Present her with KDE or Gnome, though, and it's scary and unfamiliar.
Short answer: No.
Long answer: Modern versions of KDE and Gnome are now so advanced that they are just as easy to use for a normal Mom to use.
Example: A few months ago, I showed KDE 3.1.x, running on my Slackware laptop, to my wife (who is also a mom, by the way). She is not a power user, but she is smart and she knows Windows and Microsoft Office pretty well.
Within 5 minutes, with only minimal explanations from me, she had opened KWrite, KMail and Konqueror and was happily checking her email and writing a small document, all the while surfing on the web.
She even went as far as saying: "What's so special about Linux? It's almost the same as Windows!"... *sigh*
So, please, let us stop this nonsense about Linux not being ready for the desktop, and not having quality apps. It's simply untrue. And more and more people, corporations and governments are realizing this and switching to Linux.
This being said, I agree that a lot of average users would be very challenged by a Linux installation and configuration... But that's how people like me make money after all!
It's not a 3D desktop that going to get Linux on desktops.
Now, that, I can agree on. 3D desktop is a waste of time.
What's really lagging in OpenBSD is an easy to use port/package system
I am really sorry but have you even used OpenBSD recently? I installed OpenBSD 3.4 last month on a small server at home and installing third-party software was as simple as:
For a package:
cd <path to packages> pkg_add <name of package here>
For a port:
cd <path to port> make install
And... that's it!
Could you please explain to me how this is difficult?
Memories, memories. At the time, my Amiga 500 could kick any PCs ass.
This being said, I do think we'll see another Amiga platform in the future... Just in time for that new version of Duke 'Nukem to be ported to it... =(
I really appreciate his stand against SCO. Maybe a lot of other GPL projects (Gnome, KDE *hint* *hint*) may also decide to revoke SCO's right to use their software.
Picture this: a worldwide tribe of programmers, all saying to SCO that they can't use this or that program with OpenLinux, UnixWare and so on. If everyone sent $1 to the FSF to cover future litigation at the same time...
Stop me if I am wrong, but aren't Sendmail and Microsoft two of the biggest security problems on the Internet today? (Microsoft, of course, is a lot more dangerous, but still).
I believe it was a former sysadmin at a previous job who told me (speaking of email, of course): "Never install Sendmail. Period". Thats sums it up pretty nicely.
And I don't: Postfix is faster, more secure and easier to configure than Sendmail ever was. Qmail is also quite good.
... sue teenagers and grand parents for using Kazaa and/or exchanging music MP3s on P2P.
Then they are condemned for price fixing. Ain't life grand? The inmates are running the asylum, the foxes are guarding the hen house, and so on and so forth.
(Yes, I know that the RIAA is probably not involved in this settlement, but the RIAA bosses... er... members are the one who are condemned in this case)
I remember reading Wired Magazine about "The New Economy". Yes, the one with a big green Godzilla on the cover.
Closing the magazine, I thought: "Either these guys deserve a Nobel Prize in Economics, or they just don't understand anything about Economics".
Late 1999, I remember talking to a friend about Yahoo and other companies offering free services over the World Wide Web. He could not understand how these companies could offer a valuable service (email, personal web space, etc) for free and (a) make money, (b) have a stock price that went through the roof.
I remember telling him: "This is not going to last. The stock market is going to crash really badly and most of these companies are going to go down in flames".
Today, I am really happy most of my money was not invested in stupid schemes such as pets.com or any other "new economy"/Internet company.
Bottom line? Here are my most basic rules for economy, new or otherwise...
There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. If it looks like a free lunch, there must be a catch.
Whatever goes up (especially stock price) will eventually go down, because everything in economy is based on cycles. It does not matter if you sell pork rinds, soda or personal computers.
Do not invest in a company when you can't understand its business model (or what it sells) because it is probably a scam. That's how Warren Buffet made a fortune and it's always a god rule of thumb.
One last thing: 90% of all the people who made money in the new economy where insiders, people who knew if a stock was going to go up or down. Think about that for a second.
Here is Rational Economic Sense to you: (cut to the 'GodFather' set -- small smoky room in the middle of nowhere)
Godfather (in a very breathy voice): Guido, I know you like that little spam business of yours, but I am gonna make youse an offer you can't refuse...
Spammer (badly bruised up and tied to a chair between two very tall and muscular men): Yes, Don Corleone?
Godfather: You stop that little racket of yours -- the one that sends me insulting emails about my manhood size -- or you are going to find yourself in a trashcan in the toilets of Grand Central Station. All 600 little pieces of you. Is that economically rational to ya or what?
Spammer: Su... Sure, Don Corleone...
Godfather: Good boy. See? I just knew ya were going to like my deal! (pats spammer on the cheek)
(Godfather stands up and exits the small smoky room . A group of even bigger tough guys are waiting outside.)
Godfather (talking to no-one in particular): As soon as he has erased his hard disk, chop him up in a thousand pieces and drop the remains in the toilets of Grand Central Station. Then, kill all his family and business associates, chop *them* up and throw the pieces in the Hudson.
(Godfather enters his long black limo)
Godfather: Increase my penis size! Sheesh, you don't get no respect these days...
I have thought about this whole monoculture thing recently, and here is my take on it...
Microsoft made a conscious decision, a long long time ago, to make sure that everything in its Office applications (starting with Word) would be scriptable with VBA. And that the VBA scripts would have access to the entire underlying OS.
At the time, it made perfect marketing sense: the king of word processors was Word Perfect, and it offered advanced scripting functions. Microsoft had to duplicate this functionalities if it wanted to kick WordPerfect ass and establish Windows and Word as the desktop champions. And it worked -- when was the last time you used WordPerfect on your PC?
The only problem is, of course, that Windows security (3.x was a single user, single task operating system) was absolutely broken from the very beginning. After all, if you are the only user on your machine, you don't need a lot of security, do you? Wrong. You may need a different kind of security, but you still need some sort of framework to protect your resources. Windows never provided any kind of security at all.
Then came the Internet. And, with it, a virus transmission vector of incomparable speed. The rest, as they say is history. Microsoft never bothered to create proper security and, because it completely ignored the Internet before 1995 (remember the Gates memo?), they were caught unprepared by the hordes of yahoos who write VBA viruses. VB is easy to use, viruses are easy to program in VB and, thanks to MS stupid decisions, they were allowed to run wild.
In effect, most users and sysadmins are, today, paying the price of a marketing decision: Microsoft decided to design VBA, all the while ignoring the research that proved that application scripting needed to be severely limited and controlled. Emacs LISP scripts and shell files in the UNIX world were prohibited a loooooong time before VBA was even created.
They kicked a competitor out of the field and, in doing so, created more problems for themselves (and for us!) than they solved...
If I remember well, Robert Morris father (former NSA scientist if I remember well) also worked on Multics, the "ancestor" of UNIX.
One day, programmers saw Rober Morris Sr go to a Multics console. He called everyone in the room to him. Then, once he had everyone complete attention, he hit three keys at the same time on the console... and crashed Multics completely.
He then left the room without saying a word, leaving all the others scratching their heads...
I don't know if the story is true, or what were the three keys he pressed, but with a father like that, it's no wonder young Robert Morris Jr ended up a hacker!;-)
Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson [...] An elegant, open operating system for minicomputers, UNIX helped users with general computing, word processing and networking, and soon became a standard language.
Ah well. At least they got 90% of that article right... *sigh*
One of the differences between Europe (especially Germany) is that their views on such things as privacy have been formed in the context of direct recent (in terms of living memory of the politically active population of the past 50 years) experience of totalitarian government and/or occupation.
This is true, but with a small caveat. If you read this book (highly recommended), you'll note that US researchers were the first to blow the whistle, in the '60s if I remember well, about the risks of database tracking individuals and collecting way too much info about citizens.
The US governement did nothing about this, but Western European (Eastern Europe is something else) governments did, and created several tough laws designed to protect privacy. Whether this was due to the history of Europe, and, as you mention, to the memories of the Nazi regime is open for debate.
This being said, these European privacy laws are being undermined by the US government as we speak. The first step was, of course, to require European airlines to communicate information about their passengers to US authorities.
(I am probably going to be moderated down in flames for this, but what the heck... Entering 'Rant' mode...)
From the article:
President Francois Mitterrand of France also opposed the gas pipeline. He took President Reagan aside at a conference in Ottawa on July 19, 1981, to reveal that France had recruited a key K.G.B. officer in Moscow Center. Col. Vladimir Vetrov provided what French intelligence called the Farewell dossier.
This little bit of information is more or less correct. "Farewell" was the code name assigned to Col. Vetrov by his French DGSE (French CIA) handlers.
The next time you are tempted to say that France is not an ally of the USA, just remember that little bit of transatlantic cooperation. I personally think Mitterand was a crook, a thief and a sleazeball -- and I am trying to stay polite, here... But, ultimately, he may have done the right thing here.
But Safire glosses over the saddest part of the Farewell history (emphasis mine):
Vetrov was caught and executed in 1983. A year later, Bill Casey ordered the K.G.B. collection network rolled up, closing the Farewell dossier. [...] Now is a time to remember that sometimes our spooks get it right in a big way.
What Safire does not says is that:
Farewell was a French agent, and not an American one! Give credit where credit is due!!
Col. Vetrov, aka Farewell, died because of the CIA involvement (If I remember well, he was caught communicating to American agents after the big explosion mentioned), and before DGSE could smuggle him and his family out of the USSR. In short, he paid the price for American incompetence.
In short: every good intelligence in this story was supplied by the French, and the USA made a mess of it, an important source was killed and years of hard work were wasted.
A little bit like the recent situation with a middle-east country with vast oil reserves, but I digress... You can mod me down now. End of Rant mode.
90% of my surfing is done with Firebird, either under Windows or Linux. It's fast (on a Pentium IV @ 2.0 GHz), complete and full-featured.
9% is done with Opera 7.23. Mostly at home, since it's still small and light enough for my poor little Pentium machine.
Less than 1% is done with IE, mostly with horribly broken site that only accept it, and I am actively searching for replacement
FWIW, I never use MS Outlook or Outlook Express either. Earlier this week, when MyDoom struck our email servers, a couple of coworkers were infected. I was not.
The moral of the story is that you can't trust Microsoft products.
Except, of course, that I was not talking about desktop computers (even though I use Linux on my desktop), but about servers, where Linux enjoys solid growth and market share. Don't believe me? Check out Netcraft.
Desktop computers are not really profitable for most PC makers anyway. Servers are.
The title says it all. These various... ahem... projects by Microsoft are getting creepier and creepier every day.
I still think Palladium will fail, simply because Linux and the BSDs have now attained critical mass, and that most Linux users simply won't accept a closed hardware platform like it. Therefore, someone will step up to the plate and provide a non-Palladium hardware platform -- simply because there is money to be made in such a platform.
Now, for a serious question: has anybody got any idea on how to quickly disable RFIDs? I don't want to be followed around, whether it is by Microsoft, a retailer or anybody else. Please don't say: "Just microwave it", because some things with embedded RFIDs cannot be microwaved...
Slashdot Mirror
Present her with KDE or Gnome, though, and it's scary and unfamiliar.
Short answer: No.
Long answer: Modern versions of KDE and Gnome are now so advanced that they are just as easy to use for a normal Mom to use.
Example: A few months ago, I showed KDE 3.1.x, running on my Slackware laptop, to my wife (who is also a mom, by the way). She is not a power user, but she is smart and she knows Windows and Microsoft Office pretty well.
Within 5 minutes, with only minimal explanations from me, she had opened KWrite, KMail and Konqueror and was happily checking her email and writing a small document, all the while surfing on the web.
She even went as far as saying: "What's so special about Linux? It's almost the same as Windows!"... *sigh*
So, please, let us stop this nonsense about Linux not being ready for the desktop, and not having quality apps. It's simply untrue. And more and more people, corporations and governments are realizing this and switching to Linux.
This being said, I agree that a lot of average users would be very challenged by a Linux installation and configuration... But that's how people like me make money after all!
It's not a 3D desktop that going to get Linux on desktops.
Now, that , I can agree on. 3D desktop is a waste of time.
Or, in the immortal words of P.T. Barnum: " A sucker is born every minute ".
I am really sorry but have you even used OpenBSD recently? I installed OpenBSD 3.4 last month on a small server at home and installing third-party software was as simple as:
For a package:For a port:And... that's it!
Could you please explain to me how this is difficult?
Memories, memories. At the time, my Amiga 500 could kick any PCs ass.
This being said, I do think we'll see another Amiga platform in the future... Just in time for that new version of Duke 'Nukem to be ported to it... =(
a auto-completing python interpreter and editor
Try the Wing IDE. It has most of the functions you wanted... But it's not free software.
it is pretty nice, why did it not get reviewed? Is this site biased or something?
;-)
You must be new around here...
I really appreciate his stand against SCO. Maybe a lot of other GPL projects (Gnome, KDE *hint* *hint*) may also decide to revoke SCO's right to use their software.
Picture this: a worldwide tribe of programmers, all saying to SCO that they can't use this or that program with OpenLinux, UnixWare and so on. If everyone sent $1 to the FSF to cover future litigation at the same time...
Stop me if I am wrong, but aren't Sendmail and Microsoft two of the biggest security problems on the Internet today? (Microsoft, of course, is a lot more dangerous, but still).
;^)
I believe it was a former sysadmin at a previous job who told me (speaking of email, of course): "Never install Sendmail. Period". Thats sums it up pretty nicely.
And I don't: Postfix is faster, more secure and easier to configure than Sendmail ever was. Qmail is also quite good.
(Microsoft? Who needs Microsoft??)
... sue teenagers and grand parents for using Kazaa and/or exchanging music MP3s on P2P.
Then they are condemned for price fixing. Ain't life grand? The inmates are running the asylum, the foxes are guarding the hen house, and so on and so forth.
(Yes, I know that the RIAA is probably not involved in this settlement, but the RIAA bosses... er... members are the one who are condemned in this case)
Closing the magazine, I thought: "Either these guys deserve a Nobel Prize in Economics, or they just don't understand anything about Economics".
Late 1999, I remember talking to a friend about Yahoo and other companies offering free services over the World Wide Web. He could not understand how these companies could offer a valuable service (email, personal web space, etc) for free and (a) make money, (b) have a stock price that went through the roof.
I remember telling him: "This is not going to last. The stock market is going to crash really badly and most of these companies are going to go down in flames".
Today, I am really happy most of my money was not invested in stupid schemes such as pets.com or any other "new economy"/Internet company.
Bottom line? Here are my most basic rules for economy, new or otherwise...
One last thing: 90% of all the people who made money in the new economy where insiders, people who knew if a stock was going to go up or down. Think about that for a second.
Here is Rational Economic Sense to you:
(cut to the 'GodFather' set -- small smoky room in the middle of nowhere)
Godfather (in a very breathy voice): Guido, I know you like that little spam business of yours, but I am gonna make youse an offer you can't refuse...
Spammer (badly bruised up and tied to a chair between two very tall and muscular men): Yes, Don Corleone?
Godfather: You stop that little racket of yours -- the one that sends me insulting emails about my manhood size -- or you are going to find yourself in a trashcan in the toilets of Grand Central Station. All 600 little pieces of you. Is that economically rational to ya or what?
Spammer: Su... Sure, Don Corleone...
Godfather: Good boy. See? I just knew ya were going to like my deal! (pats spammer on the cheek)
(Godfather stands up and exits the small smoky room . A group of even bigger tough guys are waiting outside.)
Godfather (talking to no-one in particular): As soon as he has erased his hard disk, chop him up in a thousand pieces and drop the remains in the toilets of Grand Central Station. Then, kill all his family and business associates, chop *them* up and throw the pieces in the Hudson.
(Godfather enters his long black limo)
Godfather: Increase my penis size! Sheesh, you don't get no respect these days...
Gentlemen! Start your slurping!
You goal is to slurp more than 6,000,000,000 elements of the World Wide Web! It's a fight we cannot afford to lose! Now, go, and may Bob be with you!
I have thought about this whole monoculture thing recently, and here is my take on it...
Microsoft made a conscious decision, a long long time ago, to make sure that everything in its Office applications (starting with Word) would be scriptable with VBA. And that the VBA scripts would have access to the entire underlying OS.
At the time, it made perfect marketing sense: the king of word processors was Word Perfect, and it offered advanced scripting functions. Microsoft had to duplicate this functionalities if it wanted to kick WordPerfect ass and establish Windows and Word as the desktop champions. And it worked -- when was the last time you used WordPerfect on your PC?
The only problem is, of course, that Windows security (3.x was a single user, single task operating system) was absolutely broken from the very beginning. After all, if you are the only user on your machine, you don't need a lot of security, do you? Wrong. You may need a different kind of security, but you still need some sort of framework to protect your resources. Windows never provided any kind of security at all.
Then came the Internet. And, with it, a virus transmission vector of incomparable speed. The rest, as they say is history. Microsoft never bothered to create proper security and, because it completely ignored the Internet before 1995 (remember the Gates memo?), they were caught unprepared by the hordes of yahoos who write VBA viruses. VB is easy to use, viruses are easy to program in VB and, thanks to MS stupid decisions, they were allowed to run wild.
In effect, most users and sysadmins are, today, paying the price of a marketing decision: Microsoft decided to design VBA, all the while ignoring the research that proved that application scripting needed to be severely limited and controlled. Emacs LISP scripts and shell files in the UNIX world were prohibited a loooooong time before VBA was even created.
They kicked a competitor out of the field and, in doing so, created more problems for themselves (and for us!) than they solved...
A day with SCO is like a day without sunshine, I know that's what you're thinking.
Personally, a day with SCO is like a day spent having a hole slowly drilled in my head. Without pain killers.
But, hey, that's just me.
From the article:
Additionally, there are positive results from a viability study of Netbook with Linux for professional users with specialist applications.
What can I say? I have been dreaming of running Linux on one of these little machines for years. If they do one of thse, I'll be the first to buy one!
If I remember well, Robert Morris father (former NSA scientist if I remember well) also worked on Multics, the "ancestor" of UNIX.
;-)
One day, programmers saw Rober Morris Sr go to a Multics console. He called everyone in the room to him. Then, once he had everyone complete attention, he hit three keys at the same time on the console... and crashed Multics completely.
He then left the room without saying a word, leaving all the others scratching their heads...
I don't know if the story is true, or what were the three keys he pressed, but with a father like that, it's no wonder young Robert Morris Jr ended up a hacker!
Straight from the article:
Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson
[...]
An elegant, open operating system for minicomputers, UNIX helped users with general computing, word processing and networking, and soon became a standard language.
Ah well. At least they got 90% of that article right... *sigh*
Best quote from the article (at least for me):
:-)
I wouldn't have a job if there was two minutes of downtime and I wouldn't trust Windows for that.
There you have it, in a nutshell...
One of the differences between Europe (especially Germany) is that their views on such things as privacy have been formed in the context of direct recent (in terms of living memory of the politically active population of the past 50 years) experience of totalitarian government and/or occupation.
This is true, but with a small caveat. If you read this book (highly recommended), you'll note that US researchers were the first to blow the whistle, in the '60s if I remember well, about the risks of database tracking individuals and collecting way too much info about citizens.
The US governement did nothing about this, but Western European (Eastern Europe is something else) governments did, and created several tough laws designed to protect privacy. Whether this was due to the history of Europe, and, as you mention, to the memories of the Nazi regime is open for debate.
This being said, these European privacy laws are being undermined by the US government as we speak. The first step was, of course, to require European airlines to communicate information about their passengers to US authorities.
Go back to work, you slacker. If you post too much on Slashdot, the terrorists will win!
Nice Troll. You probably don't know how to "Google" very well, then... Or you don't read French:
Google Search: 'Farewell DGSE'
Search for 'Farewell' on the following pages:
Some successes of the DGSE.
French/English analysis of the DGSE.
DST/DGSE comparison.
And I'll add one of my own:
dgse.org (unofficial French fan club).
Sheesh...
From the article:
President Francois Mitterrand of France also opposed the gas pipeline. He took President Reagan aside at a conference in Ottawa on July 19, 1981, to reveal that France had recruited a key K.G.B. officer in Moscow Center. Col. Vladimir Vetrov provided what French intelligence called the Farewell dossier.
This little bit of information is more or less correct. "Farewell" was the code name assigned to Col. Vetrov by his French DGSE (French CIA) handlers.
The next time you are tempted to say that France is not an ally of the USA, just remember that little bit of transatlantic cooperation. I personally think Mitterand was a crook, a thief and a sleazeball -- and I am trying to stay polite, here... But, ultimately, he may have done the right thing here.
But Safire glosses over the saddest part of the Farewell history (emphasis mine):
Vetrov was caught and executed in 1983. A year later, Bill Casey ordered the K.G.B. collection network rolled up, closing the Farewell dossier. [...] Now is a time to remember that sometimes our spooks get it right in a big way.
What Safire does not says is that:
In short: every good intelligence in this story was supplied by the French, and the USA made a mess of it, an important source was killed and years of hard work were wasted.
A little bit like the recent situation with a middle-east country with vast oil reserves, but I digress... You can mod me down now. End of Rant mode.
90% of my surfing is done with Firebird, either under Windows or Linux. It's fast (on a Pentium IV @ 2.0 GHz), complete and full-featured.
9% is done with Opera 7.23. Mostly at home, since it's still small and light enough for my poor little Pentium machine.
Less than 1% is done with IE, mostly with horribly broken site that only accept it, and I am actively searching for replacement
FWIW, I never use MS Outlook or Outlook Express either. Earlier this week, when MyDoom struck our email servers, a couple of coworkers were infected. I was not.
The moral of the story is that you can't trust Microsoft products.
Except, of course, that I was not talking about desktop computers (even though I use Linux on my desktop), but about servers, where Linux enjoys solid growth and market share. Don't believe me? Check out Netcraft.
Desktop computers are not really profitable for most PC makers anyway. Servers are.
The title says it all. These various... ahem... projects by Microsoft are getting creepier and creepier every day.
I still think Palladium will fail, simply because Linux and the BSDs have now attained critical mass, and that most Linux users simply won't accept a closed hardware platform like it. Therefore, someone will step up to the plate and provide a non-Palladium hardware platform -- simply because there is money to be made in such a platform.
Now, for a serious question: has anybody got any idea on how to quickly disable RFIDs? I don't want to be followed around, whether it is by Microsoft, a retailer or anybody else. Please don't say: "Just microwave it", because some things with embedded RFIDs cannot be microwaved...