Exactly -- those schlocky sequels are exactly the sort of crap that Jobs wouldn't stand for. But the grasping, shameless greedy media bosses at Disney -- who just want the money -- will always choose to put out the garbage sequel.
I consider their actions to be shameful; by putting out such garbage they shit all over their customers, whom they must obviously despise.
Perhaps you know from the video game industry: most guys are working on totally awful sequels because some producers at a publisher got the greenlight to make a cheap, awful sequel. Same thing in Hollywood: lot's of crap, because it pays (a little) and nobody sees that that sort of garbage drags everybody down.
OK, you get info via IRC -- but do you get more than when you search through usenet?
E.g. suppose a driver is acting flaky, and you need to know why, fast. And what to do about it.
Do you search through netnews (with Deja Gnu -- now Google) -- or do you go on some IRC and ask a question.
I'm going to bet that you get a higher quality answer, quicker, via groups.google.com than you do on some IRC channel.
Furthermore, I've looked through archived chat sessions -- there's so much text, the stuff is not threaded (lots of extraneous crap in there), and generally there just isn't much information. That's what I'm basing my assessment on -- that, and using some IRC-like services to try to exchange information.
I'm just figuring that most IRC fans haven't figured out to look in comp.embedded, or comp.linux. Or to sign up to some mailing lists .
I thought all the power-ninjas just use netnews (nntp), not chat.
Unix has "talk" -- but that was always pretty lame, right?
I find chatrooms (like talk) to be a real waste of time -- the signal to noise ratio is very low. It takes a very long time to transfer any signifigant technical info.
A Neat Pixar/Disney Story
on
Pixar For Sale?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The Pixar/Disney story is very interesting, if only for showing the kind of attitude that Pixar has (compared with the normal Hollywood flacks): when push came to shove, Pixar made the move "their way", walking away from the Disney bosses and their "Geld". Shortly thereafter the Disney media bosses decided it really was the best thing ever, and got back on board. And they proceeded to take as much credit for the outcome as they could, of course. If you've ever worked with the publisher/media boss types, you know what they are like, and greatly appreciate the backbone that Jobs and company showed.
... Disney, which was bankrolling the project, peppered the young animators with notes and suggestions. The story was too juvenile, the higher-ups said, and the characters had to be edgier. Afraid to trust themselves, Lasseter and his crew tried to follow all the directions.
It was, nearly everyone agrees, a train wreck. Disney hated the movie and the idea -- and shut it down.
"Yeah that was fun,'' jokes Pete Docter, who was nominated for Oscars for "Toy Story'' and "Monsters, Inc.'' "And it happened right around Christmas, too.''
Lasseter recalls that he "begged'' for two weeks to fix things. The animators went back, took out all of Disney's suggestions and made the movie they wanted to make in the first place.
And, naturally, when they screened the new version, Disney execs loved it...
Thanks media bosses!
Give Jobs Credit
on
Pixar For Sale?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Although I'd never buy a Mac, I give Jobs and his employees credit for:
1. Showing the hacks who run Disney that not all movies have to suck. It is possible to make an animated movie that's actually watchable and somewhat entertaining. Just think about the crappy cartoons that existed before Pixar movies, in case you don't agree.
2. Showing that Disney totally sucks. Empereror has no clothes. They can crank out schlocky sequels, but that's about it. A bit like the video game business -- indies do it better. The big publishers are filled with money-grubbing power seekers. With Jobs, I think that money is just for keeping score -- his main goal is to make superb stuff.
3. Pixar has run cirles around Eisner, Katzenberg, Spielberg and Geffen. The media bosses suck. Jobs has more talent than those greedy, grasping, imitative, uncreative hacks.
Hotmail is actually the number one used e-mail service.
And AOL is the "number one" ISP.
That's a big SO FUCKING WHAT!
Hotmail sucks. Ask anyone who has used Yahoo!, Google and Hotmail.
Furthermore, Hotmail, under Microsoft, has had massive security problems (remember the Passport bug that let anyone log in as you?)
That bodes very well for the web services offering -- nothing like having everyone being able to read your documents to make you say, "FUCK OFF, BILLY GATES!" Finally, if you've used Outlook's web offering, you know it sucks. The person I know who used that (on a LAN) was bitching about how fucking slow it was, compared to Google, over a WAN.
But if its the case that you actually work for MicroSoft -- I take it all back. I hope you folks just keep on doing what you are doing. Google is just a fad. You'll slay them any day now. And we'll all go back to sucking MicroSoft cock any day now, and taking it up the ass too. Billy and Ballmer can do a Bukkake sessio on me.
It will be interesting to see if they can pull this off.
I'm pretty sure the folks over at Google are laughing and yelling a big collective, "Nigg@#$ Pleeeeeeeeze!"
MicroSoft is choosing to compete in territory where it tends to do badly. E.g. Hotmail is 3rd, compared to Yahoo! or Google. MicroSoft isn't a service organization -- they don't do continuous uptime, no bugs, rapid releases well.
I'm sure Google is happy MicroSoft is trying to do this; they'll hemorrage money and generally be feeling like they are on the receiving end of a bukkake session for a long time.
However, if Yahoo! said they were going to do this, the Google folks would be kicking themselves, for not getting it out the door first. And they'd be scared, because Yahoo! knows from running web services. Microsoft knows from bubkis about this.
This particular payload is awful -- automated rootkit install.
Maybe one day we'll get a series of destructive worms that will render hardware unusable (e.g. no boot, disk overwritten, fan turned off and processor cranked up to do permanent damage, boot flash cleared) -- resulting in successive waves of hardware replacement.
I talked to a guy at a computer store about the aftermath of a worm that cleared the bootflash -- they sold so many new computers!
At that point, I figure Micr$oft will be in big trouble; after you buy your fifth motheboard in a row (and try to recover your data) after "Bukk@keB1ll" versions A through X hit you, you'll consider getting a Mac so you can get work done.
There's talk of Rambus 'abusing' the patents -- but that doesn't make sense to me. I thought that was the whole point of patents; for a limited time (17 years?) you get to be the only one to do whatever it is that you've patented.
If Rambus really patented the stuff, it doesn't really matter whether or not they manufactured anything; that's not how patent law works. But, if you force me to be Talmudic -- I'm sure Rambus can quote a single RAM part at a price of $100 million.
Were their patents crap? If their patents were valid, why shouldn't they've gotten paid? It sounds like they actually developed the technology, unlike some firms (the vultures that just buy up the patents of failed companies and then start suing).
I'm all for chaning the law to suit public policy better, but assuming we've got the laws that we've got, I don't see how "Rambus is bad" translates into "ignore their patents." If you do that, they may as well vanish, as they don't do anything but make IP.
Also, just so you don't think I'm a member of the Rambus Anti-Defamation League, I don't have a dog in this fight: I don't work for them, knowingly own their stock, etc.
Thanks very much for the explanation of their technical decisions!
It is interesting to hear that a bunch of the Mach guys thought like Unix geeks -- somehow they Mac-juju didn't stick to them permanently (if it ever did). I just assumed they'd all drunk Steve Job's Kool Aid. Now I'm old enough to figure that he probably told them, "my way or the highway," and they chose to keep their job and do it his way.
I can imagine that they wanted a cleaner approach to files (that would map to Mach better), and then a layer of "resource info" on top of it -- that way Unix-style stuff could co-exist with Mac-style stuff. But even if it started that way, there were probably good reasons to junk it and muddle things.
I'm surprised that they've still got the resource stuff in there -- in the form of "/rsrc". But I guess you can't break all the old apps that need it.
Thanks again for the info -- it is interesting to hear your take on Quicktime.
I can easily imagine that the pasty-faced, unattractive geeks are probably never going to buy anything from Apple -- they'll just get a Rio if they want a music player.
Now I get it -- I just want a computer with a big bitmapped display to run emacs. I run "fvwm" as my window manager, for instance. So I'd probably never "get" the Apple bug enough to shell out for the experience.
I never liked the Macs and their frilly user interface. Being a Unix geek, I just wanted a set of Unix-like (or better tools).
Some things, like Macscheme, really impressed me though.
I remember working with their development tools (Neal Stephenson wrote the same) and being surprised to see that they were put together like a bunch of Unix tools --- command line, pipes and so on -- but, it was a like a version of the Unix tools put together by two teenage brothers, and one was unfortunately a bit "special" -- aka, retarded.
Their insistence on the "resource" fork always struck me as idiotic: data is data. If it is in a file, it is a bunch of bytes (or even blocks of bytes) -- no need to have separate "meta" information. That drove me nuts -- it meant you couldn't easily make tools (as in any Unix environment), because you had to be willing to do resource fork stuff. That sort of thing convinced me that the Mac was half-baked, and I should just stick to BSD-derived OSes.
So I'm happy to see that Apple got on the Mach tip, and now they have a decent userland and tools (for crabby programmers like myself). But I don't use it -- for my needs, BSD on x86 is wonderful.
If you read the article, you'll find these guys, who have "point of view" porn. Their concept sounds good -- the format of the porn is meant to correspond to the type of experience you'll have while masturbating with your iPod -- or maybe that's just the kind of orn you get when you make a cheapo porn movie with one guy holding a camera, for the duration of the whole flick.
The stuff is free, so download away. I'm sure the pornographers will appreciate the Slashdot market knowing about their fine product -- it is their crowd of early adopters.
Whippee -- everybody, get out your khock and balls and whack away!! (that's an Adam Sandler reference).
Re:Lazy Journalism [Z.I.N.S. -- Zonk is not Slashd
on
No Porn for You, iPod
·
· Score: 1
but I would expect no less of Slashdot than to rehash it
It is a bit more precise to say "Zonk" (or l'il Zonky, as his fans call him) than Slashdot. L'il Zonky has a habit of taking PR pieces, old news and generally unimportant crap and putting it up on Slashdot. Some of the other editors are quite good.
I recommend you keep Z.I.N.S in mind -- "Zonk is not Slashdot."
A review of the porn business quickly reveals a pattern: some greedy guy (conincidentally enough, he's almost always a Jew) spots an opportunity to make a killing selling something a bit beyond the Pale.
First it was "dirty books" and black and white softcore photos -- much later hardcore, gangbangs, bukkake and goatse style stuff. The guy starts making money -- and voila, porn is everywhere and he's filthy rich.
If nobody steps up to the plate, I'm going to make it happen. I will be the Reuben Sturman of the iPod, damnit!
This story is interesting, but as you mention, it isn't new.
This is the Zonk Effect in action. A mutation that Zonk has allows hime to think old news is news. So he forwards this. Another mutation causes Zonk to pass off press releases as news -- see today's "Microsoft as Vigilante" story.
Folks like you happen to have the "Google" mutation, which means that you are immune to mistaking old information for "new". When you see something interesting, you Google it, and immeditately discover that you've been "Zonked".
Didn't you notice the original article was written by Zonk (aka li'l Zonky)?
He does this sort of inflammatory crap all the time.
This is a non-story --- clearly Microsoft is doing some PR. Rather than auditing their codebase, using formal methods or other techniques to root out flaws, they've decided to do a feelgood story and feed it to the press.
Useful idiots like li'l Zonky will push it for them.
Symbian is the dominant OS. Linux is second.
Something Called "Windows" is in there too.
Here is the article
I'm confused though -- are the Symbian phones not feature rich compared to Linux? I figured that was the whole point; it has better phone features (power management?). I'm guessing that the article is trumpeting Linux's success when it isn't exactly warranted (but at least it is kicking Windows ass).
Yeah, it works great -- but you'd better know what you are doing. One thing I notice is that there's a lot more tutorials and hand-holding stuff in the Linux community (I think that goes hand in hand with their advocacy approach).
With BSD, you need to be the wizard.
Oh yeah -- I'm sure it cheeses off the Linux fans that the guy installed OpenBSD, and not some Linux distribution. But that's how he got it to work smoothly -- the whole thing comes as a package that works properly.
Fine to make such a well-considered policy -- but if the astronauts are like these brutes, they'll ignore the rules and revert to their natural behavior:
"Sexual harassment may also endanger a mission. In an 8-month space station simulation on Earth in 2000, a Russian man twice tried to kiss a Canadian woman researcher just after two other Russians had gotten into a bloody brawl. As a result, locks were installed between the Russian and international crews' compartments."
"We killed well over 30 of the things. At first they simply waltz out to the feeder and we pegged them with the pellet gun. After a while they knew what the noise of the window opening meant so we had to round the animals up 30-45 minutes before feeding time and open the window. They then figured out the lighting so we learned to shoot in our noral lighting (none in that room). They then figured out where the killing lanes were - itwas kinda funny. You could see them walk right up to the line - almost to the inch - and prepare for the run. In one go get one seed. Unfortunatly for them we are good shots and small running targets are fun - still killed them. Changing food sources was not an option - nothing else around here to eat and they didn't seem to take the hint to move."
That's really something. If you read about guys who try to trap/bait rats, it isn't so different. Their habits are such that they won't fall for the traps -- even if you put in what you think is a tasty treat. I'm not shocked they figured out the kill-zone boundaries!
I've also read that they'll develop a taste for certain foods --- e.g. if they habitually eat spicy food, they'll want spicy food. Also, quite interestingly, they like the foods that humans like. E.g. macraronic and cheese, banannas and Pasta. They hate the foods that we hate: raw vegetables. Fried chicken and pizza they really like! They are very human in their tastes.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly -- those schlocky sequels are exactly the sort of crap that Jobs wouldn't stand for. But the grasping, shameless greedy media bosses at Disney -- who just want the money -- will always choose to put out the garbage sequel.
I consider their actions to be shameful; by putting out such garbage they shit all over their customers, whom they must obviously despise.
Perhaps you know from the video game industry: most guys are working on totally awful sequels because some producers at a publisher got the greenlight to make a cheap, awful sequel. Same thing in Hollywood: lot's of crap, because it pays (a little) and nobody sees that that sort of garbage drags everybody down.
OK, you get info via IRC -- but do you get more than when you search through usenet?
E.g. suppose a driver is acting flaky, and you need to know why, fast. And what to do about it.
Do you search through netnews (with Deja Gnu -- now Google) -- or do you go on some IRC and ask a question.
I'm going to bet that you get a higher quality answer, quicker, via groups.google.com than you do on some IRC channel.
Furthermore, I've looked through archived chat sessions -- there's so much text, the stuff is not threaded (lots of extraneous crap in there), and generally there just isn't much information. That's what I'm basing my assessment on -- that, and using some IRC-like services to try to exchange information.
I'm just figuring that most IRC fans haven't figured out to look in comp.embedded, or comp.linux. Or to sign up to some mailing lists .
I thought all the power-ninjas just use netnews (nntp), not chat.
Unix has "talk" -- but that was always pretty lame, right?
I find chatrooms (like talk) to be a real waste of time -- the signal to noise ratio is very low. It takes a very long time to transfer any signifigant technical info.
The Pixar/Disney story is very interesting, if only for showing the kind of attitude that Pixar has (compared with the normal Hollywood flacks): when push came to shove, Pixar made the move "their way", walking away from the Disney bosses and their "Geld". Shortly thereafter the Disney media bosses decided it really was the best thing ever, and got back on board. And they proceeded to take as much credit for the outcome as they could, of course. If you've ever worked with the publisher/media boss types, you know what they are like, and greatly appreciate the backbone that Jobs and company showed.
... Disney, which was bankrolling the project, peppered the young animators with notes and suggestions. The story was too juvenile, the higher-ups said, and the characters had to be edgier. Afraid to trust themselves, Lasseter and his crew tried to follow all the directions.
Here's the source of this quote:
It was, nearly everyone agrees, a train wreck. Disney hated the movie and the idea -- and shut it down.
"Yeah that was fun,'' jokes Pete Docter, who was nominated for Oscars for "Toy Story'' and "Monsters, Inc.'' "And it happened right around Christmas, too.''
Lasseter recalls that he "begged'' for two weeks to fix things. The animators went back, took out all of Disney's suggestions and made the movie they wanted to make in the first place.
And, naturally, when they screened the new version, Disney execs loved it...
Thanks media bosses!
Although I'd never buy a Mac, I give Jobs and his employees credit for:
1. Showing the hacks who run Disney that not all movies have to suck. It is possible to make an animated movie that's actually watchable and somewhat entertaining. Just think about the crappy cartoons that existed before Pixar movies, in case you don't agree.
2. Showing that Disney totally sucks. Empereror has no clothes. They can crank out schlocky sequels, but that's about it. A bit like the video game business -- indies do it better. The big publishers are filled with money-grubbing power seekers. With Jobs, I think that money is just for keeping score -- his main goal is to make superb stuff.
3. Pixar has run cirles around Eisner, Katzenberg, Spielberg and Geffen. The media bosses suck. Jobs has more talent than those greedy, grasping, imitative, uncreative hacks.
Hotmail is actually the number one used e-mail service.
And AOL is the "number one" ISP.
That's a big SO FUCKING WHAT!
Hotmail sucks. Ask anyone who has used Yahoo!, Google and Hotmail. Furthermore, Hotmail, under Microsoft, has had massive security problems (remember the Passport bug that let anyone log in as you?) That bodes very well for the web services offering -- nothing like having everyone being able to read your documents to make you say, "FUCK OFF, BILLY GATES!" Finally, if you've used Outlook's web offering, you know it sucks. The person I know who used that (on a LAN) was bitching about how fucking slow it was, compared to Google, over a WAN.
But if its the case that you actually work for MicroSoft -- I take it all back. I hope you folks just keep on doing what you are doing. Google is just a fad. You'll slay them any day now. And we'll all go back to sucking MicroSoft cock any day now, and taking it up the ass too. Billy and Ballmer can do a Bukkake sessio on me.
It will be interesting to see if they can pull this off.
I'm pretty sure the folks over at Google are laughing and yelling a big collective, "Nigg@#$ Pleeeeeeeeze!"
MicroSoft is choosing to compete in territory where it tends to do badly. E.g. Hotmail is 3rd, compared to Yahoo! or Google. MicroSoft isn't a service organization -- they don't do continuous uptime, no bugs, rapid releases well.
I'm sure Google is happy MicroSoft is trying to do this; they'll hemorrage money and generally be feeling like they are on the receiving end of a bukkake session for a long time.
However, if Yahoo! said they were going to do this, the Google folks would be kicking themselves, for not getting it out the door first. And they'd be scared, because Yahoo! knows from running web services. Microsoft knows from bubkis about this.
This particular payload is awful -- automated rootkit install.
Maybe one day we'll get a series of destructive worms that will render hardware unusable (e.g. no boot, disk overwritten, fan turned off and processor cranked up to do permanent damage, boot flash cleared) -- resulting in successive waves of hardware replacement.
I talked to a guy at a computer store about the aftermath of a worm that cleared the bootflash -- they sold so many new computers!
At that point, I figure Micr$oft will be in big trouble; after you buy your fifth motheboard in a row (and try to recover your data) after "Bukk@keB1ll" versions A through X hit you, you'll consider getting a Mac so you can get work done.
There's talk of Rambus 'abusing' the patents -- but that doesn't make sense to me. I thought that was the whole point of patents; for a limited time (17 years?) you get to be the only one to do whatever it is that you've patented.
If Rambus really patented the stuff, it doesn't really matter whether or not they manufactured anything; that's not how patent law works. But, if you force me to be Talmudic -- I'm sure Rambus can quote a single RAM part at a price of $100 million.
Were their patents crap? If their patents were valid, why shouldn't they've gotten paid? It sounds like they actually developed the technology, unlike some firms (the vultures that just buy up the patents of failed companies and then start suing).
I'm all for chaning the law to suit public policy better, but assuming we've got the laws that we've got, I don't see how "Rambus is bad" translates into "ignore their patents." If you do that, they may as well vanish, as they don't do anything but make IP.
Also, just so you don't think I'm a member of the Rambus Anti-Defamation League, I don't have a dog in this fight: I don't work for them, knowingly own their stock, etc.
Thanks very much for the explanation of their technical decisions!
It is interesting to hear that a bunch of the Mach guys thought like Unix geeks -- somehow they Mac-juju didn't stick to them permanently (if it ever did). I just assumed they'd all drunk Steve Job's Kool Aid. Now I'm old enough to figure that he probably told them, "my way or the highway," and they chose to keep their job and do it his way.
I can imagine that they wanted a cleaner approach to files (that would map to Mach better), and then a layer of "resource info" on top of it -- that way Unix-style stuff could co-exist with Mac-style stuff. But even if it started that way, there were probably good reasons to junk it and muddle things.
I'm surprised that they've still got the resource stuff in there -- in the form of "/rsrc". But I guess you can't break all the old apps that need it.
Thanks again for the info -- it is interesting to hear your take on Quicktime.
Those are some amazing photos!
I can easily imagine that the pasty-faced, unattractive geeks are probably never going to buy anything from Apple -- they'll just get a Rio if they want a music player.
Now I get it -- I just want a computer with a big bitmapped display to run emacs. I run "fvwm" as my window manager, for instance. So I'd probably never "get" the Apple bug enough to shell out for the experience.
I never liked the Macs and their frilly user interface. Being a Unix geek, I just wanted a set of Unix-like (or better tools).
Some things, like Macscheme, really impressed me though.
I remember working with their development tools (Neal Stephenson wrote the same) and being surprised to see that they were put together like a bunch of Unix tools --- command line, pipes and so on -- but, it was a like a version of the Unix tools put together by two teenage brothers, and one was unfortunately a bit "special" -- aka, retarded.
Their insistence on the "resource" fork always struck me as idiotic: data is data. If it is in a file, it is a bunch of bytes (or even blocks of bytes) -- no need to have separate "meta" information. That drove me nuts -- it meant you couldn't easily make tools (as in any Unix environment), because you had to be willing to do resource fork stuff. That sort of thing convinced me that the Mac was half-baked, and I should just stick to BSD-derived OSes.
So I'm happy to see that Apple got on the Mach tip, and now they have a decent userland and tools (for crabby programmers like myself). But I don't use it -- for my needs, BSD on x86 is wonderful.
Any instructions on what to do for the BSDs? I didnt' see anything there.
I'm assuming there isn't much to do to OpenBSD and NetBSD.
If you read the article, you'll find these guys, who have "point of view" porn. Their concept sounds good -- the format of the porn is meant to correspond to the type of experience you'll have while masturbating with your iPod -- or maybe that's just the kind of orn you get when you make a cheapo porn movie with one guy holding a camera, for the duration of the whole flick.
The stuff is free, so download away. I'm sure the pornographers will appreciate the Slashdot market knowing about their fine product -- it is their crowd of early adopters.
Whippee -- everybody, get out your khock and balls and whack away!! (that's an Adam Sandler reference).
but I would expect no less of Slashdot than to rehash it
It is a bit more precise to say "Zonk" (or l'il Zonky, as his fans call him) than Slashdot. L'il Zonky has a habit of taking PR pieces, old news and generally unimportant crap and putting it up on Slashdot. Some of the other editors are quite good.
I recommend you keep Z.I.N.S in mind -- "Zonk is not Slashdot."
A review of the porn business quickly reveals a pattern: some greedy guy (conincidentally enough, he's almost always a Jew) spots an opportunity to make a killing selling something a bit beyond the Pale.
First it was "dirty books" and black and white softcore photos -- much later hardcore, gangbangs, bukkake and goatse style stuff. The guy starts making money -- and voila, porn is everywhere and he's filthy rich.
If nobody steps up to the plate, I'm going to make it happen. I will be the Reuben Sturman of the iPod, damnit!
This story is interesting, but as you mention, it isn't new.
This is the Zonk Effect in action. A mutation that Zonk has allows hime to think old news is news. So he forwards this. Another mutation causes Zonk to pass off press releases as news -- see today's "Microsoft as Vigilante" story.
Folks like you happen to have the "Google" mutation, which means that you are immune to mistaking old information for "new". When you see something interesting, you Google it, and immeditately discover that you've been "Zonked".
Didn't you notice the original article was written by Zonk (aka li'l Zonky)?
He does this sort of inflammatory crap all the time.
This is a non-story --- clearly Microsoft is doing some PR. Rather than auditing their codebase, using formal methods or other techniques to root out flaws, they've decided to do a feelgood story and feed it to the press.
Useful idiots like li'l Zonky will push it for them.
Symbian is the dominant OS. Linux is second.
Something Called "Windows" is in there too.
Here is the article
I'm confused though -- are the Symbian phones not feature rich compared to Linux? I figured that was the whole point; it has better phone features (power management?). I'm guessing that the article is trumpeting Linux's success when it isn't exactly warranted (but at least it is kicking Windows ass).
Ha ha. Yeah, I figured it had to be Ballmer myself. "Lower level business person" my ass.
Perhaps Ballmer's been demoted to portable music Wunderkind.
Can someone please explain the subtelties of the new Apache license?
Is the license such that MicroSoft could merge it with their stuff, and not give away the source?
OpenBSD is well documented, but there are not many tutorials (that was my point).
The Linux folks have lots of tutorials. Those help to get folks started.
Yeah, it works great -- but you'd better know what you are doing. One thing I notice is that there's a lot more tutorials and hand-holding stuff in the Linux community (I think that goes hand in hand with their advocacy approach).
With BSD, you need to be the wizard.
Oh yeah -- I'm sure it cheeses off the Linux fans that the guy installed OpenBSD, and not some Linux distribution. But that's how he got it to work smoothly -- the whole thing comes as a package that works properly.
Fine to make such a well-considered policy -- but if the astronauts are like these brutes, they'll ignore the rules and revert to their natural behavior:
"Sexual harassment may also endanger a mission. In an 8-month space station simulation on Earth in 2000, a Russian man twice tried to kiss a Canadian woman researcher just after two other Russians had gotten into a bloody brawl. As a result, locks were installed between the Russian and international crews' compartments."
"We killed well over 30 of the things. At first they simply waltz out to the feeder and we pegged them with the pellet gun. After a while they knew what the noise of the window opening meant so we had to round the animals up 30-45 minutes before feeding time and open the window. They then figured out the lighting so we learned to shoot in our noral lighting (none in that room). They then figured out where the killing lanes were - itwas kinda funny. You could see them walk right up to the line - almost to the inch - and prepare for the run. In one go get one seed. Unfortunatly for them we are good shots and small running targets are fun - still killed them. Changing food sources was not an option - nothing else around here to eat and they didn't seem to take the hint to move."
That's really something. If you read about guys who try to trap/bait rats, it isn't so different. Their habits are such that they won't fall for the traps -- even if you put in what you think is a tasty treat. I'm not shocked they figured out the kill-zone boundaries!
I've also read that they'll develop a taste for certain foods --- e.g. if they habitually eat spicy food, they'll want spicy food. Also, quite interestingly, they like the foods that humans like. E.g. macraronic and cheese, banannas and Pasta. They hate the foods that we hate: raw vegetables. Fried chicken and pizza they really like! They are very human in their tastes.