You don't...You hope...If not...Either that, or you
Bzzzzzzt! Time's up, thank you for playing.
The correct answer is: "You build your own computers, mostly out of the leftover parts from your lamer friends 'broken' (i.e. new four months ago, clogged with spy-ware now, so being replaced) computers, together with motherboards/processor combos you spec yourself. You'd never be caught shot dead and dragged heels first through a BestBuy or Circuit City, and you think Fry's is a great place for Joe Sixpack and Aunt Tillie to shop. You are never without your screwdriver."
I'd like to see it try applying a layer mask to a group of vector smart objects in CMYK mode and to slice the image and save as a transparent PNG.
Well, I could point to *plenty* of things that you can do in only one operating system. You can only use appletalk on an Apple network. You can only use QBASIC on a Microsoft. You can only compile a tarball built with an IMakefile on BSD. You can only use apt-get on a Debian system. You can only use multi-threading on a POSIX-compliant system. Yadda, yadda. Doesn't inherently make anything superior to anything else. You're pointing to one instance of profession-specific functionality. In point of fact, there is a Gimp plugin project: http://www.blackfiveservices.co.uk/separate.shtml it seems to be getting some attention http://nashi.altmuehlnet.de/pipermail/scribus/2003 -July/001415.html, but, hey, I don't type-set for newspapers so who knows if it's any good?
But I know this from my years of Linux use: There's no such thing as a problem that only one person's encountered. No matter how intricate your solution, there is at least one person who has searched for it before. Some people search, and give up, others search and, finding nothing, hack up their own solution. If it works in a big way, they post it for others to use. That's how it all started! I always figured, better to have the tools to do it myself, than pay somebody else to do it for me. PS: Gimp is certainly not the only graphics program on the Linux desktop, try researching http://www.mediainlinux.org/ MediainLinux live CD, a distro made specifically for media content creators in graphics, audio, and streaming media. Check their package list, see if you can Google about one of their programs and maybe it'll turn out to be what you need.
of course you aren't going to know how everything works in that time frame.
No, you forgot, this is Linux, which must always be held up to an unobtainable standard, while all other systems are deemed exceptional if they boot once. Linux is supposed to teach itself to you while you sleep, cure your AIDS, make you a millionaire, and send two Swedish bikini models over with champagne and a pound of coke to pleasure you every time you boot it up, in order to be considered half as good as the steaming turds put forth as the standard.
I just had somebody about three threads ago complain that they wouldn't use Linux because the live CDs lock the CD drive shut while they're running. I told them about Puppy linux. I didn't have the heart to break it to them about USB-drive-hosted distros.
We're finally going to acknowledge it in public, huh? (-:
But, I'm tired of being treated like I don't exist: Linux "made it" on my desktop years ago, has run for all of our family's needs (internet, chat, email, games, graphics design, programming, and YES office document use too!), will continue to "make it" on our desktops forever. And we're ALL sick of being discussed as if we were unicorns: "Do home Linux desktop users exist? No, that's just a fairy-tale. It's physically impossible to run Linux on a desktop, because it's just a teletype terminal you have to write the kernel from scratch every time you start it and it doesn't even use a monitor and mouse, it uses punched cards instead." This is all bandied about like it was common knowledge, taught at our universities, discussed with great seriousness in the tech publications, and carried as a confirmed opinion amongst many of my fellow Slashdotters, even.
If you can bear to have your whole reality re-defined, click here: http://www.lynucs.org/ . Behold: Linux desktops! Running on monitors! Note the "taskbar" on the bottom, JustLikeWindows. See the applications open on the desktop, they have a bar at the top with the little "x" thingie to close them and the little box thingie to full-screen them and they use jpg images for wallpaper, JustLikeWindows. Note the scrollbars on the sides of the windows, JustLikeWindows. Note the little icons that you click with the mouse to launch a program or open a file, JustLikeWindows.
Do you suppose, if they spend all this time making all this software...dozens of different window managers and hundreds of distros...that maybe, somewhere, just maybe, somebody could actually use them for anything, at all, at all?
So, the real story is, "Linux struggles daily against Microsoft to survive - and even thrive! - but we'd all be better off if there was less fighting in the world.", not "Linux has been killed by Microsoft. Alas, poor Tux, I knew him...almost." Get it right! Discuss us like we're dead, and we're likely to rise up and prove how alive we are!
If open source apps could do even 50% of what my creative apps can do
I've had this conversation before with about 9,999 of your brothers and sisters: see here:
http://slashdot.org/~Hosiah/journal/117451 . Tell me, if you've found the perfect nirvana in paid software, where you get off telling us in open source what to do with it? Open source is NOT for you, DON'T use it!
And which lock the CD drive while the machine is booted.
This just goes to show, people who complain that Linux is too hard to use over Windows are only interested in setting up one straw man after another to beat up. Windows locks CD drives too, while it's reading them. Nobody would expect a computer to do otherwise. But bring up Linux, and all of a sudden the computer is supposed to be able to read the CD while you take it out and play frisbee with it.
Fine then: Get Puppy Linux: http://www.goosee.com/puppy/ which runs entirely from RAM. It is also a live CD. Once it boots (as soon as you get a desktop), open the CD drive. Take the CD out. Play frisbee with it. Continue to use the computer while you do so. Note the exceptional performance! Puppy even has ICEwm as it's desktop, the simple window manager designed to make Windows users feel right at home, with it's drab bar and dreary button labeled "START" so you don't have to strain your brain figuring out where to click. I've even run Puppy Linux on a machine with *NO* hard drive, and taken the CD out, and we all proceeded to get several day's use out of a computer without a single byte of persistant memory anywhere on it. But no matter *what* we recommend to a Windows user, this same person sticks to pushing their shopping cart down the street because the limousine we're offering them doesn't stock any Grey Poupon.
Huzzah! Well said, and append to your to-do list for Sun: they can take the damn chains off Java, already! It's just a hybrid programming language, not the Holy Grail.
Your little litany of programs that you *just* *gotta* have reads likes a police line-up. The usual suspects... What you don't realize is, YOU'VE been HAD! The big business matrix conned you into spending Godawful amounts of money and now your files are all in proprietary formats that amounts to them being held prisoner by the corporations on whose programs you created the documents. Put your home movies in Windows Media Player format? Essentially, you gave them to Microsoft, which will own them forever. Will you be able to read your pdf documents ten years from now? That's up to Adobe, not you. It's really not anybody else's problem to solve. Open file formats that run on open-source programs which you can control yourself forever have been around for a long time. Still, Linux is *trying* to work with portability, but it's not a matter of programming, it's a matter of file formats locked up in patent booby-traps. Programmers HATE politics, so Big Business sadistically shoves politics in programmer's faces every chance it gets, and many programmers get tired of fighting that battle. They just want to *program*.
Games...I'm with you there. Games are getting there...slowly. I just happened to have downloaded and burned a new live CD, Linux Live Gaming Project. The games on it range from so-so to fantastic, with occasional bugs. Overall, it's the most impressive line-up of Linux games I've seen, yet, and it runs on a live CD, just boot-n-go. If it's not up to snuff, once again, blame the monopoly that conned everybody into using it's worthless Active X graphics platform, locking them into Windows, instead of using Open GL for graphics. So hardware today is put together with the intention of making it run active X only, and nothing else. Linux will lag behind here a few more years, but it's anybody but Linux's fault.
In fact, it's a testament to Mac, OS X, Linux, BSD, Unix, Sun Solaris, and everybody else but MS that we've all managed to thrive this long with the world's richest corporation single-mindedly trying to kill us off - for twenty goddamn years, already! Imagine what the other operating systems could accomplish if they didn't have to focus 95% of their time fighting back for their right to breathe. Imagine how much more civilization would have progressed by now, if the technology leader wasn't bent on owning it. The rest of us do what we can, but One Company just doesn't want to play nice...and when you give it money, you fund the force that opposes us in accomplishing those goals that you list!
You have to have enough time and technical experience to set up Linux.
Isn't about time we gave this poor, old horse a rest? Linux has come round since we had to cat a file through groff(or was that nroff?) to read the ed man page while using gopher. Linux now has Knoppix and Mepis: live CDs which don't even have to be installed. For 95% of the public that uses Windows, the majority of that public only uses email, a web browser, and an office document tool. Linux allows you to do all this in the same kind of GUI using the same mouse and menus, with no learning front-end whatsoever. You still save files by clicking "File : Save/Save as... ", you still get help clicking "help", your bookmarks are still in a menu called "bookmarks", etc.
Where's it say artists/musicians are better than doctors/lawyers/plumbers ? The point is, plumbers and lawyers are less likely to need a computer to work on, except for the same office-utility tasks the rest of us use. Artists and musicians can create their work using the computer itself as their main tool, and so they choose the best tool for that job. Hollywood special effects are done on computers, etc.
Sorry if you think being an artist is about sipping seltzer in an underdecorated gallery while wearing a fez and flirting with the groupies while stroking your goatee, but I assure you that I've literally worked from dawn til dusk tweaking one image on the computer until it's just right. No, it's not work the same way construction work is work (I've done that, too) but it's a *kind* of work.
I still don't see anything as friendly to computer newbies on the linux systems as windows
That's been a bug under my bonnet for a while now: My whole family uses Linux, including my grade-school-age kids. I've used everything from TRS-80s and Commodore Vic20s to MacIntosh, OS/2 Warp, Windows 9*/XP/NT, to about 10 flavors of Linux and I've found Windows to be the least user-friendly of them all. Because *my* definition of user-friendly is "Let me do whatever I want and give me the easiest tools to do it with." I think Linux is perfectly user-friendly because it offers me ten choices to do everything, I always have a command-line available that has just as much functionality as the rest of the system, I can install what I want when I want for free without signing my life away on an EULA, etc. etc.
Just because *you* were trained only on Excel, for instance, doesn't make Excel "user-friendly", it just makes Excel "you-friendly". There was life before The Microsoft Age and we used computers that look more like Linux/Unix than what the mainstream calls "common"...and the Linux/Unix boxen will be around long after Microsoft has sank back into the tar pit. After all, Linux runs on the skeleton of a dead Windows box!
Nobody's *that* stupid. Even my copy of "Unix: the complete reference" didn't cost all that, and you could prop it up on sticks and live under it for a tent.
Even though Emacs is my chosen "home" editor (to the point that I know eLisp, even), when trying out a new distro (usually a live CD), I don't mind visiting vi. vi is impressive for the performance/size ratio, and has saved my butt for always being there to run from the command line when X won't start and I need to fix configuration files. It has also become my chosen "quickie" editor, just using the ed-type keys, for those two-liner shell scripts you dash off on the fly. So I find *both* editors have their seperate merits, with vi being slim and efficient, and emacs being padded and luxurious. And both have the most arcane keyboard syntax known to man, where every time you hit a wrong key, you cringe because you know it was *some* command to do *something*, and you're almost afraid to look at the screen and find out what it is...
Yah, and C/C++ doesn't scratch the surface of the development support in the GNU/Linux world. But I think the tail may wag the dog on this one soon: Anybody gotten the latest CD from the Linux Live Gaming Project http://tuxgamers.altervista.org/llgp.php ? Although the CD itself has several bugs to work out (DOES ANYBODY know what goat you sacrifice to make it start in something like Fluxbox? It tried all the Knoppix options, and they passed unheeded.), there are some games on it that rock, and quite a few more that are still pretty fair. Certainly not blockbusters, but a few of them remind me of the kind of titles I have paid money for in the past. Linux gaming is mushrooming every year, (I keep telling myself). In five years, maybe it'll have a few tricks to teach the corporates.
published by Interplay -- who has/had no connection to EA.
Yipe! That's the one, but it doesn't seem to be EA - I wonder where I got that idea? (Wasn't there a sub-owned, subsidiary, re-partnership or something in there somewhere?) OK, substitute any random EA title that you felt didn't cut the bill. My point being, that nobody's won them all.
if I had to stand up in public and wonder aloud " does E.A. already own the future of video games?" Certainly, and airborne simians are going to fly out of my rectal orifice.
Yeah, you corporate weenie knob-polisher, there is games after E.A. EA has the Sims. EA did not have Doom, Myst, Mario, the original Sim City, Tetris, Quake, Pac Man (scoff only if you never put a quarter into a Pac Man (or any of his relatives') machine in your entire life), or ten zillion other blockbuster titles that leap instantly to our minds when we think of popular games in history. And like any software gaming company, EA has had it's share of stinkers, too. (I have almost - after intense exorcism - forgotten about the one with the baby angel you fly around possessing people, which I purchased during one of those 24-hour brain tumors you get every year during flu season.)
Meanwhile, how's "free software" for indy? Truly, we may believe that there is only one kind of computer in the world and it proudly sports the bent-squares-in-Fischer-Price-colors logo on it's case, but I insist that non-Windows computers are not a myth - I'VE SEEN THEM! The truth is out there...running on an ext2 file system.
Now, while we're on the Sims, lemme just say that we played the Sims to death in our household for about a week, until we realized that the fun derived from playing the Sims came entirely from dressing up the little pixel dolls and downloading templates to draw precious little furniture pieces for them. Then we started mesh modeling instead. It's better because: (a) You can download it for free http://www.blender3d.org/cms/Home.2.0.html here, (b) It fits on a floppy instead of needing 2 Gigs to stretch out in, (c) It's all there, and doesn't need a $60 expansion pack every two weeks to keep current, (d) You can download some equally free starter dolls and furniture pieces to start playing with http://www.katorlegaz.com/index.php?a=download&c=B lender_3D_Model_Repository here, (e) You can make everything look like you want it too, even the naughty bits, and you don't need to wrestle with a transmogrifier to try to correct the blurry-pixels that appear when your model takes a shower, and finally (f) your models will never get so wrapped up in making breakfast that they forget they have to go to the bathroom and pee on the kitchen floor and then go take a shower because now their hygeine is red and leave breakfast to set the kitchen on fire, causing them to miss work and get fired over the telephone.
Yes, EA has had some home runs. No, they will not own the world. Now, don't you feel *better*?
Even if a court decision doesn't mean spit in the wind these days, at least SOMEbody else finally said it: (I've been saying it since my TSR-80), "I PAID for every bit of memory, so I will do with it what I Damn. Well. Please. And nobody else may say different."
I don't know what takes people so long to come round. From my old Windows days, I literally scoured every directory, not just for spyware, but ANYthing I didn't want. It was a big motivation for my move to Linux. We ALL have the right to say how every single byte of memory is used. Executable too big? Bundled with crap I don't use? Too skeaky with your files nested inside directories with unpronouncable names? Hiding your source code from me? Out you go! Restrictive rights? Copy-protection? EULA? Bullshit! As long as I don't *share* the file with anybody else, I hold that it's within my perfect right to HEX edit, reverse engineer, and (MOST importantly) FIX it!
I figure, as long as I already spent the money and no-one else sees it, it's my disk, regardless of whether I port it to a different file system, use it for a coaster, or cat the binary into a bitmap to make abstract art. It is the classic victimless crime. Meanwhile, anybody who tries to exert control over My computer, with or without my "consent" is wrong! (By "consent" I mean: I had no choice but to use your crap or get fired, to use your crap I had to check the box swearing that you own my children: NOT consent, at all. I check the boxes...and lie like hell!)
It is JUST as bad to put a pop-up dialog in my face without my asking for it as it is to break into my house and spray-paint graffitti on the walls. The same way wrong to clog my inbox with spam as it is to scatter trash on my lawn. Should be illegal to sell me software without offering me the RIGHT to see the source code for free as it is to sell me a prepared food without showing me the ingredients and nutritional information. It is JUST as wrong to take over my machine as it is to steal my car. It is IDENTICALLY as stupid to build a computer that's locked shut so I can't upgrade it myself as it is to sell me a car with the hood padlocked shut so I can't even check the oil. What took us so long to apply the same logic to our computer that we have to our other possessions?
All computer users...if you'll pardon the soap-boxing from the deliriously ranting man...you have been screwed long enough, and it's time you demanded that it stop!
LOL No kidding! "Here's the home page of the guy famous for writing viral web code that infects your browswer, wanna go see it?" Golly, sounds like a swell idea, what's the worst that could happen?
Nearly as amusing is this common typo for "/.ers". I hypothesize that Linux users are most prone, since typing "./" on the command line means "here" in the directory sense.
Since I know only about 12 programming languages and use maybe 10 libraries between them all, that makes me next to computer illiterate these days. So I didn't know what XSS was, but found this site: http://www.cgisecurity.com/articles/xss-faq.shtml extremely informative. Including some HEX code that looks like fun!
Slashdot Mirror
Bzzzzzzt! Time's up, thank you for playing.
The correct answer is: "You build your own computers, mostly out of the leftover parts from your lamer friends 'broken' (i.e. new four months ago, clogged with spy-ware now, so being replaced) computers, together with motherboards/processor combos you spec yourself. You'd never be caught shot dead and dragged heels first through a BestBuy or Circuit City, and you think Fry's is a great place for Joe Sixpack and Aunt Tillie to shop. You are never without your screwdriver."
Well, I could point to *plenty* of things that you can do in only one operating system. You can only use appletalk on an Apple network. You can only use QBASIC on a Microsoft. You can only compile a tarball built with an IMakefile on BSD. You can only use apt-get on a Debian system. You can only use multi-threading on a POSIX-compliant system. Yadda, yadda. Doesn't inherently make anything superior to anything else. You're pointing to one instance of profession-specific functionality. In point of fact, there is a Gimp plugin project: http://www.blackfiveservices.co.uk/separate.shtml it seems to be getting some attention http://nashi.altmuehlnet.de/pipermail/scribus/2003 -July/001415.html, but, hey, I don't type-set for newspapers so who knows if it's any good?
But I know this from my years of Linux use: There's no such thing as a problem that only one person's encountered. No matter how intricate your solution, there is at least one person who has searched for it before. Some people search, and give up, others search and, finding nothing, hack up their own solution. If it works in a big way, they post it for others to use. That's how it all started! I always figured, better to have the tools to do it myself, than pay somebody else to do it for me. PS: Gimp is certainly not the only graphics program on the Linux desktop, try researching http://www.mediainlinux.org/ MediainLinux live CD, a distro made specifically for media content creators in graphics, audio, and streaming media. Check their package list, see if you can Google about one of their programs and maybe it'll turn out to be what you need.
No, you forgot, this is Linux, which must always be held up to an unobtainable standard, while all other systems are deemed exceptional if they boot once. Linux is supposed to teach itself to you while you sleep, cure your AIDS, make you a millionaire, and send two Swedish bikini models over with champagne and a pound of coke to pleasure you every time you boot it up, in order to be considered half as good as the steaming turds put forth as the standard.
I just had somebody about three threads ago complain that they wouldn't use Linux because the live CDs lock the CD drive shut while they're running. I told them about Puppy linux. I didn't have the heart to break it to them about USB-drive-hosted distros.
But, I'm tired of being treated like I don't exist: Linux "made it" on my desktop years ago, has run for all of our family's needs (internet, chat, email, games, graphics design, programming, and YES office document use too!), will continue to "make it" on our desktops forever. And we're ALL sick of being discussed as if we were unicorns: "Do home Linux desktop users exist? No, that's just a fairy-tale. It's physically impossible to run Linux on a desktop, because it's just a teletype terminal you have to write the kernel from scratch every time you start it and it doesn't even use a monitor and mouse, it uses punched cards instead." This is all bandied about like it was common knowledge, taught at our universities, discussed with great seriousness in the tech publications, and carried as a confirmed opinion amongst many of my fellow Slashdotters, even.
If you can bear to have your whole reality re-defined, click here: http://www.lynucs.org/ . Behold: Linux desktops! Running on monitors! Note the "taskbar" on the bottom, JustLikeWindows. See the applications open on the desktop, they have a bar at the top with the little "x" thingie to close them and the little box thingie to full-screen them and they use jpg images for wallpaper, JustLikeWindows. Note the scrollbars on the sides of the windows, JustLikeWindows. Note the little icons that you click with the mouse to launch a program or open a file, JustLikeWindows.
Do you suppose, if they spend all this time making all this software...dozens of different window managers and hundreds of distros...that maybe, somewhere, just maybe, somebody could actually use them for anything, at all, at all?
So, the real story is, "Linux struggles daily against Microsoft to survive - and even thrive! - but we'd all be better off if there was less fighting in the world.", not "Linux has been killed by Microsoft. Alas, poor Tux, I knew him...almost." Get it right! Discuss us like we're dead, and we're likely to rise up and prove how alive we are!
I've had this conversation before with about 9,999 of your brothers and sisters: see here: http://slashdot.org/~Hosiah/journal/117451 . Tell me, if you've found the perfect nirvana in paid software, where you get off telling us in open source what to do with it? Open source is NOT for you, DON'T use it!
This just goes to show, people who complain that Linux is too hard to use over Windows are only interested in setting up one straw man after another to beat up. Windows locks CD drives too, while it's reading them. Nobody would expect a computer to do otherwise. But bring up Linux, and all of a sudden the computer is supposed to be able to read the CD while you take it out and play frisbee with it.
Fine then: Get Puppy Linux: http://www.goosee.com/puppy/ which runs entirely from RAM. It is also a live CD. Once it boots (as soon as you get a desktop), open the CD drive. Take the CD out. Play frisbee with it. Continue to use the computer while you do so. Note the exceptional performance! Puppy even has ICEwm as it's desktop, the simple window manager designed to make Windows users feel right at home, with it's drab bar and dreary button labeled "START" so you don't have to strain your brain figuring out where to click. I've even run Puppy Linux on a machine with *NO* hard drive, and taken the CD out, and we all proceeded to get several day's use out of a computer without a single byte of persistant memory anywhere on it. But no matter *what* we recommend to a Windows user, this same person sticks to pushing their shopping cart down the street because the limousine we're offering them doesn't stock any Grey Poupon.
Huzzah! Well said, and append to your to-do list for Sun: they can take the damn chains off Java, already! It's just a hybrid programming language, not the Holy Grail.
Games...I'm with you there. Games are getting there...slowly. I just happened to have downloaded and burned a new live CD, Linux Live Gaming Project. The games on it range from so-so to fantastic, with occasional bugs. Overall, it's the most impressive line-up of Linux games I've seen, yet, and it runs on a live CD, just boot-n-go. If it's not up to snuff, once again, blame the monopoly that conned everybody into using it's worthless Active X graphics platform, locking them into Windows, instead of using Open GL for graphics. So hardware today is put together with the intention of making it run active X only, and nothing else. Linux will lag behind here a few more years, but it's anybody but Linux's fault.
In fact, it's a testament to Mac, OS X, Linux, BSD, Unix, Sun Solaris, and everybody else but MS that we've all managed to thrive this long with the world's richest corporation single-mindedly trying to kill us off - for twenty goddamn years, already! Imagine what the other operating systems could accomplish if they didn't have to focus 95% of their time fighting back for their right to breathe. Imagine how much more civilization would have progressed by now, if the technology leader wasn't bent on owning it. The rest of us do what we can, but One Company just doesn't want to play nice...and when you give it money, you fund the force that opposes us in accomplishing those goals that you list!
Isn't about time we gave this poor, old horse a rest? Linux has come round since we had to cat a file through groff(or was that nroff?) to read the ed man page while using gopher. Linux now has Knoppix and Mepis: live CDs which don't even have to be installed. For 95% of the public that uses Windows, the majority of that public only uses email, a web browser, and an office document tool. Linux allows you to do all this in the same kind of GUI using the same mouse and menus, with no learning front-end whatsoever. You still save files by clicking "File : Save/Save as... ", you still get help clicking "help", your bookmarks are still in a menu called "bookmarks", etc.
Sorry if you think being an artist is about sipping seltzer in an underdecorated gallery while wearing a fez and flirting with the groupies while stroking your goatee, but I assure you that I've literally worked from dawn til dusk tweaking one image on the computer until it's just right. No, it's not work the same way construction work is work (I've done that, too) but it's a *kind* of work.
That's been a bug under my bonnet for a while now: My whole family uses Linux, including my grade-school-age kids. I've used everything from TRS-80s and Commodore Vic20s to MacIntosh, OS/2 Warp, Windows 9*/XP/NT, to about 10 flavors of Linux and I've found Windows to be the least user-friendly of them all. Because *my* definition of user-friendly is "Let me do whatever I want and give me the easiest tools to do it with." I think Linux is perfectly user-friendly because it offers me ten choices to do everything, I always have a command-line available that has just as much functionality as the rest of the system, I can install what I want when I want for free without signing my life away on an EULA, etc. etc.
Just because *you* were trained only on Excel, for instance, doesn't make Excel "user-friendly", it just makes Excel "you-friendly". There was life before The Microsoft Age and we used computers that look more like Linux/Unix than what the mainstream calls "common"...and the Linux/Unix boxen will be around long after Microsoft has sank back into the tar pit. After all, Linux runs on the skeleton of a dead Windows box!
Nobody's *that* stupid. Even my copy of "Unix: the complete reference" didn't cost all that, and you could prop it up on sticks and live under it for a tent.
Hmmmm....drugs make you stupid, it is said....drugs are expensive....drugs are bad for you....
Well, Neo, the article was trying to free your mind, but it could only open the door. You have to decide to walk through it.
Even though Emacs is my chosen "home" editor (to the point that I know eLisp, even), when trying out a new distro (usually a live CD), I don't mind visiting vi. vi is impressive for the performance/size ratio, and has saved my butt for always being there to run from the command line when X won't start and I need to fix configuration files. It has also become my chosen "quickie" editor, just using the ed-type keys, for those two-liner shell scripts you dash off on the fly. So I find *both* editors have their seperate merits, with vi being slim and efficient, and emacs being padded and luxurious. And both have the most arcane keyboard syntax known to man, where every time you hit a wrong key, you cringe because you know it was *some* command to do *something*, and you're almost afraid to look at the screen and find out what it is...
Well, yes. Resier is the Way. (-:
Yah, and C/C++ doesn't scratch the surface of the development support in the GNU/Linux world. But I think the tail may wag the dog on this one soon: Anybody gotten the latest CD from the Linux Live Gaming Project http://tuxgamers.altervista.org/llgp.php ? Although the CD itself has several bugs to work out (DOES ANYBODY know what goat you sacrifice to make it start in something like Fluxbox? It tried all the Knoppix options, and they passed unheeded.), there are some games on it that rock, and quite a few more that are still pretty fair. Certainly not blockbusters, but a few of them remind me of the kind of titles I have paid money for in the past. Linux gaming is mushrooming every year, (I keep telling myself). In five years, maybe it'll have a few tricks to teach the corporates.
Yipe! That's the one, but it doesn't seem to be EA - I wonder where I got that idea? (Wasn't there a sub-owned, subsidiary, re-partnership or something in there somewhere?) OK, substitute any random EA title that you felt didn't cut the bill. My point being, that nobody's won them all.
Yeah, you corporate weenie knob-polisher, there is games after E.A. EA has the Sims. EA did not have Doom, Myst, Mario, the original Sim City, Tetris, Quake, Pac Man (scoff only if you never put a quarter into a Pac Man (or any of his relatives') machine in your entire life), or ten zillion other blockbuster titles that leap instantly to our minds when we think of popular games in history. And like any software gaming company, EA has had it's share of stinkers, too. (I have almost - after intense exorcism - forgotten about the one with the baby angel you fly around possessing people, which I purchased during one of those 24-hour brain tumors you get every year during flu season.)
Meanwhile, how's "free software" for indy? Truly, we may believe that there is only one kind of computer in the world and it proudly sports the bent-squares-in-Fischer-Price-colors logo on it's case, but I insist that non-Windows computers are not a myth - I'VE SEEN THEM! The truth is out there...running on an ext2 file system.
Now, while we're on the Sims, lemme just say that we played the Sims to death in our household for about a week, until we realized that the fun derived from playing the Sims came entirely from dressing up the little pixel dolls and downloading templates to draw precious little furniture pieces for them. Then we started mesh modeling instead. It's better because: (a) You can download it for free http://www.blender3d.org/cms/Home.2.0.html here, (b) It fits on a floppy instead of needing 2 Gigs to stretch out in, (c) It's all there, and doesn't need a $60 expansion pack every two weeks to keep current, (d) You can download some equally free starter dolls and furniture pieces to start playing with http://www.katorlegaz.com/index.php?a=download&c=B lender_3D_Model_Repository here, (e) You can make everything look like you want it too, even the naughty bits, and you don't need to wrestle with a transmogrifier to try to correct the blurry-pixels that appear when your model takes a shower, and finally (f) your models will never get so wrapped up in making breakfast that they forget they have to go to the bathroom and pee on the kitchen floor and then go take a shower because now their hygeine is red and leave breakfast to set the kitchen on fire, causing them to miss work and get fired over the telephone.
Yes, EA has had some home runs. No, they will not own the world. Now, don't you feel *better*?
Not to mention, after a gallon of beer, I don't know about anybody else, but *my* walking pattern changes so drastically even *I* don't recognize it.
"enslave your browser", then???
I don't know what takes people so long to come round. From my old Windows days, I literally scoured every directory, not just for spyware, but ANYthing I didn't want. It was a big motivation for my move to Linux. We ALL have the right to say how every single byte of memory is used. Executable too big? Bundled with crap I don't use? Too skeaky with your files nested inside directories with unpronouncable names? Hiding your source code from me? Out you go! Restrictive rights? Copy-protection? EULA? Bullshit! As long as I don't *share* the file with anybody else, I hold that it's within my perfect right to HEX edit, reverse engineer, and (MOST importantly) FIX it!
I figure, as long as I already spent the money and no-one else sees it, it's my disk, regardless of whether I port it to a different file system, use it for a coaster, or cat the binary into a bitmap to make abstract art. It is the classic victimless crime. Meanwhile, anybody who tries to exert control over My computer, with or without my "consent" is wrong! (By "consent" I mean: I had no choice but to use your crap or get fired, to use your crap I had to check the box swearing that you own my children: NOT consent, at all. I check the boxes...and lie like hell!)
It is JUST as bad to put a pop-up dialog in my face without my asking for it as it is to break into my house and spray-paint graffitti on the walls. The same way wrong to clog my inbox with spam as it is to scatter trash on my lawn. Should be illegal to sell me software without offering me the RIGHT to see the source code for free as it is to sell me a prepared food without showing me the ingredients and nutritional information. It is JUST as wrong to take over my machine as it is to steal my car. It is IDENTICALLY as stupid to build a computer that's locked shut so I can't upgrade it myself as it is to sell me a car with the hood padlocked shut so I can't even check the oil. What took us so long to apply the same logic to our computer that we have to our other possessions?
All computer users...if you'll pardon the soap-boxing from the deliriously ranting man...you have been screwed long enough, and it's time you demanded that it stop!
FTFA:
"The next step was to simply instruct the Web browser to load a MySpace URL that would automatically invite Samy as a friend"
???
LOL No kidding! "Here's the home page of the guy famous for writing viral web code that infects your browswer, wanna go see it?" Golly, sounds like a swell idea, what's the worst that could happen?
Nearly as amusing is this common typo for "/.ers". I hypothesize that Linux users are most prone, since typing "./" on the command line means "here" in the directory sense.
OT as all get out, of course.
Since I know only about 12 programming languages and use maybe 10 libraries between them all, that makes me next to computer illiterate these days. So I didn't know what XSS was, but found this site: http://www.cgisecurity.com/articles/xss-faq.shtml extremely informative. Including some HEX code that looks like fun!