Past that, because he doesn't have much in the way of preconceived notions about how it should look feel and act just like windows, it'll be perfect.
And that's exactly what it's all about. Kids are excellent Linux adopters, because they haven't had it drilled into their heads for 20 years that Bill Gates invented computers. I think somewhere in the Scary Devil Monastary they came up with a name for it: "The lock-washer effect". In the beginning, knowing nothing to start with, some user may pick up absolutely any version of anything and learn it. Once they've done so, however, their mind clamps shut, their brain throws out the learning module, and they refuse to learn any new way to do it for the rest of their lives. What gets me is, how do these kinds of people keep themselves in the gene pool, if they only have sex the exact same way they did it the first time as fumbling virgins?
I'm sick of it. This is the stupidest debate in the history of computing. *I* adopted Linux on *my* desktop because I *liked* it better. Other people have adopted it for their own reasons, being primarily that they knew a good system when it walked up and bit them.
There is no reason to care whether anybody else uses it or not. This isn't a goddamn religion. Quit campaigning to save the world. Linux has enough of a user and developer community that it will thrive forever without any more input from anybody outside of it at all. I'm glad to help those who want to learn it learn it, and to offer what little contributions I can to make it better. Anything beyond that is a waste of everybody's time.
What if the government is so tied up in the scandal that you risk swimming with the fishies if you go to the government? I don't care WHO you tell, any outlet which brings the story to light and gets it out to the people's ear is just measure. Public outcry will then inform the government's "justice" branch. I trust many agencies and organizations to bring about justice, and government is off the bottom of that list, has been for some years.
One of Linux's supposed liabilities is it's broad range of distros or even wide choices of programs for each purpose. We'll see how much of a defect it is when Microsoft does it.
I happen to run Mandriva on one of my machines. I've said it before and I'll say it again: "Try writing your programs on it." Know any programming languages? Use any? If not, you're in over your head arguing with me. We're talking CLisp and Ruby and Perl as well. We're talking the ncurses library and GTK+ devel packages also. We're wanting wxWindows module and the PyGame library to go with Python, and Tcl/Tk/Wish to run our Tcl scripts. Mandriva surprised me by coming with at least half what I needed, but I still had to urpmi the rest. Ever had a source tarball as your only choice to install the program you needed? Obviously not, or you wouldn't be writing this way to me.
Try googling for the phrase "dumbing down Linux". If I'm "paranoid", I have some very intelligent company!
??? All *any* TV needs to do, be it LCD, cathode tube, projection, HD, or black'n'white is display pictures and play sounds. The only controls you'll ever need for that is a channel changer and a volume button. Some secondary tweaks for last channel, etc. The rest is peripherals.
there is nothing stopping savvy users from switching off all the automatic stuff
Oh, were it that easy! Have you noticed how hard it is to find a slide rule these days? Could be because fewer people use them. You know how hard it's getting to find a distro released with a full set of programming tools? "Gramma doesn't need a compiler." Even with a compiler, there's documentation, libraries, devel-packages...seriously try bashing out a simple C/SDL game or Python GUI sometime and try it on about 75% of the distros out there - you'll have to go chase after every little package. How about development environments? Try finding Emacs, Glade, Scite, etc. Ask around about programming tools, half the forum acts like you're from Mars. Programming? What's that? No, my SOP with *any* Linux distro after installing it is to spend the next week chasing down all the packages (and frequently, that's.tar.gz source packages) until I manage to drum up a decent work-station - yes, even notoriously hands-on distros like Slackware.
Yeah, I know, Linux from Scratch, Rock, Gentoo, T3, Sourcemage. That's it, five projects at the rock-bottom of distrowatch's popularity ranking stand between me and having to start over in assembly on the bare metal. God forbid one of them should go under. Well, if all anybody thinks about is Joe Sixpack and Gramma, then that's all they'll end up with for a user-base. Why even bother calling it "Open Source", then, when you're alienating those few users who know what value it is?
And therein the nut of the matter. This reminds me too much of the child of alcoholic parents, who grows up to drink himself, but rationalizes: "But *I'll* never get addicted, because I have the bad example of my parents to teach me when to stop."
See, Operating System sophistication and user awareness go hand in hand. Smart system=smart users. Dumb the system down, and WHERE DO YOU STOP??? When you ditch the compiler, negating the whole advantage of open source? When you eradicate the security features, making it just as vulnerable as Swiss cheese? When you do away with the command line and make the whole system crash every time the window manager hickups? When you integrate the whole system into one big program, multiplying the bugs and vulnerabilities? Hell, let's just go for a new height in user-friendliness and throw away the KEYBOARD, and use a Mac-style mouse: guess what: you'll STILL have users waving their flippers complaining they don't know how to drag and drop a file. If the computer had NO interfaces at all, if it was just a screen that read your mind, people would complain that it was too difficult to think the pictures of commands to the computer! What you're doing this way, is daring evolution to produce a stupider user than you can produce a stupider system.
Like it or not, you CANNOT bend the laws of physics to make a machine we've taught to think be infallible! You have to compromise on one hand or the other - or, as I used to put it, "Stealth Bombers are more complicated than tricycles to operate BECAUSE THEY CAN FLY!" I mean, you don't think the problems with Windows are deliberately put in there just to spite everyone, do you? No, the problems of Windows are a NATURAL consequence of DUMBING IT DOWN. You CANNOT make something as stupid-friendly as Windows without making it as stupid, too! Likewise, do you think the Linux programmers of these past few years deliberately make everything unnecessarily complicated, just to sit back and laugh at us? No, you CANNOT have the robustness of Linux without inheriting the complexity of Linux!
Go ahead and laugh at me and do it your way. But see if I'm not hailed as a prophet later. And when you've reduced every other system to rubble in your attempts to build a Stealth Bomber which is controlled by nothing but handle-bars, pedals, and a bell, and you come to something like Plan Nine from Bell Labs, I'll be right there waiting for you with my command line and file permissions and arcane shell commands, just like we've had since the 80's.
"HERE at last is my new, improved Linux! It looks like Windows! It sounds like Windows! It feels like Windows! It tastes like Windows! It gets rid of the confusing command line and compiler just like Windows! It does without all that tiresome security nonsense just like Windows! We're releasing it through a commercial company so it'll cost as much as Windows! It even crashes and gets infected with malware just like Windows! Look, I even made the failure screen blue with white text!!!"
"Great! So tell me about all the benefits of switching from Windows to Linux again?"
"............"
What a bunch of hypocrites. Microsoft is rotten through and through, UNTIL you start releasing your own operating system, and then Windows allofasudden becomes the shining perfect pinacle of excellence to be exactly cloned byte for byte. So, in effect, your ONLY real problem with Microsoft was simply that it wasn't YOUR COMPANY. Well, people who think that are just as damned as Bill Gates, with the extra measure of being even WORSE, since Bill never envied anybody else.
If I take a photo, I don't want it indexed to the world- I send it to the 2-3 people who might give a shit.
See, there's people out there who would *never* deprive us of 21 blurry polaroids of their pickup truck from wobbly angles. There are whole blogs dedicated to stuff like this; I've seen them.
Google Dollars: trade one-to-one with US currency a la Disney Dollars
Google History: send actual wireless webcams back in time and space to search history
Google Genes: pick your baby's DNA from Google's wide base of genetic data.
Google Cyber-Implants: when you're *really* assimilated! Have the power of Google searches on tap in your own brain. Win every trivia game show. Ace every test. View porn just by thinking about it.
A little over the top? maybe, but I've had a crappy week. I'm going to go home, get drunk, and forget the last 4 Mondays.
God, I hope you took double shots! Uh, lissen, we can't keep it free(freedom) without keeping it free(price). And we can't give it away and then cuss people out for accepting it.
We couldn't possibly fit all the users of every product into it's developer base, anyway. You'd spend 90% of the release cycle answering emails.
I'm beginning to be convinced that there's no such thing as a Muslim extremist. I believe the US govt pulled the whole thing off clean. Like the gal in the movie Brazil said "How many terrorists have you MET?"
Of course, this is an excellent idea to post it on/. : "Let's take this blame-tech article and drop it on the tech-lovers!" Ooooooh, look at all the clicks!
If you dont want to pay for the fruits of other peoples labours, you are either a thief or a communist.
What about those of us who *voluntarily* give our work away for free? Because, see, it pays off in intangible benefits...like good word of mouth = good for business in the long run. Programmers who release their work under the GPL get better exposure to the headhunters. Etc.
If I'm Communist for giving away pictures and programs and tutorials, then so is McDonald's for giving away free ketchup and napkins with each hamburger.
Many things the **IA do is bullshit, but closing torrent sites that encourage illegal content is fine by me.
The problem is, how do the rest of us who want to voluntarily license our software under the GPL and our creative content under the CC license go on distributing our work for free?
By the way, distributing your work for free is not bad for business. It's a way to give out free samples with your name attatched. After awhile, people see your work and come to you offering to pay you for custom jobs. That worked for me, and I've never had to lose a minutes' sleep over the dread that somebody's using my work without paying for it.
I think you're missing something. I, for one, could care less about the music and video. I find very little in either category even worth my *time*, let alone money. The deal is, BT is also becoming a major distribution mode for Free/Open Source Software, not to mention legal works licensed under Creative Commons. Which, I suspect, is what *really* pisses off the Suits, anyway. Haven't seen the anti-piracy measure yet that didn't also jeopardize voluntary free distribution.
That's the second post I've seen saying most/.ers are too young to have kids.
No. Not what I said. I didn't specify "too young", although I've certainly gotten flamed by *my* share of whippersnappers. I'm talking about how geeks in general are not famous for being hot, throbbing love machines who score a lot. I'm talking about how quite a few geek are more interrested in attending the latest Star Trek convention or this year's Renaissance Faire than procreating. Yes, it's a stereotype, but some people *do* fit it, more so than a random sampling of the population at large, hence the supposition that most/.ers don't have kids.
On the other hand, I don't have the relevant statistic. Poll, CmdrTaco?
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And that's exactly what it's all about. Kids are excellent Linux adopters, because they haven't had it drilled into their heads for 20 years that Bill Gates invented computers. I think somewhere in the Scary Devil Monastary they came up with a name for it: "The lock-washer effect". In the beginning, knowing nothing to start with, some user may pick up absolutely any version of anything and learn it. Once they've done so, however, their mind clamps shut, their brain throws out the learning module, and they refuse to learn any new way to do it for the rest of their lives. What gets me is, how do these kinds of people keep themselves in the gene pool, if they only have sex the exact same way they did it the first time as fumbling virgins?
So what? My nine-year-old daughter routinely loads Linux live CDs to play games on the computer (like these). What, repectively, have we proved?
Oh, I know just what you mean. I reviewed Elive 0.4 and posted shots of some of it's ugly text screens right here. Yep, primitive!
There is no reason to care whether anybody else uses it or not. This isn't a goddamn religion. Quit campaigning to save the world. Linux has enough of a user and developer community that it will thrive forever without any more input from anybody outside of it at all. I'm glad to help those who want to learn it learn it, and to offer what little contributions I can to make it better. Anything beyond that is a waste of everybody's time.
What if the government is so tied up in the scandal that you risk swimming with the fishies if you go to the government? I don't care WHO you tell, any outlet which brings the story to light and gets it out to the people's ear is just measure. Public outcry will then inform the government's "justice" branch. I trust many agencies and organizations to bring about justice, and government is off the bottom of that list, has been for some years.
One of Linux's supposed liabilities is it's broad range of distros or even wide choices of programs for each purpose. We'll see how much of a defect it is when Microsoft does it.
Nothing overheated and uninformed *EVER* goes away.
Try googling for the phrase "dumbing down Linux". If I'm "paranoid", I have some very intelligent company!
Well, so I blew that one. It's T2 not T3, and Gentoo's hardly "rock-bottom".
??? All *any* TV needs to do, be it LCD, cathode tube, projection, HD, or black'n'white is display pictures and play sounds. The only controls you'll ever need for that is a channel changer and a volume button. Some secondary tweaks for last channel, etc. The rest is peripherals.
there is nothing stopping savvy users from switching off all the automatic stuff
Oh, were it that easy! Have you noticed how hard it is to find a slide rule these days? Could be because fewer people use them. You know how hard it's getting to find a distro released with a full set of programming tools? "Gramma doesn't need a compiler." Even with a compiler, there's documentation, libraries, devel-packages...seriously try bashing out a simple C/SDL game or Python GUI sometime and try it on about 75% of the distros out there - you'll have to go chase after every little package. How about development environments? Try finding Emacs, Glade, Scite, etc. Ask around about programming tools, half the forum acts like you're from Mars. Programming? What's that? No, my SOP with *any* Linux distro after installing it is to spend the next week chasing down all the packages (and frequently, that's .tar.gz source packages) until I manage to drum up a decent work-station - yes, even notoriously hands-on distros like Slackware.
Yeah, I know, Linux from Scratch, Rock, Gentoo, T3, Sourcemage. That's it, five projects at the rock-bottom of distrowatch's popularity ranking stand between me and having to start over in assembly on the bare metal. God forbid one of them should go under. Well, if all anybody thinks about is Joe Sixpack and Gramma, then that's all they'll end up with for a user-base. Why even bother calling it "Open Source", then, when you're alienating those few users who know what value it is?
You mispelled "Knoppix".
And therein the nut of the matter. This reminds me too much of the child of alcoholic parents, who grows up to drink himself, but rationalizes: "But *I'll* never get addicted, because I have the bad example of my parents to teach me when to stop."
See, Operating System sophistication and user awareness go hand in hand. Smart system=smart users. Dumb the system down, and WHERE DO YOU STOP??? When you ditch the compiler, negating the whole advantage of open source? When you eradicate the security features, making it just as vulnerable as Swiss cheese? When you do away with the command line and make the whole system crash every time the window manager hickups? When you integrate the whole system into one big program, multiplying the bugs and vulnerabilities? Hell, let's just go for a new height in user-friendliness and throw away the KEYBOARD, and use a Mac-style mouse: guess what: you'll STILL have users waving their flippers complaining they don't know how to drag and drop a file. If the computer had NO interfaces at all, if it was just a screen that read your mind, people would complain that it was too difficult to think the pictures of commands to the computer! What you're doing this way, is daring evolution to produce a stupider user than you can produce a stupider system.
Like it or not, you CANNOT bend the laws of physics to make a machine we've taught to think be infallible! You have to compromise on one hand or the other - or, as I used to put it, "Stealth Bombers are more complicated than tricycles to operate BECAUSE THEY CAN FLY!" I mean, you don't think the problems with Windows are deliberately put in there just to spite everyone, do you? No, the problems of Windows are a NATURAL consequence of DUMBING IT DOWN. You CANNOT make something as stupid-friendly as Windows without making it as stupid, too! Likewise, do you think the Linux programmers of these past few years deliberately make everything unnecessarily complicated, just to sit back and laugh at us? No, you CANNOT have the robustness of Linux without inheriting the complexity of Linux!
Go ahead and laugh at me and do it your way. But see if I'm not hailed as a prophet later. And when you've reduced every other system to rubble in your attempts to build a Stealth Bomber which is controlled by nothing but handle-bars, pedals, and a bell, and you come to something like Plan Nine from Bell Labs, I'll be right there waiting for you with my command line and file permissions and arcane shell commands, just like we've had since the 80's.
"Great! So tell me about all the benefits of switching from Windows to Linux again?"
"............"
What a bunch of hypocrites. Microsoft is rotten through and through, UNTIL you start releasing your own operating system, and then Windows allofasudden becomes the shining perfect pinacle of excellence to be exactly cloned byte for byte. So, in effect, your ONLY real problem with Microsoft was simply that it wasn't YOUR COMPANY. Well, people who think that are just as damned as Bill Gates, with the extra measure of being even WORSE, since Bill never envied anybody else.
See, there's people out there who would *never* deprive us of 21 blurry polaroids of their pickup truck from wobbly angles. There are whole blogs dedicated to stuff like this; I've seen them.
Google Dollars: trade one-to-one with US currency a la Disney Dollars
Google History: send actual wireless webcams back in time and space to search history
Google Genes: pick your baby's DNA from Google's wide base of genetic data. Google Cyber-Implants: when you're *really* assimilated! Have the power of Google searches on tap in your own brain. Win every trivia game show. Ace every test. View porn just by thinking about it.
A mere lack of scientists could be recovered from. But look at it through these three traits, and now the US is doomed.
God, I hope you took double shots! Uh, lissen, we can't keep it free(freedom) without keeping it free(price). And we can't give it away and then cuss people out for accepting it.
We couldn't possibly fit all the users of every product into it's developer base, anyway. You'd spend 90% of the release cycle answering emails.
I'm beginning to be convinced that there's no such thing as a Muslim extremist. I believe the US govt pulled the whole thing off clean. Like the gal in the movie Brazil said "How many terrorists have you MET?"
There it is, in an 8-word nutshell.
Of course, this is an excellent idea to post it on /. : "Let's take this blame-tech article and drop it on the tech-lovers!" Ooooooh, look at all the clicks!
What about those of us who *voluntarily* give our work away for free? Because, see, it pays off in intangible benefits...like good word of mouth = good for business in the long run. Programmers who release their work under the GPL get better exposure to the headhunters. Etc.
If I'm Communist for giving away pictures and programs and tutorials, then so is McDonald's for giving away free ketchup and napkins with each hamburger.
The problem is, how do the rest of us who want to voluntarily license our software under the GPL and our creative content under the CC license go on distributing our work for free?
By the way, distributing your work for free is not bad for business. It's a way to give out free samples with your name attatched. After awhile, people see your work and come to you offering to pay you for custom jobs. That worked for me, and I've never had to lose a minutes' sleep over the dread that somebody's using my work without paying for it.
I think you're missing something. I, for one, could care less about the music and video. I find very little in either category even worth my *time*, let alone money. The deal is, BT is also becoming a major distribution mode for Free/Open Source Software, not to mention legal works licensed under Creative Commons. Which, I suspect, is what *really* pisses off the Suits, anyway. Haven't seen the anti-piracy measure yet that didn't also jeopardize voluntary free distribution.
I used to hope the same thing. I'm beyond that now. I now hope everybody who works for the MPAA dies of cancer. Of the pecker. Sans painkillers.
Perhaps we should make this an abreviation: YAIRARI. It is oh-so-popular amongst the /. teeming millions.
No. Not what I said. I didn't specify "too young", although I've certainly gotten flamed by *my* share of whippersnappers. I'm talking about how geeks in general are not famous for being hot, throbbing love machines who score a lot. I'm talking about how quite a few geek are more interrested in attending the latest Star Trek convention or this year's Renaissance Faire than procreating. Yes, it's a stereotype, but some people *do* fit it, more so than a random sampling of the population at large, hence the supposition that most /.ers don't have kids.
On the other hand, I don't have the relevant statistic. Poll, CmdrTaco?