Upgrading is often the issue, no matter what the operating system. You're using Debian, and upgraded to X.org. Presumably, your old XF86Config file was modified during the process, and something went wrong.
Also, presumably, you have the option of temporarily reverting to a standard VGA driver and configuration, then trying to use Debian's configuration utility to get X.org working properly.
However, it appears you're taking this issue as evidence that the Linux desktop isn't mature. By these standards, no desktop really is. I've upgraded Windows 2000 PCs to Windows XP and perma-bluescreen'd them. I've attempted upgrades of Solaris workstations that ended similarly. I've broken Linux several times simply by upgrading as well.
This is a major issue, certainly, and it's a major stopping point for upgrades. But it equally applies to all operating systems, not just Linux. If you want to do a more realistic comparison, contrast your Linux upgrade with upgrading a Win2K box with a bunch of applications installed to WinXP SPK2, and see what results you get.
Actually, Slashdot is a news site. Specifically, news for nerds and stuff that matters.
Frankly, I can understand his beef with sound on Linux. There's no mucking about with "sound servers" on other mainstream operating systems. ALSA is a good attempt to fix that problem, but it's not quite there yet.
Interesting. If Linux and Unix were counted together, that would be a 45% market as opposed to Microsoft's 35%.
Does anyone know off the tops of their heads if Linux has always been counted separately in IDC statistics, or if this is new? If it's always been this way, then bully for Windows; however you feel about the OS personally, it's kicking pretty good butt in sales.
However, if this is the first year Linux, BSD, and other free Unix OS variants haven't been included in the Unix count, then this is awfully disingenuous of IDC.
Let's take a look at why an administrator might say both those quotes.
"Oh, no MS releases too many secuirty patches making my job as an admin hard, what a bunch of A-holes"
Looking at our hypothetical admin's thought processes, what's going through his head might be: "IE is just a damn application, but they've embedded it into the OS. So every time they release a patch for this friggin' application, I have to patch! I'd prefer to just remove the damn thing, but no... There's no uninstaller for it."
And now, let's look at the next quote.
"*Stoopid* MS is going to take a month to release a security patch, what a bunch of A-holes. Firefox ROX#$%^&!"
So what's the administrator thinking on this one? It's pretty simple: "Okay, so now this damnable embedded application, this junk browser that has to be on my operating systems, isn't gonna be patched for a month? The way they did it before would have been acceptable if I could patch the application without worrying about it breaking the OS or making me reboot. But NEITHER of these patching methods works well for me. I've either gotta patch applications that might destabilize my systems all the time, or I've gotta give hackers the keys to my network for a month!"
So, while the point you're trying to make - i.e., that neither of the upgrading options Microsoft has provided are acceptable to admins - is a valid one, it's a situation Microsoft brought on themselves.
I know it doesn't help much after the fact, but it's fairly simple to make Mandr(whatever) sniff out only the printers you want it to. The advanced options really aren't terribly advanced.
When I say "three months" I mean "several years."
on
Mapping the Mind
·
· Score: 1
Not really, of course, but in this case "three months" was an arbitrary stretch of time. It takes longer for some "definitive" works on the mind to become not-so-definitive, but it happens all of them eventually, at least so far.
Perhaps this one's different, but like I said, I'm skeptical. I don't think anyone has all the answers on the human mind. And as I meantioned earlier, I don't really believe in the human mind as a catch-all for all people.
Re:Mistaking his wife for a hat
on
Mapping the Mind
·
· Score: 1
Is his wife's name Alice? If so, that's really quite weird. Maybe all our minds do work the same way after all.
I'm generally skeptical of this kind of thing.
on
Mapping the Mind
·
· Score: 1
Too many books have purported to finally explain this aspect or that aspect of the human psyche, or (worse yet) explain the entirety of the human mind. And invariably, three months later someone else writes an equally exhaustive study that contradicts many points of the previous one.
My conclusion? There is no such thing as the human mind. There's Fred's mind. There's Alice's mind. There's Bob's mind. But the human mind? Some catch-all that accurately describes why we, as a species, do the things we do? Don't believe it.
That's not to say this particular book wouldn't be a good read. In fact, it sounds fascinating. But I'm a lot more interested in how much of it will turn out to be bunk in three months.
The screenshots look like someone from the Microsoft design team saw a Mac and a Fedora machine side by side, and shoved them together.
Perhaps it's just the techno-nerd in me, but I can't stand it when my computer tries to hide things like actual file locations from me, which is what the new Explorer seems to be doing. The very first thing I do when I set up a Windows machine is turn off all the GUI "features" that hide the contents of directories, file extensions, and menus from me.
It's hard to say how much monetary clout Microsoft has beyond its value on paper. Certainly, they have a lot of value in investor funds available to them, and because of accounting methods that allowed them to exclude stock option grants from their expense statements, they've been able to consistently beat earnings estimates.
But from some perspectives, that looks like a pyramid scheme. Microsoft's single most important product isn't Windows, but Microsoft itself. Or more specifically, Microsoft stock. As long as the stock continues to rise in price, it remains an attractive purchase for investors who (rightly) see that it will continue to increase in value.
But as soon as that stock stops rising, the investor funds will slow to a trickle, and Microsoft will be forced to survive solely on the profits from its software and the actual cash it has in the bank. Is that enough by itself?
I use it almost exclusively now for my music-playing needs. It has an iTunes-like interface for music management, it can use MusicBrainz to generate info for your songs, it organizes them based on whatever criteria (author, album, track number, etc.) you like, and it's got dcop interfaces for everything, which means you can script anything you like. I like it more than any of the other players I've tried.
I use it with (shameless plug) Media-Detect and LinEAK to control it with my multimedia keyboard.
This is what I actually recommend to friends and family who want to surf the net securely and still use Windows.
1. Installation
a. Divide your hard drive into two partitions, even though with large drives size isn't an issue anymore.
b. Install the base OS (including patches) on the C: drive. Do this offline, and install the patches from CD.
c. Install an antivirus application (do not install two or more, because they will probably be incompatible with each other, and you will not gain any benefit from it!)
d. Install a personal firewall and 1 or more spyware/adware scanners.
e. Install any patches/updates for your antivirus, firewall, and spyware/adware scanner applications. Again, do it from a CD, not the net. At this point, you should not be online yet!
f. Install the base set of applications you plan to use, including all patches if possible. I recommend that this include an alternative browser to IE and an alternative mail client to Outlook.
g. Assign your My Documents, Favorites, and other important data folders to a path on the D: drive. You will be keeping all data on the D: drive.
2. Configuration
a. Disable all unnecessary Windows services, like the messaging service.
b. If the person using this computer is an experienced Windows user, Power User rights might be acceptable. Otherwise, for day-to-day activities, use a regular User account.
c. Once Windows is configured to an acceptable level, use a backup/imaging application to image the C: drive to a bootable CD-ROM.
3. Maintenance
a. Enable automatic Windows Updating. If an update is installed, create a new backup image.
b. If you install a new application, create a new backup image.
c. Schedule automatic updates of your antivirus and firewall software. If your last backup image has definitions older than 1 month, create a new backup image.
d. Keep ALL data on the D: drive and scan BOTH drives regularly with your antivirus and spyware/adware scanners. I recommend a weekly scan.
e. Make weekly (or maybe more frequently) backups of your data.
So far, this method has proven remarkably successful.
If you could uninstall all of WMP, there wouldn't be a problem. It would be a simple matter for Microsoft to make WMP an optional component; it certainly was in the past.
You can remove up2date from Redhat distros. Same thing for apt-get and Portage. But you can't remove WMP any more than you can remove IE from Windows. You're stuck with it. And having it on a server makes about as much sense as having IE on a server.
The logical fallacy in your statement can be easily demonstrated with bagels. Let us say your statement instead read as follows:
"Bagels with cream cheese is what society holds up to be the ideal. If you disagree, then you must also logically hold bagels with tapioca to be a valid, tasty treat."
Obviously, it does not follow that someone who likes choice in bagel spreads would necessarily like any and all possible combinations of bagel and x.
At this point, our society is trying to determine whether there is any logical point in preventing homosexual couples from marrying. Society has not begun questioning strictures against polygamy, incest, bestiality, pedophilia, or any one of a number of other possible (and impossible) pairings. In many of those cases, such as pedophilia, the logical argument against them is strong and abundantly clear to all; marriage between an adult and a being who cannot possibly consent to the marriage would have physiological and psychological impacts on the wellbeing of the one who cannot give consent.
So we are left with the question of homosexual marriage (all other topics brought in being red herrings at this point). The arguments against homosexual marriage typically boil down to these three:
1) It is against the arguer's religion.
2) The "tradition" question. "It's always been this way..."
3) The assertion that marriage is for children.
The first argument is categorically invalid for anyone whose religious opinions differ. For instance, I am agnostic, and do not hold any religious text to have any meaning whatsoever outside of what one finds in it personally, and that is a matter between oneself and God. The proscription against a man "laying with another man" in Leviticus means literally nothing to me.
The second argument is not only illogical (if we did things the way we always did them, we'd still be picking lice out of each other's fur in the trees), but it is historically untrue. Prior to the Civil Rights Act, marriage was between one man and one woman of the same race. Earlier incarnations made the woman the slave/property of the man. In some cultures, marriages are even now still political in nature, and not at all based on the desires/loves of the marrying couple. Redefining marriage to include homosexual couples would be a change, but it wouldn't be a drastic one.
The third argument is the most persuasive on the surface. Obviously, a stable home is important to children. However, men and women beyond child-rearing age are currently allowed to marry, as are infertile couples. Moreover, even many fertile couples are married without producing children (I am an example of that). If the sole purpose of marriage was for the generation/rearing of children, then marriages such as mine would necessarily be invalid.
In the absence of logical arguments against homosexual marriage, it appears that homosexual marriage is eventually going to be a fact in the United States. It is already overwhelmingly supported by the 16-29 demographic, and at this point I'm confident it's just a matter of time.
Right now, if you vote Green, Libertarian, or any of the other parties currently running in the presidential election, your vote really is wasted.
Why? Because those guys are not going to get elected. Unless something truly drastic happens, the next President of the United States of America is going to be either George W. Bush or John F. Kerry. A vote for one of the other guys has exactly zero effect on the outcome, other than reducing the amount of votes going to the Democrat or Republican candidates.
That's OK in one of the heavily red or heavily blue states. Getting a significant voice for any of these parties in national politics is a Good Thing (tm). But right now, because of inherent problems with the electoral system the United States uses, I don't consider it a good idea to go third-party in a battleground state.
The problem is twofold: First, we have the electoral college, which actually elects the President. In most states, electoral votes aren't divided up amongst the candidates based on percentages, they all go to the winner. Someone who wins with 50.03% of the popular vote gets all the electoral votes, while the one who gets 49.97% of the popular vote gets none of the electoral votes.
But the second (and worse) problem is that we don't have instant run-off elections. If 47% of the populace votes for the Democrat, 5% for the Green Party candidate, and 48% for the Republican, then the candidate more than half of the population voted against is elected.
In an instant run-off election, third party candidates could be voted for safely, because if your first choice doesn't win, your second choice might. Requiring an actual majority of the votes to win would, in the above example, guarantee a Democrat the victory, because the folks who voted Green would almost certainly vote Democrat for the run-off. Thus we'd get the candidate most people find at least acceptable, as opposed to the candidate most people find objectionable.
Unfortunately, we don't have instant run-offs, and Republicans will never allow them to happen while they're in power.
The site loadux.com is a pay service ($6.99) not actually associated with Mandrake. In other words, you pay them for something Mandrake will soon be releasing to everyone for free, and Mandrake gets nothing.
You want the new Mandrake NOW NOW NOW? You've got six choices:
1) Get a club membership. You get tons of apps prepackaged as Mandrake RPMs and dedicated mirrors, too.
2) Make a friend with someone who already has a club membership. Nothing wrong with making copies of the CDs.
3) Learn the art of patience, and wait for the general release.
4) Download the current Cooker. It's gonna be essentially the same.
5) Download the sources and compile it yourself. Pain in the butt, but no one ever said the GPL means they have to provide you binaries, only source.
6) Pay these guys $6.99 to download the images from them. Please note: This option will automatically make you an asshat.
I'd say club membership is worth it, if you happen to prefer Mandrake as your primary distro. I appreciate the dedicated mirrors for club members quite a bit. Makes patch times much faster.
I also like the repositories for software that are available to club members. I have yet to find a piece of software out there that someone didn't turn into a Mandrake RPM, and the club mirrors seem to have it all. Sure, you can find them other places, too, but all in all it's nice to have everything in one place.
That logical critique of Enderle's keynote belongs in a text-book. It is systematic and devastating. Nothing I can say will do it justice, so I'll just recommend that Slashdot readers interested in logical argument construction (and deconstruction) read the piece. It's long, but well worth it.
I think you have some very good points, but I think you're discounting the improvements that have already been made.
Most distros have a package management system for adding/removing application easily, without the user having to know more than the root password (to gain the rights necessary to install the package). Users are free to stray into tarballs if they desire, and go through the whole./configure && make && make install process, but they're not forced to.
Especially with user-oriented distributions like Knoppix, a user can go without seeing a tarball (or even a command line) for most of their computing experience. Need to install an application? Just click on the rpm/deb/whatever, type in your password, and voila!
There's certainly room for improvement, of course. I'd love to see a GUI that can take most tarballs and figure out what dependencies they'll need filled before they're be installed, install those dependencies in an easy, transparent manner, and compile/install the selected application. Gosh, it would be great if it could do that really quickly, too.
Care to write it?
The wave of the (Linux) future...
on
Moving To Linux
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
These book/CD combos are a godsend to those of us trying to convince friends and family to switch (so we no longer have to clean viruses, trojans, and spyware from their computers every few weeks).
I'm easing my family into it right now. The trick is to start by introducing the easiest open-source applications that are available on both platforms. Pull the old "Here, I'll 'upgrade' your browser for you, and you won't get pop-ups anymore" trick and get them used to Firefox. Follow it up with Thunderbird and OpenOffice, and they'll gradually start wondering why they put up with all the problems they used to have in the first place.
That's when you whip out the book and the Knoppix CD, and introduce them to the same applications they're used to on a different operating system. Get them curious, get them interested, and then they'll start doing the work for you.
I had simply meant to point out to the original "spelling nazi" that correcting spelling/grammar mistakes when one commits them oneself is amusingly ironic.
It appears I also engaged in some unintentional jingoism, having made the assumption that the original poster was American.
I apologize.
I caught that right as I was clicking Submit. I'd love to be able to claim it was an intentional piece of irony, but the reality is that I simply hit the 'i' instead of the 'u' by mistake.
Perhaps this could be a lesson to all those who feel an insatiable need to correct spelling and grammar online without first proof-reading their own material.
If you're going to be a "spelling nazi," permit me to be a "grammar nazi." Please note the positioning of periods, commas, and other similar punctiation inside the quotes.
There are a lot of problematic elements in basic grammar that the technologically literate crowd at Slashdot, and even the legal eagles at Groklaw, have let fall by the wayside. I'm sure I've committed some egregious error in this very post, aside from responding to an off-topic comment with an even more off-topic one...
Slashdot Mirror
Upgrading is often the issue, no matter what the operating system. You're using Debian, and upgraded to X.org. Presumably, your old XF86Config file was modified during the process, and something went wrong.
Also, presumably, you have the option of temporarily reverting to a standard VGA driver and configuration, then trying to use Debian's configuration utility to get X.org working properly.
However, it appears you're taking this issue as evidence that the Linux desktop isn't mature. By these standards, no desktop really is. I've upgraded Windows 2000 PCs to Windows XP and perma-bluescreen'd them. I've attempted upgrades of Solaris workstations that ended similarly. I've broken Linux several times simply by upgrading as well.
This is a major issue, certainly, and it's a major stopping point for upgrades. But it equally applies to all operating systems, not just Linux. If you want to do a more realistic comparison, contrast your Linux upgrade with upgrading a Win2K box with a bunch of applications installed to WinXP SPK2, and see what results you get.
Actually, Slashdot is a news site. Specifically, news for nerds and stuff that matters.
Frankly, I can understand his beef with sound on Linux. There's no mucking about with "sound servers" on other mainstream operating systems. ALSA is a good attempt to fix that problem, but it's not quite there yet.
Interesting. If Linux and Unix were counted together, that would be a 45% market as opposed to Microsoft's 35%.
Does anyone know off the tops of their heads if Linux has always been counted separately in IDC statistics, or if this is new? If it's always been this way, then bully for Windows; however you feel about the OS personally, it's kicking pretty good butt in sales.
However, if this is the first year Linux, BSD, and other free Unix OS variants haven't been included in the Unix count, then this is awfully disingenuous of IDC.
And now, let's look at the next quote. So what's the administrator thinking on this one? It's pretty simple: "Okay, so now this damnable embedded application, this junk browser that has to be on my operating systems, isn't gonna be patched for a month? The way they did it before would have been acceptable if I could patch the application without worrying about it breaking the OS or making me reboot. But NEITHER of these patching methods works well for me. I've either gotta patch applications that might destabilize my systems all the time, or I've gotta give hackers the keys to my network for a month!"
So, while the point you're trying to make - i.e., that neither of the upgrading options Microsoft has provided are acceptable to admins - is a valid one, it's a situation Microsoft brought on themselves.
I know it doesn't help much after the fact, but it's fairly simple to make Mandr(whatever) sniff out only the printers you want it to. The advanced options really aren't terribly advanced.
Not really, of course, but in this case "three months" was an arbitrary stretch of time. It takes longer for some "definitive" works on the mind to become not-so-definitive, but it happens all of them eventually, at least so far.
Perhaps this one's different, but like I said, I'm skeptical. I don't think anyone has all the answers on the human mind. And as I meantioned earlier, I don't really believe in the human mind as a catch-all for all people.
Is his wife's name Alice? If so, that's really quite weird. Maybe all our minds do work the same way after all.
Too many books have purported to finally explain this aspect or that aspect of the human psyche, or (worse yet) explain the entirety of the human mind. And invariably, three months later someone else writes an equally exhaustive study that contradicts many points of the previous one.
My conclusion? There is no such thing as the human mind. There's Fred's mind. There's Alice's mind. There's Bob's mind. But the human mind? Some catch-all that accurately describes why we, as a species, do the things we do? Don't believe it.
That's not to say this particular book wouldn't be a good read. In fact, it sounds fascinating. But I'm a lot more interested in how much of it will turn out to be bunk in three months.
The screenshots look like someone from the Microsoft design team saw a Mac and a Fedora machine side by side, and shoved them together.
Perhaps it's just the techno-nerd in me, but I can't stand it when my computer tries to hide things like actual file locations from me, which is what the new Explorer seems to be doing. The very first thing I do when I set up a Windows machine is turn off all the GUI "features" that hide the contents of directories, file extensions, and menus from me.
Does anyone actually find these features useful?
I'm changing my name to "A. Kernel Programmer" if that actually happens.
Let's see how long it will take before someone says the study is invalid...
The study is invalid!!!
It's hard to say how much monetary clout Microsoft has beyond its value on paper. Certainly, they have a lot of value in investor funds available to them, and because of accounting methods that allowed them to exclude stock option grants from their expense statements, they've been able to consistently beat earnings estimates.
But from some perspectives, that looks like a pyramid scheme. Microsoft's single most important product isn't Windows, but Microsoft itself. Or more specifically, Microsoft stock. As long as the stock continues to rise in price, it remains an attractive purchase for investors who (rightly) see that it will continue to increase in value.
But as soon as that stock stops rising, the investor funds will slow to a trickle, and Microsoft will be forced to survive solely on the profits from its software and the actual cash it has in the bank. Is that enough by itself?
I use it almost exclusively now for my music-playing needs. It has an iTunes-like interface for music management, it can use MusicBrainz to generate info for your songs, it organizes them based on whatever criteria (author, album, track number, etc.) you like, and it's got dcop interfaces for everything, which means you can script anything you like. I like it more than any of the other players I've tried.
I use it with (shameless plug) Media-Detect and LinEAK to control it with my multimedia keyboard.
This is what I actually recommend to friends and family who want to surf the net securely and still use Windows.
1. Installation
a. Divide your hard drive into two partitions, even though with large drives size isn't an issue anymore.
b. Install the base OS (including patches) on the C: drive. Do this offline, and install the patches from CD.
c. Install an antivirus application (do not install two or more, because they will probably be incompatible with each other, and you will not gain any benefit from it!)
d. Install a personal firewall and 1 or more spyware/adware scanners.
e. Install any patches/updates for your antivirus, firewall, and spyware/adware scanner applications. Again, do it from a CD, not the net. At this point, you should not be online yet!
f. Install the base set of applications you plan to use, including all patches if possible. I recommend that this include an alternative browser to IE and an alternative mail client to Outlook.
g. Assign your My Documents, Favorites, and other important data folders to a path on the D: drive. You will be keeping all data on the D: drive.
2. Configuration
a. Disable all unnecessary Windows services, like the messaging service.
b. If the person using this computer is an experienced Windows user, Power User rights might be acceptable. Otherwise, for day-to-day activities, use a regular User account.
c. Once Windows is configured to an acceptable level, use a backup/imaging application to image the C: drive to a bootable CD-ROM.
3. Maintenance
a. Enable automatic Windows Updating. If an update is installed, create a new backup image.
b. If you install a new application, create a new backup image.
c. Schedule automatic updates of your antivirus and firewall software. If your last backup image has definitions older than 1 month, create a new backup image.
d. Keep ALL data on the D: drive and scan BOTH drives regularly with your antivirus and spyware/adware scanners. I recommend a weekly scan.
e. Make weekly (or maybe more frequently) backups of your data.
So far, this method has proven remarkably successful.
If you could uninstall all of WMP, there wouldn't be a problem. It would be a simple matter for Microsoft to make WMP an optional component; it certainly was in the past.
You can remove up2date from Redhat distros. Same thing for apt-get and Portage. But you can't remove WMP any more than you can remove IE from Windows. You're stuck with it. And having it on a server makes about as much sense as having IE on a server.
Or non sequitor, if you like.
The logical fallacy in your statement can be easily demonstrated with bagels. Let us say your statement instead read as follows:
"Bagels with cream cheese is what society holds up to be the ideal. If you disagree, then you must also logically hold bagels with tapioca to be a valid, tasty treat."
Obviously, it does not follow that someone who likes choice in bagel spreads would necessarily like any and all possible combinations of bagel and x.
At this point, our society is trying to determine whether there is any logical point in preventing homosexual couples from marrying. Society has not begun questioning strictures against polygamy, incest, bestiality, pedophilia, or any one of a number of other possible (and impossible) pairings. In many of those cases, such as pedophilia, the logical argument against them is strong and abundantly clear to all; marriage between an adult and a being who cannot possibly consent to the marriage would have physiological and psychological impacts on the wellbeing of the one who cannot give consent.
So we are left with the question of homosexual marriage (all other topics brought in being red herrings at this point). The arguments against homosexual marriage typically boil down to these three:
1) It is against the arguer's religion.
2) The "tradition" question. "It's always been this way..."
3) The assertion that marriage is for children.
The first argument is categorically invalid for anyone whose religious opinions differ. For instance, I am agnostic, and do not hold any religious text to have any meaning whatsoever outside of what one finds in it personally, and that is a matter between oneself and God. The proscription against a man "laying with another man" in Leviticus means literally nothing to me.
The second argument is not only illogical (if we did things the way we always did them, we'd still be picking lice out of each other's fur in the trees), but it is historically untrue. Prior to the Civil Rights Act, marriage was between one man and one woman of the same race. Earlier incarnations made the woman the slave/property of the man. In some cultures, marriages are even now still political in nature, and not at all based on the desires/loves of the marrying couple. Redefining marriage to include homosexual couples would be a change, but it wouldn't be a drastic one.
The third argument is the most persuasive on the surface. Obviously, a stable home is important to children. However, men and women beyond child-rearing age are currently allowed to marry, as are infertile couples. Moreover, even many fertile couples are married without producing children (I am an example of that). If the sole purpose of marriage was for the generation/rearing of children, then marriages such as mine would necessarily be invalid.
In the absence of logical arguments against homosexual marriage, it appears that homosexual marriage is eventually going to be a fact in the United States. It is already overwhelmingly supported by the 16-29 demographic, and at this point I'm confident it's just a matter of time.
Right now, if you vote Green, Libertarian, or any of the other parties currently running in the presidential election, your vote really is wasted.
Why? Because those guys are not going to get elected. Unless something truly drastic happens, the next President of the United States of America is going to be either George W. Bush or John F. Kerry. A vote for one of the other guys has exactly zero effect on the outcome, other than reducing the amount of votes going to the Democrat or Republican candidates.
That's OK in one of the heavily red or heavily blue states. Getting a significant voice for any of these parties in national politics is a Good Thing (tm). But right now, because of inherent problems with the electoral system the United States uses, I don't consider it a good idea to go third-party in a battleground state.
The problem is twofold: First, we have the electoral college, which actually elects the President. In most states, electoral votes aren't divided up amongst the candidates based on percentages, they all go to the winner. Someone who wins with 50.03% of the popular vote gets all the electoral votes, while the one who gets 49.97% of the popular vote gets none of the electoral votes.
But the second (and worse) problem is that we don't have instant run-off elections. If 47% of the populace votes for the Democrat, 5% for the Green Party candidate, and 48% for the Republican, then the candidate more than half of the population voted against is elected.
In an instant run-off election, third party candidates could be voted for safely, because if your first choice doesn't win, your second choice might. Requiring an actual majority of the votes to win would, in the above example, guarantee a Democrat the victory, because the folks who voted Green would almost certainly vote Democrat for the run-off. Thus we'd get the candidate most people find at least acceptable, as opposed to the candidate most people find objectionable.
Unfortunately, we don't have instant run-offs, and Republicans will never allow them to happen while they're in power.
The site loadux.com is a pay service ($6.99) not actually associated with Mandrake. In other words, you pay them for something Mandrake will soon be releasing to everyone for free, and Mandrake gets nothing.
You want the new Mandrake NOW NOW NOW? You've got six choices:
1) Get a club membership. You get tons of apps prepackaged as Mandrake RPMs and dedicated mirrors, too.
2) Make a friend with someone who already has a club membership. Nothing wrong with making copies of the CDs.
3) Learn the art of patience, and wait for the general release.
4) Download the current Cooker. It's gonna be essentially the same.
5) Download the sources and compile it yourself. Pain in the butt, but no one ever said the GPL means they have to provide you binaries, only source.
6) Pay these guys $6.99 to download the images from them. Please note: This option will automatically make you an asshat.
I'd say club membership is worth it, if you happen to prefer Mandrake as your primary distro. I appreciate the dedicated mirrors for club members quite a bit. Makes patch times much faster.
I also like the repositories for software that are available to club members. I have yet to find a piece of software out there that someone didn't turn into a Mandrake RPM, and the club mirrors seem to have it all. Sure, you can find them other places, too, but all in all it's nice to have everything in one place.
That logical critique of Enderle's keynote belongs in a text-book. It is systematic and devastating. Nothing I can say will do it justice, so I'll just recommend that Slashdot readers interested in logical argument construction (and deconstruction) read the piece. It's long, but well worth it.
I think you have some very good points, but I think you're discounting the improvements that have already been made.
./configure && make && make install process, but they're not forced to.
Most distros have a package management system for adding/removing application easily, without the user having to know more than the root password (to gain the rights necessary to install the package). Users are free to stray into tarballs if they desire, and go through the whole
Especially with user-oriented distributions like Knoppix, a user can go without seeing a tarball (or even a command line) for most of their computing experience. Need to install an application? Just click on the rpm/deb/whatever, type in your password, and voila!
There's certainly room for improvement, of course. I'd love to see a GUI that can take most tarballs and figure out what dependencies they'll need filled before they're be installed, install those dependencies in an easy, transparent manner, and compile/install the selected application. Gosh, it would be great if it could do that really quickly, too.
Care to write it?
These book/CD combos are a godsend to those of us trying to convince friends and family to switch (so we no longer have to clean viruses, trojans, and spyware from their computers every few weeks).
I'm easing my family into it right now. The trick is to start by introducing the easiest open-source applications that are available on both platforms. Pull the old "Here, I'll 'upgrade' your browser for you, and you won't get pop-ups anymore" trick and get them used to Firefox. Follow it up with Thunderbird and OpenOffice, and they'll gradually start wondering why they put up with all the problems they used to have in the first place.
That's when you whip out the book and the Knoppix CD, and introduce them to the same applications they're used to on a different operating system. Get them curious, get them interested, and then they'll start doing the work for you.
I had simply meant to point out to the original "spelling nazi" that correcting spelling/grammar mistakes when one commits them oneself is amusingly ironic. It appears I also engaged in some unintentional jingoism, having made the assumption that the original poster was American. I apologize.
I caught that right as I was clicking Submit. I'd love to be able to claim it was an intentional piece of irony, but the reality is that I simply hit the 'i' instead of the 'u' by mistake.
Perhaps this could be a lesson to all those who feel an insatiable need to correct spelling and grammar online without first proof-reading their own material.
And in conclusion...
Tounge.
Punctiation.
"Periods outside quotes".
If you're going to be a "spelling nazi," permit me to be a "grammar nazi." Please note the positioning of periods, commas, and other similar punctiation inside the quotes.
There are a lot of problematic elements in basic grammar that the technologically literate crowd at Slashdot, and even the legal eagles at Groklaw, have let fall by the wayside. I'm sure I've committed some egregious error in this very post, aside from responding to an off-topic comment with an even more off-topic one...