Furthermore, don't wait around for fscking Vista to fix problems that Microsoft cannot afford to fix.
Protecting computers from vulnerabilities that need not be there in the first place is a multi-billion dollar business encompassing thousands of product and service vendors world-wide that ultimately trickle capital back up the vulnerability supply chain.
This bizarre altruistic myth of Microsoft working around the clock to solve these problems, to deliver the customer a trouble-free computing experience, is to be awash on the shoals of pure reason. It is idiocy. No monopoly in it's right mind can afford to produce a flawless, self-obsolescing product. MS is all about creating a sickness and providing itself as the only cure. There's no reason that given time, Apple would do otherwise either - such is the legacy of these old proprietary software corporations and their rental operating systems.
At a certain point internet users are going to have to get down with the fact that spam isn't like weather, it's not an environmental effect. They're going to have to learn to make sensible choices: like not using Outlook express, IE, not exposing their email on their websites in clear text, mass CC'ing friends and realising that by using operating systems like Windows they are supporting a broader economic machinery that provides a ready platform for the widest possible proliferation of spam, despite the empty pledge of our self-elected baysean martyr, Sir Gates.
Only then will we start to see a real reduction in spam in general. Spam is, in part, a supply and demand system. We're getting alot of spam because statistically speaking, it's justifying the expense of its implementation and distribution. Windows especially is actively a part of the macro-economics of spam, the multi-billion dollar cat and mouse game that it is. Stop supporting the proliferation of spam. Companies, schools, organistions ought to take responsibility for educating the users of the computer terminals they provide and make sane choices come time for them to spend their technology budget.
For starters, one cannot plug in one of those USB memory sticks into a Linux PC. Forget about plugging the thing and having it auto-recognized and mounted.
Clearly you haven't used Linux in 5 years. I don't know of a desktop Linux distro which doesn't automount USB storage devices, including cameras.
The 90's called, and they want their "I tried Linux but couldn't install it" angst back.
I look forward to the day people start suing the numerous idiots that use Flash in their index page as the sole menu interface to content on their site.
The campaign will organize supporters into effective and unusual actions drawing attention to this daylight theft of computer users' rights, aggregate news stories cutting through the Vista marketing propaganda, and provide a user-friendly gateway to the adoption of free software operating systems like gNewSense (http://www.gnewsense.org).
They're going to have to work hard to make this a pearly alternative to Vista. As it stands the page will be completely meaningless to any long-time Windows user.
The tantalising features - to encourage Windows users influenced/informed by the 'Bad Vista' campaign enough to finally make that big break - are listed here and include:
gNewSense is derived from Ubuntu, and thus has most of the same functionality. There are a number of differences though.
* Firmware removed from kernel in main*
* Restricted removed
* Ubuntu logos replaced
* Universe enabled by default
* emacs, bsdgames, nethack and build-essential part of the default install
That, sadly will look like complete bollocks to anyone other than a well-versed Linux user.
What is 'firmware, 'Ubuntu', 'emacs' and 'build-essential'? Where are the screenshots? On the main gnewsense page there is nothing about how one should actually aquire the distro, merely a link to an ISO, which people are supposed to intuit how to burn?
Compare that to opensuse whose first page includes the languages of people that (shock) may not speak english. It has all the hand-holding any trembling gnubie needs to get them going. Ubuntu, clearly layed out and friendly, a ton of documentation - in many languages - and direct in-roads to an enormous community of users sharing information and providing assistance around the world, around the clock. Most of the popularity of Ubuntu, for instance, is due to it's incredible community. People will climb a wall if they know someone is on the other side to help them down. Binary blobs aside, GNewSense has a long way to go before it's anything close to a sane option for the switcher.
Agreed, the article is incorrect regarding use of tar's -C switch.
This works:
tar -C/tmp/foo -xvf/path/to/some.tar.gz
This doesn't:
tar xvf -C/tmp/foo/path/to/some.tar.gz
I agree that '&&' is a better practice to encourage than ';'. Chaining commands without heeding their exit status can make a real mess and cause much confusion.
Aside from that I don't think it's a bad top-ten. I think there should've been something in there about command completion. If productivity is important to this discussion then this feature of any good shell environment can't be ignored.
Methinks you're talking bollocks. Kreuzberg is one of the most well-tended suburbs in Berlin. Those hand water pumps are antiques, scattered throughout the parks and streets because it's always been nice to get a free drink and wash the snow of your boots and bike tires in the winter. The only houses that don't have running water are likely to be squats. Graffiti like the kind you describe is everywhere in the world, especially that which antagonises the Police. Garbage trucks don't have police escorts except on the very unusual circumstance of May Day.Of all the cities I've lived in Berlin has to be one of the safest and sanest. Berlin makes Paris, London or New York look both panicked and pathologically paranoid.
That does sound strange given that a huge proportion of the West Berlin's Kreuzberg are Turkish, in fact Berlin itself has a huge and strong Turkish community. Admittedly there is some tension between white German Berliners and German Turks in Kreuzberg in some suburbs; but there are far worse cities for a Turk elsewhere in the world than Berlin. This is due to the same kind of racism that it symptomatic of territorial anxiety mixed with nationalistic ambition found anywhere in the world.
Anyway, what does your supposed example of blanket racism have to do with Nazism in particular? Ask a black American in L.A if it's Germans that ignore them from behind a counter.
Agreed. The massive task of switching to dpkg shouldn't be underestimated, but it seems like the decision to not do this has more to do with a fear of losing identity than anything else, as though it were a 'spiritual concession' of some sort.
Any good distro differentiates itself through offering a quality user experience. Look at the massively popular Ubuntu and the rising of Xandros. Both are Debian based distributions but favoured for different reasons. They are unique yet on an architectural level they have a common heritage. Fedora should raise the bar and choose the best tools for the job. I can't count the number of times I've heard someone say they tried Fedora but gave up because of package dependency / conflict resolution problems.
I've seen enough loyal Fedora/RH users using apt-rpm on their own systems to indicate that a complete transition, ie. replacing rpm's with debs may not be so shocking for a community of $RPMDISTRO users.
The task of migrating rpm packages over to the deb format would certainly be a massive undertaking, but the popularity and reputation of the Debian packaging system shouldn't be ignored. With the rapid growth of Ubuntu, the interest from historically Linux unfriendly third-parties in releasing packages in a Debian format is hard to ignore. Fedora could benefit from the growth of Debian based distributions, getting a lead on other rpm distros that choose to stick with a troubled package format. They could do what any good distro does these days: focus on offering a quality user experience, choosing the best technology available to fulfill these ends. Package conflict / dependency resolution is a typical reason people turn away from an rpm based distro, even Linux altogether.
Why don't you just suspend the thing? FYI Ubuntu seems to be your best bet if you want out-of-the-box suspend support where you can close the lid and send a laptop off snoozing in seconds. I've seen several Ubuntu different laptops with this working perfectly.
Suspend in Debian is improving gradually over the years, but for some odd reason I now have to disconnect any USB devices, and ifdown network devices, else it grumbles about not being able to power manage these things. This results in it getting stuck half-way, requiring a painful hard reset.
.. any Windows laptop must cost 10's of 1000's of $'s. What, with all the time spent keeping the thing clean, installing spyware blockers, anti-virus software
subscriptions et al. Given Windows is the statistical default desktop computing environment, then it is the daily use of Windows that should be considered as our psudeo-economic benchmark in such a simplistic time == money equation. Thus, we can conclude, the OLPC project is in fact money in the bank for millions of kids.
You shouldn't let them just demand Adobe PhotoShop to edit a couple of pictures, and then give them their way. You still need to examine what they're asking for and provide what they actually need.
Here hear. I work in education at a University level, mostly as a teacher. With one student, a friend, I sat down and added all the cost of all the software (at educational discounts) she was required to use across her 3 year design and media degree. It came to over $AU17000.00. Her course fees per year were $AU1500.00. She was quite concerned about being caught using cracked software and yet was naturally reluctant to tell department staff of her problem. Fellow students of hers had the response "Don't worry about it, the teachers know we all do it."
Universities are teaching students software they know they cannot afford, relying entirely (expecting even) that they steal software to complete an education they have enrolled in and paid for.
If you're interested in encouraging change to suitable FOSS alternatives in your school, this - from experience - is an excellent card to play. Expose how the school's policy on expecting students to use proprietary software puts students in the uncomfortable situation of become software theives, downloading cracks from dubious sites and point out the hazardous situation this puts them in and the bad habits it produces. Get economic on them. Add up the software a given students is expected to own and point out the financial pressure this would put on that a student wanted to avoid "committing a crime". Use this as the basis for an argument that the school must research suitable replacements for costly proprietary applications and/or subsidising their software budget. Don't be black and white about it; be honest and explain that (for instance) the GIMP may not be able to replace all of the functionality of Photoshop CS, but in many cases it can replace enough, that Blender can do many things Maya/3DSMax/Rhino/Lightwave can't and vice versa, that Inkscape can replace much of Illustrator's functionality and that millions of kids come out of schools thinking through the same software and that their are real advantages to a diversity of experience in the employment 'marketplace'.
Moreso, don't yield to the unspoken argument that it is the strategy of Adobe, Alias etc to ensure their software remains easily crackable and therefore easily adoptable. This is often used as a prop when arguing for pushing costly proprietary software to students in the course of their education. Expose this assumption also if need be.
You get few, if any, benefits from ditching Aqua if you're still running OS X
There may be benefits. OS X is extremely resource intensive and has terrible memory management. A fine place to start if you're interested in a performant machine would be to strip back Aqua.
I work with 3D alot and have been surprised by just how much of an under-acheiver OS X is (Core Duo or PPC) compared to a Linux install on the same machine. OS X won't ever compete with Linux in 3D workstation market until it makes it easier to get rid of the bling. The last thing I want on a graphics workstation is having my graphics memory full of texture data and my GPU running hot on some vector math - before I even begin 3D modeling.
"Perhaps there are better things to do with our time and money in developing nations?"
Should read: "Perhaps there are better things to do with our time that reading 'analysis' on the success of a product firstly, before it's released, and secondly, from a company with it's own low-cost computing ambitions in the very same regions as the $100 laptop seeks to reach."
An article about the OLPC on 'Microsoft Network Money Central'. Give me a break.
True. Sadly his plans for wireless-electricity were completely thwarted, interestingly enough, by a refrigeration company that needed low prices for copper in order to enjoy low-cost production for their cooling systems. The reason copper was cheap, of course, was because wired electricity was in demand at the time.
Next: An engineer working for Ford will be on the cover of Time magazine hailed as a saint for his invention, the Hydroden Engine. No one will find it conspicuous the article is flanked by a full page ad for BP featuring a woman drinking from a pool of crystal clear alpine water.
These days distributions like Xandros and Ubuntu require no CLI intervention on the part of the user for daily desktop tasks. This was certainly not the case a few years ago. The odd install may require CLI interaction however, hence the need for more like System76 and big vendors like HP and Dell to push pre-installs.
I wouldn't be so sure. Google are mid-development of their in-house developer desktop OS Goobuntu, an Ubuntu derivative made by Google for the task. Furthermore don't forget that Google's next biggest 'market' is in Asia, where Linux desktop growth is formidable to say the least, far surpassing desktop Linux growth we've seen elsewhere in the West. Don't forget also OS X isn't a migration target for whole governments and their administrations either - comprising a large chunk of the so-called enterprise market.
OS X growth is still very much confined to the (comparably small) western world domestic market by and large.. Vendor lock-in (of which Apple offers the most extreme given the marriage of hardware and software) is increasingly unfashionable large desktop deployments. Linux is the 'people's OS' - free for the public - fast moving and enjoying rapid growth on the Desktop. Google appears very aware of that with their recent and growing support for the Linux desktop (Picassa, Google Earth, upcoming Google Desktop for Linux).
Finally I'd be very surprised if there are in fact more OS X users than Linux desktop users. If that is the case, it certainly may not be that way for long given the growth we've been seeing - albeit of the radar of retail-market quantified 'market share'.
Rays of hope aside, this is precisely why supporting Transgaming will ensure a steady decline of interest in making games that run natively on non-Windows systems, or even porting them to non-Windows systems. The more popular Transgaming becomes, the less games we'll see made for, or ported to, our favourite $UNIX platform. The secondary fallout will be a reduction of developer interest in OpenGL itself.
there is a difference between [b]design[/b] and [b]manufacture[/b]
Correct. I reiterate, Apple is not a hardware manufacturer. Elements like the sudden motion sensor (also on the Thinkpads) and the dual speed firewire are the work of design engineers.
Slashdot Mirror
Furthermore, don't wait around for fscking Vista to fix problems that Microsoft cannot afford to fix.
Protecting computers from vulnerabilities that need not be there in the first place is a multi-billion dollar business encompassing thousands of product and service vendors world-wide that ultimately trickle capital back up the vulnerability supply chain.
This bizarre altruistic myth of Microsoft working around the clock to solve these problems, to deliver the customer a trouble-free computing experience, is to be awash on the shoals of pure reason. It is idiocy. No monopoly in it's right mind can afford to produce a flawless, self-obsolescing product. MS is all about creating a sickness and providing itself as the only cure. There's no reason that given time, Apple would do otherwise either - such is the legacy of these old proprietary software corporations and their rental operating systems.
If you want to step out of this self-flagellating pit, try a desktop quality BSD or find peace in the sanity of a certain brownish distribution of Linux.
At a certain point internet users are going to have to get down with the fact that spam isn't like weather, it's not an environmental effect. They're going to have to learn to make sensible choices: like not using Outlook express, IE, not exposing their email on their websites in clear text, mass CC'ing friends and realising that by using operating systems like Windows they are supporting a broader economic machinery that provides a ready platform for the widest possible proliferation of spam, despite the empty pledge of our self-elected baysean martyr, Sir Gates.
Only then will we start to see a real reduction in spam in general. Spam is, in part, a supply and demand system. We're getting alot of spam because statistically speaking, it's justifying the expense of its implementation and distribution. Windows especially is actively a part of the macro-economics of spam, the multi-billion dollar cat and mouse game that it is. Stop supporting the proliferation of spam. Companies, schools, organistions ought to take responsibility for educating the users of the computer terminals they provide and make sane choices come time for them to spend their technology budget.
The 90's called, and they want their "I tried Linux but couldn't install it" angst back.
This is a troll post that we've seen here, in near carbon copy, at least a hundred times.
Yes I realise I just had an RTFA parse error..
Got to love the idea of using an OS whose scope of security vulnerability need to be 'leaked' to be known.
Fsck that..
I look forward to the day people start suing the numerous idiots that use Flash in their index page as the sole menu interface to content on their site.
The tantalising features - to encourage Windows users influenced/informed by the 'Bad Vista' campaign enough to finally make that big break - are listed here and include:
That, sadly will look like complete bollocks to anyone other than a well-versed Linux user.
What is 'firmware, 'Ubuntu', 'emacs' and 'build-essential'? Where are the screenshots? On the main gnewsense page there is nothing about how one should actually aquire the distro, merely a link to an ISO, which people are supposed to intuit how to burn?
Compare that to opensuse whose first page includes the languages of people that (shock) may not speak english. It has all the hand-holding any trembling gnubie needs to get them going. Ubuntu, clearly layed out and friendly, a ton of documentation - in many languages - and direct in-roads to an enormous community of users sharing information and providing assistance around the world, around the clock. Most of the popularity of Ubuntu, for instance, is due to it's incredible community. People will climb a wall if they know someone is on the other side to help them down. Binary blobs aside, GNewSense has a long way to go before it's anything close to a sane option for the switcher.
It works anyway, try it. -z is redundant in this case.
Agreed, the article is incorrect regarding use of tar's -C switch.
This works: tar -C
This doesn't: tar xvf -C
I agree that '&&' is a better practice to encourage than ';'. Chaining commands without heeding their exit status can make a real mess and cause much confusion.
Aside from that I don't think it's a bad top-ten. I think there should've been something in there about command completion. If productivity is important to this discussion then this feature of any good shell environment can't be ignored.
Methinks you're talking bollocks. Kreuzberg is one of the most well-tended suburbs in Berlin. Those hand water pumps are antiques, scattered throughout the parks and streets because it's always been nice to get a free drink and wash the snow of your boots and bike tires in the winter. The only houses that don't have running water are likely to be squats. Graffiti like the kind you describe is everywhere in the world, especially that which antagonises the Police. Garbage trucks don't have police escorts except on the very unusual circumstance of May Day.Of all the cities I've lived in Berlin has to be one of the safest and sanest. Berlin makes Paris, London or New York look both panicked and pathologically paranoid.
That does sound strange given that a huge proportion of the West Berlin's Kreuzberg are Turkish, in fact Berlin itself has a huge and strong Turkish community. Admittedly there is some tension between white German Berliners and German Turks in Kreuzberg in some suburbs; but there are far worse cities for a Turk elsewhere in the world than Berlin. This is due to the same kind of racism that it symptomatic of territorial anxiety mixed with nationalistic ambition found anywhere in the world.
Anyway, what does your supposed example of blanket racism have to do with Nazism in particular? Ask a black American in L.A if it's Germans that ignore them from behind a counter.
Agreed. The massive task of switching to dpkg shouldn't be underestimated, but it seems like the decision to not do this has more to do with a fear of losing identity than anything else, as though it were a 'spiritual concession' of some sort.
Any good distro differentiates itself through offering a quality user experience. Look at the massively popular Ubuntu and the rising of Xandros. Both are Debian based distributions but favoured for different reasons. They are unique yet on an architectural level they have a common heritage. Fedora should raise the bar and choose the best tools for the job. I can't count the number of times I've heard someone say they tried Fedora but gave up because of package dependency / conflict resolution problems.
I've seen enough loyal Fedora/RH users using apt-rpm on their own systems to indicate that a complete transition, ie. replacing rpm's with debs may not be so shocking for a community of $RPMDISTRO users.
The task of migrating rpm packages over to the deb format would certainly be a massive undertaking, but the popularity and reputation of the Debian packaging system shouldn't be ignored. With the rapid growth of Ubuntu, the interest from historically Linux unfriendly third-parties in releasing packages in a Debian format is hard to ignore. Fedora could benefit from the growth of Debian based distributions, getting a lead on other rpm distros that choose to stick with a troubled package format. They could do what any good distro does these days: focus on offering a quality user experience, choosing the best technology available to fulfill these ends. Package conflict / dependency resolution is a typical reason people turn away from an rpm based distro, even Linux altogether.
Why don't you just suspend the thing? FYI Ubuntu seems to be your best bet if you want out-of-the-box suspend support where you can close the lid and send a laptop off snoozing in seconds. I've seen several Ubuntu different laptops with this working perfectly.
Suspend in Debian is improving gradually over the years, but for some odd reason I now have to disconnect any USB devices, and ifdown network devices, else it grumbles about not being able to power manage these things. This results in it getting stuck half-way, requiring a painful hard reset.
.. any Windows laptop must cost 10's of 1000's of $'s. What, with all the time spent keeping the thing clean, installing spyware blockers, anti-virus software subscriptions et al. Given Windows is the statistical default desktop computing environment, then it is the daily use of Windows that should be considered as our psudeo-economic benchmark in such a simplistic time == money equation. Thus, we can conclude, the OLPC project is in fact money in the bank for millions of kids.
Universities are teaching students software they know they cannot afford, relying entirely (expecting even) that they steal software to complete an education they have enrolled in and paid for.
If you're interested in encouraging change to suitable FOSS alternatives in your school, this - from experience - is an excellent card to play. Expose how the school's policy on expecting students to use proprietary software puts students in the uncomfortable situation of become software theives, downloading cracks from dubious sites and point out the hazardous situation this puts them in and the bad habits it produces. Get economic on them. Add up the software a given students is expected to own and point out the financial pressure this would put on that a student wanted to avoid "committing a crime". Use this as the basis for an argument that the school must research suitable replacements for costly proprietary applications and/or subsidising their software budget. Don't be black and white about it; be honest and explain that (for instance) the GIMP may not be able to replace all of the functionality of Photoshop CS, but in many cases it can replace enough, that Blender can do many things Maya/3DSMax/Rhino/Lightwave can't and vice versa, that Inkscape can replace much of Illustrator's functionality and that millions of kids come out of schools thinking through the same software and that their are real advantages to a diversity of experience in the employment 'marketplace'.
Moreso, don't yield to the unspoken argument that it is the strategy of Adobe, Alias etc to ensure their software remains easily crackable and therefore easily adoptable. This is often used as a prop when arguing for pushing costly proprietary software to students in the course of their education. Expose this assumption also if need be.
I work with 3D alot and have been surprised by just how much of an under-acheiver OS X is (Core Duo or PPC) compared to a Linux install on the same machine. OS X won't ever compete with Linux in 3D workstation market until it makes it easier to get rid of the bling. The last thing I want on a graphics workstation is having my graphics memory full of texture data and my GPU running hot on some vector math - before I even begin 3D modeling.
An article about the OLPC on 'Microsoft Network Money Central'. Give me a break.
Make that "Hydrogen". The 'Hydroden Engine' is waiting for us next century.
True. Sadly his plans for wireless-electricity were completely thwarted, interestingly enough, by a refrigeration company that needed low prices for copper in order to enjoy low-cost production for their cooling systems. The reason copper was cheap, of course, was because wired electricity was in demand at the time.
More on that in here.
Next: An engineer working for Ford will be on the cover of Time magazine hailed as a saint for his invention, the Hydroden Engine. No one will find it conspicuous the article is flanked by a full page ad for BP featuring a woman drinking from a pool of crystal clear alpine water.
These days distributions like Xandros and Ubuntu require no CLI intervention on the part of the user for daily desktop tasks. This was certainly not the case a few years ago. The odd install may require CLI interaction however, hence the need for more like System76 and big vendors like HP and Dell to push pre-installs.
It seems your sig is stuck in the 90's.
I wouldn't be so sure. Google are mid-development of their in-house developer desktop OS Goobuntu, an Ubuntu derivative made by Google for the task. Furthermore don't forget that Google's next biggest 'market' is in Asia, where Linux desktop growth is formidable to say the least, far surpassing desktop Linux growth we've seen elsewhere in the West. Don't forget also OS X isn't a migration target for whole governments and their administrations either - comprising a large chunk of the so-called enterprise market.
OS X growth is still very much confined to the (comparably small) western world domestic market by and large.. Vendor lock-in (of which Apple offers the most extreme given the marriage of hardware and software) is increasingly unfashionable large desktop deployments. Linux is the 'people's OS' - free for the public - fast moving and enjoying rapid growth on the Desktop. Google appears very aware of that with their recent and growing support for the Linux desktop (Picassa, Google Earth, upcoming Google Desktop for Linux).
Finally I'd be very surprised if there are in fact more OS X users than Linux desktop users. If that is the case, it certainly may not be that way for long given the growth we've been seeing - albeit of the radar of retail-market quantified 'market share'.
Rays of hope aside, this is precisely why supporting Transgaming will ensure a steady decline of interest in making games that run natively on non-Windows systems, or even porting them to non-Windows systems. The more popular Transgaming becomes, the less games we'll see made for, or ported to, our favourite $UNIX platform. The secondary fallout will be a reduction of developer interest in OpenGL itself.
there is a difference between [b]design[/b] and [b]manufacture[/b] Correct. I reiterate, Apple is not a hardware manufacturer. Elements like the sudden motion sensor (also on the Thinkpads) and the dual speed firewire are the work of design engineers.