Gentoo Linux is an interesting new distribution with some great features. Unfortunately, it has attracted a large number of clueless wannabes who absolutely MUST advocate Gentoo at every opportunity. Let's look at the language of these zealots, and find out what it really means...
"Gentoo makes me so much more productive." "Although I can't use the box at the moment because it's compiling something, as it will be for the next five days, it gives me more time to check out the latest USE flags and potentially unstable optimisation settings."
"Gentoo is more in the spirit of open source!" "Apart from Hello World in Pascal at school, I've never written a single program in my life or contributed to an open source project, yet staring at endless streams of GCC output whizzing by somehow helps me contribute to international freedom."
"I use Gentoo because it's more like the BSDs." "Last month I tried to install FreeBSD on a well-supported machine, but the text-based installer scared me off. I've never used a BSD, but the guys on Slashdot say that it's l33t though, so surely I must be for using Gentoo."
"Heh, my system is soooo much faster after installing Gentoo." "I've spent hours recompiling Fetchmail, X-Chat, gEdit and thousands of other programs which spend 99% of their time waiting for user input. Even though only the kernel and glibc make a significant difference with optimisations, and RPMs and.debs can be rebuilt with a handful of commands, my box MUST be faster. It's nothing to do with the fact that I've disabled all startup services and I'm running BlackBox instead of GNOME or KDE."
"...my Gentoo Linux workstation..." "...my overclocked AMD eMachines box from PC World, and apart from the third-grade made-to-break components and dodgy fan..."
"You Red Hat guys must get sick of dependency hell..." "I'm too stupid to understand that circular dependencies can be resolved by specifying BOTH.rpms together on the command line, and that problems hardly ever occur if one uses proper Red Hat packages instead of mixing SuSE, Mandrake and Joe's Linux packages together (which the system wasn't designed for)."
"All the other distros are soooo out of date." "Constantly upgrading to the latest bleeding-edge untested software makes me more productive. Never mind the extensive testing and patching that Debian and Red Hat perform on their packages; I've just emerged the latest GNOME beta snapshot and compiled with -09 -fomit-instructions, and it only crashes once every few hours."
"Let's face it, Gentoo is the future." "OK, so no serious business is going to even consider Gentoo in the near future, and even with proper support and QA in place, it'll still eat up far too much of a company's valuable time. But this guy I met on #animepr0n is now using it, so it must be growing!"
First off, Linux is a great operating system and given the proper venue it is a good choice.
However, to believe for a moment that Linux could replace, or even co-exist with Windows in the home environment is a pipe dream fantasy of the Linux zealots.
As an example I offer up the home networking problem. The reality, and it is a good one, is that home networking is becoming a big reality. Families with children are competing with each other for internet time, printers, scanners and so forth. Most new home construction includes pre-wired Cat 5 cable as an option.
Anyway how is a home network with internet connection sharing, printer sharing, scanner sharing and firewall set up easily under Linux?
Answer; it isn't.
Oh sure you can play with Samba if you happen to not have a Win-printer and assuming you are able to figure out how to set it up it might work ok. You can play with ip masquerading and ip-chains and so forth, entering all kinds of crap in text files and so forth. That is of course assuming you know what to enter. How many times in the Linux help system do you see "ask your system administrator" mentioned? So who is the sys admin of a home network??
Know how you do all of the above with Windows 98se or Win2k? Select internet connection sharing in help and the wizard does it all for you.
Download ZoneAlarm for free and it works without a single amount of input required by the user to configure it.
It simply asks you if you want a particular task to be allowed to take place (Realplayer accessing the internet as an example).
Resource sharing?
Place a check in the sharing box...That's it..Wizard does it for you when you select "How do I share my printer"
That's the way it should be.
I spent 3 weeks trying to get a network working under Linux and finally gave up. And another thing, the default set up is a real security risk even selecting Medium security under Mandrake. FTP, Telnet and other ports were wide open.
Sorry Linux Zealots but you should read more of the the Linux install/set up groups to see how many folks have had it up to their ears with Linux and more will follow.
Take off the rose colored glasses and look into the world of reality for a change. Linux is certainly improving, but it isn't even close to Windows.
I think its just terrible. China is worse then the Soviet Union used to be. Thankfully, in this age of information, news leaks quickly over international borders. The Firewall of China has Been hacked before, and It'll happen again.
I was referring to the motivation for the invasion of Iraq. It seems there was a volentry media blackout on the subject - Fox News and co offered the advice of 'experts' to tell us what to think, ansd didn't try to do Investivigative Journalism
As the age of SARS has proven, nothing scares the gullible, scientifically illiterate population like a vague, panic-provoking communicable disease. Just tack a scary acronym onto any poorly-defined set of flu-like symptoms, and watch the fun begin.
Your Vague, Panic-Provoking Communicable Disease comes with several medical journal articles identifying the disease in the most non-specific terms possible, a batch of press releases, and 25% ownership of a face mask factory.
Btw, The US also has censorship problems. Just look at how american news sources acted over Iraq - did a single mainsteam journalist criticize the government's plan?
As a consultant for several large companies, I'd always done my work on Windows. Recently however, a top online investment firm asked us to do some work using Linux. The concept of having access to source code was very appealing to us, as we'd be able to modify the kernel to meet our exacting standards which we're unable to do with Microsoft's products.
Although we met several technical challenges along the way (specifically, Linux's lack of Token Ring support and the fact that we were unable to defrag its ext2 file system), all in all the process went smoothly. Everyone was very pleased with Linux, and we were considering using it for a great deal of future internal projects.
So you can imagine our suprise when we were informed by a lawyer that we would be required to publish our source code for others to use. It was brought to our attention that Linux is copyrighted under something called the GPL, or the Gnu Protective License. Part of this license states that any changes to the kernel are to be made freely available. Unfortunately for us, this meant that the great deal of time and money we spent "touching up" Linux to work for this investment firm would now be available at no cost to our competitors.
Furthermore, after reviewing this GPL our lawyers advised us that any products compiled with GPL'ed tools - such as gcc - would also have to its source code released. This was simply unacceptable.
Although we had planned for no one outside of this company to ever use, let alone see the source code, we were now put in a difficult position. We could either give away our hard work, or come up with another solution. Although it was tought to do, there really was no option: We had to rewrite the code, from scratch, for Windows 2000.
I think the biggest thing keeping Linux from being truly competitive with Microsoft is this GPL. Its draconian requirements virtually guarentee that no business will ever be able to use it. After my experience with Linux, I won't be recommending it to any of my associates. I may reconsider if Linux switches its license to something a little more fair, such as Microsoft's "Shared Source". Until then its attempts to socialize the software market will insure it remains only a bit player.
Thank you for your time.
Site is Slashdotted - and no comments!
on
On the Gripping Hand
·
· Score: 2, Informative
A human being recognizes external environment by using many kinds of sensory information. By integrating these information and making up lack of information for each other, a more reliable and multilateral recognition can be achieved. The purpose of Sensor Fusion Project is to realize new sensing architecture by integrating multi-sensor information and to develop hierarchical and decentralized architecture for recognizing human beings further. As a result, more reliable and multilateral information can be extracted, which can realize high level recognition mechanism.
Note that the site is mostly pictures, which explained why it went down so quickly. There's almost no decent text at all:-(
Please... Let's get it out of the way...
on
On the Gripping Hand
·
· Score: 0, Insightful
American economy has been hit hard. Enron, etc, and september 11 couldn't have come at a worse time. Not trying to be flamebait, but the usual 'let's start a war or 2 to fix up the economy' hasn't worked:-(
According to the Debt clock, each Citizen's share of this debt is $22,684.87.
he National Debt has continued to increase an average of $1.47 billion per day since September 30, 2002!
If you came and found a strange man teaching your kids to punch each other, or trying to sell them all kinds of products, you'd kick him right out of your house, but here you are; you come in and the TV is on, and you don't think twice about it."--Jerome Singer
"We cannot blame the schools alone for the dismal decline in SAT verbal scores. When our kids come home from school, do they pick up a book or do they sit glued to the tube, watching music videos? Parents, don't make the mistake of thinking your kid only learns between 9:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m."--former president George Bush
If you came and found a strange man teaching your kids to punch each other, or trying to sell them all kinds of products, you'd kick him right out of your house, but here you are; you come in and the TV is on, and you don't think twice about it."--Jerome Singer
"Television is basically teaching whether you want it or not."--Jim Henson, Muppets creator
magine a world where microscopic biomechanical devices are used to cure diseases, control our computers, and power the vehicles we drive. In this brave new world, minuscule techno-agents would have incredible computational power--power that is completely imperceptible to the human eye. Devices like these could become commonplace over the next fifty years as new innovations in molecular engineering--also known as nanotechnology--may help establish a new molecular age.
I've always used Windowz and I consider myself an exceptional Visual Basic programmer, so I know computers pretty good. In fact I got an A- in my programming class last term. But I'm a little wary of how much power Microsoft has in the computer field. Many of my friends use RedHat and I've recently installed it on my machine at home. Although I haven't had as much chance to play with it as I'd like, I've been greatly impressed.
This weekend I gave some thoughts to the things that are wrong with Linux. I hope no one minds having some flaws pointed out. I'd like to help make RedHat stronger so it can conquer MS. Hopefully RedHat will hear this (crossing fingers) and address these. I think with a little effort, RedHat's Linux can defeat Microsoft's Windows!:)
To begin with, there are too many different flavors of RedHat. Browsing a list on Amazon, I saw they made varients under the codenames of Mandrake, Debian and Slackware, just to name a few. I know that I'm very new to RedHat so maybe this is obvious but it seems like RedHat should just sell a few different flavors of its operating system. Perhaps one for the desktop and one for a server? Could someone explain why RedHat produces dozens of different versions of Linux?
Secondly did you know that anyone can view the source code to Linux! I think that RedHat shouldn't make its code available. After all, what keeps Microsoft from stealing RedHat's ideas and putting it into Windows? My friend says that FreeBSD stole the TCP/IP stack from DOS a long time ago and Microsoft is always looking for revenge for that. Plus it seems to me like RedHat is just giving away its ideas for free. And what keeps hackers or terrorists from tampering with the code and putting a virus in every computer?
On a related note, why doesn't RedHat write Linux in assembly? My friend says that's what Microsoft does for Windows, and that's why Windows is faster and more stable than Linux.
Next RedHat definitely should kill -9 (ha, ha!) the command line. Microsoft finally gave up DOS when Windows 2000 came out. I'm suprised that RedHat hasn't migrated away from...whatever its version of DOS is called (Bash, I think?) But maybe this is planned for a futurerelease? Finally Linux needs games! RedHat will never be successful in the home without games. They should also tell M$ to release a version of Office for Linux too. And Internet Explorer!
Nothing. It was an attempt to score karma from the morons with mod points. Usually, if you post a comment with a link that's even slightly relevent, you get modded up. If it's within the first 20 comments, you'll get a +5, informative or interesting.
Slashdot Mirror
Official Gentoo-Linux-Zealot translator-o-matic
.debs can be rebuilt with a handful of commands, my box MUST be faster. It's nothing to do with the fact that I've disabled all startup services and I'm running BlackBox instead of GNOME or KDE."
.rpms together on the command line, and that problems hardly ever occur if one uses proper Red Hat packages instead of mixing SuSE, Mandrake and Joe's Linux packages together (which the system wasn't designed for)."
yes, I stole it. Sue me -ed
Gentoo Linux is an interesting new distribution with some great features. Unfortunately, it has attracted a large number of clueless wannabes who absolutely MUST advocate Gentoo at every opportunity. Let's look at the language of these zealots, and find out what it really means...
"Gentoo makes me so much more productive."
"Although I can't use the box at the moment because it's compiling something, as it will be for the next five days, it gives me more time to check out the latest USE flags and potentially unstable optimisation settings."
"Gentoo is more in the spirit of open source!"
"Apart from Hello World in Pascal at school, I've never written a single program in my life or contributed to an open source project, yet staring at endless streams of GCC output whizzing by somehow helps me contribute to international freedom."
"I use Gentoo because it's more like the BSDs."
"Last month I tried to install FreeBSD on a well-supported machine, but the text-based installer scared me off. I've never used a BSD, but the guys on Slashdot say that it's l33t though, so surely I must be for using Gentoo."
"Heh, my system is soooo much faster after installing Gentoo."
"I've spent hours recompiling Fetchmail, X-Chat, gEdit and thousands of other programs which spend 99% of their time waiting for user input. Even though only the kernel and glibc make a significant difference with optimisations, and RPMs and
"...my Gentoo Linux workstation..."
"...my overclocked AMD eMachines box from PC World, and apart from the third-grade made-to-break components and dodgy fan..."
"You Red Hat guys must get sick of dependency hell..."
"I'm too stupid to understand that circular dependencies can be resolved by specifying BOTH
"All the other distros are soooo out of date."
"Constantly upgrading to the latest bleeding-edge untested software makes me more productive. Never mind the extensive testing and patching that Debian and Red Hat perform on their packages; I've just emerged the latest GNOME beta snapshot and compiled with -09 -fomit-instructions, and it only crashes once every few hours."
"Let's face it, Gentoo is the future."
"OK, so no serious business is going to even consider Gentoo in the near future, and even with proper support and QA in place, it'll still eat up far too much of a company's valuable time. But this guy I met on #animepr0n is now using it, so it must be growing!"
pity about law and order.
Great pirorities, guys.
First off, Linux is a great operating system and given the proper
venue it is a good choice.
However, to believe for a moment that Linux could replace, or even
co-exist with Windows in the home environment is a pipe dream fantasy
of the Linux zealots.
As an example I offer up the home networking problem. The reality, and
it is a good one, is that home networking is becoming a big reality.
Families with children are competing with each other for internet
time, printers, scanners and so forth. Most new home construction
includes pre-wired Cat 5 cable as an option.
Anyway how is a home network with internet connection sharing, printer
sharing, scanner sharing and firewall set up easily under Linux?
Answer; it isn't.
Oh sure you can play with Samba if you happen to not have a
Win-printer and assuming you are able to figure out how to set it up
it might work ok. You can play with ip masquerading and ip-chains and
so forth, entering all kinds of crap in text files and so forth.
That is of course assuming you know what to enter. How many times in
the Linux help system do you see "ask your system administrator"
mentioned?
So who is the sys admin of a home network??
Know how you do all of the above with Windows 98se or Win2k?
Select internet connection sharing in help and the wizard does it all
for you.
Download ZoneAlarm for free and it works without a single amount of
input required by the user to configure it.
It simply asks you if you want a particular task to be allowed to take
place (Realplayer accessing the internet as an example).
Resource sharing?
Place a check in the sharing box...That's it..Wizard does it for you
when you select "How do I share my printer"
That's the way it should be.
I spent 3 weeks trying to get a network working under Linux and
finally gave up. And another thing, the default set up is a real
security risk even selecting Medium security under Mandrake. FTP,
Telnet and other ports were wide open.
Sorry Linux Zealots but you should read more of the the Linux
install/set up groups to see how many folks have had it up to their
ears with Linux and more will follow.
Take off the rose colored glasses and look into the world of reality
for a change. Linux is certainly improving, but it isn't even close to
Windows.
Windows is a much, much better choice.
62 Dams in one night? What the heck happened?
I think its just terrible. China is worse then the Soviet Union used to be. Thankfully, in this age of information, news leaks quickly over international borders. The Firewall of China has Been hacked before, and It'll happen again.
I apoligise - I guess I was unclear.
I was referring to the motivation for the invasion of Iraq. It seems there was a volentry media blackout on the subject - Fox News and co offered the advice of 'experts' to tell us what to think, ansd didn't try to do Investivigative Journalism
OK, time to wear my Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie
The Good folks at Villain Supply are selling a VAGUE, PANIC-PROVOKING COMMUNICABLE DISEASE for a mere US$149,999.99.
As the age of SARS has proven, nothing scares the gullible, scientifically illiterate population like a vague, panic-provoking communicable disease. Just tack a scary acronym onto any poorly-defined set of flu-like symptoms, and watch the fun begin.
Your Vague, Panic-Provoking Communicable Disease comes with several medical journal articles identifying the disease in the most non-specific terms possible, a batch of press releases, and 25% ownership of a face mask factory.
Mod me down if you must, but I couldn't resist.
Alas, china has a long history of coverups - the Great Firewall of China being the most spectular. Last year they China invited the U.N. to investigate allegations of human rights abuse. Alas, with this so called 'war on Terror' the outcome has been forgotten.
Btw, The US also has censorship problems. Just look at how american news sources acted over Iraq - did a single mainsteam journalist criticize the government's plan?
1980 Called, and they want their Troll Back!
As a consultant for several large companies, I'd always done my work on
Windows. Recently however, a top online investment firm asked us to do
some work using Linux. The concept of having access to source code was
very appealing to us, as we'd be able to modify the kernel to meet our
exacting standards which we're unable to do with Microsoft's products.
Although we met several technical challenges along the way
(specifically, Linux's lack of Token Ring support and the fact that we
were unable to defrag its ext2 file system), all in all the process
went smoothly. Everyone was very pleased with Linux, and we were
considering using it for a great deal of future internal projects.
So you can imagine our suprise when we were informed by a lawyer that
we would be required to publish our source code for others to use. It
was brought to our attention that Linux is copyrighted under something
called the GPL, or the Gnu Protective License. Part of this license
states that any changes to the kernel are to be made freely available.
Unfortunately for us, this meant that the great deal of time and money
we spent "touching up" Linux to work for this investment firm would
now be available at no cost to our competitors.
Furthermore, after reviewing this GPL our lawyers advised us that any
products compiled with GPL'ed tools - such as gcc - would also have to
its source code released. This was simply unacceptable.
Although we had planned for no one outside of this company to ever
use, let alone see the source code, we were now put in a difficult
position. We could either give away our hard work, or come up with
another solution. Although it was tought to do, there really was no
option: We had to rewrite the code, from scratch, for Windows 2000.
I think the biggest thing keeping Linux from being truly competitive
with Microsoft is this GPL. Its draconian requirements virtually
guarentee that no business will ever be able to use it. After my
experience with Linux, I won't be recommending it to any of my
associates. I may reconsider if Linux switches its license to
something a little more fair, such as Microsoft's "Shared Source".
Until then its attempts to socialize the software market will insure
it remains only a bit player.
Thank you for your time.
Here's the shameless Google Mirror
:-(
A human being recognizes external environment by using many kinds of sensory information. By integrating these information and making up lack of information for each other, a more reliable and multilateral recognition can be achieved. The purpose of Sensor Fusion Project is to realize new sensing architecture by integrating multi-sensor information and to develop hierarchical and decentralized architecture for recognizing human beings further. As a result, more reliable and multilateral information can be extracted, which can realize high level recognition mechanism.
Note that the site is mostly pictures, which explained why it went down so quickly. There's almost no decent text at all
No Wank Jokes please. You're not funny.
What would qualify as a "fixing" the economy in your mind?
I will believe things are looking better when...
1) The Dollar gains ground
2) The Budget has a Surplus
3) Companies realize that Outsourcing, whilst pleasing shareholders, ticks everyone else off.
American economy has been hit hard. Enron, etc, and september 11 couldn't have come at a worse time. Not trying to be flamebait, but the usual 'let's start a war or 2 to fix up the economy' hasn't worked :-(
According to the Debt clock, each Citizen's share of this debt is $22,684.87.
he National Debt has continued to increase an average of $1.47 billion per day since September 30, 2002!
The Fix? I don't know. Welcome to Globaliziation.
One of the quotes from My Other Post is
If you came and found a strange man teaching your kids to punch each other, or trying to sell them all kinds of products, you'd kick him right out of your house, but here you are; you come in and the TV is on, and you don't think twice about it."--Jerome Singer
"We cannot blame the schools alone for the dismal decline in SAT verbal scores. When our kids come home from school, do they pick up a book or do they sit glued to the tube, watching music videos? Parents, don't make the mistake of thinking your kid only learns between 9:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m."--former president George Bush
If you came and found a strange man teaching your kids to punch each other, or trying to sell them all kinds of products, you'd kick him right out of your house, but here you are; you come in and the TV is on, and you don't think twice about it."--Jerome Singer
"Television is basically teaching whether you want it or not."--Jim Henson, Muppets creator
Expert Quotations on TVs Cultural Impact
is Here
magine a world where microscopic biomechanical devices are used to cure diseases, control our computers, and power the vehicles we drive. In this brave new world, minuscule techno-agents would have incredible computational power--power that is completely imperceptible to the human eye. Devices like these could become commonplace over the next fifty years as new innovations in molecular engineering--also known as nanotechnology--may help establish a new molecular age.
You do realize that IPv6 offers something like an IP address for every square centremetre of ground on the planet, right?
For those not in the know, here is a brief article Explaining the benefits of IPV6.
Hi,
:)
I've always used Windowz and I consider myself an exceptional Visual
Basic programmer, so I know computers pretty good. In fact I got an A-
in my programming class last term. But I'm a little wary of how much
power Microsoft has in the computer field. Many of my friends use
RedHat and I've recently installed it on my machine at home. Although
I haven't had as much chance to play with it as I'd like, I've been
greatly impressed.
This weekend I gave some thoughts to the things that are wrong with
Linux. I hope no one minds having some flaws pointed out. I'd like to
help make RedHat stronger so it can conquer MS. Hopefully RedHat will
hear this (crossing fingers) and address these. I think with a little
effort, RedHat's Linux can defeat Microsoft's Windows!
To begin with, there are too many different flavors of RedHat.
Browsing a list on Amazon, I saw they made varients under the
codenames of Mandrake, Debian and Slackware, just to name a few. I
know that I'm very new to RedHat so maybe this is obvious but it seems
like RedHat should just sell a few different flavors of its operating
system. Perhaps one for the desktop and one for a server? Could
someone explain why RedHat produces dozens of different versions of Linux?
Secondly did you know that anyone can view the source code to Linux! I
think that RedHat shouldn't make its code available. After all, what
keeps Microsoft from stealing RedHat's ideas and putting it into
Windows? My friend says that FreeBSD stole the TCP/IP stack from DOS a
long time ago and Microsoft is always looking for revenge for that.
Plus it seems to me like RedHat is just giving away its ideas for
free. And what keeps hackers or terrorists from tampering with the
code and putting a virus in every computer?
On a related note, why doesn't RedHat write Linux in assembly? My
friend says that's what Microsoft does for Windows, and that's why
Windows is faster and more stable than Linux.
Next RedHat definitely should kill -9 (ha, ha!) the command line.
Microsoft finally gave up DOS when Windows 2000 came out. I'm suprised
that RedHat hasn't migrated away from...whatever its version of DOS is
called (Bash, I think?) But maybe this is planned for a futurerelease?
Finally Linux needs games! RedHat will never be successful in the home
without games. They should also tell M$ to release a version of Office
for Linux too. And Internet Explorer!
Have a nice day! Go Linux!!
Beaten by an AC 3 times in a row. Oh the shame.
and I wasn't even trying!
srf re rewkjh 4ew ewfh43kth asdrfj345kh 43kruh 3k54h
Nothing. It was an attempt to score karma from the morons with mod points. Usually, if you post a comment with a link that's even slightly relevent, you get modded up. If it's within the first 20 comments, you'll get a +5, informative or interesting.
To the moderators reading this: You SUCK.
I wonder if they have anything like This?
Now THAT would be nasty