I've been using linux for a few years now, and am a sys admin in likewise at a uni. That said, apart from trying to co-found one at the college I went to (didn't really pan out to much while I was there), I'd never been to a LUG.
Just recently however I started attending the one in my city, to bring my oldest there (7 years old). It's really wonderful, gives us some nice time together, and exposes him to linux and part of linux culture. After the first time (which was an installfest, where some fellow there let him play a bunch of linux games on his box) my son asks about going ahead of time and looks forward to it. If something less than interesting for a seven year old is being discussed, I just bring my lappie with free games on it anyhow to keep him entertained (loves wesnoth). That and the the free food of course;-)
I've been using linux for a few years now, and am a sys admin in likewise at a uni. That said, apart from trying to co-found one at the college I went to (didn't really pan out to much while I was there), I'd never been to a LUG.
Just recently however I started attending the one in my city, to bring my oldest there (7 years old). It's really wonderful, gives us some nice time together, and exposes him to linux and part of linux culture. After the first time (which was an installfest, where some fellow there let him play a bunch of linux games on his box) my son asks about going ahead of time and looks forward to it. If something less than interesting for a seven year old is being discussed, I just bring my lappie with free games on it anyhow to keep him entertained (loves wesnoth). That and the the free food of course;-)
Great point. In fact for me as a parent (albeit of younger kids right now) the ratings system has helped me quite a bit. Not in determining what to by though, I think if you see some mangled corpse with a chainsaw wielding maniac lurched over him on a game cover, you should know "hey this isn't appropriate for the young 'uns". For me, it provided a great way of making my oldest son (7 years old now) understand why and what games are off limits to him. He had the hardest time understanding why some of my games weren't allowed to him to play (or watch) until I explained to him what the T and M on the cases meant. i.e. He's not that age yet, so he needs to wait for it. The box says so.
I think alot of posters on here who reply "it's all the parents doing, blah blah blah" likely don't and perhaps never will have children of their own. I've found one's perspective on acceptable watching radically shifts when you have a three year old sitting next to you.
Anyhow, as to your point, I'd add that what people seem to be forgetting is that it's not only the idea that someone playing the latest hack'n'slash is then going to become a psychopathic monster, thankfully that'd be rare. However, how sensitive will that person after spending day in day out, playing virtual slaughter and all sorts of mayhem be towards the suffering of others (particularly that kid who like it or not is more impressionable than we are (though I think sometimes we even give our own sense of immunity to much credit)) That is, if say their country declares war on another, and we find that in that last bomb raid, about twenty kids got killed/mutatilated, will they feel a moral outrage or at least deep sympathy to the horrible suffering of an innocent, or will they shrug it off and change the channel. To me that's the real danger here, to become complacent and accepting of clear evils, and lose one's humanity towards your fellow man (even if you'd never be the one to pull the trigger/drop the bomb yourself. you'll just happily re-elect the guy who did it last time).
There's not a lot of difference between regular debian (sid that is) and ubuntu. Ubuntu is more focused however on providing an up to date gnome-centric desktop system (kde for kubuntu). So for instance, xorg is the X server, gnome 2.12 is in breezy, etc. Debian is more supposed to be the 'universal' OS. I've come to like both personally. That said, on my current home system (a dell laptop that's pretending to be a workstation, hooked up to a monitor and all), I switched from ubuntu back to regular debian. I was having trouble with some of the funkier hardware on the system, and found a good site someone made with instructions and debs to work around the problems using debian.
If you're not interested however in gnome/kde, I might suggest staying with debian (testing or unstable). There's still more packages available in the debian repo (I think), and less hoops to jump through to get interesting software installed. I wouldn't pay much attention to those saying that testing/unstable is unsuitable for day to day use. I wouldn't put it on a server, but for a desktop who cares? Plus keep in mind that ubuntu itself is based off a frozen snapshot of sid anyhow.
So I guess my question would be, which is brighter, this or the DS? Or are they the same now?
Personally what I wish they release would be a GB with this type of screen, however with the shape and such of the original GBA (which I have and enjoy). The SP form factor while better for protecting the screen I guess, just feels more cramped to me. I've considered getting a DS for this reason. The dual-screen and pen don't mean a whole bunch to me. I just want a brighter screen and be able to comfortably keep my hands apart.
Your X install, include your.xinitrc shouldn't be any different across *nixes (so long as the same x.org or xfree release is being used, and even there, it's stayed fairly consistent). It's just that RedHat does a lot more for you by default than FBSD does.
Personally, FBSD is one of those things I really wanted to like, but time and time again left dissapointed. That said, it's a *nix, so it certainly has it's good qualities;-)
See my other post below. I agree with some of your points.
It's dissappointing to me as a unix bigot and formerly a strong propenent of the linux desktop. In some ways the linux desktop(s) have really come so far in many ways, in terms of features and ooo-ah factors certainly surpassing windows at this point, but parallel to that, all sorts of problems have come in. On fairly modern hardware windows XP can running screaming fast. Same can't always be said of the more full-featured DEs out there in linux nowadays. And it's not just speed. I've tried to help one of my coworkers run first FC3, now FC4 on his box to learn linux. Looking at the hoops I've had to have him jump through to have it do what he wants it to do, I could understand why someone would just give up and stick with windows instead.
Maybe a reason linux on the desktop doesn't seem to get the priority that many of us might like, is that for many if not most unix folk like myself, all we really need to get our work done effectively is a window manager that can hold a whole bunch of xterms (and to me, there's really nothing wrong with that). Looking at my setup here at work right now, this is what I see, a windows box running firefox, thunderbird, gaim, konfabulator, and wmp streaming in some audio. Maybe if I want I could fire up a game, maybe watch some videos. On my other side, a linux box with a lotta xterms open, one with pine, others ssh'ed to a bunch of boxes, and gaim. Maybe I'd fire up firefox. But the purpose and strength of each machine is pretty clear to me now. One is for the desktop and general purpose computing, the other is to get my actual work done.
About your last statement, sadly, I have to agree there. I'm a pretty thorough-going unix bigot, but on the laptop (not including my powerbook running OSX), windows just works better for me now. Especially once you install stuff like the ssh client (the _real_ ssh), cygwin, and your other free standards (firefox, tbird, etc), and the sort-of free things like konfabulator, plus the ability to run pretty much any commercial app you want, the advantages, for a desktop, become clear. Plus, though like I said, SUSE runs pretty decently on the laptop, once it's actually running, windows just runs better overall (apc and all that).
That said, I've come to a personal compromise here at my work, one station running linux with fluxbox or whatever (to be able to nicely hold all those xterms), and one running windows for your more 'desktopish' type things.
Windows may still suck at a lot of things, and I'm exceedingly grateful to have a career in unixland instead of windowsworld, but admittedly there are some areas where it's really half decent.
Uh, dude, it's not 1999. Most respectable distros do all for you now anyhow (detect your vid card, sound, etc.) You might only get in a little trouble if your hardware is say a month or two old. And yes, laptops can be more annoying. Really, I find at this point linux hardware detection to be far better than windows (for the simple reason that the last installment of a consumer windows is rather old at this point.)
Case in point, I have this dell d610 latitude here I'm borriwing. On it I have windows XP pro, and SUSE 9.3. I cleaned installed windows, but unfortunately did not have the dell resource cd. That meant having to go to dell's site, pick and manually install the missing drivers. One problem being though that one of the missing drivers was the NIC. Another problem being that because the laptop was non-US, I couldn't get the specific hardware components of the model based on my serial, so the list included a lot of extraneous drivers I didn't know whether I needed or not.
Solution? Boot into SUSE, which worked out of the box, including wireless, check my hardware specs, download the right drivers to a shared FAT32 partition, and now Windows is happy...
Granted desktop Linux is _not_ perfect, but seriously the situation you describe is from a largely bygone past. (unless you're a sadist, and want to run some uber-l337 do it yourself distro to prove how awesome and c00l you think you are;-)
I do. I work at a major university in the States. I'm regularly in contact with coworkers at a campus we have in the Middle-East. Skype allows for very decent voice communication when simple IMing won't do, cross platform, free of charge... For us it can be exceedingly useful.
I'm listening to the sixth now. Sounds pretty good so far. However, why did the BBC have to mar it by a talking bit at the start. Not complaining too much, it is a free download, but still, it will be distracting in my music library to have that hear it every time I play the song if I decide to keep it.
Uh, those 'dark ages' also coincided with what's called by some the golden age of Islam. A time period wherein scientific discovery and religion where not seen as being in antipathy to the other. Just because Europe was wallowing in the decay of its former Empire, don't paint the whole of humanity with one brush.
As to the war thing, that really gets tiring. Most wars are not caused by religion, most wars are caused by governments/societies wanting to expand their territories, power, and/or holdings. Sometimes, perhaps often, religious speech is used as a propaganda tool to justify what's being done (especially in societies, read: the majority of human history, where religion has played an important part in their cultivation and direction), but I'd hardly think it could be called the root cause. Exceptions granted. You really think the last two world wars were religious in their undertones? Vietnam? Korea? I mean come on, apart from the Crusades, how many of these "major wars" are you referring to anyhow?
but what you mention in the last part hits on my point, after leaving prison they revert to normal sexual conduct, whatever that is in their case. that is, their environment coupled with their own personality and decisions, led otherwise heterosexual individuals to want to get sexual gratification from someone else of the same gender. yes, a lot of it is violent and domineering, but then, look at the type of individuals we're talking about here. how gentle and family oriented do you think they are out of prison?
understandable, we're not talking about loving caring relationships here, but then really, when you get down to it, how much of human sexual conduct really is about loving caring relationships anyhow? usually it's all about physical desire, and a needing a of sexual outlet to release that desire, the affection one feels for one's partner is often secondary, whatever romantics and poets would like us to believe. and considering the high level of promiscuity in the gay community, bathhouse sex and all, (come on you can't really be denying that now), how much of that is about long term companionships either? i.e., what exactly is the "normal" homosexual relationship you speak of?
what would be interesting to consider in the debate, would be animal pair-bonding. from what I understand, same-gender sexual relationships do happen in the animal kingdom, however what's important, is they usually come about as the result of some stressful unusual situation (like say, prisons in the case of humans). same-sex long term bonding however does not happen.
my answer to that would be, how about all those people in prison that start taking "bitches" for themselves? out here in the ordinary world most of them I doubt would ever think to have sex with someone of the same gender. however, under the special social circumstance they find themselves in, they become quite capable of being sexually attracted and aroused in such a situation. how do you figure that if sexual disposition is something inherently ingrained that can't be changed?
interesting post, considering just this morning I've dealt with the same exact issue, sort of. My problem is that at one point I decided to buy us (my oldest (6) son and I) a gamecube. Really it was a mistake I'm coming to think. What I've noticed is this, when my son plays something like a Linux game, on our old Atari, or some educational title on the old Mac I have here, no real problem. He enjoys it, is pleasant, and doesn't throw a fit when time comes to turn it off. Usually. However, same cannot be said with the more complex Windows games, or with the GameCube. He gets overly absorbed, and will often throw a fit when comes time to turn it offf. I cut out most of the windows games from him (plus my x86 died anyhow), and as to the gamecube, we restricted it to certain times on weekends. But still, as in this morning, it's making me think having it is a bad idea. So sounds like it's time to pull out the parental authority and do something about it. (anyone want to buy a used GC with a number of games?)
I'm curious by your post as to how well Ubuntu runs on the G3. Reason I ask is that I have an old G3 b&w powermac here (350MHz with 256M of RAM (I can kick that up to 512 though if I want)) currently running OS 9 on it (OS X would be painful on such a configuration). Been thinking of putting another OS on it, but I'd prefer to keep a dual boot for the time being. How hard is it to do that? Does the ubuntu ppc installer come with a disk partitioner now? What type of performance does one get on such an "old" machine? Even running gnome?
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It does sort of sound like something you'd be asked if you want fries with...
I've been using linux for a few years now, and am a sys admin in likewise at a uni. That said, apart from trying to co-found one at the college I went to (didn't really pan out to much while I was there), I'd never been to a LUG.
;-)
Just recently however I started attending the one in my city, to bring my oldest there (7 years old). It's really wonderful, gives us some nice time together, and exposes him to linux and part of linux culture. After the first time (which was an installfest, where some fellow there let him play a bunch of linux games on his box) my son asks about going ahead of time and looks forward to it. If something less than interesting for a seven year old is being discussed, I just bring my lappie with free games on it anyhow to keep him entertained (loves wesnoth). That and the the free food of course
gah! wrong article...
I've been using linux for a few years now, and am a sys admin in likewise at a uni. That said, apart from trying to co-found one at the college I went to (didn't really pan out to much while I was there), I'd never been to a LUG.
;-)
Just recently however I started attending the one in my city, to bring my oldest there (7 years old). It's really wonderful, gives us some nice time together, and exposes him to linux and part of linux culture. After the first time (which was an installfest, where some fellow there let him play a bunch of linux games on his box) my son asks about going ahead of time and looks forward to it. If something less than interesting for a seven year old is being discussed, I just bring my lappie with free games on it anyhow to keep him entertained (loves wesnoth). That and the the free food of course
small correction: I remember the genesis originally comming with Altered Beast. Point still holds though, I loved that game.
Great point. In fact for me as a parent (albeit of younger kids right now) the ratings system has helped me quite a bit. Not in determining what to by though, I think if you see some mangled corpse with a chainsaw wielding maniac lurched over him on a game cover, you should know "hey this isn't appropriate for the young 'uns". For me, it provided a great way of making my oldest son (7 years old now) understand why and what games are off limits to him. He had the hardest time understanding why some of my games weren't allowed to him to play (or watch) until I explained to him what the T and M on the cases meant. i.e. He's not that age yet, so he needs to wait for it. The box says so.
Simple logic, but ya know it actually worked...
I think alot of posters on here who reply "it's all the parents doing, blah blah blah" likely don't and perhaps never will have children of their own. I've found one's perspective on acceptable watching radically shifts when you have a three year old sitting next to you.
Anyhow, as to your point, I'd add that what people seem to be forgetting is that it's not only the idea that someone playing the latest hack'n'slash is then going to become a psychopathic monster, thankfully that'd be rare. However, how sensitive will that person after spending day in day out, playing virtual slaughter and all sorts of mayhem be towards the suffering of others (particularly that kid who like it or not is more impressionable than we are (though I think sometimes we even give our own sense of immunity to much credit)) That is, if say their country declares war on another, and we find that in that last bomb raid, about twenty kids got killed/mutatilated, will they feel a moral outrage or at least deep sympathy to the horrible suffering of an innocent, or will they shrug it off and change the channel. To me that's the real danger here, to become complacent and accepting of clear evils, and lose one's humanity towards your fellow man (even if you'd never be the one to pull the trigger/drop the bomb yourself. you'll just happily re-elect the guy who did it last time).
There's not a lot of difference between regular debian (sid that is) and ubuntu. Ubuntu is more focused however on providing an up to date gnome-centric desktop system (kde for kubuntu). So for instance, xorg is the X server, gnome 2.12 is in breezy, etc. Debian is more supposed to be the 'universal' OS. I've come to like both personally. That said, on my current home system (a dell laptop that's pretending to be a workstation, hooked up to a monitor and all), I switched from ubuntu back to regular debian. I was having trouble with some of the funkier hardware on the system, and found a good site someone made with instructions and debs to work around the problems using debian. If you're not interested however in gnome/kde, I might suggest staying with debian (testing or unstable). There's still more packages available in the debian repo (I think), and less hoops to jump through to get interesting software installed. I wouldn't pay much attention to those saying that testing/unstable is unsuitable for day to day use. I wouldn't put it on a server, but for a desktop who cares? Plus keep in mind that ubuntu itself is based off a frozen snapshot of sid anyhow.
So I guess my question would be, which is brighter, this or the DS? Or are they the same now?
Personally what I wish they release would be a GB with this type of screen, however with the shape and such of the original GBA (which I have and enjoy). The SP form factor while better for protecting the screen I guess, just feels more cramped to me. I've considered getting a DS for this reason. The dual-screen and pen don't mean a whole bunch to me. I just want a brighter screen and be able to comfortably keep my hands apart.
Your X install, include your .xinitrc shouldn't be any different across *nixes (so long as the same x.org or xfree release is being used, and even there, it's stayed fairly consistent). It's just that RedHat does a lot more for you by default than FBSD does.
;-)
Personally, FBSD is one of those things I really wanted to like, but time and time again left dissapointed. That said, it's a *nix, so it certainly has it's good qualities
See my other post below. I agree with some of your points.
It's dissappointing to me as a unix bigot and formerly a strong propenent of the linux desktop. In some ways the linux desktop(s) have really come so far in many ways, in terms of features and ooo-ah factors certainly surpassing windows at this point, but parallel to that, all sorts of problems have come in. On fairly modern hardware windows XP can running screaming fast. Same can't always be said of the more full-featured DEs out there in linux nowadays. And it's not just speed. I've tried to help one of my coworkers run first FC3, now FC4 on his box to learn linux. Looking at the hoops I've had to have him jump through to have it do what he wants it to do, I could understand why someone would just give up and stick with windows instead.
Maybe a reason linux on the desktop doesn't seem to get the priority that many of us might like, is that for many if not most unix folk like myself, all we really need to get our work done effectively is a window manager that can hold a whole bunch of xterms (and to me, there's really nothing wrong with that). Looking at my setup here at work right now, this is what I see, a windows box running firefox, thunderbird, gaim, konfabulator, and wmp streaming in some audio. Maybe if I want I could fire up a game, maybe watch some videos. On my other side, a linux box with a lotta xterms open, one with pine, others ssh'ed to a bunch of boxes, and gaim. Maybe I'd fire up firefox. But the purpose and strength of each machine is pretty clear to me now. One is for the desktop and general purpose computing, the other is to get my actual work done.
About your last statement, sadly, I have to agree there. I'm a pretty thorough-going unix bigot, but on the laptop (not including my powerbook running OSX), windows just works better for me now. Especially once you install stuff like the ssh client (the _real_ ssh), cygwin, and your other free standards (firefox, tbird, etc), and the sort-of free things like konfabulator, plus the ability to run pretty much any commercial app you want, the advantages, for a desktop, become clear. Plus, though like I said, SUSE runs pretty decently on the laptop, once it's actually running, windows just runs better overall (apc and all that).
That said, I've come to a personal compromise here at my work, one station running linux with fluxbox or whatever (to be able to nicely hold all those xterms), and one running windows for your more 'desktopish' type things.
Windows may still suck at a lot of things, and I'm exceedingly grateful to have a career in unixland instead of windowsworld, but admittedly there are some areas where it's really half decent.
Uh, dude, it's not 1999. Most respectable distros do all for you now anyhow (detect your vid card, sound, etc.) You might only get in a little trouble if your hardware is say a month or two old. And yes, laptops can be more annoying. Really, I find at this point linux hardware detection to be far better than windows (for the simple reason that the last installment of a consumer windows is rather old at this point.)
;-)
Case in point, I have this dell d610 latitude here I'm borriwing. On it I have windows XP pro, and SUSE 9.3. I cleaned installed windows, but unfortunately did not have the dell resource cd. That meant having to go to dell's site, pick and manually install the missing drivers. One problem being though that one of the missing drivers was the NIC. Another problem being that because the laptop was non-US, I couldn't get the specific hardware components of the model based on my serial, so the list included a lot of extraneous drivers I didn't know whether I needed or not.
Solution? Boot into SUSE, which worked out of the box, including wireless, check my hardware specs, download the right drivers to a shared FAT32 partition, and now Windows is happy...
Granted desktop Linux is _not_ perfect, but seriously the situation you describe is from a largely bygone past. (unless you're a sadist, and want to run some uber-l337 do it yourself distro to prove how awesome and c00l you think you are
I do. I work at a major university in the States. I'm regularly in contact with coworkers at a campus we have in the Middle-East. Skype allows for very decent voice communication when simple IMing won't do, cross platform, free of charge... For us it can be exceedingly useful.
Actually, I thought the Saving Private Ryan one was the funniest of the three.
Actually I do. Thanks for the tip.
I'm listening to the sixth now. Sounds pretty good so far. However, why did the BBC have to mar it by a talking bit at the start. Not complaining too much, it is a free download, but still, it will be distracting in my music library to have that hear it every time I play the song if I decide to keep it.
"So, Steve Jobs is 2 of the 10."
you will be assimilated...
Uh, those 'dark ages' also coincided with what's called by some the golden age of Islam. A time period wherein scientific discovery and religion where not seen as being in antipathy to the other. Just because Europe was wallowing in the decay of its former Empire, don't paint the whole of humanity with one brush.
As to the war thing, that really gets tiring. Most wars are not caused by religion, most wars are caused by governments/societies wanting to expand their territories, power, and/or holdings. Sometimes, perhaps often, religious speech is used as a propaganda tool to justify what's being done (especially in societies, read: the majority of human history, where religion has played an important part in their cultivation and direction), but I'd hardly think it could be called the root cause. Exceptions granted. You really think the last two world wars were religious in their undertones? Vietnam? Korea? I mean come on, apart from the Crusades, how many of these "major wars" are you referring to anyhow?
um, so what's next, an announcement from microsoft that longhorn will be using linux as it's kernel?
but what you mention in the last part hits on my point, after leaving prison they revert to normal sexual conduct, whatever that is in their case. that is, their environment coupled with their own personality and decisions, led otherwise heterosexual individuals to want to get sexual gratification from someone else of the same gender. yes, a lot of it is violent and domineering, but then, look at the type of individuals we're talking about here. how gentle and family oriented do you think they are out of prison?
understandable, we're not talking about loving caring relationships here, but then really, when you get down to it, how much of human sexual conduct really is about loving caring relationships anyhow? usually it's all about physical desire, and a needing a of sexual outlet to release that desire, the affection one feels for one's partner is often secondary, whatever romantics and poets would like us to believe. and considering the high level of promiscuity in the gay community, bathhouse sex and all, (come on you can't really be denying that now), how much of that is about long term companionships either? i.e., what exactly is the "normal" homosexual relationship you speak of?
what would be interesting to consider in the debate, would be animal pair-bonding. from what I understand, same-gender sexual relationships do happen in the animal kingdom, however what's important, is they usually come about as the result of some stressful unusual situation (like say, prisons in the case of humans). same-sex long term bonding however does not happen.
my answer to that would be, how about all those people in prison that start taking "bitches" for themselves? out here in the ordinary world most of them I doubt would ever think to have sex with someone of the same gender. however, under the special social circumstance they find themselves in, they become quite capable of being sexually attracted and aroused in such a situation. how do you figure that if sexual disposition is something inherently ingrained that can't be changed?
interesting post, considering just this morning I've dealt with the same exact issue, sort of. My problem is that at one point I decided to buy us (my oldest (6) son and I) a gamecube. Really it was a mistake I'm coming to think. What I've noticed is this, when my son plays something like a Linux game, on our old Atari, or some educational title on the old Mac I have here, no real problem. He enjoys it, is pleasant, and doesn't throw a fit when time comes to turn it off. Usually. However, same cannot be said with the more complex Windows games, or with the GameCube. He gets overly absorbed, and will often throw a fit when comes time to turn it offf. I cut out most of the windows games from him (plus my x86 died anyhow), and as to the gamecube, we restricted it to certain times on weekends. But still, as in this morning, it's making me think having it is a bad idea. So sounds like it's time to pull out the parental authority and do something about it. (anyone want to buy a used GC with a number of games?)
great, thanks for the reply.
I'm curious by your post as to how well Ubuntu runs on the G3. Reason I ask is that I have an old G3 b&w powermac here (350MHz with 256M of RAM (I can kick that up to 512 though if I want)) currently running OS 9 on it (OS X would be painful on such a configuration). Been thinking of putting another OS on it, but I'd prefer to keep a dual boot for the time being. How hard is it to do that? Does the ubuntu ppc installer come with a disk partitioner now? What type of performance does one get on such an "old" machine? Even running gnome?
Thanks