So far I've seen a lot of posts where people are already saying Gentoo, Debian, LFS, etc...
Almost all Linux distros are componentised. OK everyone let's hear it: "Linux is not Windows."
We've got distros mainly because we aren't all kernal coders who know all the in's and out's of every single chipset. Quite frankly I don't know who even has the time (but apparently some of you do). We have generic groups of packages/aptget/emerge/etc. to allow for faster deployment. And that's another beautiful part to Linux: Choices!
Yes, perhaps it's overwhelming at first, but you can build it from the ground up if that's what you really want or just pile it on thick and zesty!
The author wants to promote Progeny and "Componentized Linux", and I think there's always room for Yet Another Distro (YAD), but to say the others are doomed to fail because they came on 3 CD's (Think Fidora) is misleading. Mandrake 9.1 came on 3 CD's but it certainly won't force you to install all of it. In fact, you can just select a kernal only option, and it won't even ask for the other two disks. Not only that, but you can hand select only the packages you want. How cool is that?
So I guess what I'm trying to say is that most linux distros have options to allow their users to build it pretty much from the ground up. The reason for the different distros lies in what their vision of the ultimate system looks like when it's totally loaded down.
OK, so let's assume that you're entitled to a really nice puffy winter coat to help conserve heat, and you cover the skin with baby oil to help prevent chapping (And I don't assume to know that either of these would be effective in the least). So what is the lowest possible atmospheric pressure the human body could reasonably achieve?
And yeah, it's probably a good idea to assume you'd be breathing pure oxigen so you could keep the O2 pressure as low as possible to help the body adjust.
OK, so at the risk of showing off my ignorance (I know... already too late.) Here's a question I've been pondering for some time now:
Obviously if you just abruptly depressurised a person, they'd form nitrogen bubbles in their blood and contract the bends, and probably die. But what if... And this is a big morbid what if... What if you slowly depressurised a person while having an oxigen mask securely (but comfortably) attached to their face? Could you eventually bring a human body down to zero atmospheres and they'd be able to stay alive?
Of course we all want the scumbags to go to jail for bringing about this tragedy of the commons, but at the same time I can't help but wonder if it's possible to use this bit of law as the first step in the direction towards censoring any internet content that someone might find offensive.
Oh sure... Someone could argue that partybeef.com could be typed in by a 6 year old looking for snacks for her friends, (not a real site, so use your imagination...) Next thing you know the site operator ends up as a piece of party beef in a federal prison because someone decided it was obviously misleading.
What is obvious to me is that the next step will involve going after anyone who puts objectionable material on the net without it being clearly labeled, registered, and hidden behind a credit card required brown paper wrapper page.
And what about unintentionally misleading Google results? When will they hold us liable for that? This one actually disturbs me a little.
Jabba the Hut had Lando freeze a bunch of people including Han Solo in Carbonite. He hung Han on the wall where he was later rescued. The rest got launched into space and were used for target practice. This was probably their remains.
Ah, come on... It's late, it's Friday, and it's supposed to be funny!:-)
The act of picking a lock is to obtain access in an unorthodox way. I suppose one could pick a lock with a stick of dynamite.
Of course the other issue is that it uses light... Light implies electric. Electric locks may not be a "Good Thing" (TM) when your power goes out, or the batteries run down. What if water gets inside? If it's unpickable, then how do you open it in emergency situations when the power goes out?
Perhaps it should read: "Interesting Nift-value Lock" and come with a stick of dynamite in case of emergency.
It's the same thing with hurricane predictions. Oh sure, they've got a decent grip on about where it's headed, but those things can change direction and completely nullify any predictions made 24 hours earlier.
Reality doesn't scale down to the simulation level very well when you need an extreme degree of accuracy.
"Terrorists only have to be lucky once. We have to be lucky every time." -can't remember who said it.
If OJ ever finds the real killers...
If Nader ever gets elected president...
If Pete Rose ever gets into baseball's HOF...
If SCO ever wins against IBM...
If Osama ever turns himself in...
If I ever get laid...
Apple has a nice product, but let's face it, we are in absolutely no danger of them becoming a dominant force in general computing.
I think (though not completely positive) that the parent is referring to the fact that MS Windows code actually contains Unix code for use in interfacing with Unix systems. Since SCO is licensing only binaries, and MS contains those binaries within a wrapper, then servers utilizing MS software would have to pay SCO the $699 per processor fee. (Of course I could be mistaken, so please consult an expert.)
Firstly, thank you for the thoughtful response. Although replying to each point would get horribly long winded I'll try to address some of your comments. I assure you it's not because I don't appreciate everything you said.:-)
The other logical fallacy I see in your comment here is that "government" and "corporations" employ hundreds of millions of exactly the kind of "average people" you describe. We use abstract expressions like "government" and "corporations" to describe the *people* who administer them. Without those people the abstractions have no meaning.
True. "Of the people, by the people, for the people". But the same could be said of communist China. Those people are assumed to be living under an extremely oppressive government. It shows no signs of weakening. Are they just a collection of evil people? Or the victims of horrible misguidance? Even if they're being forced at gunpoint, somebody has to be willing to hold that gun.
Are you saying that we need to abolish governments and corporations? If so, what comes next?..;)
No... I would not suggest that governments or corporations should be removed. I'm suggesting that people look deeper into the motivations of their government, and (probably more dangerously) take a stronger stance against corperations that should lobby in self-interest to the detriment of living independently from corporations. It may be hard to comprehend this idea, but a corporation works very hard to make you afraid to think it even possible to live without them. Could you live without Microsoft? What if Boeing didn't exist? GM? Granted, we live in a world where they do, but there's the rub. These are a few of the companies that would prefer if legislators would just take their wise counsel without question, and prescribe new laws to allow them to operate unfettered. People need to realize they can affect real control of these situations in spite of the money involved, but it takes a little incitefulness to get them motivated.;-)
You might like to think of what it is that these lobbyists use in their "convincing"...;) It's often money, isn't it? The problem for your analogy here, too, is that it overlooks the difference between what is voluntary and what is not.
Voluntary is subjective. A despot with a gun can ask a group of people who wants to "volunteer" to be shot in the head. But I'd like to walk into my local department store and voluntarily buy a pair of leather athletic shoes made in the USA. Certainly if you want to make your point you can still find companies out there that make such shoes in this country (I'm hoping at least...), but most of the time I'm stuck with only the "made in China" option because the American made counterpart doesn't seem to exist in my neighborhood, and no one seems to care. The "shoes" analogy is just a single generic example. There are too many of these types of scenarios.
You might not be aware of it, but watching TV is entirely voluntary...:) I hate much of it personally, and rarely watch anymore. Unlike the compulsion the government uses to collect taxes, no one who doesn't want one has to own a TV, let alone watch it. What I get from your remarks is that you apparently watch way too much TV yourself--so do what I do--don't watch TV and do something else instead.
Actually, I watch very little television. I derive my knowledge about television from conversations I have with the people around me, and the occasional glance when I visit them in their homes. While it is true that TV is completely voluntary, it seems to have the same effect upon the masses as opiates. People get so addicted it's impossible to hold conversations without them mentioning, "Did you see last night's 'Survivor'?" Sadly you can't just tell people not to watch so much TV... You'd sooner talk a crack addict out of their junk.
By way of example: be sure and wake me when Microsoft is able to haul the DOJ into court and break it up...;)
Oh that was precious! I'll do that, and you can wake me when the DOJ can actually manage to break up Microsoft.;-D
Again, thank you for the response. It was a rare pleasure!:-)
First of all, make no mistake that to the corporations and government, the average person is little more than a veal calf. You are merely a by-product of what they desire, and of course managing that takes time and energy away from them, so naturally they will regard the common citizen with a certain degree of contempt. After all, don't you feel a little ripped off when you have to pay your taxes? Corporatists feel a little ripped off when they have to share liberty and dignity with you. They regard themselves as the exceptional few, the elite, the have's. And the rest of you? Well... There you are.
They keep you busy with jobs that require more time than brains. They keep you running on a treadmill for as many hours as possible. It disorients and distracts. It keeps your mind off the fact that you are slowly slipping and sliding down that slope. But keep breeding- They are going to need that population to stay high so they will have a never ending resource of willing subjects.
They rely on having large numbers of people, because when people become a scarce resource, the value of humanity increases. It's harder to control a person who has value, so the more idiots they can create, the less value the average, or even slightly above average person will have. It's only the privileged few that should enjoy life to the fullest, and a few token morons just for show, "See? Anyone can live like a king in America. So the problem is yours."
So the corporatists have overtaken the government with layers of lobbyists. They have convinced the "elected" leaders that they have the nations best interests at heart. They use you as a pawn, and they see the nuclear family as their greatest ad campaign. All that remains is to keep this little secret less than obvious.
Keep them watching those sports channels, the so-called reality based TV, and the endless parade of entertainment provided by the cable TV and TiVo. It keeps them off the streets, and ensures that the rabble stay out from under their agenda. Turn up the noise, and keep them riveted to the latest episode of "Survivor". If they have a tech fetish, let them watch Star Trek knock-offs, but never again show anything that might force them to think.
This technology we contrived does most of the work for us. But it's ingeniously engineered to have a drone standing over a mind-numbing machine for eight hours or more. This kills two birds with one stone: It keeps our standards artificially high, and keeps that drone occupied and out of our hair. If they don't like it, we'll start accusing them of being Luddites, and since the Luddites were destructive we can automatically associate and brand them with being vandals, and terrorists.
Nice, neat, and easy to justify.
OH LOOK! A TERROR THREAT! QUICK! BURY YOUR HEAD IN THE SAND! That's right... The big friendly corporate brother will take good care of you.
That ought to shut them up for a while...
Big business made this country what it is today. What will it turn this country into tomorrow.
OK, I'm done. Burn my karma and send in the flaming AC trolls.
What's really interesting about this case is the fact that Europe will more than likely approve the law without making any adjustments or making only superficial adjustments in order to say, "See? We took your side into consideration," without actually doing anything that would truly relieve any of the fears.
As time goes by it will be useful to observe how people will cling to an increasingly abusive state, and to see how many of them will turn on their own friends and relatives to ensure the safety of their own skin.
Meanwhile, for those of us who brave the -1 threshold I'm not even remotely surprised that this topic is being trolled to death. The corporatists have an agenda, and people trying to discuss their options threaten to interfere with their desire for unquestioned authority.
Hello?! There are 300 million people in this country. We're a long ways away from having that data available.
300 million people isn't a big deal to a computer. Think of it like this: You can hold a lot of details about a person's life within a single megabyte of text. Try printing a whole megabyte of raw text and you'll see that's quite a dosier. (*note, do note use the bloated MS Word format where "hello world" takes up 128K) Using 1MB per person, that comes to a mere 300 gigabytes of data. Hell, Google can sift through that much data in the blink of an eye. The technology is already there, and it's too damned easy to implement.
I know you're not trying to be dismissive, but just sweeping it under the carpet and remaining complicite simply because you accept the rhetoric that it's good for national security will only feed this beast even more. It will evolve into a massive "jobs program" bogged down by so much red tape and politics that you will have effectively created yet another corporate welfare system to support an industry that common people can no longer afford, corporate pawns will be forced to endure, and the wealthy upper class can't imagine living without.
If they're going to have a whole bunch of rules about the naming conventions of planets, then why don't they just make up a list in advance and each successive planet be named on a first discovered gets named basis?
I know it's the thrill of geek suspense that drives this naming nonsense, but geeze, it's just a name. Call the rose a stench-blossom and name the planet Fred.
Yeah... Fred... He was the god of underwear I think...
OK, I've got MDK9.1 obviously with XFree86, a 1.47GHz Athlon, and an ATI 7500. It's not top of the line by today's standards, but it manages. Being curious, I followed your "test" using Firebird.
Nope. I can't say I see any smearing. It looks pretty good.
I'm trying it right now as I type this response... I'm jerking the windows around left to right, right to left... Nope. Can't shake it.
Don't forget one of the most important phrases used to describe almost any system out there: YMMV: Your Mileage May Vary.
We should put these things into mass production, stategically place them throughout the entire world, then eraticate the entire mosquito population and make them go the way of the carrier pigeon.
OK, so I sound a little hateful, but I'm tired of being under them on the food chain. It hurts my self-esteem. (What's left of it anyway...)
I'm pretty sure from the posting pattern here on Slashdot that Microsoft has moles posting and trolling (and you guys know who you are), but for the life of me, I can't recall any law (IANAL) that prohibits the downloading of a "leaked file". Oh sure, we all know that possession of certain kinds of pornography and other files can get you into nasty trouble, but really... If that were the case, then why didn't the FBI start investigating IBM when SCO started belly-aching?
On the flip side, I've already given up on Microsoft, and want nothing further to do with them or their products, so somebody leaking their code is almost a bad joke to me at this point. The most likely conspiracy to come out of this is that the next version of the Linux kernal will have a cloud of accusations that it derived some of its functionality from Windows 2000 source. (Oh please...)
I guess the ugly part is dealing with the feds out there who are intent on taking names and kicking ass... After all, it's a national emergency! Microsoft's code has been leaked!
Feh.
Many of us have woke up to the fact that you don't need Windows to accomplish your goals on a computer. While the rest of of us are trying to actually get something done with our computers (instead of updating them every 15 minutes), Microsoft is suddenly crying out "Thieves!". Just how does MS come up with these horribly written plot devices?
It's both a valid and interesting point, but how many times do we have to keep second-guessing ourselves over the security of software? In general, it boils down to "who do you trust?"
In my case, I see it as, "Do I want to trust a company who's only interest is in generating a profit, or do I want to trust the broader base of humanity who wants to create an open and free system?"
Admittedly I've got a tin-foil hat collection to rival any slashdotter, so I'll try to advocate the devil as well with "Do I want to trust some band of amaturish zealots who lack a clear and unified mission statement, or do I want to trust a company that has shown an exceptional degree of responsibility by haveing a track record in producing enormous profits?"
Obviously both have appealing merits. So "who do you want to trust today?" (TM)
We all have our heroes into which we place our faith, and nobody likes to be let down by a hero. For some it's the almighty dollar, for others it's their faith that deep down, humanity tends to be good.
Eh... About the paranoia... Sorry, I started out on one subject and my mind wandered. I was overwhelmed by the other posts that looked awfully trollish.
As for your personal uses of Windows, I say fair enough... While I decided to switch to Linux, I'm actually an OS agnostic. (Not entirely true... WinXP makes me cringe, but prior versions are still pretty cool.) But I encourage you to try VLC media player (for your distro of course),and you'll have excellent DVD support in spite of your video card's lack of support. (YMMV)
Re:try and locate the magic bullet..
on
WineConf 2004 Wrapup
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· Score: 2, Informative
Wow... I didn't realize they've changed their policy on that... I use a slightly older version of Wine (7/9/03) to run three win32 apps, and no I don't have a Windows partition.
And on a slightly different subject, what's with all the trolls in this area? Does Microsoft hire moles to go flood the halls of Slashdot anytime someone points out that you can run some Win32 apps without MS Windows? Is it really necessary to point out that it's not a perfect solution, or a magic bullet?
Hey, if you need to use several apps developed under MS Windows that badly, then STICK WITH WINDOWS!!! But if there's just a couple of things you'd like to keep when you make the leap to Linux, then Wine offers a potential answer to your prayers.
You know, I almost hate to admit this now, but if it were not for the Wine project, I would have stuck with MS Windows. But I got to keep three of my favorite Win32 apps, and that was more than enough to help me move into my new Linux OS. There were other apps that I had to sacrifice, but it was worth it.
And oh yeah... For anyone that's using Mandrake 9.1 and having trouble getting Wine to work, I humbly offer a tutorial on getting it up and moving without MS Windows. I know everyone's cousin has a how-to on this subject, but I've tried to make it step-by-step easy.
There's also the option of using codeweavers' crossover products, which run IE on linux...
Thanks, but for now I'll pass. It gives me good reason to keep in touch with friends.;-)
Just wondering though... What about the licensing issues of running IE under Linux? I know somebody out there has had to have beaten that horse to death, but I must have missed that meeting, cause I honestly don't have a clue on that one.
Well, apparently the USPO is granting pantents on the absurd, hoping to use the numbering system to search for very large prime numbers as a bi-product.
Not only that, but it has to be useful... It's not even all that useful when weighed against the "annoyance" factor that most people experience from it.
TweakUI should be one of the earliest companions to any Windows user so as to quickly and easily remove that disfunctionality.
Slashdot Mirror
I suppose that depends on who's looking at it... Litterally! :-D
Almost all Linux distros are componentised. OK everyone let's hear it: "Linux is not Windows."
We've got distros mainly because we aren't all kernal coders who know all the in's and out's of every single chipset. Quite frankly I don't know who even has the time (but apparently some of you do). We have generic groups of packages/aptget/emerge/etc. to allow for faster deployment. And that's another beautiful part to Linux: Choices!
Yes, perhaps it's overwhelming at first, but you can build it from the ground up if that's what you really want or just pile it on thick and zesty!
The author wants to promote Progeny and "Componentized Linux", and I think there's always room for Yet Another Distro (YAD), but to say the others are doomed to fail because they came on 3 CD's (Think Fidora) is misleading. Mandrake 9.1 came on 3 CD's but it certainly won't force you to install all of it. In fact, you can just select a kernal only option, and it won't even ask for the other two disks. Not only that, but you can hand select only the packages you want. How cool is that?
So I guess what I'm trying to say is that most linux distros have options to allow their users to build it pretty much from the ground up. The reason for the different distros lies in what their vision of the ultimate system looks like when it's totally loaded down.
And yeah, it's probably a good idea to assume you'd be breathing pure oxigen so you could keep the O2 pressure as low as possible to help the body adjust.
Obviously if you just abruptly depressurised a person, they'd form nitrogen bubbles in their blood and contract the bends, and probably die. But what if... And this is a big morbid what if... What if you slowly depressurised a person while having an oxigen mask securely (but comfortably) attached to their face? Could you eventually bring a human body down to zero atmospheres and they'd be able to stay alive?
If not, what would be the lowest limit?
Oh sure... Someone could argue that partybeef.com could be typed in by a 6 year old looking for snacks for her friends, (not a real site, so use your imagination...) Next thing you know the site operator ends up as a piece of party beef in a federal prison because someone decided it was obviously misleading.
What is obvious to me is that the next step will involve going after anyone who puts objectionable material on the net without it being clearly labeled, registered, and hidden behind a credit card required brown paper wrapper page.
And what about unintentionally misleading Google results? When will they hold us liable for that? This one actually disturbs me a little.
This is /. remember? We like it complicated. ;-)
Jabba the Hut had Lando freeze a bunch of people including Han Solo in Carbonite. He hung Han on the wall where he was later rescued. The rest got launched into space and were used for target practice. This was probably their remains.
Ah, come on... It's late, it's Friday, and it's supposed to be funny! :-)
Of course the other issue is that it uses light... Light implies electric. Electric locks may not be a "Good Thing" (TM) when your power goes out, or the batteries run down. What if water gets inside? If it's unpickable, then how do you open it in emergency situations when the power goes out?
Perhaps it should read: "Interesting Nift-value Lock" and come with a stick of dynamite in case of emergency.
Reality doesn't scale down to the simulation level very well when you need an extreme degree of accuracy.
"Terrorists only have to be lucky once. We have to be lucky every time." -can't remember who said it.
Oh please...
If OJ ever finds the real killers...
If Nader ever gets elected president...
If Pete Rose ever gets into baseball's HOF...
If SCO ever wins against IBM...
If Osama ever turns himself in...
If I ever get laid...
Apple has a nice product, but let's face it, we are in absolutely no danger of them becoming a dominant force in general computing.
I think (though not completely positive) that the parent is referring to the fact that MS Windows code actually contains Unix code for use in interfacing with Unix systems. Since SCO is licensing only binaries, and MS contains those binaries within a wrapper, then servers utilizing MS software would have to pay SCO the $699 per processor fee. (Of course I could be mistaken, so please consult an expert.)
The other logical fallacy I see in your comment here is that "government" and "corporations" employ hundreds of millions of exactly the kind of "average people" you describe. We use abstract expressions like "government" and "corporations" to describe the *people* who administer them. Without those people the abstractions have no meaning.
True. "Of the people, by the people, for the people". But the same could be said of communist China. Those people are assumed to be living under an extremely oppressive government. It shows no signs of weakening. Are they just a collection of evil people? Or the victims of horrible misguidance? Even if they're being forced at gunpoint, somebody has to be willing to hold that gun.
Are you saying that we need to abolish governments and corporations? If so, what comes next?..;)
No... I would not suggest that governments or corporations should be removed. I'm suggesting that people look deeper into the motivations of their government, and (probably more dangerously) take a stronger stance against corperations that should lobby in self-interest to the detriment of living independently from corporations. It may be hard to comprehend this idea, but a corporation works very hard to make you afraid to think it even possible to live without them. Could you live without Microsoft? What if Boeing didn't exist? GM? Granted, we live in a world where they do, but there's the rub. These are a few of the companies that would prefer if legislators would just take their wise counsel without question, and prescribe new laws to allow them to operate unfettered. People need to realize they can affect real control of these situations in spite of the money involved, but it takes a little incitefulness to get them motivated. ;-)
You might like to think of what it is that these lobbyists use in their "convincing"...;) It's often money, isn't it? The problem for your analogy here, too, is that it overlooks the difference between what is voluntary and what is not.
Voluntary is subjective. A despot with a gun can ask a group of people who wants to "volunteer" to be shot in the head. But I'd like to walk into my local department store and voluntarily buy a pair of leather athletic shoes made in the USA. Certainly if you want to make your point you can still find companies out there that make such shoes in this country (I'm hoping at least...), but most of the time I'm stuck with only the "made in China" option because the American made counterpart doesn't seem to exist in my neighborhood, and no one seems to care. The "shoes" analogy is just a single generic example. There are too many of these types of scenarios.
You might not be aware of it, but watching TV is entirely voluntary...:) I hate much of it personally, and rarely watch anymore. Unlike the compulsion the government uses to collect taxes, no one who doesn't want one has to own a TV, let alone watch it. What I get from your remarks is that you apparently watch way too much TV yourself--so do what I do--don't watch TV and do something else instead.
Actually, I watch very little television. I derive my knowledge about television from conversations I have with the people around me, and the occasional glance when I visit them in their homes. While it is true that TV is completely voluntary, it seems to have the same effect upon the masses as opiates. People get so addicted it's impossible to hold conversations without them mentioning, "Did you see last night's 'Survivor'?" Sadly you can't just tell people not to watch so much TV... You'd sooner talk a crack addict out of their junk.
By way of example: be sure and wake me when Microsoft is able to haul the DOJ into court and break it up...;)
Oh that was precious! I'll do that, and you can wake me when the DOJ can actually manage to break up Microsoft. ;-D
Again, thank you for the response. It was a rare pleasure! :-)
They keep you busy with jobs that require more time than brains. They keep you running on a treadmill for as many hours as possible. It disorients and distracts. It keeps your mind off the fact that you are slowly slipping and sliding down that slope. But keep breeding- They are going to need that population to stay high so they will have a never ending resource of willing subjects.
They rely on having large numbers of people, because when people become a scarce resource, the value of humanity increases. It's harder to control a person who has value, so the more idiots they can create, the less value the average, or even slightly above average person will have. It's only the privileged few that should enjoy life to the fullest, and a few token morons just for show, "See? Anyone can live like a king in America. So the problem is yours."
So the corporatists have overtaken the government with layers of lobbyists. They have convinced the "elected" leaders that they have the nations best interests at heart. They use you as a pawn, and they see the nuclear family as their greatest ad campaign. All that remains is to keep this little secret less than obvious.
Keep them watching those sports channels, the so-called reality based TV, and the endless parade of entertainment provided by the cable TV and TiVo. It keeps them off the streets, and ensures that the rabble stay out from under their agenda. Turn up the noise, and keep them riveted to the latest episode of "Survivor". If they have a tech fetish, let them watch Star Trek knock-offs, but never again show anything that might force them to think.
This technology we contrived does most of the work for us. But it's ingeniously engineered to have a drone standing over a mind-numbing machine for eight hours or more. This kills two birds with one stone: It keeps our standards artificially high, and keeps that drone occupied and out of our hair. If they don't like it, we'll start accusing them of being Luddites, and since the Luddites were destructive we can automatically associate and brand them with being vandals, and terrorists.
Nice, neat, and easy to justify.
OH LOOK! A TERROR THREAT! QUICK! BURY YOUR HEAD IN THE SAND! That's right... The big friendly corporate brother will take good care of you.
That ought to shut them up for a while...
Big business made this country what it is today. What will it turn this country into tomorrow.
OK, I'm done. Burn my karma and send in the flaming AC trolls.
As time goes by it will be useful to observe how people will cling to an increasingly abusive state, and to see how many of them will turn on their own friends and relatives to ensure the safety of their own skin.
Meanwhile, for those of us who brave the -1 threshold I'm not even remotely surprised that this topic is being trolled to death. The corporatists have an agenda, and people trying to discuss their options threaten to interfere with their desire for unquestioned authority.
Good Luck Europe.
300 million people isn't a big deal to a computer. Think of it like this: You can hold a lot of details about a person's life within a single megabyte of text. Try printing a whole megabyte of raw text and you'll see that's quite a dosier. (*note, do note use the bloated MS Word format where "hello world" takes up 128K) Using 1MB per person, that comes to a mere 300 gigabytes of data. Hell, Google can sift through that much data in the blink of an eye. The technology is already there, and it's too damned easy to implement.
I know you're not trying to be dismissive, but just sweeping it under the carpet and remaining complicite simply because you accept the rhetoric that it's good for national security will only feed this beast even more. It will evolve into a massive "jobs program" bogged down by so much red tape and politics that you will have effectively created yet another corporate welfare system to support an industry that common people can no longer afford, corporate pawns will be forced to endure, and the wealthy upper class can't imagine living without.
I know it's the thrill of geek suspense that drives this naming nonsense, but geeze, it's just a name. Call the rose a stench-blossom and name the planet Fred.
Yeah... Fred... He was the god of underwear I think...
Nope. I can't say I see any smearing. It looks pretty good.
I'm trying it right now as I type this response... I'm jerking the windows around left to right, right to left... Nope. Can't shake it.
Don't forget one of the most important phrases used to describe almost any system out there: YMMV: Your Mileage May Vary.
OK, so I sound a little hateful, but I'm tired of being under them on the food chain. It hurts my self-esteem. (What's left of it anyway...)
On the flip side, I've already given up on Microsoft, and want nothing further to do with them or their products, so somebody leaking their code is almost a bad joke to me at this point. The most likely conspiracy to come out of this is that the next version of the Linux kernal will have a cloud of accusations that it derived some of its functionality from Windows 2000 source. (Oh please...)
I guess the ugly part is dealing with the feds out there who are intent on taking names and kicking ass... After all, it's a national emergency! Microsoft's code has been leaked!
Feh.
Many of us have woke up to the fact that you don't need Windows to accomplish your goals on a computer. While the rest of of us are trying to actually get something done with our computers (instead of updating them every 15 minutes), Microsoft is suddenly crying out "Thieves!". Just how does MS come up with these horribly written plot devices?
In my case, I see it as, "Do I want to trust a company who's only interest is in generating a profit, or do I want to trust the broader base of humanity who wants to create an open and free system?"
Admittedly I've got a tin-foil hat collection to rival any slashdotter, so I'll try to advocate the devil as well with "Do I want to trust some band of amaturish zealots who lack a clear and unified mission statement, or do I want to trust a company that has shown an exceptional degree of responsibility by haveing a track record in producing enormous profits?"
Obviously both have appealing merits. So "who do you want to trust today?" (TM)
We all have our heroes into which we place our faith, and nobody likes to be let down by a hero. For some it's the almighty dollar, for others it's their faith that deep down, humanity tends to be good.
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Yes, I'm biased.
As for your personal uses of Windows, I say fair enough... While I decided to switch to Linux, I'm actually an OS agnostic. (Not entirely true... WinXP makes me cringe, but prior versions are still pretty cool.) But I encourage you to try VLC media player (for your distro of course),and you'll have excellent DVD support in spite of your video card's lack of support. (YMMV)
And on a slightly different subject, what's with all the trolls in this area? Does Microsoft hire moles to go flood the halls of Slashdot anytime someone points out that you can run some Win32 apps without MS Windows? Is it really necessary to point out that it's not a perfect solution, or a magic bullet?
Hey, if you need to use several apps developed under MS Windows that badly, then STICK WITH WINDOWS!!! But if there's just a couple of things you'd like to keep when you make the leap to Linux, then Wine offers a potential answer to your prayers.
You know, I almost hate to admit this now, but if it were not for the Wine project, I would have stuck with MS Windows. But I got to keep three of my favorite Win32 apps, and that was more than enough to help me move into my new Linux OS. There were other apps that I had to sacrifice, but it was worth it.
And oh yeah... For anyone that's using Mandrake 9.1 and having trouble getting Wine to work, I humbly offer a tutorial on getting it up and moving without MS Windows. I know everyone's cousin has a how-to on this subject, but I've tried to make it step-by-step easy.
Thanks, but for now I'll pass. It gives me good reason to keep in touch with friends. ;-)
Just wondering though... What about the licensing issues of running IE under Linux? I know somebody out there has had to have beaten that horse to death, but I must have missed that meeting, cause I honestly don't have a clue on that one.
Well, apparently the USPO is granting pantents on the absurd, hoping to use the numbering system to search for very large prime numbers as a bi-product.
TweakUI should be one of the earliest companions to any Windows user so as to quickly and easily remove that disfunctionality.