...I will still likely stay with FC3 for production, FC4 to play with pending it going to production, and various RH for servers as soon as I get some more money to send down to Raleigh.
I will say this... they need a better mascot. The Red Hat fedora is just plain cooler, imho. The SuSE lizard looks like it is high or something and the name just brings back this inane taunt line of Wimp Lo's in Kung Pow: Enter the Fist, "I rock. And roll. All day long. Sweet Suzy."
But I will try not to let that stop me from giving it a chance somewhere. I mean, if I can get past the horrors of Motif, the idiocy of Vi, and still use *nix OSes...
SCO will be sueing Novell for open sourcing Open Source Software. Darl McBride was quoted as saying "This kind of thing can't be allowed to continue, where would this country be if software were free"?
Asked for quotes, random geeks seemed to think all software was free anyways and offered free cracked Windows Office XP copies to the reporters.
Nicely spun!!
Now can you explain how an employers has ANY right whatsoever to tell us what to do when we are off the clock?
While wearing the company's uniform you may be reasonably seen to be a representative of the company due to that uniform and thus any actions to engage in may reflect on the company. If you were to appear in a pr0n flick while wearing a guard uniform, would you not expect them to be fired? Extreme example, but it is necessary to get people on/. headed in the right direction of meaning on a point. Simply work backward and see where the behaviors they had a problem with in uniform but off duty might have been unfairly adversely affecting that company.
If you owned a company would you want your employees wearing your company regalia and doing something that would bring harm to your enterprise? No. But you wouldn't have a say if they got into their street clothes and no one could reasonably associate them with you.
It's a total fallacy that you can or should "soak the rich" since A) the middle class hold the bulk of the cash and not "the rich", B) those who employ people are always rich or richer than you (when was the last time a homeless schitzo or someone from the projects handed you a $60K/year tech job? No one in the projects I grew up in did, that's for frigging sure), and C) rich is a measure of a static snapshot of holdings, ie, wealth, and not a measure of a dynamic cash flow.
There are a lot of "rich" people who have almost zero cash flow on a daily basis and we tax INCOME not cash after it has already been income. Want to change this? Fine, expect the IRS to tax your pay every second after it is in your pocket until you've spent what is left. You'll be taxed before the paycheck hits your account, and they will continuous drain your account, taxing that money over and over and over... That is what it means to go from taxing income to taxing cash on hand.
I aspire to become rich someday and don't need to be sent back to the projects and government welfare because someone wanted to open the can of worms that it would be to tax wealth and not income. You can't soak the rich without ultimately going straight into total socialistic property rights abolition and economic anarchy and deprivation. You want to start the second American revolution? That would do it.
...that they don't turn out like the Umbrella Corporation. Last thing we need is Mozilla spawning zombies. That's the job of your local clueless end-user, Internet Explorer and Active X.
...getting sued for pirating an Oasis track. Well, I hope those on the receiving ends remember this in the future and learn to pirate higher on the musical foodchain... like Mozart, or Beethoven...
I almost thought they were actually going to bring food to places where it lacks. That'd be a freedom toaster alright.
I like Kingdom of Loathing a lot myself, but I think this is going way too far. Let them come up with a meat globe that bulks up the hungry and gives them money first, at least...
I can't say that with straight face and without choking.
Anyhow, if sources are so anonymous that they cannot be verified as to identity by the news people, and when has this ever stopped them, then how do we ever know it isn't some geek with a crude sense of humor who has managed to master nym and mixmaster remailers?
If they are known by the reporters, then the court order comes into play and they can testify or go to jail. That simple. We're not talking lawyer-client or doctor-patient or married couples here, we are talking about quite plainly, people whose entire job it is to print the most sensational things in their area that they can to sell newspapers and increase paying readership. Not saving people from the noose, not saving people's lives, not keeping a marriage together.
I place reporter-source privilege on the same level as that of gossip-mongers in my own neighborhood and as much importance on it. Reporters say their profession is about truth and facts. Well truth is ephemeral and in the mind of the person at hand and facts things that people may very well ignore in choosing their truth for themselves. If they want to be so high and mighty, let them put out verifiable bonafide facts and cut down the use of anonymous sources.
If news people see it as needing some way to circumvent court orders using encryption, then how trustworthy can it be? Sounds more like shielding their backsides and giving themselves greater latitude in abusing "anonymous sources" which they do too frequently these days as it is. Let them start acting ethical and aboveboard in the fourth estate to begin with and not looking for ways to cover their behinds.
...everyone already on record as opposed to Microsoft creating standards and Micrsoft having to dance to others' tune. I think this is basically inane horsesh*t.
Do we expect Macromedia not to produce and website builders not to use Flash or Shockwave? Why not? They aren't standards. Do we expect people to stop using Java? Why not? It was foisted by a private company called Sun Microsystems.
It is entirely the province of those who use the net to decide how they will each do so and those who interact with them to make their choices as they see fit. Most of the other browsers aren't properly compliant either. Yet most come from outfits which are supposed to be pure as the driven snow by virtue of their being from either associations like those promulgating web standards or because they're the magical Open Source.
Ooooh... Open Source...
Please.
If Microsoft wants to add ten dozen tchotchkes to their particular browser and ten dozen other browsers want to add or subtract ten dozen tchotchkes of their own each or adopt those of someone else, good for them. Why should what I get offered for display goodness on the net be decided by some third party council of knighted strangers carried on the shoulders of a mob of people with an axe to grind against the largest browser purveyor and a long history of turning a blind eye to the inadequacies and weaknesses of their own favorite browsers?
Microsoft has brought a lot of good stuff to my web browsing experience not brought to me by the committee of blind monkeys hammering out so-called web standards. For crying out loud people, it's freaking web page display stuff, not the underlying ATM, Frame Relay, IP, etc. protocols. It's not like Microsoft invented their own version of TCP/IP and ordered you to use it to surf for pr0n...
Information "wants" to be free in the same sense that things "want" to fall to the ground; it's the path of least resistance.
Things don't want to fall to the ground; the ground is merely in the way.
What the statement means to me is that information usually becomes free in the absence of measures taken to prevent it from doing so. I think we can agree that that's true.
No, in the absence of any measures, information ceases to exist. Fail to remember, fail to record it, fail to anything with it and it doesn't exist. It may be true, but information is a concept relative to those holding it as such. This is why 1984 is so relevant to information technology. What people consider to be true or factual is dependent upon information as recorded or held in the minds of others and transmitted to them. 1984 tells you why hackers can be dangerous. Should information not be held in the mind and be changed in some database and it not exist in anyone's mind until it is read after the changes, it is assumed to be right and it becomes "information" at that point.
Information doesn't want to be at all. People insist on it being. The fewer the people with it, the closer it gets to its ephemeral basis of nonexistance, just waiting for some entity to come along and encompass it back into being.
You may now return to not-so-deep end of the/. world.
What are you talking about? I did that as you stated and it backed right up to/. with no problem. IE6SP2. Actually, I can't remember ever having such a flaw in IE.
/* I have no idea what this portion does and I wrote it, but my daughter says it is good so I guess I'll leave it in but I hope my boss never has to read this in court on the stand in a lawsuit */
Linux should focus more on becoming user-friendly so it gets a bigger customer base, this would inspire more developers to include a Linux version of the more popular games/ apps. My 2cents.
This simple thing is lost on most everyone in Linux it seems some days.
Does Tux Racer alone not suggest good gaming is possible on Linux? Do increasingly better drivers for nVidia and ATI not sink in?
Oh, that's right. The problem is user-friendliness which is the antithesis of the leet geek brigades who search out things to do because they're hard and prove how smart they are.
I got tired of writing in hex in my head when I was a teen. I just want stuff to work. XP and FC3 for me for now while I wait for the Linux equivalent of XP to hit... And wait...
And does it come under the heading ironic that this site boasts of W3C compliance, arrogantly stops IE users with some insult warning screen despite the site rendering just fine when you get past it, and violates probably a dozen of the rules laid down in the very first incarnation of Vincent Flanders' Webpages That Suck?.
Wrapping yourself in anti-MS/anti-IE leetness and promptly do the website wrong anyhow seems to be getting alarmingly common.
I'm way past getting tired of the a-critical, as in having nothing to do with critical in any way it might be defined or construed, fawning over Apple by the/. masses.
There was a time when you could not get the average/. geek to sit in front of, stand in front of, stand in the same room as, a Macintosh. Now they adopt a Unix-ish OS and suddenly they are darlings.
There was also a time when the average geek couldn't stand getting near a Unix box of any kind because their teachers had already done years if not a decade plus in front of the monsters and warned them of the horrors. Instead, they hacked early PCs, Apples, Commodores, anything else that might do for experimenting, proving their technical abilities, and didn't drive them to madness with esoteric idiocy that felt wrong the instant you looked at it.
I know I got that impression the moment I looked at Apple ProDOS and again when I looked at MS-DOS. It sent a shiver down my spine and I recall the pre-release demonstration events for the Macintosh where Lisa boxes were also on display. I remember thinking, "what the fark is this? We've seen the future, and it is a simple visual interface playing to natural human tendencies and abilities. What is this?! Why are these other systems still controlled by endless text that fights the unwinnable fight against Occam and his razor?"
If there is one thing Apple does deserve credit for it is being relentlessly gui-centric since the Lisa. If anything, Microsoft played catch-up to them until Windows XP with gui vs. text ratios and only their non-religious it's-business-and-not-personal way, easier accessibility of information for programming to it, and their no-nonsense recognition that Microsoft is a SOFTWARE COMPANY kept them ahead of the Mac. Had they gone straight to something as good as Windows XP from the start, Apple would no longer be in business now... but there's a learning curve to everything.
So I hope the true underlying reason that Apple's OSX should be appreciated isn't lost in orgasmic geek fawning: it's opened the platform somewhat compared to earlier, it's powerful and extensible, and it has a beautiful easy-to-use for end-users interface, and NOT simply because it has some relation to *nix. The core of being a geek should be to understand the reasoning behind things and not religious blind faith that something is because it is. Leave that to church on Sunday and life after death. Leave the OS to deconstruction and analysis in the light of reality.
FWIW, I was impressed with the Lisa when I first saw it. I wish Apple hadn't squandered that with their exclusivity and arrogance... but there's a learning curve to everything.
Microsoft IS most definitely based on software, they know it and work it, and do it very well. Why are so many on/. unwilling to give them credit where it is due? Through acquisition of skilled individuals and small outfits with good IP and talented people, and leveraging of everything they've put together, they've managed to kick the royal sh*t out of IBM, Oracle, Novell, Netscape, and a long laundry list of other would-be Micrsoft-killers.
OSS has zip to do with nobility or anything else associated with good. It's rapidly being brought low to the same level as drug abuse due to peer pressure. Better go open source or you'll be seen in the same light as Microsoft. Open source to be cool and hip and accepted.
Horsesh*t. Microsoft spent real money, invested real resources, why should they not keep their source closed if they so choose? It's their right to do, as it is theirs. You want to open source your stuff, do what you want with your stuff. You want to close source it, who cares, its yours.
I am so sick of this tinfoil hat FUD about Microsoft. Their chief crimes are simple: they sold unfinished, alpha, and beta software as finished product and downplayed the results despite voluminous documention by support professionals and by virtue of the sheer number of patches needed to stabilize it afterwards; their second crime is to abuse the patent system while claiming to desire an end to the same behavior. Lastly, they tend to get overprotective of their market and cross the line in proper and ethical sales and marketing practices.
But enough is enough with the "MS is teh enemy" nonsense. Windows XP isn't remotely the mess that Windows 3.11 and DOS 6.22, Windows 95 first release or Windows ME were. You want to go after them for what they really do? Fine, document it, prove it, make the case. Don't have one? Drop it until you do people. If MS continues to be villified for being something they aren't and doing things they haven't, sooner or later they will and though it may soothe the hearts of a lot of pathetic geeks to see them become guilty after the fact, it won't help anyone. Not the market, not the industry, not the customers, not the world.
So let's think before we paint them so darkly automatically.
Linux doesn't *HAVE* to be any harder to install or use than any other OS.
If it was as easy to use as Windows XP, it wouldn't have the same "geek cred". Gentoo people scoff at Fedora Core users as wimps. OpenBSD advocates look at Gentoo as just too easy. Real geekness is predicated on how hard it is, how inaccessible it is, and how little the average person without "skillz" relates to it.
As much as we enjoy watching great innovations come out of corporations who employ amazing talent, occassionally we get a quick and dirty reminder that these companies (Apple, Amazon, Google, etc.) are just as worried about the bottom dollar as M$. If it weren't for porn, the Internet wouldn't be nearly as whiz bang as it is today
And this surprises people? Truly, really, deep down? Some of us have been willing to say it forever, others merely know it but are afraid to say it. While there's nothing inherently evil in big business and corporate entities, they are as given to abuse of the boundaries of good taste, common sense, fairness, and so on as the individuals of which they are comprised.
THAT INCLUDES APPLE AND GOOGLE, NOT JUST AMAZON AND MICROSOFT.
We need to call things as they are. It's not just Amazon that's doing stupid things in the world of patents. It's merely that Amazon has now pushed the boundary from patenting software to patenting the very pre-idea thoughts themselves. Any minor notion is now being patented.
Not as though Apple isn't doing their share of patent abuse though.
This isn't about the bottom dollar, this is about pure machiavellian venal attitude. Make money/power off of every little tiny thing to the point of total absurdity and no matter what the public thinks like Ferengi on acid. A long time ago, I wrote a novel I never submitted to a published about the near future where companies did this sort of thing, cutting their profit margins per line of income to the bone and doing business in bulk multiplicity with extreme prejudice towards anything that got in their way. Then I noted that it was starting to happen and shelved it. I really shoud publish it online anyways.
This is what is going on. Meanwhile the best the opposition can come up with is the battle cry of "free, free, free". Well guess what kids? You cannot change the course of the river by jumping in and screaming at the waters. You can't stop the stampede by standing in front and shouting at the bovines. "Free, free, free" is the equivalent of that. You want to change how things are done? You have to do it from within. You have to ride the horse into the stampede from behind, overtake, redirect from the front when you get there. "Free, free, free" won't do that.
I know what the opposition thinks, that they will sooner or later open source every idea under the sun that can be thought up before they can be patented but since the patent office seems to have decided to eliminate the very concept of prior art from their decision making process and grant patents almost before they are filed, thinking any longer that open source will derail a money-driven idea market of corporate empires is just plain immature and naive fantasizing.
Trouble is, can the opposition join their enemies within, redirect from within acting as a fifth column, without becoming as corrupt and short-sighted as those they are fighting? Most of the time, it runs counter to human nature and making money and power becomes more important to the supposed fighter for change than the cause that ostensibly drove them to start.
We want to stop this patenting of nothingness nonsense, we need to join the political process. Simple leftist anti-corporatism won't sell to people who work for a living like responsible adults any more than "free, free, free" is making them switch to Linux from Windows. We need to go into business and push the counter idea that patenting of those things that do more to destroy the company's reputation and posterity than raise dime one are a bad idea. Amazon may be making money right now, but so is Microsoft and look at their reputation. People buy Windows because it works not because they love Microsoft and we need to get that straight. We need to get good money making product out there to get the financial resources together to get the fight into their world on their turf where it has to be fought to be won.
In all honesty, so do many if not most of the people who've used it from inception and an entire book has been written about it collecting the stories of the Usenet newsgroup on which so much pain and misery of the poor Unix userdom had to deal with.
What does that have to do with how correct their take on the situation is here in this story?
I hope that message wasn't indicative of what happens when you try not to run any Windows services...
Anywho, of course most of the services aren't needed at all times, but if they aren't turned on by default, a lot of extraneous apps that expect them will either not install or not work correctly. Hence, they are turned on. Are not most services blazing along on Linux by default to the glee of OpenBSD booster?
Alright then. Don't want em, kill em. It's easy, but the average user would have to read up and learn to do it. On whatever OS. Probably easier to leave them running by default so as not to fark things later. Or not because of the inherent security holes. Up to you. I'm ambivalent as long as my Windows boxes are behind a sharing router on private IPs without a lot of forwarding and firewall software.
With respect to resources, I'll check it out some time to see if there's really any improvement. Filed under "Review Later"....
As a large portion of the Slashdot and Open Source community will be at SIGGRAPH, I'd really like to hear some moderated arguments beforehand before stepping up to the microphone.
"Moderated arguments"?!
This is Slashdot. The very idea is on the edge of being a logical contradiction.
And yes, they can coexist. They already do, hence if it is, it must be possible as nothing unreal can exist. Yes, that is a Trek/Vulcan reference. This is Slashdot, remember?
..."where are the flying cars? I was told there would be flying cars."
Internet 2057? High speed pr0n in 3D and sex bots from Japan. Spam everywhere you look. The *AA still suing everyone for sharing their own self-created music. Viruses that erase your data more creatively and let Jamster send that damn crazyfrog ringtone to your cellphone whether you want it or not.
One need only look over this book and do six months of desktop end-user support on Windows to see how insane an idea it is that Unix of any kind is going to win in the market over Windows as long as the Unix community remains ruled by sadomasochistic techie dweebs who love things based on how hard they are which is the exact opposite of the attitude that has allowed Microsoft and AOL to prosper and thrive in the common end-user market.
I love my FC3, but once again, don't mistake my technical abilities and the chance to flex them each day on it for meaning that everyone is going to take to it like a fish to water.
Apple's OSX most definitely is the best Unix-ish distribution ever conceived, built, and sold to end-users without any doubt in my mind. But do the Linux geeks get it as to why? No, they try mightily to avoid the BSD-ish ancestry of it and sit there wishing this beautiful *nix-style OS with such wonderful design and construction were a Linux distro.
Won't happen. Linux is dominated by the sort of people on whom it is still lost that ease of use, administration, and support are paramount over everything else for end-users. Windows XP and Mac OSX give them what Linux never will as long as the current crop of leaders and movers and shakers controls the Linux scene.
Slashdot Mirror
...I will still likely stay with FC3 for production, FC4 to play with pending it going to production, and various RH for servers as soon as I get some more money to send down to Raleigh.
I will say this... they need a better mascot. The Red Hat fedora is just plain cooler, imho. The SuSE lizard looks like it is high or something and the name just brings back this inane taunt line of Wimp Lo's in Kung Pow: Enter the Fist, "I rock. And roll. All day long. Sweet Suzy."
But I will try not to let that stop me from giving it a chance somewhere. I mean, if I can get past the horrors of Motif, the idiocy of Vi, and still use *nix OSes...
SCO will be sueing Novell for open sourcing Open Source Software. Darl McBride was quoted as saying "This kind of thing can't be allowed to continue, where would this country be if software were free"?
Asked for quotes, random geeks seemed to think all software was free anyways and offered free cracked Windows Office XP copies to the reporters.
Nicely spun!!
/. headed in the right direction of meaning on a point. Simply work backward and see where the behaviors they had a problem with in uniform but off duty might have been unfairly adversely affecting that company.
Now can you explain how an employers has ANY right whatsoever to tell us what to do when we are off the clock?
While wearing the company's uniform you may be reasonably seen to be a representative of the company due to that uniform and thus any actions to engage in may reflect on the company. If you were to appear in a pr0n flick while wearing a guard uniform, would you not expect them to be fired? Extreme example, but it is necessary to get people on
If you owned a company would you want your employees wearing your company regalia and doing something that would bring harm to your enterprise? No. But you wouldn't have a say if they got into their street clothes and no one could reasonably associate them with you.
That simple.
It's a total fallacy that you can or should "soak the rich" since A) the middle class hold the bulk of the cash and not "the rich", B) those who employ people are always rich or richer than you (when was the last time a homeless schitzo or someone from the projects handed you a $60K/year tech job? No one in the projects I grew up in did, that's for frigging sure), and C) rich is a measure of a static snapshot of holdings, ie, wealth, and not a measure of a dynamic cash flow.
There are a lot of "rich" people who have almost zero cash flow on a daily basis and we tax INCOME not cash after it has already been income. Want to change this? Fine, expect the IRS to tax your pay every second after it is in your pocket until you've spent what is left. You'll be taxed before the paycheck hits your account, and they will continuous drain your account, taxing that money over and over and over... That is what it means to go from taxing income to taxing cash on hand.
I aspire to become rich someday and don't need to be sent back to the projects and government welfare because someone wanted to open the can of worms that it would be to tax wealth and not income. You can't soak the rich without ultimately going straight into total socialistic property rights abolition and economic anarchy and deprivation. You want to start the second American revolution? That would do it.
...that they don't turn out like the Umbrella Corporation. Last thing we need is Mozilla spawning zombies. That's the job of your local clueless end-user, Internet Explorer and Active X.
Another soon-to-be-obligatory-on-/. reference.
Imagine a beowulf cluster...
...self-destructing under the power of all the brainless conversations intercepted in midtown Manhattan.
...getting sued for pirating an Oasis track. Well, I hope those on the receiving ends remember this in the future and learn to pirate higher on the musical foodchain... like Mozart, or Beethoven...
I almost thought they were actually going to bring food to places where it lacks. That'd be a freedom toaster alright.
I like Kingdom of Loathing a lot myself, but I think this is going way too far. Let them come up with a meat globe that bulks up the hungry and gives them money first, at least...
*ack*
I can't say that with straight face and without choking.
Anyhow, if sources are so anonymous that they cannot be verified as to identity by the news people, and when has this ever stopped them, then how do we ever know it isn't some geek with a crude sense of humor who has managed to master nym and mixmaster remailers?
If they are known by the reporters, then the court order comes into play and they can testify or go to jail. That simple. We're not talking lawyer-client or doctor-patient or married couples here, we are talking about quite plainly, people whose entire job it is to print the most sensational things in their area that they can to sell newspapers and increase paying readership. Not saving people from the noose, not saving people's lives, not keeping a marriage together.
I place reporter-source privilege on the same level as that of gossip-mongers in my own neighborhood and as much importance on it. Reporters say their profession is about truth and facts. Well truth is ephemeral and in the mind of the person at hand and facts things that people may very well ignore in choosing their truth for themselves. If they want to be so high and mighty, let them put out verifiable bonafide facts and cut down the use of anonymous sources.
If news people see it as needing some way to circumvent court orders using encryption, then how trustworthy can it be? Sounds more like shielding their backsides and giving themselves greater latitude in abusing "anonymous sources" which they do too frequently these days as it is. Let them start acting ethical and aboveboard in the fourth estate to begin with and not looking for ways to cover their behinds.
...everyone already on record as opposed to Microsoft creating standards and Micrsoft having to dance to others' tune. I think this is basically inane horsesh*t.
Do we expect Macromedia not to produce and website builders not to use Flash or Shockwave? Why not? They aren't standards. Do we expect people to stop using Java? Why not? It was foisted by a private company called Sun Microsystems.
It is entirely the province of those who use the net to decide how they will each do so and those who interact with them to make their choices as they see fit. Most of the other browsers aren't properly compliant either. Yet most come from outfits which are supposed to be pure as the driven snow by virtue of their being from either associations like those promulgating web standards or because they're the magical Open Source.
Ooooh... Open Source...
Please.
If Microsoft wants to add ten dozen tchotchkes to their particular browser and ten dozen other browsers want to add or subtract ten dozen tchotchkes of their own each or adopt those of someone else, good for them. Why should what I get offered for display goodness on the net be decided by some third party council of knighted strangers carried on the shoulders of a mob of people with an axe to grind against the largest browser purveyor and a long history of turning a blind eye to the inadequacies and weaknesses of their own favorite browsers?
Microsoft has brought a lot of good stuff to my web browsing experience not brought to me by the committee of blind monkeys hammering out so-called web standards. For crying out loud people, it's freaking web page display stuff, not the underlying ATM, Frame Relay, IP, etc. protocols. It's not like Microsoft invented their own version of TCP/IP and ordered you to use it to surf for pr0n...
This hit me like a brick in the face and sounded like someone claiming that Hustler was actually owned by Billy Graham.
Whisky Tango Foxtrot, wasn't expecting this.
Information "wants" to be free in the same sense that things "want" to fall to the ground; it's the path of least resistance.
/. world.
Things don't want to fall to the ground; the ground is merely in the way.
What the statement means to me is that information usually becomes free in the absence of measures taken to prevent it from doing so. I think we can agree that that's true.
No, in the absence of any measures, information ceases to exist. Fail to remember, fail to record it, fail to anything with it and it doesn't exist. It may be true, but information is a concept relative to those holding it as such. This is why 1984 is so relevant to information technology. What people consider to be true or factual is dependent upon information as recorded or held in the minds of others and transmitted to them. 1984 tells you why hackers can be dangerous. Should information not be held in the mind and be changed in some database and it not exist in anyone's mind until it is read after the changes, it is assumed to be right and it becomes "information" at that point.
Information doesn't want to be at all. People insist on it being. The fewer the people with it, the closer it gets to its ephemeral basis of nonexistance, just waiting for some entity to come along and encompass it back into being.
You may now return to not-so-deep end of the
What are you talking about? I did that as you stated and it backed right up to /. with no problem. IE6SP2. Actually, I can't remember ever having such a flaw in IE.
...don't write things like...
/* I have no idea what this portion does and I wrote it, but my daughter says it is good so I guess I'll leave it in but I hope my boss never has to read this in court on the stand in a lawsuit */
Bad idea.
Linux should focus more on becoming user-friendly so it gets a bigger customer base, this would inspire more developers to include a Linux version of the more popular games/ apps. My 2cents.
This simple thing is lost on most everyone in Linux it seems some days.
Does Tux Racer alone not suggest good gaming is possible on Linux? Do increasingly better drivers for nVidia and ATI not sink in?
Oh, that's right. The problem is user-friendliness which is the antithesis of the leet geek brigades who search out things to do because they're hard and prove how smart they are.
I got tired of writing in hex in my head when I was a teen. I just want stuff to work. XP and FC3 for me for now while I wait for the Linux equivalent of XP to hit... And wait...
And does it come under the heading ironic that this site boasts of W3C compliance, arrogantly stops IE users with some insult warning screen despite the site rendering just fine when you get past it, and violates probably a dozen of the rules laid down in the very first incarnation of Vincent Flanders' Webpages That Suck?.
Wrapping yourself in anti-MS/anti-IE leetness and promptly do the website wrong anyhow seems to be getting alarmingly common.
I'm way past getting tired of the a-critical, as in having nothing to do with critical in any way it might be defined or construed, fawning over Apple by the /. masses.
/. geek to sit in front of, stand in front of, stand in the same room as, a Macintosh. Now they adopt a Unix-ish OS and suddenly they are darlings.
There was a time when you could not get the average
There was also a time when the average geek couldn't stand getting near a Unix box of any kind because their teachers had already done years if not a decade plus in front of the monsters and warned them of the horrors. Instead, they hacked early PCs, Apples, Commodores, anything else that might do for experimenting, proving their technical abilities, and didn't drive them to madness with esoteric idiocy that felt wrong the instant you looked at it.
I know I got that impression the moment I looked at Apple ProDOS and again when I looked at MS-DOS. It sent a shiver down my spine and I recall the pre-release demonstration events for the Macintosh where Lisa boxes were also on display. I remember thinking, "what the fark is this? We've seen the future, and it is a simple visual interface playing to natural human tendencies and abilities. What is this?! Why are these other systems still controlled by endless text that fights the unwinnable fight against Occam and his razor?"
If there is one thing Apple does deserve credit for it is being relentlessly gui-centric since the Lisa. If anything, Microsoft played catch-up to them until Windows XP with gui vs. text ratios and only their non-religious it's-business-and-not-personal way, easier accessibility of information for programming to it, and their no-nonsense recognition that Microsoft is a SOFTWARE COMPANY kept them ahead of the Mac. Had they gone straight to something as good as Windows XP from the start, Apple would no longer be in business now... but there's a learning curve to everything.
So I hope the true underlying reason that Apple's OSX should be appreciated isn't lost in orgasmic geek fawning: it's opened the platform somewhat compared to earlier, it's powerful and extensible, and it has a beautiful easy-to-use for end-users interface, and NOT simply because it has some relation to *nix. The core of being a geek should be to understand the reasoning behind things and not religious blind faith that something is because it is. Leave that to church on Sunday and life after death. Leave the OS to deconstruction and analysis in the light of reality.
FWIW, I was impressed with the Lisa when I first saw it. I wish Apple hadn't squandered that with their exclusivity and arrogance... but there's a learning curve to everything.
Microsoft IS most definitely based on software, they know it and work it, and do it very well. Why are so many on /. unwilling to give them credit where it is due? Through acquisition of skilled individuals and small outfits with good IP and talented people, and leveraging of everything they've put together, they've managed to kick the royal sh*t out of IBM, Oracle, Novell, Netscape, and a long laundry list of other would-be Micrsoft-killers.
OSS has zip to do with nobility or anything else associated with good. It's rapidly being brought low to the same level as drug abuse due to peer pressure. Better go open source or you'll be seen in the same light as Microsoft. Open source to be cool and hip and accepted.
Horsesh*t. Microsoft spent real money, invested real resources, why should they not keep their source closed if they so choose? It's their right to do, as it is theirs. You want to open source your stuff, do what you want with your stuff. You want to close source it, who cares, its yours.
I am so sick of this tinfoil hat FUD about Microsoft. Their chief crimes are simple: they sold unfinished, alpha, and beta software as finished product and downplayed the results despite voluminous documention by support professionals and by virtue of the sheer number of patches needed to stabilize it afterwards; their second crime is to abuse the patent system while claiming to desire an end to the same behavior. Lastly, they tend to get overprotective of their market and cross the line in proper and ethical sales and marketing practices.
But enough is enough with the "MS is teh enemy" nonsense. Windows XP isn't remotely the mess that Windows 3.11 and DOS 6.22, Windows 95 first release or Windows ME were. You want to go after them for what they really do? Fine, document it, prove it, make the case. Don't have one? Drop it until you do people. If MS continues to be villified for being something they aren't and doing things they haven't, sooner or later they will and though it may soothe the hearts of a lot of pathetic geeks to see them become guilty after the fact, it won't help anyone. Not the market, not the industry, not the customers, not the world.
So let's think before we paint them so darkly automatically.
Linux doesn't *HAVE* to be any harder to install or use than any other OS.
If it was as easy to use as Windows XP, it wouldn't have the same "geek cred". Gentoo people scoff at Fedora Core users as wimps. OpenBSD advocates look at Gentoo as just too easy. Real geekness is predicated on how hard it is, how inaccessible it is, and how little the average person without "skillz" relates to it.
Geeks are masochists on the whole.
As much as we enjoy watching great innovations come out of corporations who employ amazing talent, occassionally we get a quick and dirty reminder that these companies (Apple, Amazon, Google, etc.) are just as worried about the bottom dollar as M$. If it weren't for porn, the Internet wouldn't be nearly as whiz bang as it is today
And this surprises people? Truly, really, deep down? Some of us have been willing to say it forever, others merely know it but are afraid to say it. While there's nothing inherently evil in big business and corporate entities, they are as given to abuse of the boundaries of good taste, common sense, fairness, and so on as the individuals of which they are comprised.
THAT INCLUDES APPLE AND GOOGLE, NOT JUST AMAZON AND MICROSOFT.
We need to call things as they are. It's not just Amazon that's doing stupid things in the world of patents. It's merely that Amazon has now pushed the boundary from patenting software to patenting the very pre-idea thoughts themselves. Any minor notion is now being patented.
Not as though Apple isn't doing their share of patent abuse though.
This isn't about the bottom dollar, this is about pure machiavellian venal attitude. Make money/power off of every little tiny thing to the point of total absurdity and no matter what the public thinks like Ferengi on acid. A long time ago, I wrote a novel I never submitted to a published about the near future where companies did this sort of thing, cutting their profit margins per line of income to the bone and doing business in bulk multiplicity with extreme prejudice towards anything that got in their way. Then I noted that it was starting to happen and shelved it. I really shoud publish it online anyways.
This is what is going on. Meanwhile the best the opposition can come up with is the battle cry of "free, free, free". Well guess what kids? You cannot change the course of the river by jumping in and screaming at the waters. You can't stop the stampede by standing in front and shouting at the bovines. "Free, free, free" is the equivalent of that. You want to change how things are done? You have to do it from within. You have to ride the horse into the stampede from behind, overtake, redirect from the front when you get there. "Free, free, free" won't do that.
I know what the opposition thinks, that they will sooner or later open source every idea under the sun that can be thought up before they can be patented but since the patent office seems to have decided to eliminate the very concept of prior art from their decision making process and grant patents almost before they are filed, thinking any longer that open source will derail a money-driven idea market of corporate empires is just plain immature and naive fantasizing.
Trouble is, can the opposition join their enemies within, redirect from within acting as a fifth column, without becoming as corrupt and short-sighted as those they are fighting? Most of the time, it runs counter to human nature and making money and power becomes more important to the supposed fighter for change than the cause that ostensibly drove them to start.
We want to stop this patenting of nothingness nonsense, we need to join the political process. Simple leftist anti-corporatism won't sell to people who work for a living like responsible adults any more than "free, free, free" is making them switch to Linux from Windows. We need to go into business and push the counter idea that patenting of those things that do more to destroy the company's reputation and posterity than raise dime one are a bad idea. Amazon may be making money right now, but so is Microsoft and look at their reputation. People buy Windows because it works not because they love Microsoft and we need to get that straight. We need to get good money making product out there to get the financial resources together to get the fight into their world on their turf where it has to be fought to be won.
Forg
DaHat, the author of this story, hates linux.
In all honesty, so do many if not most of the people who've used it from inception and an entire book has been written about it collecting the stories of the Usenet newsgroup on which so much pain and misery of the poor Unix userdom had to deal with.
What does that have to do with how correct their take on the situation is here in this story?
I hope that message wasn't indicative of what happens when you try not to run any Windows services...
Anywho, of course most of the services aren't needed at all times, but if they aren't turned on by default, a lot of extraneous apps that expect them will either not install or not work correctly. Hence, they are turned on. Are not most services blazing along on Linux by default to the glee of OpenBSD booster?
Alright then. Don't want em, kill em. It's easy, but the average user would have to read up and learn to do it. On whatever OS. Probably easier to leave them running by default so as not to fark things later. Or not because of the inherent security holes. Up to you. I'm ambivalent as long as my Windows boxes are behind a sharing router on private IPs without a lot of forwarding and firewall software.
With respect to resources, I'll check it out some time to see if there's really any improvement. Filed under "Review Later"....
As a large portion of the Slashdot and Open Source community will be at SIGGRAPH, I'd really like to hear some moderated arguments beforehand before stepping up to the microphone.
"Moderated arguments"?!
This is Slashdot. The very idea is on the edge of being a logical contradiction.
And yes, they can coexist. They already do, hence if it is, it must be possible as nothing unreal can exist. Yes, that is a Trek/Vulcan reference. This is Slashdot, remember?
..."where are the flying cars? I was told there would be flying cars."
Internet 2057? High speed pr0n in 3D and sex bots from Japan. Spam everywhere you look. The *AA still suing everyone for sharing their own self-created music. Viruses that erase your data more creatively and let Jamster send that damn crazyfrog ringtone to your cellphone whether you want it or not.
That I could believe.
One need only look over this book and do six months of desktop end-user support on Windows to see how insane an idea it is that Unix of any kind is going to win in the market over Windows as long as the Unix community remains ruled by sadomasochistic techie dweebs who love things based on how hard they are which is the exact opposite of the attitude that has allowed Microsoft and AOL to prosper and thrive in the common end-user market.
I love my FC3, but once again, don't mistake my technical abilities and the chance to flex them each day on it for meaning that everyone is going to take to it like a fish to water.
Apple's OSX most definitely is the best Unix-ish distribution ever conceived, built, and sold to end-users without any doubt in my mind. But do the Linux geeks get it as to why? No, they try mightily to avoid the BSD-ish ancestry of it and sit there wishing this beautiful *nix-style OS with such wonderful design and construction were a Linux distro.
Won't happen. Linux is dominated by the sort of people on whom it is still lost that ease of use, administration, and support are paramount over everything else for end-users. Windows XP and Mac OSX give them what Linux never will as long as the current crop of leaders and movers and shakers controls the Linux scene.