The obvious problem being that a lot of ISPs these days (especially UK-based ISPs) are blocking or severely throttling torrent traffic. It makes it rather slow to grab the latest Fedora ISOs...
Well, that's not distributor fault, and therefore the distributor should still be GPL compliant (unless the torrent becomes completely un-downloadable). But in this case, hey, put it on a couple of DVD's (just to have backups) and write on the homepage "if you want source, send me $2+stamps and I'll send you the source code DVD".
I don't understand why Google did it this way. It would be so much easier to make a Linux version from scratch (using Qt or GTK+).
I think you're quite crazy:). Do you really think that rewriting a big,mature commercial application from scratch using another GUI toolkit is somehow easier and cheaper than just hiring Codeweavers (that probably know the WINE codebase much better than almost anyone on this planet) to do the required patches, as Google did?
16) Decide my time is too valuable for all this pissing around.
Rephrase it: "Decide that, while my time isn't valuable at all when I did learn how to use DOS/Windows/whatever, it suddenly becomes extremly valuable when I have to google a bit to figure out how to make things work on Linux, no matter how really simple they are."
My computers are supposed to be set it and forget it.
That's *exactly* why I'm using Linux.
I don't use computers for the sake of computing, my computers are used to accomplish a goal - HDTV, regular TV, web crap, digital pictures etc. They are media machines. I have the same expectations of my PC as I do for my Xbox 360, receiver, DVD player, TV, etc. They are just supposed to work.
Same as above. For me a Windows PC isn't just working (AV software, buggy drivers, etc.). Linux never betrayed me in this sense. Of course, YMMV.
it doesn't have a grammar checker, and knowing how bad I am at this stuff I would really like one; I know it won't be perfect but it might be nice.
I know I can sound bitter and trollish but... have you considered to learn grammar better as a solution? You can't always be sure you'll have a software grammar checker under your hands.:)
I checked today and... yes, it's 1.4.3. I found it crashing (not so often, but regularly on certain operations) and has small but annoying bugs like writing the bin boundary values of histograms under the bars instead than under the inter-bar ticks; or often refusing to print with a margin > 0, no matter what you do. However I'm not bashing it, it's a very good software for most things. Just a bit rough around the edges:)
I have no idea how to launch the program (start terminal window, is it in/bin? nope./sbin? nope./usr/bin? nope./usr/sbin? nope...)
Man, this is pure trolling. I can have no idea too, but who cares? My shell will take care of it, just typing "program" will work.
And if I really badly need to know where is, well, a simple locate will do. Uninstall? If you compiled it yourself, is just matter of going in the directory where you unpacked the.tar.gz and type "make uninstall".
I actually use Gnumeric quite often at work in my lab on my Debian box. It's fast and mostly does its work well, but I must admit it's often buggy and not that feature-rich. For most users it's OK, but it sure isn't on par with Excel. For me it's not a problem, but I'm sure there are much more picky people than myself.
If you want to be ineffecient and waste time doing something the computer can do faster and more effectively, go right ahead.
The problem is that in the case of word processors, I become much more inefficient and I waste much more time by using "features" than by doing things by hand.
In my lab I have a strict policy that papers I'm co-writing must never use MS Word revision tracking: if someone uses it, I'll just strip them away and ignore them. Here's why. My boss happened once to use it. For the first 2-3 revisions it was fine. After 40 revisions of the same paper, where paragraphs have been cut and pasted various times in various locations and things have been rewritten various times, it just becomes a meaningless hell. The tracking revision tool also cannot decide if a change is important or not -every time I correct a typo, a new things pops up in the tracking. I then stripped down *all* revisions and now I just put the significant things I changed in various colors, with various meanings (es. red: additions, blue: things I am uncertain of, green: suggestions etc.) We work this way now, and everyone is much happier.
(BTW, I would love to use just LaTeX to write papers, but alas, there are a lot of reasons this is not possible. Sigh.)
If you don't use the package selector after the first startup, and instead immediately apt-get install aptitude, then pick which packages, it's a VERY clean system.
That's exactly what I do, and no, it is difficult (not really impossible, but difficult) to have a very clean system.
Why should I bother with gentoo, I don't want or need to compile everything, and the install is just a hastle.
The install is not so bad, and is rapidly becoming more and more automagic: moreover it is exceptionally well documented and anyone that's a minimum linux-savy can proceed within it.
As for compiling, yes, it can be annoying (but doing it during sleep- or work- time zeroizes most problems). However it has the advantage that you can strip down packages to the minumum necessary (or, OTOH, make them fatter than ever if you like them so), deciding at compile time what they should support or not. For example I don't use ARTS, and all my KDE apps are compiled without ARTS support.
Hear this noise? Must be my ROTFLCOPTER, it's arriving...
Seriously, I feel Debian as one of the most dependencies-hungry distro I know. Every package brings down a bazillion dependencies with it, because it's compiled to support everything. That's a beautiful default, and I don't bash it at all, moreover apt-get of course greately eases the pain. But you need a lot of disk space and you have a lot of dependencies. That's my experience both with Woody and Sarge and derivatives like Ubuntu.
I wonder when most distros will pick the concept of USE flags invented by Gentoo.
If you feel that one app fits all for a given task (something that is rarely true in my experience), go along and install just one app per task. But leave us the choices 1)to decide WHICH app to install for a given task and 2)to install more than one, if I feel to. I agree with reasonable defaults for newbies, but I don't agree with self castration.
you do not attempt to answer his questions but you attack him for asking such questions.
The problem is, ID is not a scientific theory, in the philosophical sense. It has no predictive nor explaining value. So yes, the problem is, by using your (lovely geeky:D ) analogy:
And not because the bug report is bad but the programmer has an emotional attachment to his project.
Here you're wrong. It's the bug report that is invalid.
There is nothing magic in the evolution of both neural pathways and biomolecules. Brains are made for plasticity: co-evolving a neural pathway along with the sensory organ sounds like the lesser problem to me. While eyes must evolve a plethora of new tissues, differentiation signals etc., neurons are just there, they just need to grow and wire up in the right way. A simple arc reflex of the kind "if light, then avoid" or "if it moves, then attack" probably requires just a few neurons firing (remember Valentino Breitenberg...) , would be extremly easily selected by evolution, and would be of tremendous advantage.
On the other hand, the evolution of proteins also is nothing magic IMHO, although it is the newest field of evolutive theory, as of today. Proteins are so chemically long and complex that is easy for them to be able to bind almost anything, at least with low specificity. Evolving specificity by selection alone is easy -in fact, it is something readily done every day both in your immune system and in biochemistry labs.
From TFA: the top of the page, above the ads, featured a Smart Answer box that included a picture of Ted, an excerpt from a biography, direct links to his official site, an encyclopedia article and other images of him.
If I look on the Italian ask.com, I see nothing of all this. Just a dull grey thing bar. www.ask.com redirects me to it.ask.com, here.
However if I use the search query URL and I delete the "it." I see the described features.
It would be OK for me to use the English language version, but the redirect is plain annoying.
If all their current, and yes, most likely future educational software will be written for Windows, you would do them a disservice by switching to Linux.
If schools switch to Linux, educational software houses will write things for Linux.
I can't imagine why teachers (with around 50 minutes or so per class period) wouldn't want to use that time learning a new OS, instead of ACTUALLY TEACHING.
Actually, to teach you also have to learn. My mother is an high school teacher, and she still studies a lot when she's at home. Also, I did molecular biology introductory lessons at her high school, and despite me being a biophysics Ph.D. student I learned really a lot coming back to the basics to explain them to 16 years old kids.
I was 7 when I begun to program in BASIC on my dad's Vic20, and I clearly remember it. I also clearly remember when the Vic was first brought in home (I was 5 or 6) and my dad typed 10 PRINT "HELLO" 20 GOTO 10 RUN...
Slashdot Mirror
The obvious problem being that a lot of ISPs these days (especially UK-based ISPs) are blocking or severely throttling torrent traffic. It makes it rather slow to grab the latest Fedora ISOs...
Well, that's not distributor fault, and therefore the distributor should still be GPL compliant (unless the torrent becomes completely un-downloadable). But in this case, hey, put it on a couple of DVD's (just to have backups) and write on the homepage "if you want source, send me $2+stamps and I'll send you the source code DVD".
Well, I don't think the issue is how many times the code will be requested, but it is important the very fact that is is *possible* to retrieve it.
I don't understand why Google did it this way. It would be so much easier to make a Linux version from scratch (using Qt or GTK+).
I think you're quite crazy :). Do you really think that rewriting a big,mature commercial application from scratch using another GUI toolkit is somehow easier and cheaper than just hiring Codeweavers (that probably know the WINE codebase much better than almost anyone on this planet) to do the required patches, as Google did?
It becomes a native app for Linux-x86. No contradiction in this (Most closed-source apps for Linux are x86 only, BTW)
16) Decide my time is too valuable for all this pissing around.
Rephrase it: "Decide that, while my time isn't valuable at all when I did learn how to use DOS/Windows/whatever, it suddenly becomes extremly valuable when I have to google a bit to figure out how to make things work on Linux, no matter how really simple they are."
My computers are supposed to be set it and forget it.
That's *exactly* why I'm using Linux.
I don't use computers for the sake of computing, my computers are used to accomplish a goal - HDTV, regular TV, web crap, digital pictures etc. They are media machines. I have the same expectations of my PC as I do for my Xbox 360, receiver, DVD player, TV, etc. They are just supposed to work.
Same as above. For me a Windows PC isn't just working (AV software, buggy drivers, etc.). Linux never betrayed me in this sense. Of course, YMMV.
Me neither (I'm Italian), and that's exactly why learning grammar better is the only solution.
it doesn't have a grammar checker, and knowing how bad I am at this stuff I would really like one; I know it won't be perfect but it might be nice.
I know I can sound bitter and trollish but... have you considered to learn grammar better as a solution? You can't always be sure you'll have a software grammar checker under your hands. :)
I checked today and... yes, it's 1.4.3. I found it crashing (not so often, but regularly on certain operations) and has small but annoying bugs like writing the bin boundary values of histograms under the bars instead than under the inter-bar ticks; or often refusing to print with a margin > 0, no matter what you do. However I'm not bashing it, it's a very good software for most things. Just a bit rough around the edges :)
I have no idea how to launch the program (start terminal window, is it in /bin? nope. /sbin? nope. /usr/bin? nope. /usr/sbin? nope...)
Man, this is pure trolling. I can have no idea too, but who cares? My shell will take care of it, just typing "program" will work.
And if I really badly need to know where is, well, a simple locate will do. Uninstall? If you compiled it yourself, is just matter of going in the directory where you unpacked the .tar.gz and type "make uninstall".
I actually use Gnumeric quite often at work in my lab on my Debian box. It's fast and mostly does its work well, but I must admit it's often buggy and not that feature-rich. For most users it's OK, but it sure isn't on par with Excel. For me it's not a problem, but I'm sure there are much more picky people than myself.
If you want to be ineffecient and waste time doing something the computer can do faster and more effectively, go right ahead.
The problem is that in the case of word processors, I become much more inefficient and I waste much more time by using "features" than by doing things by hand.
In my lab I have a strict policy that papers I'm co-writing must never use MS Word revision tracking: if someone uses it, I'll just strip them away and ignore them. Here's why. My boss happened once to use it. For the first 2-3 revisions it was fine. After 40 revisions of the same paper, where paragraphs have been cut and pasted various times in various locations and things have been rewritten various times, it just becomes a meaningless hell. The tracking revision tool also cannot decide if a change is important or not -every time I correct a typo, a new things pops up in the tracking. I then stripped down *all* revisions and now I just put the significant things I changed in various colors, with various meanings (es. red: additions, blue: things I am uncertain of, green: suggestions etc.) We work this way now, and everyone is much happier.
(BTW, I would love to use just LaTeX to write papers, but alas, there are a lot of reasons this is not possible. Sigh.)
Maybe we'll have to present a national ID card first...
That's what happens here in Italy from 2005 for all public internet access points. Anti-terrorism measures, they say. Sigh.
Something like Debian GNU/kFreeBSD is very similar to this!
(The concept is that you can use KDE with other window managers instead of kwin)
If you don't use the package selector after the first startup, and instead immediately apt-get install aptitude, then pick which packages, it's a VERY clean system.
That's exactly what I do, and no, it is difficult (not really impossible, but difficult) to have a very clean system.
Why should I bother with gentoo, I don't want or need to compile everything, and the install is just a hastle.
The install is not so bad, and is rapidly becoming more and more automagic: moreover it is exceptionally well documented and anyone that's a minimum linux-savy can proceed within it.
As for compiling, yes, it can be annoying (but doing it during sleep- or work- time zeroizes most problems). However it has the advantage that you can strip down packages to the minumum necessary (or, OTOH, make them fatter than ever if you like them so), deciding at compile time what they should support or not. For example I don't use ARTS, and all my KDE apps are compiled without ARTS support.
Hear this noise? Must be my ROTFLCOPTER, it's arriving...
Seriously, I feel Debian as one of the most dependencies-hungry distro I know. Every package brings down a bazillion dependencies with it, because it's compiled to support everything. That's a beautiful default, and I don't bash it at all, moreover apt-get of course greately eases the pain. But you need a lot of disk space and you have a lot of dependencies. That's my experience both with Woody and Sarge and derivatives like Ubuntu.
I wonder when most distros will pick the concept of USE flags invented by Gentoo.
I'm one of these screaming about choice.
If you feel that one app fits all for a given task (something that is rarely true in my experience), go along and install just one app per task. But leave us the choices 1)to decide WHICH app to install for a given task and 2)to install more than one, if I feel to. I agree with reasonable defaults for newbies, but I don't agree with self castration.
you do not attempt to answer his questions but you attack him for asking such questions.
The problem is, ID is not a scientific theory, in the philosophical sense. It has no predictive nor explaining value. So yes, the problem is, by using your (lovely geeky :D ) analogy:
And not because the bug report is bad but the programmer has an emotional attachment to his project.
Here you're wrong. It's the bug report that is invalid.
There is nothing magic in the evolution of both neural pathways and biomolecules. Brains are made for plasticity: co-evolving a neural pathway along with the sensory organ sounds like the lesser problem to me. While eyes must evolve a plethora of new tissues, differentiation signals etc., neurons are just there, they just need to grow and wire up in the right way. A simple arc reflex of the kind "if light, then avoid" or "if it moves, then attack" probably requires just a few neurons firing (remember Valentino Breitenberg...) , would be extremly easily selected by evolution, and would be of tremendous advantage.
On the other hand, the evolution of proteins also is nothing magic IMHO, although it is the newest field of evolutive theory, as of today. Proteins are so chemically long and complex that is easy for them to be able to bind almost anything, at least with low specificity. Evolving specificity by selection alone is easy -in fact, it is something readily done every day both in your immune system and in biochemistry labs.
From TFA:
the top of the page, above the ads, featured a Smart Answer box that included a picture of Ted, an excerpt from a biography, direct links to his official site, an encyclopedia article and other images of him.
If I look on the Italian ask.com, I see nothing of all this. Just a dull grey thing bar. www.ask.com redirects me to it.ask.com, here.
However if I use the search query URL and I delete the "it." I see the described features.
It would be OK for me to use the English language version, but the redirect is plain annoying.
Sorry, guys, but isn't this almost the same story?
Hey, this guy is running high for the Trollish Incoherent Babble Prize 2006!
If all their current, and yes, most likely future educational software will be written for Windows, you would do them a disservice by switching to Linux.
If schools switch to Linux, educational software houses will write things for Linux.
I can't imagine why teachers (with around 50 minutes or so per class period) wouldn't want to use that time learning a new OS, instead of ACTUALLY TEACHING.
Actually, to teach you also have to learn. My mother is an high school teacher, and she still studies a lot when she's at home. Also, I did molecular biology introductory lessons at her high school, and despite me being a biophysics Ph.D. student I learned really a lot coming back to the basics to explain them to 16 years old kids.
I was 7 when I begun to program in BASIC on my dad's Vic20, and I clearly remember it. I also clearly remember when the Vic was first brought in home (I was 5 or 6) and my dad typed 10 PRINT "HELLO" 20 GOTO 10 RUN ...