This whole article is ridiculous. It appears, as it often happens, that no one here read it.
Here's why in no specific order.
0) He claims to have been running Linux since 1993, but does not know that Macromedia offers easy rpms to install its software and the instructions on how to run the script are also dead easy.
1) He rubishes Linux by claiming that it's just gueswork to know whether what works in one distribution will work in the next one. Nonsense, the four big distributions generally provide identical hardware support. (Suse, MDK, Red Hat/Fedora, Debian).
2) Check out the screenshot on that review. It is of Arklinux, which never had the horrible unattractive KDE 2.0 look, because it didn't ship until much later. This guy is out to make look Linux as bad as possible.
3) The whole thing is his opinion at best. Yet every other sentence has the word fact in it, when the review is far from being factual.
4) "Several distributions have had no trouble recognizing the touchpad on my laptop, but I haven't found anywhere to configured its advanced functions - things like being able to tap directly on the pad rather than using a button..."
Why doesn't he tell us which laptop and which distributions? Because I can use my touchpad fully on MDK, Suse, Red hat and Debian.
He then goes on to claim that powermanagement isn't compiled into the kernel by default. What planet is this guy on? All current distributions will display a nice icon with your battery status and most allow you to suspend to disk and resume without any issues. There are some issues, both because Linux is still maturing in this area and because many bioses have a buggy ACPI implementation, but for the most part, it just works. Of course, if you choose to run Gentoo or LFS, it is up to you to make it work.
5) "If I had been able to buy the laptop with Linux pre-configured on it, no doubt everything would be fine."
But you have been able to do so for the past 4 years.
http://www.emperorlinux.com/
http://www.linuxcertified.com/linux_laptops.html
IBM's laptops were sold with Linux for a while, are known to work with linux and are internally tested to do so. Wait for announcements by year's end.
And as of late:
http://www.hp.com -> See the nx5000
6)Since this is an article directed at new users, can someone tell me how speaking about something that you don't understand helps new users? I quote:
"If the difference between widget style, window behavior, desktop environment, and window manager is still unclear to you - well, that's probably because it's unclear to me, too. I have certain notions of what they each mean, but I could not begin to give a good definition of each."
Well, don't bring it up, damn it. Just say to the user that you will be clicking on things to open programs and that your experience in this sense will be fairly similar to what you now do in Windows.
He continues to do this throughout the article to make Linux seem messy and difficult. There is too much choice in window managers, too many in text editors, too much choice everywhere, and you will be confused. The truth is that most distributions that you would put on a desktop, particularly the one on the screenshot, Arklinux, now default to one desktop, install sane defaults and choose best of breed programs.
7) "Since I am considerably more comfortable with computers than the average Windows user, I think I should prepare you for.conf files now: get used to them. Although things are getting better, [...] the fact is that most Linux programs still operate this way."
Nonsense. Utter nonsense. This is an article about desktop usage. My wife has never ever had to touch a configuration file. Everything that she needed to do whether it was in evolution, Mozilla, OpenOffice, Juk, Bookcase or whatever was always readily available through a GUI menu option.
I would have to say Pamela Jones of Groklaw who has done a lot to uphold the values and spirit of free software through valuable legal research.
Closer to home, Gonzalo Porcel, one of the founders of the Miami Linux Users Group has done more to spread the use of Free Softaware locally than anybody I know. Not only does he help with technical issues in our monthly meetings and through the forum, he has led a number of very successful projects to set up community computer labs running Linux.
What in god's name are you talking about? If Mandrake does not have a package,you build one.
That is the proper way to maintain an rpm distribution. And it would serve you well to learn the power of urpmi.
By the way, when was the last time that you fail to find a package for Mandrake? Put together, contrib,plf, elsac, just to name a few and you have thousands of packages available.
Do you need to berate other distributions to feel better about whatever it is you run, Gentoo in this case?
I have followed the release cycle of Mandrake 10 very closely and the amount of updates is huge, which is fine, it means that bugs are being addressed. However, the updates can come at 100MB at a time, simply because they just have no way of doing real patches and thus redownload the whole of Openoffice or kdelibs for a small change.
I love Mandrake to death, but this is something that needs to be addressed as soon as possible. This issue has been enough of a showstopper that I have avoided putting Mandrake on my brother's computer until I can either get him on DSL or Mandrake makes its updates dial-up friendly.
We do not want proprietary drivers. I prefer no drivers to proprietary drivers. When a Linux box begins crashing because of some weird proprietary drivers, who do you think most customers will blame?
First of all, this guy does no permanent damage to public property.
Secondly, while not all graffiti is equally defensible, I think of it as a valuable form of expression. And the problem is that as with many other free speech issues, you cannot protect the positive uses while penalizing the negative ones. Hear me out, before you jump the gun.
See, there are times when the appropriation of public space is the only way to speak because the state or its corporate allies controls all legal -or the most effective- forms of communication. This isn't as true in the United States, although the large media conglomerates do exercise a great deal of control over what he hear and listen. Thankfully, we have the internet still left.
Yet, as surprising as that may be to some Slashdotters, a piece of wall is an easiser medium to master than a computer and thinking otherwise only shows how out of touch some of you may be with some very poor communities in the United States where internet access does not exist nor do the skills to use a computer are common (I am working on fixing both, by the way).
Moreover, graffiti and leafletting have both played a crucial role in breaking the fear that grips societies in authoritarian regimes. In dictatorships where people often die for less than painting graffiti on the wall, a piece of political graffiti can serve to end the sense of isolation caused by fear that often renders people unable to seek other ways to overthrow the military junta.
If you are interested in history, read about how graffiti was used against the dictatorships of the southern cone in Latin America in the late 1970s and 1980s.
The ethymological origin of the word is also very telling:
Graffiti Graf*fi"ti, n. pl. It., pl. of graffito scratched Inscriptions, figure drawings, etc., found on the walls of ancient sepulchers or ruins, as in the Catacombs, or at Pompeii.
Damn, it is hard to please the slashdot crowd. It's too expensive, how is this different from knoppix?
Well, I find it very inexpensive and convenient. Yes, I could probably do this myself, but I happen to like Mandrake's distribution and this gives me the chance to support my favorite distribution in an all-in-one package that is easy to use.
If you think you can do it reliably and more cheaply than Mandrake, please by all means give them some competition.
But I, for one, love Mandrake. It is the fastest distribution of the latest round I tried (Suse 9.1, Fedora 2, Slackware 10) and it is very stable. I also happen to like Suse 9.1 quite a bit for certain uses, but overall lean much more strongly towards Mandrake, but I digress.
I love this idea. You will be able to take your desktop with you everywhere without needing to use Knoppix. Knoppix is very nice, but this gives you another way to reach portability and will be faster since it runs off a HD, rather than off the CD. You can take music, documents with you and have your fully personalized desktop available anywhere where a computer is available.
This is more convenient than a laptop in some regards as it doesn't need to be recharged and is less conspicuous and thus less likely to be stolen.
And I don't know about you, but I can find a computer I can plug into just about anywhere, whether it's at a friend's or a relative's house, the library...
I think Mandrake is working very hard and they are making incredible progress. I have tested their 10.1 Beta 2 and it is already very, very good, although I would caution new users to wait for the *Official* release, not community, and definitely not RCs.
I love Linux and all, but if you want a real Unix that works, use a Mac.
Or Linux is great and all, but if you want to stay compatible, read, locked into Microsoft's proprietary office formats, I will use a Mac.
I don't know what sadder, that you cannot imagine a future where all file formats will be free or that you will not do your part to bring it about.
Finally, it used to be that Linux was a toy OS, then it was a good OS because it run on "edge of the network servers", then it was great that it could run on big servers and mainframes, but where is the enterprise software for it. After that, well, yeah it makes a great server, but I mean nobody in his right mind would use it as a desktop. Now, wow, that's nice that you can get a laptop with a killer Free Software OS that just works, but it just isn't as nice as my shiny powerbook.
Nobody gives a hoot. No matter what excuses and subterfuges you throw at the free software movement, we keep on improving the coding-testing-using-bugreporting cycle. Our current focus is usability and accessibility. If you think we are not going to do on those two fields on the desktop, what we did on the server, that is strive for and achieve excellence, then you are in for a surprise. The revolution is on schedule.:)
And in a couple of years, nobody in his right mind will want to pay for a proprietary OS when a free one in all senses of the word does everything (s)he wants to do.
I don't have a sig, but I wanted one, it would be:
Meet the Irritandus Unixea specimen, made up of annoying Gentoo zealots and Mac OS X users who keep repeating the "I love Mac OS X, all the power of Unix, all the great proprietary apps that we all love". Well, we do NOT ALL LOVE THEM.
"because the site keeps going down for some reason I just deactivated the video vault for awhile.. Please don't send me questions asking why aren't the videos working. now you know. Thanks.. I hope to have them up later tonight.."
The guy must have not heard of what a herd of slashdotters can do. He acts surprised.
That beyond asking people to call Linux, GNU/Linux, which I find reasonable, RMS is enough of a pragmatist to want to use a real kernel and that Linus is enough of a thinker to understand the depth of RMS's non-code contributions and philosophy.
"Software patents concern me. I worry about some greedy companies -- possibly failing ones, trying to make trouble and abusing the system. Software patents, in particular, are very ripe for abuse. The whole system encourages big corporations getting thousands and thousands of patents. Individuals almost never get them.
We have random people in random countries working on random things, and they don't have 1,000 patent lawyers. So I'm not worried about one patent in particular, but the whole system. It's not a problem today. But it's a thing I can't control, unlike the technical side, where I can actually do something."
It is refreshing to hear Linus state what RMS has been saying for the past five years. Software patents are evil, evil, evil. Yet Linus seems to stir less controversy when he says these things. I think both of them have a great deal of admiration for each other and both of them do very important if parallel work.
For all the talk about the Hurd, RMS doesn't use the Hurd.
This borders on the obvious but librarians love books, which means that they are often well-informed liberals in the enlightenment sense of that word, i.e., someone who is broad-minded and tolerant of the views of others and expect others to behave in the same manner.
They also understand that our cultural heritage depends on free sharing for its preservation and nurturing -as does innovation. Librarians are therefore quite suspicious of those who try to place limits on the sharing of cultural outputs, particularly when they do so to benefit from the social conjectures and economic dislocations produced by a given technological moment in history.
This was incredibly smart as they are now producing a legal report that the goverment will have to act upon, thus derailing the European directive to approve software patents as unanimity is likely to be needed on the Commission.
They have not admitted to the existence of any patents that affect Linux, but rather have stated that it is a troubling issue that needs to be examined.
This was very shrewed. They raised public awareness, will get the city's legal department to produce a patent-unfriendly report which will be elevated to the German national government, which will then adopt a no-patents European position at the Comission.
Let me state that while not all graffiti is equally defensible, I think of it as a valuable form of expression. And the problem is that as with many other free speech issues, you cannot protect the positive uses while penalizing the negative ones. Hear me out, before you jump the gun.
See, there are times when the appropriation of public space is the only way to speak because the state controls all legal forms of communication. This isn't as true in the United States, although the large media conglomerates do exercise a great deal of control over what he hear and listen. Thankfully, we have the internet still left.
Yet, as surprising as that may be to some Slashdotters, a piece of wall is an easiser medium to master than a computer and thinking otherwise only shows how out of touch some of you may be with some very poor communities in the United States where internet access does not exist nor do the skills to use a computer are common (I am working on fixing both, by the way).
Moreover, graffiti and leafletting have both played a crucial roal in breaking the fear that grips societies in authoritarian regimes. In dictatorships where people often die for less than painting graffiti on the wall, a piece of political graffiti can serve to end the sense of isolation caused by fear that often renders people unable to seek other ways to overthrow the military junta.
If you are interested in history, read about how graffiti was used against the dictatorships of the southern cone in Latin America in the late 1970s and 1980s.
The ethymological origin of the word is also very telling:
Graffiti Graf*fi"ti, n. pl. It., pl. of graffito scratched Inscriptions, figure drawings, etc., found on the walls of ancient sepulchers or ruins, as in the Catacombs, or at Pompeii.
You mean like Bush moderated his stance to make it sound like he was pro-choice in 2000 and a compassionate conservative that would do no nation-building or squander the billions in the Social Security fund?
No, they were hirinig consultants because Grimaldo does not have in-house techs. They hired the wrong consultants, I submit, on purpose.
This whole thing was staged and the fact is that Microsoft Argentina has now retracted some of the statements they made when the local press began to make inquiries
By the way, in Argentina, you pay about the same for a Linux or a Windows guy.
Jesus Christ, Slashdot is about to close its doors.
Somebody who gets it. And I totally agree . To be proficent with Microsoft's software and to follow best-practices also requires knowledge. To hear some people here tell it, it just seems like people are born knowing how to "properly" set up Exchange.
And I am all for doing what you are doing. The more technology under your belt, the better off you are.
"It might surprise you to learn that the fact that the free OSes are easy to set up as web servers does not in fact say anything at all about their capabilities on the desktop or shop floor."
Look, an anonymous troll with a condescending attitude that is going to tell us how things are done in the real world. And it isn't true that they need to provide a small amout of functionality anymore. Web hosting is a fairly cut-throat business these days. You have to make it easy for your customers to run LAMP applications, which implies databases, email servers, and more.
Many of the web hosting companies use cpanel or similar software that allows them to deploy servers in seconds and, better yet, allows clients who know nothing about servers to use them productively. But, yeah, Linux is hard to use, does not work.
When do you people give up? How much evidence do you need?
Thanks for bringing this out in the open, which is precisely what's going on. Most people here are under the illusion that these shops have full-time admins in house.
They hired the wrong people and got the wrong results.
Slashdot Mirror
This whole article is ridiculous. It appears, as it often happens, that no one here read it.
.conf files now: get used to them. Although things are getting better, [...] the fact is that most Linux programs still operate this way."
Here's why in no specific order.
0) He claims to have been running Linux since 1993, but does not know that Macromedia offers easy rpms to install its software and the instructions on how to run the script are also dead easy.
1) He rubishes Linux by claiming that it's just gueswork to know whether what works in one distribution will work in the next one. Nonsense, the four big distributions generally provide identical hardware support. (Suse, MDK, Red Hat/Fedora, Debian).
2) Check out the screenshot on that review. It is of Arklinux, which never had the horrible unattractive KDE 2.0 look, because it didn't ship until much later. This guy is out to make look Linux as bad as possible.
3) The whole thing is his opinion at best. Yet every other sentence has the word fact in it, when the review is far from being factual.
4) "Several distributions have had no trouble recognizing the touchpad on my laptop, but I haven't found anywhere to configured its advanced functions - things like being able to tap directly on the pad rather than using a button..."
Why doesn't he tell us which laptop and which distributions? Because I can use my touchpad fully on MDK, Suse, Red hat and Debian.
He then goes on to claim that powermanagement isn't compiled into the kernel by default. What planet is this guy on? All current distributions will display a nice icon with your battery status and most allow you to suspend to disk and resume without any issues. There are some issues, both because Linux is still maturing in this area and because many bioses have a buggy ACPI implementation, but for the most part, it just works. Of course, if you choose to run Gentoo or LFS, it is up to you to make it work.
5) "If I had been able to buy the laptop with Linux pre-configured on it, no doubt everything would be fine."
But you have been able to do so for the past 4 years.
http://www.emperorlinux.com/
http://www.linuxcertified.com/linux_laptops.html
IBM's laptops were sold with Linux for a while, are known to work with linux and are internally tested to do so. Wait for announcements by year's end.
And as of late:
http://www.hp.com -> See the nx5000
6)Since this is an article directed at new users, can someone tell me how speaking about something that you don't understand helps new users? I quote:
"If the difference between widget style, window behavior, desktop environment, and window manager is still unclear to you - well, that's probably because it's unclear to me, too. I have certain notions of what they each mean, but I could not begin to give a good definition of each."
Well, don't bring it up, damn it. Just say to the user that you will be clicking on things to open programs and that your experience in this sense will be fairly similar to what you now do in Windows.
He continues to do this throughout the article to make Linux seem messy and difficult. There is too much choice in window managers, too many in text editors, too much choice everywhere, and you will be confused. The truth is that most distributions that you would put on a desktop, particularly the one on the screenshot, Arklinux, now default to one desktop, install sane defaults and choose best of breed programs.
7) "Since I am considerably more comfortable with computers than the average Windows user, I think I should prepare you for
Nonsense. Utter nonsense. This is an article about desktop usage. My wife has never ever had to touch a configuration file. Everything that she needed to do whether it was in evolution, Mozilla, OpenOffice, Juk, Bookcase or whatever was always readily available through a GUI menu option.
8) "You see, when I right-click o
I would have to say Pamela Jones of Groklaw who has done a lot to uphold the values and spirit of free software through valuable legal research.
Closer to home, Gonzalo Porcel, one of the founders of the Miami Linux Users Group has done more to spread the use of Free Softaware locally than anybody I know. Not only does he help with technical issues in our monthly meetings and through the forum, he has led a number of very successful projects to set up community computer labs running Linux.
What in god's name are you talking about? If Mandrake does not have a package,you build one.
That is the proper way to maintain an rpm distribution. And it would serve you well to learn the power of urpmi.
By the way, when was the last time that you fail to find a package for Mandrake? Put together, contrib,plf, elsac, just to name a few and you have thousands of packages available.
Do you need to berate other distributions to feel better about whatever it is you run, Gentoo in this case?
I disagree. Binary diffs are needed now.
I have followed the release cycle of Mandrake 10 very closely and the amount of updates is huge, which is fine, it means that bugs are being addressed. However, the updates can come at 100MB at a time, simply because they just have no way of doing real patches and thus redownload the whole of Openoffice or kdelibs for a small change.
I love Mandrake to death, but this is something that needs to be addressed as soon as possible. This issue has been enough of a showstopper that I have avoided putting Mandrake on my brother's computer until I can either get him on DSL or Mandrake makes its updates dial-up friendly.
Go back and crawl under you rock, you moron.
We do not want proprietary drivers. I prefer no drivers to proprietary drivers. When a Linux box begins crashing because of some weird proprietary drivers, who do you think most customers will blame?
First of all, this guy does no permanent damage to public property.
Secondly, while not all graffiti is equally defensible, I think of it as a valuable form of expression. And the problem is that as with many other free speech issues, you cannot protect the positive uses while penalizing the negative ones. Hear me out, before you jump the gun.
See, there are times when the appropriation of public space is the only way to speak because the state or its corporate allies controls all legal -or the most effective- forms of communication. This isn't as true in the United States, although the large media conglomerates do exercise a great deal of control over what he hear and listen. Thankfully, we have the internet still left.
Yet, as surprising as that may be to some Slashdotters, a piece of wall is an easiser medium to master than a computer and thinking otherwise only shows how out of touch some of you may be with some very poor communities in the United States where internet access does not exist nor do the skills to use a computer are common (I am working on fixing both, by the way).
Moreover, graffiti and leafletting have both played a crucial role in breaking the fear that grips societies in authoritarian regimes. In dictatorships where people often die for less than painting graffiti on the wall, a piece of political graffiti can serve to end the sense of isolation caused by fear that often renders people unable to seek other ways to overthrow the military junta.
If you are interested in history, read about how graffiti was used against the dictatorships of the southern cone in Latin America in the late 1970s and 1980s.
The ethymological origin of the word is also very telling:
Graffiti Graf*fi"ti, n. pl. It., pl. of graffito scratched Inscriptions, figure drawings, etc., found on the walls of ancient sepulchers or ruins, as in the Catacombs, or at Pompeii.
Damn, it is hard to please the slashdot crowd. It's too expensive, how is this different from knoppix?
Well, I find it very inexpensive and convenient. Yes, I could probably do this myself, but I happen to like Mandrake's distribution and this gives me the chance to support my favorite distribution in an all-in-one package that is easy to use.
If you think you can do it reliably and more cheaply than Mandrake, please by all means give them some competition.
But I, for one, love Mandrake. It is the fastest distribution of the latest round I tried (Suse 9.1, Fedora 2, Slackware 10) and it is very stable. I also happen to like Suse 9.1 quite a bit for certain uses, but overall lean much more strongly towards Mandrake, but I digress.
I love this idea. You will be able to take your desktop with you everywhere without needing to use Knoppix. Knoppix is very nice, but this gives you another way to reach portability and will be faster since it runs off a HD, rather than off the CD. You can take music, documents with you and have your fully personalized desktop available anywhere where a computer is available.
This is more convenient than a laptop in some regards as it doesn't need to be recharged and is less conspicuous and thus less likely to be stolen.
And I don't know about you, but I can find a computer I can plug into just about anywhere, whether it's at a friend's or a relative's house, the library...
I think Mandrake is working very hard and they are making incredible progress. I have tested their 10.1 Beta 2 and it is already very, very good, although I would caution new users to wait for the *Official* release, not community, and definitely not RCs.
Scribus, Audacity and lots more. Do a bit of research.
Too bad I am out of mod points.
More parent up!
These kinds of posts are so predictable.
:)
Here's the pattern:
I love Linux and all, but if you want a real Unix that works, use a Mac.
Or Linux is great and all, but if you want to stay compatible, read, locked into Microsoft's proprietary office formats, I will use a Mac.
I don't know what sadder, that you cannot imagine a future where all file formats will be free or that you will not do your part to bring it about.
Finally, it used to be that Linux was a toy OS, then it was a good OS because it run on "edge of the network servers", then it was great that it could run on big servers and mainframes, but where is the enterprise software for it. After that, well, yeah it makes a great server, but I mean nobody in his right mind would use it as a desktop. Now, wow, that's nice that you can get a laptop with a killer Free Software OS that just works, but it just isn't as nice as my shiny powerbook.
Nobody gives a hoot. No matter what excuses and subterfuges you throw at the free software movement, we keep on improving the coding-testing-using-bugreporting cycle. Our current focus is usability and accessibility. If you think we are not going to do on those two fields on the desktop, what we did on the server, that is strive for and achieve excellence, then you are in for a surprise. The revolution is on schedule.
And in a couple of years, nobody in his right mind will want to pay for a proprietary OS when a free one in all senses of the word does everything (s)he wants to do.
I don't have a sig, but I wanted one, it would be:
Meet the Irritandus Unixea specimen, made up of annoying Gentoo zealots and Mac OS X users who keep repeating the "I love Mac OS X, all the power of Unix, all the great proprietary apps that we all love". Well, we do NOT ALL LOVE THEM.
"because the site keeps going down for some reason I just deactivated the video vault for awhile.. Please don't send me questions asking why aren't the videos working. now you know. Thanks.. I hope to have them up later tonight.."
The guy must have not heard of what a herd of slashdotters can do. He acts surprised.
The site keeps going down for some reason...
Well, help out and write the examples.
That beyond asking people to call Linux, GNU/Linux, which I find reasonable, RMS is enough of a pragmatist to want to use a real kernel and that Linus is enough of a thinker to understand the depth of RMS's non-code contributions and philosophy.
What's your beef?
"Software patents concern me. I worry about some greedy companies -- possibly failing ones, trying to make trouble and abusing the system. Software patents, in particular, are very ripe for abuse. The whole system encourages big corporations getting thousands and thousands of patents. Individuals almost never get them.
We have random people in random countries working on random things, and they don't have 1,000 patent lawyers. So I'm not worried about one patent in particular, but the whole system. It's not a problem today. But it's a thing I can't control, unlike the technical side, where I can actually do something."
It is refreshing to hear Linus state what RMS has been saying for the past five years. Software patents are evil, evil, evil. Yet Linus seems to stir less controversy when he says these things. I think both of them have a great deal of admiration for each other and both of them do very important if parallel work.
For all the talk about the Hurd, RMS doesn't use the Hurd.
Wrong.
Slashdot is like a compilation CD or book. What is copyright is the order of the stories, the timing and the editor's notes on it.
Perfectly legitimate, btw.
And you have every fair-use right to link to them in your own blog or to quote them.
This borders on the obvious but librarians love books, which means that they are often well-informed liberals in the enlightenment sense of that word, i.e., someone who is broad-minded and tolerant of the views of others and expect others to behave in the same manner.
They also understand that our cultural heritage depends on free sharing for its preservation and nurturing -as does innovation. Librarians are therefore quite suspicious of those who try to place limits on the sharing of cultural outputs, particularly when they do so to benefit from the social conjectures and economic dislocations produced by a given technological moment in history.
Insightful, my ass.
This was incredibly smart as they are now producing a legal report that the goverment will have to act upon, thus derailing the European directive to approve software patents as unanimity is likely to be needed on the Commission.
They have not admitted to the existence of any patents that affect Linux, but rather have stated that it is a troubling issue that needs to be examined.
This was very shrewed. They raised public awareness, will get the city's legal department to produce a patent-unfriendly report which will be elevated to the German national government, which will then adopt a no-patents European position at the Comission.
The trees not letting you see the forest?
Let me state that while not all graffiti is equally defensible, I think of it as a valuable form of expression. And the problem is that as with many other free speech issues, you cannot protect the positive uses while penalizing the negative ones. Hear me out, before you jump the gun.
See, there are times when the appropriation of public space is the only way to speak because the state controls all legal forms of communication. This isn't as true in the United States, although the large media conglomerates do exercise a great deal of control over what he hear and listen. Thankfully, we have the internet still left.
Yet, as surprising as that may be to some Slashdotters, a piece of wall is an easiser medium to master than a computer and thinking otherwise only shows how out of touch some of you may be with some very poor communities in the United States where internet access does not exist nor do the skills to use a computer are common (I am working on fixing both, by the way).
Moreover, graffiti and leafletting have both played a crucial roal in breaking the fear that grips societies in authoritarian regimes. In dictatorships where people often die for less than painting graffiti on the wall, a piece of political graffiti can serve to end the sense of isolation caused by fear that often renders people unable to seek other ways to overthrow the military junta.
If you are interested in history, read about how graffiti was used against the dictatorships of the southern cone in Latin America in the late 1970s and 1980s.
The ethymological origin of the word is also very telling:
Graffiti Graf*fi"ti, n. pl. It., pl. of graffito scratched Inscriptions, figure drawings, etc., found on the walls of ancient sepulchers or ruins, as in the Catacombs, or at Pompeii.
You mean like Bush moderated his stance to make it sound like he was pro-choice in 2000 and a compassionate conservative that would do no nation-building or squander the billions in the Social Security fund?
Which webmail/outlook replacement packages support those authentication packages?
Egroupware supports MySQL, LDAP or Unix authentication and does groupware, email, project management.
FTP, can use whatever backend, but as somebody else said, use something a bit more secure.
Stop spreading FUD. This is not the Linux of 1995. This is 2004
No, they were hirinig consultants because Grimaldo does not have in-house techs. They hired the wrong consultants, I submit, on purpose.
This whole thing was staged and the fact is that Microsoft Argentina has now retracted some of the statements they made when the local press began to make inquiries
By the way, in Argentina, you pay about the same for a Linux or a Windows guy.
Jesus Christ, Slashdot is about to close its doors.
Somebody who gets it. And I totally agree . To be proficent with Microsoft's software and to follow best-practices also requires knowledge. To hear some people here tell it, it just seems like people are born knowing how to "properly" set up Exchange.
And I am all for doing what you are doing. The more technology under your belt, the better off you are.
"It might surprise you to learn that the fact that the free OSes are easy to set up as web servers does not in fact say anything at all about their capabilities on the desktop or shop floor."
Look, an anonymous troll with a condescending attitude that is going to tell us how things are done in the real world. And it isn't true that they need to provide a small amout of functionality anymore. Web hosting is a fairly cut-throat business these days. You have to make it easy for your customers to run LAMP applications, which implies databases, email servers, and more.
Many of the web hosting companies use cpanel or similar software that allows them to deploy servers in seconds and, better yet, allows clients who know nothing about servers to use them productively. But, yeah, Linux is hard to use, does not work.
When do you people give up? How much evidence do you need?
Thanks for bringing this out in the open, which is precisely what's going on. Most people here are under the illusion that these shops have full-time admins in house.
They hired the wrong people and got the wrong results.
Yeap, Linux is so hard to use and deploy that that is why all the major web hosting providers use it.
Has it occured to you that ignorance and difficulty are two entirely separate things?