I'm not sure what kind of person Linux snobs think they're dealing with.
The problem is, that they DON'T think about whom they're dealing with. "Linux snobs" (only a subset of the set of "Linux users" I should add) are typical of the type of person who is well-informed and even highly-developed in their understanding of only a narrow range of things, and hopelessly inept outside that range.
This is not unusual in human beings generally. For instance, there are brilliant physicians who have the bedside manner of a fruit-bat--they just don't interact well at all with the people that they ostensibly are there to help. It is in everyone's best interest if they improve, but they'll never be naturally gregarious.
So it is with a lot of "computer geek" types of which the "Linux snob" is comprised. They aren't too comfortable with interpersonal relationships to begin with, and many of them are positive social misfits. Their natural response to having to deal with someone "inferior" is to be, well, a "snob."
FWIW, there was a time in the early days of "microcomputers" when nearly everyone was a hobbyist and an elitist snob. Somehow, the community overcame that, and computers moved into the mainstream, so that even the "un-nerdiest" among us are well acquainted with their use.
Therefore, I disagree with the premise of the Article: I think that technical streamlining is the key to wider acceptance. The snobs can be overcome now as they were before.
As you can see from the site, it has been possible to upgrade distributions using Yum since FC1--so I'm not sure where you got your information.
I used to use APT with Fedora, until FC4 when Yum became facile enough to use on an ongoing basis. Since then, I've abandoned APT entirely. The fact that the Fedora project officially supports Yum, and that they have improved it dramatically over the past year, seals the deal for me.
Do you actually sit there--maybe even in the U.S.--writing pretty much whatever you want on whatever you topic you want, and then claim that the U.S. and Communist China are "the same"?
I still think that as long as Linux continues to improve, and especially if one desktop-focused distribution becomes pre-eminent--it might be Xandros, or Ubuntu, or any of a dozen others--Mac's days are numbered.
And yes, precisely BECAUSE the hardware is so expensive.
FWIW, I priced a Mac Mini at Fry's Electronics, trying to give myself an excuse to get one:
Or I can get a new Acer or similar PC system with all the bells and whistles, running a Dual-Core 64-bit AMD processor at 3.2 GHz, a Gig of memory, a 300 GB HD, for about $700 at my local Impress Computer store. Since I don't like XP, I can reformat the drive and load Fedora or Ubuntu or whatever, and have a hell of a workstation, every bit as stable as MacOS X, plus a huge selection of productivity software, for about two-thirds the price. And I'm not even getting into how much more powerful the Acer system is, the far larger (and faster) hard-drive, the fact that it includes a DVD-R/W drive, etc.
Sorry, but you Mac entusiasts need to cotton to the fact that your choice of computer is more akin to your choice of hobby than a practical decision.
...find a just model for social organization that respects some basic malthusian ecological premises...
Why, it must be one of the Asian countries, right?
Japan? Uh, no.
Korea? Only if you consider North--South Korea is if anything more crowded and has even less natural resources--but their economy ($20,000+ per-capita GDP) is ten times that of their neighbor ($2,000-).
Taiwan? Singapore? Malaysia? Nope, nope, nope.
India? Has a very growing economy as well as some third-worldish regions and a population problem.
Yeah, right. Everyone's "underpaid." It's AMAZING the level of exploitation of underpaid, talented workers in America.
If only we could do it like, say, the socialist countries of the world, where the government FORCES people to pay workers what they're worth. I mean, look at how much stronger their economies are, how high the standard of living for the average joe and jane.
I wonder if folks like you ever take a step back and LISTEN to what you actually say, and compare it to reality.
The only bugbear I have is that its support for my cable box is pretty poor.Everyone's given pretty good recommendations, but your sentence here clinches it all.
The point I'm making is that there are no (or insufficient) standards to allow all the different pieces of junk to talk to one another--aside from compatible cabling, and even that's not 100% true.
I'm just gobsmacked that they can come up with standards to allow "home automation," but the most common form of automation that you will likely encounter in any given home, all the entertainment-center components, adhere to NO such standard to the extent that I have a drawer full of "universal" remotes that aren't.
If somebody started a guild called the "Language Prudes" where all the members were supposed to speak polite English with no hax0risms, would you consider that "intruding a message"?
I'd be interested in your pointing out to me the overt and organized activism of those who insist on speaking and writing stunted English and "hax()rism." Note that I continue to insist this person's aims were political, based on the person's own statements as well as the continuing onslaught of homosexual rights activism in everything from the public schools to churches.
As a matter of fact, if the "hax()rs" were are obtrusive and rude as the homosexual lobby, then yes, I WOULD consider that they ought to go somewhere else to play, and leave people alone to play their games without having to deal with their punkish behavior.
You and others of like mind keep trying to turn this into a "rights" issue--which is consistent with that "activism-drenched" society that has been created and is currently in full sway. I'm saying that OTHERS have rights, too, and they include they "right to be let alone."
I am fully with "Blizzard" on this one. I suspect the majority of people who complained in WoW don't care one whit about homosexual rights or activism one way OR the other--they just want to be left alone.
This is the one thing the activist never gets: When to quit the bitching and moaning so that you don't lose all sympathy among those who don't have a dog in the fight.
That may be your personal opinion but it is decidedly NOT the basis for this Republic. The Declaration of Independence, one of our founding documents, clearly states that our rights are not arbitrary, nor are they man-made. Rather, they come from our Creator, and are inalienable--meaning that as they are not "made" things, they also cannot be "unmade." They are permanent.
The right to private property is one of them.
Note that you may continue to believe what you will--including your doubt that a Creator exists. I simply remind you that the foundation of our Republic is predicated on a notion directly OPPOSITE what you imply.
I'd be far, far more interested in a "universal remote" that really worked, that was infinitely programmable without having to learn a new language of keypresses, that didn't lose everything it had learned every time it's dropped from a height of one foot (or the batteries go dead), and actually KNEW HOW TO FRIGGIN' TURN ON ALL MY JUNK AND WORK THE VOLUME AND CHANNEL SELECTION.
Here it is 2006, and I STILL have to turn my TV and home theatre receiver on manually, so the remote can do MOST of the rest of it.
Someone come up with a universal standard for communicating with the modest array of electronic home entertainment devices--and have them communicate with each other--and THEN I'll start getting hot-and-bothered about "home automation standards."
Did you read TFA? Nobody's trying to "intrude" any "message"
I guess that's in the eyes of the beholders. I suspect that a lot more people would agree that this is "political speech" than just some innocent bantering akin to "hey u tard, lol."
eople love to accuse gays of "activism" and "recruiting", when what they really mean is, "STFU, so I can pretend you don't exist."
May be, but that wasn't my point--which was "sometimes people just want to get away from all the political bullshit and unwind." I suspect the reaction would be the same--if not more strident--if someone was in there trying to preach Christianity. There's a time and a place, and an online game ain't it.
Most of these comments are simply people speculating about what they *think* it *might* be like...
There's more to that story.
People are simply willing to believe that "evil corporations that want only to suck the $$$ out of every bank account they can sink their fangs into are capable of any rumored misdeed because...well, because they're EVIL."
The fact is that, while there are corporate-types who do wrong, that's also true in the small-business world as well (I could tell you stories about a local chain of computer retail stores here in the Houston, Texas area that would make any such 'Best Buy' story pale in comparison).
And the further fact is, our burgeoning free enterprise system, including "evil corporate America," is what has made all this low-priced tech feasible in the first place--not to mention giving jobs to every one of the small-minded punks here and elsewhere who would rather depend on simple-minded stories they can get those puny brains around, than actually THINK with them.
Yeah, I bet you can find several examples of b*stard GeekSquad managers with no integrity--in a chain as big as Best Buy, there're bound to be some of them. But you WON'T hear any stories about the ones that just do their jobs and try to please the customer.
Would you advocate for a public space where people can say "nigger" all they want but complaining is strictly dissallowed?
Actually, the word "nigger" IS used in public spaces with great frequency, in in a deeply pejorative sense--by African Americans urbanites. It's only NON-African-Americans who aren't allowed to use it.
The whole "politics of language" is distorted and very illogical--the use typically reflects the agenda of the person in question.
If the population at WOW is reflective of the population generally--which is by no means assured--then the LGBT-whatever represent about 1 to 2% of the population.
That fact is that in most cases, the majority rules.
That's why so many homosexual men move to San Francisco.
All right, then, let's have all the evangelical Christians given the absolute right to intrude at GayMenChatSite.com, able to spew their message unfettered and unhindered, so that the homosexual males at that site will be forced to "shoulder" their responsbilities.
Sheesh.
Whatever happened to the notion of "appropriate time and place."
Maybe they would like to forget about all the political crap-ola with which we are inundated constantly in our activist-infested world for a change, and just go somewhere where they don't have to think about it.
You don't always have the right to intrude your "message" into everyone else's consciousness.
I am deeply religious, and I do not believe in evolution as "origin of species." I do not believe that human-kind evolved from lower forms of life.
That said, I've always thought this argument was ludicrous, and I refuse to engage in it. We as individual human beings have a ridiculously brief span of years on this world, and then we'll pass on to the next phase of our existence (or take an infinitely long dirt-nap, if that's your preference).
Whatever you believe, the truth is the truth and it WILL be manifest to us no matter what "opinion" we may hold.
I recall reading a story about a military officer who was an atheist--one of these (and they seem to make up the majority of atheists) who make a religion of it, as it were. He was upset because they would not put "atheist" on his dog-tags (this must have been in the 1960s or thereabouts--they probably do it now). He was "deathly afraid" (pun intended) that he might get killed, and actually be buried with a chaplain saying words over his ashes, and a cross or something raised over his grave. He actually filed a grievance about it.
Can you imagine? Here you believe that your ONLY existence takes place between birth and death, you only have these pitifully few microseconds of life (in the eternal scheme of things) and after you die, you CEASE TO EXIST; nothing whatsoever is going to affect you from then on (for infinite values of "from then on").
Yet he was wasting some of those precious ticks of his biological clock to worry about whether his inanimate remains, the food he'd left for the worms, might have words directed at them and be placed in close proximity to a religious symbol about which he cared not at all in life--and would even less in death.
I admit I don't get it. There have GOT to be better things to fill your time with than worrying about something that you had no way of causing nor have you any way of stopping--eternal destiny.
These statements are in no way contradictory or hypocritical.
You gotta be kiddin' me.
"Kids, I just want you to know that we would be very proud for you to be in the family business. We're very proud of our business. Uh, NOT the product, mind you, just the business.
"You'll go into the 'production' end over my dead body."
Your take on this is like saying it's "not hypocritical" for a narco-trafficker to punish his kids for taking drugs.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is, that they DON'T think about whom they're dealing with. "Linux snobs" (only a subset of the set of "Linux users" I should add) are typical of the type of person who is well-informed and even highly-developed in their understanding of only a narrow range of things, and hopelessly inept outside that range.
This is not unusual in human beings generally. For instance, there are brilliant physicians who have the bedside manner of a fruit-bat--they just don't interact well at all with the people that they ostensibly are there to help. It is in everyone's best interest if they improve, but they'll never be naturally gregarious.
So it is with a lot of "computer geek" types of which the "Linux snob" is comprised. They aren't too comfortable with interpersonal relationships to begin with, and many of them are positive social misfits. Their natural response to having to deal with someone "inferior" is to be, well, a "snob."
FWIW, there was a time in the early days of "microcomputers" when nearly everyone was a hobbyist and an elitist snob. Somehow, the community overcame that, and computers moved into the mainstream, so that even the "un-nerdiest" among us are well acquainted with their use.
Therefore, I disagree with the premise of the Article: I think that technical streamlining is the key to wider acceptance. The snobs can be overcome now as they were before.
I'm sorry, but you're absolutely wrong in this respect. I have upgraded to the next distribution at last twice that I can recall, using Yum.
See HERE for the "secret recipe."
It was relatively painless.
As you can see from the site, it has been possible to upgrade distributions using Yum since FC1--so I'm not sure where you got your information.
I used to use APT with Fedora, until FC4 when Yum became facile enough to use on an ongoing basis. Since then, I've abandoned APT entirely. The fact that the Fedora project officially supports Yum, and that they have improved it dramatically over the past year, seals the deal for me.
Do you actually sit there--maybe even in the U.S.--writing pretty much whatever you want on whatever you topic you want, and then claim that the U.S. and Communist China are "the same"?
Nothing follows.
And yes, precisely BECAUSE the hardware is so expensive.
FWIW, I priced a Mac Mini at Fry's Electronics, trying to give myself an excuse to get one:
Mac Mini 1.5 GHz/512MB/60GB HD/CD-RW|DVD-ROM Combo Drive) (1.5 GHz? Huh?) - $600
Logitech Cordless MX Duo - $70
Viewsonic 19" LCD Monitor - $290
Total Price for new Mac Mini system - $960 base.
Or I can get a new Acer or similar PC system with all the bells and whistles, running a Dual-Core 64-bit AMD processor at 3.2 GHz, a Gig of memory, a 300 GB HD, for about $700 at my local Impress Computer store. Since I don't like XP, I can reformat the drive and load Fedora or Ubuntu or whatever, and have a hell of a workstation, every bit as stable as MacOS X, plus a huge selection of productivity software, for about two-thirds the price. And I'm not even getting into how much more powerful the Acer system is, the far larger (and faster) hard-drive, the fact that it includes a DVD-R/W drive, etc.
Sorry, but you Mac entusiasts need to cotton to the fact that your choice of computer is more akin to your choice of hobby than a practical decision.
If I only had a share of Apple stock for every time I've heard this.
Why, it must be one of the Asian countries, right?
Japan? Uh, no.
Korea? Only if you consider North--South Korea is if anything more crowded and has even less natural resources--but their economy ($20,000+ per-capita GDP) is ten times that of their neighbor ($2,000-).
Taiwan? Singapore? Malaysia? Nope, nope, nope.
India? Has a very growing economy as well as some third-worldish regions and a population problem.
How about China and its attempts to curtail population growth through government action? Oh, no, there's that whole "one-child-policy-led-to-a-preponderance-of-males" thing.
Gee, getting really, really hard to defend the conventional wisdom of so-called "intellectuals."
"O the vainness, and the frailties, and the foolishness of men! When they are learned they think they are wise..."
Apparently not.
Yeah, right. Everyone's "underpaid." It's AMAZING the level of exploitation of underpaid, talented workers in America.
If only we could do it like, say, the socialist countries of the world, where the government FORCES people to pay workers what they're worth. I mean, look at how much stronger their economies are, how high the standard of living for the average joe and jane.
I wonder if folks like you ever take a step back and LISTEN to what you actually say, and compare it to reality.
As opposed to China, with a vast system of ONSHORE prison camps.
As opposed to China, with...
Oh, c'mon, this is too easy.
The point I'm making is that there are no (or insufficient) standards to allow all the different pieces of junk to talk to one another--aside from compatible cabling, and even that's not 100% true.
I'm just gobsmacked that they can come up with standards to allow "home automation," but the most common form of automation that you will likely encounter in any given home, all the entertainment-center components, adhere to NO such standard to the extent that I have a drawer full of "universal" remotes that aren't.
Is this article about GOOGLE, or The Sun?
I'd be interested in your pointing out to me the overt and organized activism of those who insist on speaking and writing stunted English and "hax()rism." Note that I continue to insist this person's aims were political, based on the person's own statements as well as the continuing onslaught of homosexual rights activism in everything from the public schools to churches.
As a matter of fact, if the "hax()rs" were are obtrusive and rude as the homosexual lobby, then yes, I WOULD consider that they ought to go somewhere else to play, and leave people alone to play their games without having to deal with their punkish behavior.
You and others of like mind keep trying to turn this into a "rights" issue--which is consistent with that "activism-drenched" society that has been created and is currently in full sway. I'm saying that OTHERS have rights, too, and they include they "right to be let alone."
I am fully with "Blizzard" on this one. I suspect the majority of people who complained in WoW don't care one whit about homosexual rights or activism one way OR the other--they just want to be left alone.
This is the one thing the activist never gets: When to quit the bitching and moaning so that you don't lose all sympathy among those who don't have a dog in the fight.
That may be your personal opinion but it is decidedly NOT the basis for this Republic. The Declaration of Independence, one of our founding documents, clearly states that our rights are not arbitrary, nor are they man-made. Rather, they come from our Creator, and are inalienable--meaning that as they are not "made" things, they also cannot be "unmade." They are permanent.
The right to private property is one of them.
Note that you may continue to believe what you will--including your doubt that a Creator exists. I simply remind you that the foundation of our Republic is predicated on a notion directly OPPOSITE what you imply.
My comment had nothing to do with Blizzard Entertainment, their WoW site, or the owners thereof.
I'd be far, far more interested in a "universal remote" that really worked, that was infinitely programmable without having to learn a new language of keypresses, that didn't lose everything it had learned every time it's dropped from a height of one foot (or the batteries go dead), and actually KNEW HOW TO FRIGGIN' TURN ON ALL MY JUNK AND WORK THE VOLUME AND CHANNEL SELECTION.
Here it is 2006, and I STILL have to turn my TV and home theatre receiver on manually, so the remote can do MOST of the rest of it.
Someone come up with a universal standard for communicating with the modest array of electronic home entertainment devices--and have them communicate with each other--and THEN I'll start getting hot-and-bothered about "home automation standards."
I guess that's in the eyes of the beholders. I suspect that a lot more people would agree that this is "political speech" than just some innocent bantering akin to "hey u tard, lol."
eople love to accuse gays of "activism" and "recruiting", when what they really mean is, "STFU, so I can pretend you don't exist."
May be, but that wasn't my point--which was "sometimes people just want to get away from all the political bullshit and unwind." I suspect the reaction would be the same--if not more strident--if someone was in there trying to preach Christianity. There's a time and a place, and an online game ain't it.
The perponderance of Supreme Court decisions over the past couple of centuries doesn't agree with you. But don't take it personally. Few Americans these days really understand the Constitution, what rights (and responsibilities) they have, etc.
Most Americans are little children.
There's more to that story.
People are simply willing to believe that "evil corporations that want only to suck the $$$ out of every bank account they can sink their fangs into are capable of any rumored misdeed because...well, because they're EVIL."
The fact is that, while there are corporate-types who do wrong, that's also true in the small-business world as well (I could tell you stories about a local chain of computer retail stores here in the Houston, Texas area that would make any such 'Best Buy' story pale in comparison).
And the further fact is, our burgeoning free enterprise system, including "evil corporate America," is what has made all this low-priced tech feasible in the first place--not to mention giving jobs to every one of the small-minded punks here and elsewhere who would rather depend on simple-minded stories they can get those puny brains around, than actually THINK with them.
Yeah, I bet you can find several examples of b*stard GeekSquad managers with no integrity--in a chain as big as Best Buy, there're bound to be some of them. But you WON'T hear any stories about the ones that just do their jobs and try to please the customer.
"Man Bites Dog," you know.
Actually, the word "nigger" IS used in public spaces with great frequency, in in a deeply pejorative sense--by African Americans urbanites. It's only NON-African-Americans who aren't allowed to use it.
The whole "politics of language" is distorted and very illogical--the use typically reflects the agenda of the person in question.
C.f. pretty much any film by Spike Lee.
...the hardware ought to work first.
That fact is that in most cases, the majority rules.
That's why so many homosexual men move to San Francisco.
All right, then, let's have all the evangelical Christians given the absolute right to intrude at GayMenChatSite.com, able to spew their message unfettered and unhindered, so that the homosexual males at that site will be forced to "shoulder" their responsbilities.
Sheesh.
Whatever happened to the notion of "appropriate time and place."
You don't always have the right to intrude your "message" into everyone else's consciousness.
That said, I've always thought this argument was ludicrous, and I refuse to engage in it. We as individual human beings have a ridiculously brief span of years on this world, and then we'll pass on to the next phase of our existence (or take an infinitely long dirt-nap, if that's your preference).
Whatever you believe, the truth is the truth and it WILL be manifest to us no matter what "opinion" we may hold.
I recall reading a story about a military officer who was an atheist--one of these (and they seem to make up the majority of atheists) who make a religion of it, as it were. He was upset because they would not put "atheist" on his dog-tags (this must have been in the 1960s or thereabouts--they probably do it now). He was "deathly afraid" (pun intended) that he might get killed, and actually be buried with a chaplain saying words over his ashes, and a cross or something raised over his grave. He actually filed a grievance about it.
Can you imagine? Here you believe that your ONLY existence takes place between birth and death, you only have these pitifully few microseconds of life (in the eternal scheme of things) and after you die, you CEASE TO EXIST; nothing whatsoever is going to affect you from then on (for infinite values of "from then on").
Yet he was wasting some of those precious ticks of his biological clock to worry about whether his inanimate remains, the food he'd left for the worms, might have words directed at them and be placed in close proximity to a religious symbol about which he cared not at all in life--and would even less in death.
I admit I don't get it. There have GOT to be better things to fill your time with than worrying about something that you had no way of causing nor have you any way of stopping--eternal destiny.
I repeat: I don't get it.
You gotta be kiddin' me.
"Kids, I just want you to know that we would be very proud for you to be in the family business. We're very proud of our business. Uh, NOT the product, mind you, just the business.
"You'll go into the 'production' end over my dead body."
Your take on this is like saying it's "not hypocritical" for a narco-trafficker to punish his kids for taking drugs.