Never simply shoot yourself in the foot when you can shoot yourself in both feet while hanging yourself with a bungee cord, disembowling yourself with a potato-peeler, running a crowbar up your ass, and jumping though a foot of plate glass to fall into a pool of sulfuric acid all at the same time.
Man, all this just in time for Christmas. When I'm shopping this Holiday Season, I think I'll just run up to store clerks and ask them if they carry Sony products and if they say yes, ask "For the love of God, WHY???" and then run away laughing.
Seriously, for all this free publicity! We Linux users just started this up as a hobby projects amongst a few geeks - we had no idea that so many people would pick our system over yours that you'd begin to get so worried. We're terribly flattered!
Next time, maybe you can have one of your auto-added AOL bots do the study for you!
Well, back to my Linux. Enjoy your bots, AOLers! I hear some of them are scintilating conversationalists by AOL standards. And with Christmas coming up, who *knows* what other surprises are in store?
Software companies that used the seal without authorization would be committing a felony.
Have you never heard of a phishing scam? It's where the cyberthief sets up a whole bogus website, corporate insignia and all, to fool people into typing their credit card numbers into this data trap that they think is their bank's website. Now, what difference would breaking *one* *more* crime make to this sort of person?
(-: Ooooh! I have an idea! I'll end burglary by going around town slapping stickers on the front of every house saying "do not rob this house". Then I'll make it a crime to rob houses with that sticker on them, and a crime to remove the sticker. I'll charge everybody ten bucks (a small price to pay to stamp out crime! you're either for me or you're for the criminals) to get the sticker service, and then after a few years, I'll pass a *new* law that makes it a crime to own a house without buying the sticker (which will have risen in price several thousand times by then), because that would encourage crime. Um, like, y'know, I'd be a hero like, um, whatsisname...Superman! D00d!!!1!1!
without taking a nasty, low shot at Linux. Sorry, but this article is a bunch of ten-dollar words to cloak the central FUD message (I quote the submitter's wording, see above) "Open-Source desktop software lags behind Windows." Period.
Accessibility is relatively easy to fix, brought to the developer's attention, it could be in the next release (the Linux desktop has had accesibility tools, i.e. xmagnify, since BEFORE Windows. KDE and Gnome also have a strong showing.). Most likely the oversight was due to the natural assumption that accessibility is already taken care of at the operating system level. But of course, don't take it from somebody's who's actually programmed. Use this as ammo for as long as you draw breath that Linux users hate the handicapped, and that Stallman and Torvalds go around town knocking over wheelchairs so that their occupants spill into traffic.
How DirectRevenue and Bullseye network get away with forcing you to download an uninstaller, and fill out a fucking survey, respectively, before you can uninstall their adware. Unbelievable.
*cough* *choke* You'd ACTUALLY DO this? Even when I knew no better than to run Windows, I got ahold of the MS-port of Emacs, guaranteed to find all files hidden everywhichway on your system (and able to read binaries in hexl-mode as well; you can get an idea of what a program does this way). I always simply deleted the files/directories associated with the questionable programs. Each one uses a stinky trick to try to stop this, but don't worry: if their programmers were any good for a goddamn thing at all, they cold get jobs writing REAL programs! Ad/mal/spyware has about 6 tricks that it uses over and over; learn them all (after your sixth time being attacked), and you'll never have a problem dealing with them again. Emacs is also good for editing.ini and.bat files, for those nasty programs that write themselves into the system configuration.
Uninstaller, my ass! You know what an install program does? It copies files/directories to a destination folder and registers the process with Windows and tells it where the icon is so it can draw the little picture for the program for you in the Start menu's program files. What does an uninstaller do? Same thing in reverse, only it usually leaves behind a huge mess of folders and data cruft that you have to remove manually (for instance, did you once run and then uninstall the Sims? If so, you can reclaim 1 whole Gig of disk space just by deleting the leftover "Maxis" folder). Now, the whole process of harrassing you before "uninstalling" the program probably (a) records your data to ensure that you'll get plenty of spam in the future, and (b) might possibly just replace your malware with *more* malware that's harder to detect.
My number-one tipoff that a program was bad news on windows: (a) it was new and I didn't recognize it, and (b) the program's folder had no README.txt, uninstaller.exe, or any other courtesy conventions usually observed by professionals, and (c) tried to obfuscate it's purpose (never trust a program named.MQ345tyuII1Pzx334l?112.345, for instance). At the very least, I'd delete the executables (SHIFT-delete, no trash can!). What's the worst that could happen that way? I'd just have *broken* malware that didn't work anymore.
If you genuinely would turn it down, then I applaud your ability to stand by your principles; I really don't think I'd be able to myself.
I wavered on that ethical question for a moment. Then I remembered that I'm too stinking proud. A lifetime of money (which would get spent all the same) wouldn't be worth hating myself until I'm dead (and the kids growing up all tristed and warped because dad developed a psychosis).
Did you just call Linux/BSD/Solaris 'moose and squirrel'?
Yes, but in a good way! (-: This will make no sense to you unless you have seen "The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show", featuring Rocky the flying squirrel, Bullwinkle the moose gradute of Wassamatta-U, and the two pseudo-Romanian villains who were always plotting to do them in. Meant as a humorous reference to those whacky corporate CEOs and all the mad-cap schemes they come up with to try to defeat Open Source.
I see my parent comment got modded troll, so I'll post this challenge: show me an Open Source download, be it iso image OS or a mere Linux/BSD tarball, that gets the AOL seal of approval to download, post a link to it here, and I'll take back what I said.
Seriously, think it over: You're running AOL, so you have to have Windows. You want to download and install a free Linux operating system, which will make you no longer an AOL/Windows customer. You think they'll be that stupid to encourage you?
It's just a front to say "Linux/BSD/Solaris is crap because the.iso file isn't AOL-certified." Meanwhile a malware-spammer with shoverfuls of cash from his latest pink contract will have no problem getting in. And how fast do you thing DRM will get on board? "Hah, Natasha! We can stop anybody from sharing ANYTHING just because it isn't AOL-certified!" "Yes, Boris, and now we make big trouble for moose and squirrel!" AOL-certified will have the opposite effect: products bearing this seal will be treated with an extra measure of suspicioun.
Touchy? Hell, no. I'm actually quite content that the anti-learning contigent you belong to will steadily breed themselves out of the gene pool, i.e. by finding themselves laying on a surgury table with the doctor standing over them saying, "Even though I attended 8 years of medical school and have my diploma on the wall, you might not survive this proceedure. After all, I am an adult, so I have a decreased capacity for learning."
Guaranteed way to find files on any CD?
on
Bad Day To Be Sony
·
· Score: 1
Well, I don't know about anybody else, but I rounded up every CD in the house with the word "Sony" on it and quaranteed them (only found six of them, and they all came free as gifts. funny, could our good taste in music be protecting us?). I don't care what albums or which rootkit or what company the DRM virus comes from; I want no part of *any* of it, and the only reason we know about this today is through the detective work of the original blogger. What if this is just the tip of the iceberg? I'm usually the last one to grab for the tin-foil-hat, but I'm paranoid as f**k about this. What scares me now is what I *don't* know.
So, OK, my plan is to mount each suspected CD on my Linux box and view the CD directory using Emacs in directory-edit-mode. Any executable binaries on them, I'll load them in hexl-mode and check them out.
My question: To the best of everybody's knowledge, is this a fool-proof, guaranteed method of finding this crap? Does any known technology exist that could hide from this method?
PS Ironically, I've always been dead against downloading *any* music, religiously buying the albums shrink-wrapped at the store - until today. Now, I'm figuring that I'm better off taking my chances with the warez/cracker network and ripping the tunes for free like a common thief than trusting one more corporation to run any media file on my computer again.
*visions of "Attack of the 50 foot Spammerputer", complete with 1950's movie poster imagery* Spam pumped into my account at 1000's of teraflops per minute. Going to open my inbox, and the internal pressure makes the monitor explode in my face, accompanied by the AOL sound file. Thank you, my hair is completely white, now.
that could make one...soooooo deluuuuusional? Do we see Radio Flyer entering their wagons in the Indianapolis 500? KMart renting a space at Fashion Island mall? Weekly World News reporters showing up at the Nobel Literature Awards "just in case they win"?
A child's capacity to learn is quite a bit larger than an adult's.
Well, then, let's just slam the doors on all colleges, universities, vocational schools, and community learning centers, because it's all such a hopeless waste of time. Hey, should we just burn down the libraries while we're at it? But I can see I can't get this point through to you - you're identifying yourself as a person with a reduced capacity to learn. And I hope going through life with the phrase "I CAN'T!!!" tatooed on your forehead works for you and you're happy with it. Just remember, you can let go of that idea any time and at least substitute "I'll try!" once in a while - you'd be amazed at what you can do when you let yourself.
But you ARE, indeed, speaking just for yourself. Tell your excuse to any IT professional. When an IT professional quits learning, it's because s/he's retiring in five years and won't care after that if all they know is rendered irrelevant by the foreward march of technology. Now if you'll excuse me, I'll go back to this AJAX tutorial I just downloaded...
OK, then I'm a little more lost than I thought it was. True, my last practical experience with a Mac was when I was publishing the company newsletter back in '92 on an Apple box. XFCE (r34||y, w3'r3 601n6 70 d36r355 fr0m 5p3||1n6 4nd 6r4mm4r f|4m35 70 f|1pp1n' (4p174|1z4710n f|4m35? |-|0w un-3|173!) has *something* up on top of the screen, a taskbar of sorts, that looks kinda like the dingus I see on Macs I look at on display in computer stores. And I didn't say it *decended* from Macs, it just looks more like a Mac than any other Linux desktop I've encountered, and also resembles that which I glean to be the out-of-the-box configuration for modern Macs in screenshots, down to the blue wallpaper with the swirly streaks (but maybe that's just OS X on a Mac?). Clearly, somebody along the way thought of Mac users, at least in passing.
Do not underestimate the kids' thirst for knowledge and their ability to acquire it:)
*BRAVO*!!! You said it even better than I did upthread.
I might add, that today's thirty-somethings got into computers back in school by - guess what? - playing with systems such as Commodores and Apple 2's and TRS-80's which were more open - at least enough to include a programming language on them, toys that they were.
Back then, the concept of a proprietary system encrusted with EULAs and DRM was unheard-of. Programs were intrinistically something you *wrote*, not something you *bought*. Virtually every computer book in the store was about how to write your programs from scratch. Oh, the joy of growing up with computers in that era - machines were mine to learn, nobody told me it was too hard, Radio Shack still sold tools and parts to *build* computers instead of just cellphones and stereos, and for every thing I learned, I later encountered somebody who'd pay me to apply that knowledge. My kids are growing up the same way, by having several Linux machines to play with at will, with plenty of scriptable Bash, Python, and Tcl languages ready at the command line whenever they get bored with the shiny GUI and pop open an xterm. Nobody has to drill it into their heads - they just learn it all by themselves!
What kinds of Scrooges would we be to deny that joy to the next generation?
We forget that using a computer is a difficult and even scary experience for the vast majority of folks, particularly those with very little education.
This fallacy that you cite is at the heart of the whole problem. You know, my daughter is nine, and she's grown up in an all-Linux household. She knows her way around several distos (we have multiple computers) and routinely runs live Linux CDs as well. She uses the whole machine (albeit with a heavy focus on games and educational software), right down to toying with the Python command line occasionally. Mind you, she's still able to use the Windows computers at school, which she sees as almost-acceptable substitutes (she's been heard to complain to the teachers that the computers at school crash, however, stating "They're not supposed to do that.", and expresses disdain for the lack of games that come with a Windows system. OK, I'm proud.). Mind you again, she didn't come to this expertise through having Linux drilled into her head. She just picked it up the way kids pick up anything else, by watching mom and dad. We had Windows on dual-boot on one machine for a long time (it came with one machine which somebody threw away and I brought home and fixed), but she picked Linux over it. I finally deleted Windows when nobody in the household had started it for a year.
What's our secret? Simply that "It's too hard." are words, more than the seven words you can't say on television, that never pass the lips of her mother and I. It turns out that people have a damn-near-infinite capacity to learn if you simply give them the tools to use, the manuals to read, and don't make a federal case about how hard it is!!!!
But thank you so much for doing your part to make this world a dumber place. Thank you for spreading the proprietary party-line that we are too stupid to understand computers, and hence are better off being enslaved by those who know the secret. Thank you for discouraging tomorrow's Einstein before he ever got started. Keep on spreading that FUD!!!
XFCE - the most Mac-like desktop for Linux, has a menubar at the top. Gnome recently has been distributing with a panel on top and bottom. Both of these are the default out-of-the-box configuration. I turn them off when I'm forced to use these desktops on a distro that only includes them, and when not I use the menu-under-the-mouse thing like with Fluxbox or Window Maker or TWM. To *my* way of seeing it, every desktop does *something* when you click the mouse pointer on it - so why not just put the whole system menu there and be done with it?
But you like menus on top, use XFCE or Gnome with the menus on top. Hey, you can even configure it to put the menus on the *side* - ooooooh!
use a custom configuration (probably with XFCE) that would be pretty snappy.
Amazing! Incredible! Somebody who's heard of a desktop besides Gnome and KDE! I'm in shock! Yes, and while we're at it, let's not forget Fluxbox, FVWM, and Window Maker as other great performance desktops, which are also tinkerable...
It's an equally common mistake that all end users wish to "tinker" with their computers as opposed to accomplishing something useful with a tool.
It's a statement of galling ignorance to suggest that tinkering is useless. You know those shiny, glowing applications that are all happy noises and bouncing cursors that you love so much? THINK VERY HARD HERE: Where did they come from? How did they come into existence? Did the Software Fairy leave them on the hard drive? Did Santa's elves build them? Did they grow on a CD tree? Did they evolve in a primordial pond? Did Saruman put his orcs together digging them out of the ground?
ANSWER: Software is written by tinkerers tinkering with tinkerable systems. If you *don't* *want* to tinker, then just stay in your GUI and use your menus. Even the grubbiest grease-monkey open-source distro has the same KDE desktop on it that the rest of the world has a heart-attack without. TOOLS ADD - ADD - ADD!!! - to an operating system, they DO NOT TAKE AWAY. I'll never understand how that myth got started. Does making a car out of bolted-together clearly-labeled parts that can be easily repaired somehow make it less drivable?
Well, if we Americans can quit talking on our cell phones as we pilot our SUVs through rush hour traffic to return the Disney DVDs to Blockbuster and put down our Starbucks sloppaccinos and think about something for a minute, we might get some insight into a whole, new way of thinking: learning is not hard. It just takes time and focus. A third-world waif in a village with no TV has alot of time on their hands, and then they can read the documentation that comes with the system which clearly explains how to tinker with it. Thus, instead of ending up with a poor kid with some point-n-click skills, the world has gained another developer. This developer may go on to customize the distro to his native language, or develop other custom apps that will enrich the software base for all. This recent article: http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=168296&o p=Reply&threshold=1&commentsort=0&tid=99&mode=thre ad&pid=14031394
shows that just that is happening in many countries already.
Alien concepts, I know. I've given up trying to explain the concept of learning=a_good_thing on Slashdot. For you, Windows is all you need. For people who find something lacking in their lot in life and want to improve it, they need less help chatting and making powerpoint spreadsheets and more help learning how to make chat and spreadsheet programs. Incidentally, people who weren't afraid of learning something new created all the software you use today, and also build the computers you use it on. But oops, I forgot, I'm on Slashdot, I mean to say computers grow on trees and software is done by the Source Code Fairy.
Your question is wildly ranging into the hypothetical, so I can't give you an answer like "six months, 32 days, 11 hours, and five minutes". To get an idea what it takes to make a Linux distro from the ground up, try one of the source-based distributions: http://distrowatch.com/search.php?category=Source- based&origin=All&basedon=All&desktop=All&architect ure=All&status=Active
I can't vouch for any personally except Linux From Scratch, which works if you Follow the Book exactly. Now, to start with Debian and release it as your own distro, that's less work...provided you did the from-the-ground-up thing so you understand what and why of the guts of a Linux system. Almost all of the distros out there are based on derivatives of Red Hat or Debian (*sniff* and something like only two for my fave Slackware!). Pick up Knoppix sometime for a prime example of a Debian-based distro.
Now, Mandriva is one distro with it's act together. No text-mode installer or arcane package manager syntax for Mandriva - it's the *easiest* distro you'll ever run. But that comes at a price, because it's also *hardest* for a developer to create an interface that's a smooth, seamless uh.. $EXPERIENCE than it is to just make the damn program work already and slap the command line interface on it with a shell script wrapper.
As the well-known tech author Peter Norvig noted, you won't learn but diddly in 24 hours (my wording). In fact, I daresay that Unix is not a topic one expects to learn completely in *any* finite length of time. Instead, one must stroll to the heftier material (like "Unix: the Complete Reference" that McGraw-Hill publishes) and take it home for a few dollars more. You keep it on hand as an on-going reference source.
I'm afraid I can't pull any punches on this one: any "teach yourself X in 24 hours" book is snake oil to get your money. It's there to take advantage of people with the wrong attitude - Unix (and most of IT along with it) evolves so continuously, it practically re-invents itself every five years (through BSD, Linux, Solaris, etc). Get it in your head that it's a "learn-it-once" thing and you end up ten years later still able to babble Apple 2 Basic and remembering that SIMM = "single inline memory module" and DIMM = "dual inline memory module", but having to scurry back to the docs every time you edit your Python script.
It's easy to see why you got modded down -1 flamebait. You need to get the facts straight. A recent study shows the average IQ of the following groups:
Stupid gits: 56
Blithering morons: 48
Bumbling fools: 44.3
Fucking Idiots: 37
Bleeding halfwits: 29.1
Fucking Imbeciles: 26
You have to get to the level of inanimate objects or at the very least slow-moving vegetables as a basis for comparison with Dumbya before you can completely abolish all concerns for counterattacks.
Slashdot Mirror
Man, all this just in time for Christmas. When I'm shopping this Holiday Season, I think I'll just run up to store clerks and ask them if they carry Sony products and if they say yes, ask "For the love of God, WHY???" and then run away laughing.
Next time, maybe you can have one of your auto-added AOL bots do the study for you!
Well, back to my Linux. Enjoy your bots, AOLers! I hear some of them are scintilating conversationalists by AOL standards. And with Christmas coming up, who *knows* what other surprises are in store?
Have you never heard of a phishing scam? It's where the cyberthief sets up a whole bogus website, corporate insignia and all, to fool people into typing their credit card numbers into this data trap that they think is their bank's website. Now, what difference would breaking *one* *more* crime make to this sort of person?
(-: Ooooh! I have an idea! I'll end burglary by going around town slapping stickers on the front of every house saying "do not rob this house". Then I'll make it a crime to rob houses with that sticker on them, and a crime to remove the sticker. I'll charge everybody ten bucks (a small price to pay to stamp out crime! you're either for me or you're for the criminals) to get the sticker service, and then after a few years, I'll pass a *new* law that makes it a crime to own a house without buying the sticker (which will have risen in price several thousand times by then), because that would encourage crime. Um, like, y'know, I'd be a hero like, um, whatsisname...Superman! D00d!!!1!1!
Accessibility is relatively easy to fix, brought to the developer's attention, it could be in the next release (the Linux desktop has had accesibility tools, i.e. xmagnify, since BEFORE Windows. KDE and Gnome also have a strong showing.). Most likely the oversight was due to the natural assumption that accessibility is already taken care of at the operating system level. But of course, don't take it from somebody's who's actually programmed. Use this as ammo for as long as you draw breath that Linux users hate the handicapped, and that Stallman and Torvalds go around town knocking over wheelchairs so that their occupants spill into traffic.
*cough* *choke* You'd ACTUALLY DO this? Even when I knew no better than to run Windows, I got ahold of the MS-port of Emacs, guaranteed to find all files hidden everywhichway on your system (and able to read binaries in hexl-mode as well; you can get an idea of what a program does this way). I always simply deleted the files/directories associated with the questionable programs. Each one uses a stinky trick to try to stop this, but don't worry: if their programmers were any good for a goddamn thing at all, they cold get jobs writing REAL programs! Ad/mal/spyware has about 6 tricks that it uses over and over; learn them all (after your sixth time being attacked), and you'll never have a problem dealing with them again. Emacs is also good for editing .ini and .bat files, for those nasty programs that write themselves into the system configuration.
Uninstaller, my ass! You know what an install program does? It copies files/directories to a destination folder and registers the process with Windows and tells it where the icon is so it can draw the little picture for the program for you in the Start menu's program files. What does an uninstaller do? Same thing in reverse, only it usually leaves behind a huge mess of folders and data cruft that you have to remove manually (for instance, did you once run and then uninstall the Sims? If so, you can reclaim 1 whole Gig of disk space just by deleting the leftover "Maxis" folder). Now, the whole process of harrassing you before "uninstalling" the program probably (a) records your data to ensure that you'll get plenty of spam in the future, and (b) might possibly just replace your malware with *more* malware that's harder to detect.
My number-one tipoff that a program was bad news on windows: (a) it was new and I didn't recognize it, and (b) the program's folder had no README.txt, uninstaller.exe, or any other courtesy conventions usually observed by professionals, and (c) tried to obfuscate it's purpose (never trust a program named .MQ345tyuII1Pzx334l?112.345, for instance). At the very least, I'd delete the executables (SHIFT-delete, no trash can!). What's the worst that could happen that way? I'd just have *broken* malware that didn't work anymore.
I wavered on that ethical question for a moment. Then I remembered that I'm too stinking proud. A lifetime of money (which would get spent all the same) wouldn't be worth hating myself until I'm dead (and the kids growing up all tristed and warped because dad developed a psychosis).
Yes, but in a good way! (-: This will make no sense to you unless you have seen "The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show", featuring Rocky the flying squirrel, Bullwinkle the moose gradute of Wassamatta-U, and the two pseudo-Romanian villains who were always plotting to do them in. Meant as a humorous reference to those whacky corporate CEOs and all the mad-cap schemes they come up with to try to defeat Open Source.
I see my parent comment got modded troll, so I'll post this challenge: show me an Open Source download, be it iso image OS or a mere Linux/BSD tarball, that gets the AOL seal of approval to download, post a link to it here, and I'll take back what I said.
Seriously, think it over: You're running AOL, so you have to have Windows. You want to download and install a free Linux operating system, which will make you no longer an AOL/Windows customer. You think they'll be that stupid to encourage you?
It's just a front to say "Linux/BSD/Solaris is crap because the .iso file isn't AOL-certified." Meanwhile a malware-spammer with shoverfuls of cash from his latest pink contract will have no problem getting in. And how fast do you thing DRM will get on board? "Hah, Natasha! We can stop anybody from sharing ANYTHING just because it isn't AOL-certified!" "Yes, Boris, and now we make big trouble for moose and squirrel!" AOL-certified will have the opposite effect: products bearing this seal will be treated with an extra measure of suspicioun.
Touchy? Hell, no. I'm actually quite content that the anti-learning contigent you belong to will steadily breed themselves out of the gene pool, i.e. by finding themselves laying on a surgury table with the doctor standing over them saying, "Even though I attended 8 years of medical school and have my diploma on the wall, you might not survive this proceedure. After all, I am an adult, so I have a decreased capacity for learning."
So, OK, my plan is to mount each suspected CD on my Linux box and view the CD directory using Emacs in directory-edit-mode. Any executable binaries on them, I'll load them in hexl-mode and check them out.
My question: To the best of everybody's knowledge, is this a fool-proof, guaranteed method of finding this crap? Does any known technology exist that could hide from this method?
PS Ironically, I've always been dead against downloading *any* music, religiously buying the albums shrink-wrapped at the store - until today. Now, I'm figuring that I'm better off taking my chances with the warez/cracker network and ripping the tunes for free like a common thief than trusting one more corporation to run any media file on my computer again.
*visions of "Attack of the 50 foot Spammerputer", complete with 1950's movie poster imagery* Spam pumped into my account at 1000's of teraflops per minute. Going to open my inbox, and the internal pressure makes the monitor explode in my face, accompanied by the AOL sound file. Thank you, my hair is completely white, now.
that could make one...soooooo deluuuuusional? Do we see Radio Flyer entering their wagons in the Indianapolis 500? KMart renting a space at Fashion Island mall? Weekly World News reporters showing up at the Nobel Literature Awards "just in case they win"?
Well, then, let's just slam the doors on all colleges, universities, vocational schools, and community learning centers, because it's all such a hopeless waste of time. Hey, should we just burn down the libraries while we're at it? But I can see I can't get this point through to you - you're identifying yourself as a person with a reduced capacity to learn. And I hope going through life with the phrase "I CAN'T!!!" tatooed on your forehead works for you and you're happy with it. Just remember, you can let go of that idea any time and at least substitute "I'll try!" once in a while - you'd be amazed at what you can do when you let yourself.
But you ARE, indeed, speaking just for yourself. Tell your excuse to any IT professional. When an IT professional quits learning, it's because s/he's retiring in five years and won't care after that if all they know is rendered irrelevant by the foreward march of technology. Now if you'll excuse me, I'll go back to this AJAX tutorial I just downloaded...
This Xfce review: http://www.computeruser.com/articles/2406,4,43,1,0 601,05.html seems to second some of what I was fumbling at.
OK, then I'm a little more lost than I thought it was. True, my last practical experience with a Mac was when I was publishing the company newsletter back in '92 on an Apple box. XFCE (r34||y, w3'r3 601n6 70 d36r355 fr0m 5p3||1n6 4nd 6r4mm4r f|4m35 70 f|1pp1n' (4p174|1z4710n f|4m35? |-|0w un-3|173!) has *something* up on top of the screen, a taskbar of sorts, that looks kinda like the dingus I see on Macs I look at on display in computer stores. And I didn't say it *decended* from Macs, it just looks more like a Mac than any other Linux desktop I've encountered, and also resembles that which I glean to be the out-of-the-box configuration for modern Macs in screenshots, down to the blue wallpaper with the swirly streaks (but maybe that's just OS X on a Mac?). Clearly, somebody along the way thought of Mac users, at least in passing.
*BRAVO*!!! You said it even better than I did upthread.
I might add, that today's thirty-somethings got into computers back in school by - guess what? - playing with systems such as Commodores and Apple 2's and TRS-80's which were more open - at least enough to include a programming language on them, toys that they were.
Back then, the concept of a proprietary system encrusted with EULAs and DRM was unheard-of. Programs were intrinistically something you *wrote*, not something you *bought*. Virtually every computer book in the store was about how to write your programs from scratch. Oh, the joy of growing up with computers in that era - machines were mine to learn, nobody told me it was too hard, Radio Shack still sold tools and parts to *build* computers instead of just cellphones and stereos, and for every thing I learned, I later encountered somebody who'd pay me to apply that knowledge. My kids are growing up the same way, by having several Linux machines to play with at will, with plenty of scriptable Bash, Python, and Tcl languages ready at the command line whenever they get bored with the shiny GUI and pop open an xterm. Nobody has to drill it into their heads - they just learn it all by themselves!
What kinds of Scrooges would we be to deny that joy to the next generation?
This fallacy that you cite is at the heart of the whole problem. You know, my daughter is nine, and she's grown up in an all-Linux household. She knows her way around several distos (we have multiple computers) and routinely runs live Linux CDs as well. She uses the whole machine (albeit with a heavy focus on games and educational software), right down to toying with the Python command line occasionally. Mind you, she's still able to use the Windows computers at school, which she sees as almost-acceptable substitutes (she's been heard to complain to the teachers that the computers at school crash, however, stating "They're not supposed to do that.", and expresses disdain for the lack of games that come with a Windows system. OK, I'm proud.). Mind you again, she didn't come to this expertise through having Linux drilled into her head. She just picked it up the way kids pick up anything else, by watching mom and dad. We had Windows on dual-boot on one machine for a long time (it came with one machine which somebody threw away and I brought home and fixed), but she picked Linux over it. I finally deleted Windows when nobody in the household had started it for a year.
What's our secret? Simply that "It's too hard." are words, more than the seven words you can't say on television, that never pass the lips of her mother and I. It turns out that people have a damn-near-infinite capacity to learn if you simply give them the tools to use, the manuals to read, and don't make a federal case about how hard it is!!!!
But thank you so much for doing your part to make this world a dumber place. Thank you for spreading the proprietary party-line that we are too stupid to understand computers, and hence are better off being enslaved by those who know the secret. Thank you for discouraging tomorrow's Einstein before he ever got started. Keep on spreading that FUD!!!
But you like menus on top, use XFCE or Gnome with the menus on top. Hey, you can even configure it to put the menus on the *side* - ooooooh!
Amazing! Incredible! Somebody who's heard of a desktop besides Gnome and KDE! I'm in shock! Yes, and while we're at it, let's not forget Fluxbox, FVWM, and Window Maker as other great performance desktops, which are also tinkerable...
It's a statement of galling ignorance to suggest that tinkering is useless. You know those shiny, glowing applications that are all happy noises and bouncing cursors that you love so much? THINK VERY HARD HERE: Where did they come from? How did they come into existence? Did the Software Fairy leave them on the hard drive? Did Santa's elves build them? Did they grow on a CD tree? Did they evolve in a primordial pond? Did Saruman put his orcs together digging them out of the ground?
ANSWER: Software is written by tinkerers tinkering with tinkerable systems. If you *don't* *want* to tinker, then just stay in your GUI and use your menus. Even the grubbiest grease-monkey open-source distro has the same KDE desktop on it that the rest of the world has a heart-attack without. TOOLS ADD - ADD - ADD!!! - to an operating system, they DO NOT TAKE AWAY. I'll never understand how that myth got started. Does making a car out of bolted-together clearly-labeled parts that can be easily repaired somehow make it less drivable?
Well, if we Americans can quit talking on our cell phones as we pilot our SUVs through rush hour traffic to return the Disney DVDs to Blockbuster and put down our Starbucks sloppaccinos and think about something for a minute, we might get some insight into a whole, new way of thinking: learning is not hard. It just takes time and focus. A third-world waif in a village with no TV has alot of time on their hands, and then they can read the documentation that comes with the system which clearly explains how to tinker with it. Thus, instead of ending up with a poor kid with some point-n-click skills, the world has gained another developer. This developer may go on to customize the distro to his native language, or develop other custom apps that will enrich the software base for all. This recent article: http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=168296&o p=Reply&threshold=1&commentsort=0&tid=99&mode=thre ad&pid=14031394
shows that just that is happening in many countries already.
Alien concepts, I know. I've given up trying to explain the concept of learning=a_good_thing on Slashdot. For you, Windows is all you need. For people who find something lacking in their lot in life and want to improve it, they need less help chatting and making powerpoint spreadsheets and more help learning how to make chat and spreadsheet programs. Incidentally, people who weren't afraid of learning something new created all the software you use today, and also build the computers you use it on. But oops, I forgot, I'm on Slashdot, I mean to say computers grow on trees and software is done by the Source Code Fairy.
Now, Mandriva is one distro with it's act together. No text-mode installer or arcane package manager syntax for Mandriva - it's the *easiest* distro you'll ever run. But that comes at a price, because it's also *hardest* for a developer to create an interface that's a smooth, seamless uh.. $EXPERIENCE than it is to just make the damn program work already and slap the command line interface on it with a shell script wrapper.
I'm afraid I can't pull any punches on this one: any "teach yourself X in 24 hours" book is snake oil to get your money. It's there to take advantage of people with the wrong attitude - Unix (and most of IT along with it) evolves so continuously, it practically re-invents itself every five years (through BSD, Linux, Solaris, etc). Get it in your head that it's a "learn-it-once" thing and you end up ten years later still able to babble Apple 2 Basic and remembering that SIMM = "single inline memory module" and DIMM = "dual inline memory module", but having to scurry back to the docs every time you edit your Python script.
It's easy to see why you got modded down -1 flamebait. You need to get the facts straight. A recent study shows the average IQ of the following groups:
Stupid gits: 56
Blithering morons: 48
Bumbling fools: 44.3
Fucking Idiots: 37
Bleeding halfwits: 29.1
Fucking Imbeciles: 26
You have to get to the level of inanimate objects or at the very least slow-moving vegetables as a basis for comparison with Dumbya before you can completely abolish all concerns for counterattacks.