to the large commercial OS speaks volumes about just where time is being spent. These are good things, and are things which go into a question of what tool is better for what job. You can use a book to drive a nail, doesn't mean that if you do, you understand things better than if you'd just got a hammer out.
Now, while people can be like Lindows and do dangerous things, the inherit nature of being open makes this possible regardless. Which is why I find it best to view each distro as a OS, not a distro of similar things. It makes the fact that a etc directory on one system looks nothing like one on another make more sense, and helps put problems like that in perspective.
THat does sound interesting. I know ROX-Session will display a program's errors for a few moments on the edge of the screen, popping up a dialog only if it takes up too much space, but if it could use this and place them in say the center of the screen with some transparent effects, that'd make a great way to give error/status messages from everything.
Man, if only Keith and crew had been able to do this stuff in XFree, imagine where we'd be by now..
While everyone seems to be pointing out that having the x86 emulated OSes or multiple versions of Windows is 'cheating,' what about Windows 1.01 - 3.1?
Those aren't OSes, but graphical shells on top of DOS. It's like listing DOS Shell as one...
It's quite obvious that the powerbook with Virtual PC runs Windows, in almost any flavor they threw at it. Why buy another computer to do what they are already doing with their powerbook?
There is another reason people would pay for it as well. Many people will buy free things merely as a show of support for the existance of said things, such as BSD or GNU/Linux distros, or the desktop they like, or web artists.
Heck, most non-profits are built on that very idea. People will give money to things they like or wish to see continue.
I think you miss the point of a reciept. It's not for the voter to hang on to and show their friends, it will be collected by the polling staff and used to verify the intergity of the electric vote if needed.
But they already have. They've seen Apple stay as a outside player for years and years. They've seen OS/2 fail horribly. They watched BeOS die when it was technically superior to everything else on a x86 at the time.
How does watching an OS die any better then what has already happened?
But then, unless it succeeds it only clouds the name of Java even further. Which is a bad thing for a world that hasn't taken any other cross-platform "compiled" language to heart in any large way yet.
We write software that we want. We write what we want and say what we want. This is the price you pay for software that's Free. Freedom breeds freedom, and that's the main point people seem to forget when they talk about what's "wrong" with the Free software community.
Why? Because having only one chip-set makes it easier to figure out which target to choose to try and make your own drivers.
The big problem right now is everyone switching chip sets left and right on their WiFi cards/devices. Sometimes the same card will have a different chip set based on the time of day you buy it, because each run will have a different, more software-based chipset and driver. It's a big old moving target.
So if Intel can "own" the WiFi market legally, more power to them.
What you want them to do is to allow them to use their software as if it were BSD licensed. What the companies are doing is stealing software, and then selling it to other people. They have every right, and futhermore a duty, to make noise about this. The "price" of GPLed software is to release the source, and you need to "pay" to use software they didn't write for commercial products. Sorry.
Oh well. I guess respecting the author's rights is unimportant next to making sure they use "anything but Windows," eh?
No, seriously. C/C++ is great for local apps and kernels, but for world-facing servers isn't managed code a good idea?
Of course, we could also begin working on some general-purpose security "modules" and make them availed to everyone. Plus the servers would now be multiplatform almost by accident, and be Free software in every sense.
It takes about a hour, possibly two, to sync your portage tree. Even after your "quick install," you will need to recompile everything again as it's all outdated. You lose the whole "advantage" of Gentoo with the precompiled packages because they don't use your USE flags to compile.
Of course, your USE flags don't change much except compile-time dependancies. Which is not any different from what you can get from Crux or Arch or any distro just custom-compiling the few packages you want special settings on.
Re:This is not fucking "stuff that matters"
on
Project Plex-Box
·
· Score: 1
It matters. It's like those messed up cars outside highschools near prom, their a warning before you do something stupid like drink and drive, or take the world's largest console and make it larger.
But I guess at least they can be confident no one will steal it. Most people can't even physically move it.
They just haven't felt the need to let anyone easily select it.
It's either a command line option passed to gconf to set the option, or available in gconf-editor. A google should turn it up. Personally, I'd just use OpenBox 3 in place of metacity. Nice and snappy even on low-end machines. You could run it (if you wanted ) in GNOME by:
opening a terminal open your session editor remove metacity from the session and then running OpenBox from the open terminal window.
In theory it should work, but it's been awhile since I've tried to run GNOME.
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If a distribution requires people to go online and start asking questions before it works, it is a failed distribution.
Perhaps. But perhaps it's a different idea in software.
Consider this. Consider software that is designed by it's very nature to requiring humans to interact, and needs you to converse with other people in a 'community' to fully use it. To become a part of said 'community.'
If we look at the popular programs of the day (IM, most P2P, etc) we see the software is becoming increasingly a thing to try and bring people together to speak. Humans are social animals, but some need a bit of goading to get them to.
I know what your saying, 'but they paid money, why should they have to speak to someone,' and that's just the point. If they have to speak to people, they will then have a network of people, possibly even friends, who will all be using the same system, all be on the lookout for the same security bulletins, all having the same problems with a nasty upgrade, etc.. By requiring human interaction from day one, you have a network of people who will be able to help you when something goes wrong, instantly, and without feeling bad because your just some random passer-by, but rather because you would be asking people you are already familiar with.
Of course, I could be talking completely out my arse...
I did. The fun thing is that most stores won't let you even try it on their hardware. (After all, it could installed something, or destroy the demo unit, or eat the CEO's lunch, or cause baby Jesus to cry. Anything is possible) Brought a CD wallet with Knoppix and my Net and FreeBSD install disks with me just incase the employees weren't watching^W^W^W^W they let me try them and see a dmesg on 'em. ;)
;)
Which would have helped me avoid this laptop. PCMCIA slots cause system crashes unless I treat them with kid gloves, the USB seems to have problems, and it's way to fast.... Well, I guess it's not all bad.
Personally, if I get another desktop, it'd probably be a PegasosPPC based system. They list not only multiple GNU/Linux distros as supported, but QNX and OpenBSD, with a FreeBSD port in the works, so it helps keep down some of the guess work. If only they made laptops...
Perhaps, but for how long?
Office is MS's cashcow. Without a steady large income, other projects suffer. The Office products begin suffering. Income lessens. Rinse, repeat.
Looking at all the available computers, they all appear to list a OS X/YDL dual boot, and as you said your paying the same.
So, your still paying for OS X, just now your also letting someone else install YellowDog for you. Nice, if that's what you want, but still doesn't sound like a Apple sans OS X-tax.
Linux or opensource.
And they are an ally of opensource. They've contributed code back to both KDE KHTML and the FreeBSD projects. Just because they're not another company supporting your One True OS doesn't mean they aren't supporting some opensource projects that they use.
Name one rule? Sure. No download version.
Fedora is not RedHat. RedHat is RedHat, Fedora is a community distro that RedHat contributes to and points people towards so they don't have to deal with having it 'sullying' the name of their commercial products, nothing more, and it shows.
If I'm not mistaken, didn't RedHat also sell product updates for the lifetimes of RedHat 9.1 to people under the ruse of it being available? Isn't it now being pulled early? Wouldn't that have violated rule 2?
And what of rule 4? "A download version of Mandrake Linux, consisting entirely of Open Source software, will continue to be released, provided without cost, and supported." You can't even buy support for Fedora if you wanted to.
There's some thinly veiled FUD around here, but it's not coming from Mandrake, it's coming from you.
I know, it was a joke.
You see, as you couldn't find the article about the IE problem, what I did was humorously imply that MS was using IE to block your access to the information.
See, humor.
So, to keep Linux viable, we should make it so people who use it have a hard time?
I'm sorry, but as a user of free OSes and a coder, when I'm coding something I want to make it very easy to use, so it's easy for me to use, not some mythic end user. The fact that it's easy for them to use as well is a happy accident.
The good thing here is that many coders writting free and shared code are learning good UI skills. This makes it easier for the coders and users to use. And it's the natural progression of code.
User friendliness is a perceivable thing, and that the BSDs and GNU/Linux, using the major desktops or something like XFCE or ROX-Desktop, is easier to use in many ways to the large commercial OS speaks volumes about just where time is being spent. These are good things, and are things which go into a question of what tool is better for what job. You can use a book to drive a nail, doesn't mean that if you do, you understand things better than if you'd just got a hammer out.
Now, while people can be like Lindows and do dangerous things, the inherit nature of being open makes this possible regardless. Which is why I find it best to view each distro as a OS, not a distro of similar things. It makes the fact that a etc directory on one system looks nothing like one on another make more sense, and helps put problems like that in perspective.
Drag and drop install?
Already got it.
THat does sound interesting. I know ROX-Session will display a program's errors for a few moments on the edge of the screen, popping up a dialog only if it takes up too much space, but if it could use this and place them in say the center of the screen with some transparent effects, that'd make a great way to give error/status messages from everything.
Man, if only Keith and crew had been able to do this stuff in XFree, imagine where we'd be by now..
Well, it's happened in California. But I can't for the life of me find a link for it.
Using IE I see?
While everyone seems to be pointing out that having the x86 emulated OSes or multiple versions of Windows is 'cheating,' what about Windows 1.01 - 3.1?
Those aren't OSes, but graphical shells on top of DOS. It's like listing DOS Shell as one...
Why?
It's quite obvious that the powerbook with Virtual PC runs Windows, in almost any flavor they threw at it. Why buy another computer to do what they are already doing with their powerbook?
They are too lazy to change their homepage, and you want them to download and install Mozilla?
Plus, they could be on dialup and view Moz as a large ol' download.
There is another reason people would pay for it as well. Many people will buy free things merely as a show of support for the existance of said things, such as BSD or GNU/Linux distros, or the desktop they like, or web artists.
Heck, most non-profits are built on that very idea. People will give money to things they like or wish to see continue.
I think you miss the point of a reciept. It's not for the voter to hang on to and show their friends, it will be collected by the polling staff and used to verify the intergity of the electric vote if needed.
Think of it as a automated paper ballot.
But they already have. They've seen Apple stay as a outside player for years and years. They've seen OS/2 fail horribly. They watched BeOS die when it was technically superior to everything else on a x86 at the time.
How does watching an OS die any better then what has already happened?
But then, unless it succeeds it only clouds the name of Java even further. Which is a bad thing for a world that hasn't taken any other cross-platform "compiled" language to heart in any large way yet.
We write software that we want. We write what we want and say what we want. This is the price you pay for software that's Free. Freedom breeds freedom, and that's the main point people seem to forget when they talk about what's "wrong" with the Free software community.
Intel "owning" the WiFi market would be great.
Why? Because having only one chip-set makes it easier to figure out which target to choose to try and make your own drivers.
The big problem right now is everyone switching chip sets left and right on their WiFi cards/devices. Sometimes the same card will have a different chip set based on the time of day you buy it, because each run will have a different, more software-based chipset and driver. It's a big old moving target.
So if Intel can "own" the WiFi market legally, more power to them.
What you want them to do is to allow them to use their software as if it were BSD licensed. What the companies are doing is stealing software, and then selling it to other people. They have every right, and futhermore a duty, to make noise about this. The "price" of GPLed software is to release the source, and you need to "pay" to use software they didn't write for commercial products. Sorry.
Oh well. I guess respecting the author's rights is unimportant next to making sure they use "anything but Windows," eh?
Why Java? Why not python?
No, seriously. C/C++ is great for local apps and kernels, but for world-facing servers isn't managed code a good idea?
Of course, we could also begin working on some general-purpose security "modules" and make them availed to everyone. Plus the servers would now be multiplatform almost by accident, and be Free software in every sense.
Of course there is. It's a whole version number higher.
;)
What sort of geek are you, man?
But:
It takes about a hour, possibly two, to sync your portage tree.
Even after your "quick install," you will need to recompile everything again as it's all outdated.
You lose the whole "advantage" of Gentoo with the precompiled packages because they don't use your USE flags to compile.
Of course, your USE flags don't change much except compile-time dependancies. Which is not any different from what you can get from Crux or Arch or any distro just custom-compiling the few packages you want special settings on.
It matters. It's like those messed up cars outside highschools near prom, their a warning before you do something stupid like drink and drive, or take the world's largest console and make it larger.
But I guess at least they can be confident no one will steal it. Most people can't even physically move it.
They have.
They just haven't felt the need to let anyone easily select it.
It's either a command line option passed to gconf to set the option, or available in gconf-editor. A google should turn it up. Personally, I'd just use OpenBox 3 in place of metacity. Nice and snappy even on low-end machines. You could run it (if you wanted ) in GNOME by:
opening a terminal
open your session editor
remove metacity from the session
and then running OpenBox from the open terminal window.
In theory it should work, but it's been awhile since I've tried to run GNOME.