It's not like most people don't use the words "geek" or "nerd" in a derogatory manner to describe us in the first place.. I suppose it's easier for them to cope with than saying, oh, the "intellectual elite" or the "future rulers of our world to whom all must submit or face their technological wrath".. Er, ah.. I mean to say..:)
To think I was talking about there being too many distros in response to/Corel/! You know, there is a very good reason why there are only a few "real" distros.. That's because only a few actually serve to fill a particularly niche that needs to be filled, and the rest is just another pile of ammunition set down on the table with the "big boys".. except that they're firing blanks rather than the full-force cannon shots of Debian and Red Hat.
To be honest, a distro (much less an OS) targeted toward women makes less sense than anything else I've heard lately (ever..?). This isn't body wash or perfume we're peddling here, people!
"LinuxChix isn't gender biased, though. Men are welcome at meetings and, by Richardson's count, about 20 percent of the 200 members of LinuxChix list are male."
Wow, those guys are smart (where do I sign up?:). Of course, it seems sort of like the idea of guys taking Home Ec or other "girl-oriented" classes in school just to meet women. Sort of defeats the purpose of a female-oriented club, though, doesn't it? Well, aside from the fact that it will draw more women than men due to its very name (or will it..?)
Finally, a topic we all (well, most) actually care about! However, I might point out that a girl found on campus would probably be easier to spend time with irl than one found on a users' group unless its a local group (or you have money to drop on plane tickets, moving, whatever:). Which is not to say that I'm against following through on/both/ methods. Ha!
That was joke, not an argument. Nothing you watch on television is going to warp your mind. You're either screwed up to begin with, or you're not (well, you can be ok to begin with and get screwed up, but that's generally due to emotional, physical, or sexual abuse.. and despite sometimes convincing arguments to the contrary, television isn't included as a part of those categories).
If we can expect quality service like this because of it, I'm all for monopolies over services, products, whatever you got! Tell Uncle Sam to stick it.. Let those businesses continue to deliver the good stuff until it hurts!
Warning: The views expressed in this message are not necessarily shared by the poster, Slashdot, or the free-thinking populace at large.
It's the same guy that was suing Larry Flynt and ended up in the supreme court against him (you've all seen the People vs. Larry Flynt, right? actually a good movie despite prior expectations..). He's like one of the most popular religious activists in the country or something. *thunks head against wall trying to remember that guy's name*
Personally I think that all Teletubbies promotes is feeble-minded humans. I can see the kids that grow up that were a part of the "Tubbies Generation", all of them saying "Uh-oh!" instead of "Hello" and other assorted gibberish rather than real English.
Now, I don't claim to follow children's shows, but isn't BBC the people who own Teletubbies? And some of you want/more/ of their broadcasts to air in the U.S.?
Almost everyone has private internet access, a t1 connection in every high school, lots of public access computers in public libararies, most universities have broadband, cable modems gaining quick popularity everywhere, it's the only place in the world that I know of where you can see the original Tom Green Show (that is to say, the only good ones.. sorry MTV fans), a much lower crime rate than the U.S., less restrictive laws, smaller cities (Ottawa, the capital of Canada, is smaller than Austin, Texas)..
I guess the only thing keeping many Americans from moving to Canada and tapping this large, relatively undisturbed paradise is their lack of conversational French (and unwillingness to learn other languages, instead insisting that others learn English). I myself think I'll pick up a French course or two next semester.
Disclaimer: The preceding joke is probably funny only to me. Don't hurt me.;)
If you read carefully (I'm sorry, I'm a real bastard for choosing my words very finely and carefully [which is why I often look like a total idiot if I post -anything- when I haven't slept enough], or at least trying to), I never really said that Linux was fragmenting.. yet. We are, however, highly, and I mean highly, fractionalized. Can you really disagree with that? Everyone has their favorite distro. Some have uses for different distros, but for most of us, I'm pretty sure we stick to one distro or another.
I also think the more contributions the better. All I'm saying is that we should be careful, and not repeat the same mistakes. It took a lot of hard work and chance to pull this off so far (I don't really remember thr last time a free OS captured the public's attention like this), so it would be good not to screw it up.:)
I myself think we need more software support in the way of applications.. not in the way of more Linux distributions. Ugh. More GPLed drivers also good.
I already have trouble tracking all of the Linux distributions we have now (actually, for the most part, I don't even bother any more). It's getting to be almost as bad as the fact that we have something like 80 or so flavors of Unix. Do we really need to fractionalize even further? I'm all for choice, but when fragmentation begins to occur on a widespread scale, that's not neccesarily a good thing.
Isn't fragmentation the entire reason why Unix fell to Windows in the first place (seems like a good thing to keep in mind since Linux is "a UNIX-type operating system")? While we may not always be able to make the BSD folks happy (I like the three flavors of BSD [yes I'm ignoring BSDI because it's commercial, of course] about as much as any other free OSes), it would be nice to have a little bit more coordination among the different distros. It would be sort of annoying to see a lot of software crop up that only runs on a specific distro. I mean, I like Red Hat and all, but I don't think I have too much use for software that is specific to Red Hat (remember.. not everything that is going to be released for Linux is going to be GPLed or whatever, which would make it easier to port like crazy if we really want to if it was).
Besides, when there are so many different choices (a la 80 flavors of Unix), the average end-user becomes rather confused about what to get and so chooses whatever is popular (which is why I doubt Red Hat will lose its popularity lead any time soon.. popularity only tends to breed even more popularity in this industry because you can use your popularity as a leverage.. people go for what's hot, after all). A little bit of consolidation couldn't hurt.
At any rate, I don't think it would be a good idea for me personally if I decided to buy software from a company whose caps lock key gets stuck when they are typing in the name of their product and neglect to fix it, IMHO. The only places I tend to see all caps are in places where the author apparently doesn't want you to read the all caps in order to see what is really written there (like, say, legal statements, licensing agreements.. the really important parts of them, anyway). Seems like a product name would be an odd place to test out that particular technique.
Of course, when MS does that kind of thing, it's generally better if its vaporware than a real announcement.. Mainly because it would be more likely to simply be more unstable than the alternatives (and be "designed" to do it all and more, but never actually live up to those design specs). I hope Transmeta lives up to the hype.
You get your cadre of engineers, programmers, or whatever kind of personnel you need to work on your project, don't say anything about what you're doing, and hire a really famous person or two (a la Linus Torvalds), and the media will create all the hype in the world for you.
Why is that, you may wonder? Because a) every other company in Silicon Valley and wherever else is/has/will make some sort of marketing campaign, more likely than not (so what makes these guys so special that they won't?) and b) there are few things people love more than rumor mills, conspiracy theories, and random speculation. If you don't say anything about your product, it makes it all the easier for the media to make up stuff (and let's face it, the media is well-known for "creating" stories out of virtually nothing when there's nothing better to report on.
I mean, think about it.. Transmeta is a perfect candidate for this kind of "media hype".
So, basically, if these chips can do this for all of the major architectures, it would run any of three ports of say, Red Hat Linux? Sounds vaguely similar to being a "Java" of the hardware world. Must be nice.. If all of this speculation actually amounts to something solid when Transmeta finally does "their big thing".
It was just a joke.:) Based on the fact that most computers use Intel chips, not Alpha, SPARC, AMD, etc.. Which is why they would have to point out some weird company that has yet to do anything (they cite paranoia over what this company will do, because obviously none of the other ones have done anything yet either, despite having a product). And no, I'm not slamming Transmeta, Alpha, SPARC, or AMD. So just chill.:)
"So what could Transmeta be making to excite such unparalleled interest and talent? We read all we could find on the subject (not much) and talked to everyone we could pin down (not many), including Torvalds; David Ditzel, Transmeta's CEO; and Linley Gwennap, publisher and editorial director of Microprocessor Report. The more we pushed and probed, the more it felt as if we were playing some kind of elaborate Silicon Valley parlor game. Rather than a list of all the tortured permutations, what follows are the best answers we could muster."
"Why would Torvalds, the inventor of the world's best-known free operating system, go to work there?"
Of course, all debate about Richard Stallman, GNU, and Linux aside (just for the record, I don't really care/what/ you call the damn thing, so there's disclaimer #1), I could probably tell these people another reason why their research ran into a little "difficulty".:)
(well, unless you consider "OS" to be synonymous with "kernel" [or even "not just the kernel" as in "the kernel and a little more than the kernel" or whatever], in which case this joke doesn't apply to you.. and there's disclaimer #2)
Ok, so, aside from the fact that I'm sleep-deprived (having three days off in a row when you work the graveyard has "interesting" consequences), no I wasn't trying to say that Apple had anything to do with PPC dev. Just edit out any misleading connotation of that sentence in my post. I know that PPC is a Motorola/IBM design. I was just thinking about the fact that they (Apple) use those chips in their computers and starting babbling some utter nonsense.
And no, I wasn't trying to say anything about Apple crippling any firmware.
All I was trying to say was a little commentary on the nifty things you could do with a Mac, Linux, and those nifty chips.. mainly in regards to Mac since they (Apple again) are the biggest customer of PPC. Ayup. Hopefully that made more sense. So.. I'm going to shut up now.:)
I've been thinking the past week or two that if Apple can keep up their lead on the processor market as they clearly plan to (of course I'm still confused as to why IBM and Motorla make chips for Apple), owning a Mac might not be so bad (even if most of their stuff nowadays looks like it was built by space aliens IMHO). I also thought it was interesting that they were supporting a project, MkLinux, with The Open Group (not that I've ever been a big fan of TOG).
Of course, this old article made me laugh a bit. Use MacOS for graphical applications? Why bother with a dual boot? TOG, of all people, should know you can run graphical applications on Linux. After all, they're the ones who put together X.Org to maintain the official X stuff (TOG getting X.. ugh..). Seems kind of silly to me.
It seems like a smart move to Apple, though, to support Linux. After all, if they can have Linux running on their machines, and have superior hardware to what's already out there, they could tap some potential markets (especially if they have modems on their computers.. I'm so sick of Linux "desktops" without modems because the computer makers love winmodems, which is something I'm sure that Apple doesn't subscribe to, at least, as their machines obviously don't run Windows).
P.S. Yes I realize the "X" link leads to the XFree86 site. I have my reasons, but I don't want to explain them, ok?:)
I'm not going to argue for or against what Katz wrote, but I find it hard to believe that Reagan would be the sole person responsible for any of the good things that happened during his presidential reign. There are a couple of other branches of government, after all.
Sure. Well, whatever you want to believe. Should I take that to mean that GNU and Linux are inherently evil, then, because of the GPL? Should I be restricted to the BSD license because it is "free-er", and allows the corporate big boys to play a little easier on their own terms? I think the BSD OSes are great and all, but.. All of this is really silly. Perhaps you could explain why you think the GPL sucks away your freedom instead of simply asserting so?
First off, I'm not arguing anything. I'm posing a question. Go be a troll somewhere else.
I find it difficult to believe much of anything told to me by someone in a childish manner. Most people at least attempt to have a civilized conversation and not flame people just for the hell of it. Such taunts are mostly the realm of those who can not articulate themselves properly. Been to any good English classes lately? You should try them. Find that source yet, by the way? If anyone happens to own a copy of Sam's Just About Anything Dealing with the Java language they could probably tell me what I want to know. Other than that, I don't see any reason to be a big baby about everything. Grow up already, people.
Any product I could possibly name would just start another debate of some kind. What you should really be asking is how stable is GPLed stuff to comparable closed source stuff? How does the quality differ? Better yet, what does the GPLed stuff do for us that the closed source stuff doesn't? The example I always think about is the GIMP. Would you rather pay the big bucks for Adobe Photoshop (and subsequent upgrades), or download the GIMP for that same low price you have pay for every upgrade: nothing..?
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It's not like most people don't use the words "geek" or "nerd" in a derogatory manner to describe us in the first place.. I suppose it's easier for them to cope with than saying, oh, the "intellectual elite" or the "future rulers of our world to whom all must submit or face their technological wrath".. Er, ah.. I mean to say.. :)
To think I was talking about there being too many distros in response to /Corel/! You know, there is a very good reason why there are only a few "real" distros.. That's because only a few actually serve to fill a particularly niche that needs to be filled, and the rest is just another pile of ammunition set down on the table with the "big boys".. except that they're firing blanks rather than the full-force cannon shots of Debian and Red Hat.
To be honest, a distro (much less an OS) targeted toward women makes less sense than anything else I've heard lately (ever..?). This isn't body wash or perfume we're peddling here, people!
"LinuxChix isn't gender biased, though. Men are welcome at meetings and, by Richardson's count, about 20 percent of the 200 members of LinuxChix list are male."
Wow, those guys are smart (where do I sign up? :). Of course, it seems sort of like the idea of guys taking Home Ec or other "girl-oriented" classes in school just to meet women. Sort of defeats the purpose of a female-oriented club, though, doesn't it? Well, aside from the fact that it will draw more women than men due to its very name (or will it..?)
Finally, a topic we all (well, most) actually care about! However, I might point out that a girl found on campus would probably be easier to spend time with irl than one found on a users' group unless its a local group (or you have money to drop on plane tickets, moving, whatever :). Which is not to say that I'm against following through on /both/ methods. Ha!
That was joke, not an argument. Nothing you watch on television is going to warp your mind. You're either screwed up to begin with, or you're not (well, you can be ok to begin with and get screwed up, but that's generally due to emotional, physical, or sexual abuse.. and despite sometimes convincing arguments to the contrary, television isn't included as a part of those categories).
If we can expect quality service like this because of it, I'm all for monopolies over services, products, whatever you got! Tell Uncle Sam to stick it.. Let those businesses continue to deliver the good stuff until it hurts!
Warning: The views expressed in this message are not necessarily shared by the poster, Slashdot, or the free-thinking populace at large.
It's the same guy that was suing Larry Flynt and ended up in the supreme court against him (you've all seen the People vs. Larry Flynt, right? actually a good movie despite prior expectations..). He's like one of the most popular religious activists in the country or something. *thunks head against wall trying to remember that guy's name*
Personally I think that all Teletubbies promotes is feeble-minded humans. I can see the kids that grow up that were a part of the "Tubbies Generation", all of them saying "Uh-oh!" instead of "Hello" and other assorted gibberish rather than real English.
Now, I don't claim to follow children's shows, but isn't BBC the people who own Teletubbies? And some of you want /more/ of their broadcasts to air in the U.S.?
Almost everyone has private internet access, a t1 connection in every high school, lots of public access computers in public libararies, most universities have broadband, cable modems gaining quick popularity everywhere, it's the only place in the world that I know of where you can see the original Tom Green Show (that is to say, the only good ones.. sorry MTV fans), a much lower crime rate than the U.S., less restrictive laws, smaller cities (Ottawa, the capital of Canada, is smaller than Austin, Texas)..
I guess the only thing keeping many Americans from moving to Canada and tapping this large, relatively undisturbed paradise is their lack of conversational French (and unwillingness to learn other languages, instead insisting that others learn English). I myself think I'll pick up a French course or two next semester.
Disclaimer: The preceding joke is probably funny only to me. Don't hurt me. ;)
If you read carefully (I'm sorry, I'm a real bastard for choosing my words very finely and carefully [which is why I often look like a total idiot if I post -anything- when I haven't slept enough], or at least trying to), I never really said that Linux was fragmenting.. yet. We are, however, highly, and I mean highly, fractionalized. Can you really disagree with that? Everyone has their favorite distro. Some have uses for different distros, but for most of us, I'm pretty sure we stick to one distro or another.
I also think the more contributions the better. All I'm saying is that we should be careful, and not repeat the same mistakes. It took a lot of hard work and chance to pull this off so far (I don't really remember thr last time a free OS captured the public's attention like this), so it would be good not to screw it up. :)
Sorry, sometimes I just feel motivated to motivate others to put some weight behind their comments. Thanks. :)
I myself think we need more software support in the way of applications.. not in the way of more Linux distributions. Ugh. More GPLed drivers also good.
I already have trouble tracking all of the Linux distributions we have now (actually, for the most part, I don't even bother any more). It's getting to be almost as bad as the fact that we have something like 80 or so flavors of Unix. Do we really need to fractionalize even further? I'm all for choice, but when fragmentation begins to occur on a widespread scale, that's not neccesarily a good thing.
Isn't fragmentation the entire reason why Unix fell to Windows in the first place (seems like a good thing to keep in mind since Linux is "a UNIX-type operating system")? While we may not always be able to make the BSD folks happy (I like the three flavors of BSD [yes I'm ignoring BSDI because it's commercial, of course] about as much as any other free OSes), it would be nice to have a little bit more coordination among the different distros. It would be sort of annoying to see a lot of software crop up that only runs on a specific distro. I mean, I like Red Hat and all, but I don't think I have too much use for software that is specific to Red Hat (remember.. not everything that is going to be released for Linux is going to be GPLed or whatever, which would make it easier to port like crazy if we really want to if it was).
Besides, when there are so many different choices (a la 80 flavors of Unix), the average end-user becomes rather confused about what to get and so chooses whatever is popular (which is why I doubt Red Hat will lose its popularity lead any time soon.. popularity only tends to breed even more popularity in this industry because you can use your popularity as a leverage.. people go for what's hot, after all). A little bit of consolidation couldn't hurt.
At any rate, I don't think it would be a good idea for me personally if I decided to buy software from a company whose caps lock key gets stuck when they are typing in the name of their product and neglect to fix it, IMHO. The only places I tend to see all caps are in places where the author apparently doesn't want you to read the all caps in order to see what is really written there (like, say, legal statements, licensing agreements.. the really important parts of them, anyway). Seems like a product name would be an odd place to test out that particular technique.
Laugh. It's funny.
- yet another sleep-deprived post.. yay! -
Care to post a link to a source where I could verify that for myself? After all, Linux is under the GPL, not the BSD license.
- yet another sleep-deprived post.. yay! -
Of course, when MS does that kind of thing, it's generally better if its vaporware than a real announcement.. Mainly because it would be more likely to simply be more unstable than the alternatives (and be "designed" to do it all and more, but never actually live up to those design specs). I hope Transmeta lives up to the hype.
You get your cadre of engineers, programmers, or whatever kind of personnel you need to work on your project, don't say anything about what you're doing, and hire a really famous person or two (a la Linus Torvalds), and the media will create all the hype in the world for you.
Why is that, you may wonder? Because a) every other company in Silicon Valley and wherever else is/has/will make some sort of marketing campaign, more likely than not (so what makes these guys so special that they won't?) and b) there are few things people love more than rumor mills, conspiracy theories, and random speculation. If you don't say anything about your product, it makes it all the easier for the media to make up stuff (and let's face it, the media is well-known for "creating" stories out of virtually nothing when there's nothing better to report on.
I mean, think about it.. Transmeta is a perfect candidate for this kind of "media hype".
So, basically, if these chips can do this for all of the major architectures, it would run any of three ports of say, Red Hat Linux? Sounds vaguely similar to being a "Java" of the hardware world. Must be nice.. If all of this speculation actually amounts to something solid when Transmeta finally does "their big thing".
It was just a joke. :) Based on the fact that most computers use Intel chips, not Alpha, SPARC, AMD, etc.. Which is why they would have to point out some weird company that has yet to do anything (they cite paranoia over what this company will do, because obviously none of the other ones have done anything yet either, despite having a product). And no, I'm not slamming Transmeta, Alpha, SPARC, or AMD. So just chill. :)
You mean not everyone uses Alpha and SPARC? Wow.. where have I been all these years? :)
"So what could Transmeta be making to excite such unparalleled interest and talent? We read all we could find on the subject (not much) and talked to everyone we could pin down (not many), including Torvalds; David Ditzel, Transmeta's CEO; and Linley Gwennap, publisher and editorial director of Microprocessor Report. The more we pushed and probed, the more it felt as if we were playing some kind of elaborate Silicon Valley parlor game. Rather than a list of all the tortured permutations, what follows are the best answers we could muster."
"Why would Torvalds, the inventor of the world's best-known free operating system, go to work there?"
Of course, all debate about Richard Stallman, GNU, and Linux aside (just for the record, I don't really care /what/ you call the damn thing, so there's disclaimer #1), I could probably tell these people another reason why their research ran into a little "difficulty". :)
(well, unless you consider "OS" to be synonymous with "kernel" [or even "not just the kernel" as in "the kernel and a little more than the kernel" or whatever], in which case this joke doesn't apply to you.. and there's disclaimer #2)
Ok, so, aside from the fact that I'm sleep-deprived (having three days off in a row when you work the graveyard has "interesting" consequences), no I wasn't trying to say that Apple had anything to do with PPC dev. Just edit out any misleading connotation of that sentence in my post. I know that PPC is a Motorola/IBM design. I was just thinking about the fact that they (Apple) use those chips in their computers and starting babbling some utter nonsense.
And no, I wasn't trying to say anything about Apple crippling any firmware.
All I was trying to say was a little commentary on the nifty things you could do with a Mac, Linux, and those nifty chips.. mainly in regards to Mac since they (Apple again) are the biggest customer of PPC. Ayup. Hopefully that made more sense. So.. I'm going to shut up now. :)
I've been thinking the past week or two that if Apple can keep up their lead on the processor market as they clearly plan to (of course I'm still confused as to why IBM and Motorla make chips for Apple), owning a Mac might not be so bad (even if most of their stuff nowadays looks like it was built by space aliens IMHO). I also thought it was interesting that they were supporting a project, MkLinux, with The Open Group (not that I've ever been a big fan of TOG).
Of course, this old article made me laugh a bit. Use MacOS for graphical applications? Why bother with a dual boot? TOG, of all people, should know you can run graphical applications on Linux. After all, they're the ones who put together X.Org to maintain the official X stuff (TOG getting X.. ugh..). Seems kind of silly to me.
It seems like a smart move to Apple, though, to support Linux. After all, if they can have Linux running on their machines, and have superior hardware to what's already out there, they could tap some potential markets (especially if they have modems on their computers.. I'm so sick of Linux "desktops" without modems because the computer makers love winmodems, which is something I'm sure that Apple doesn't subscribe to, at least, as their machines obviously don't run Windows).
P.S. Yes I realize the "X" link leads to the XFree86 site. I have my reasons, but I don't want to explain them, ok? :)
I'm not going to argue for or against what Katz wrote, but I find it hard to believe that Reagan would be the sole person responsible for any of the good things that happened during his presidential reign. There are a couple of other branches of government, after all.
Sure. Well, whatever you want to believe. Should I take that to mean that GNU and Linux are inherently evil, then, because of the GPL? Should I be restricted to the BSD license because it is "free-er", and allows the corporate big boys to play a little easier on their own terms? I think the BSD OSes are great and all, but.. All of this is really silly. Perhaps you could explain why you think the GPL sucks away your freedom instead of simply asserting so?
First off, I'm not arguing anything. I'm posing a question. Go be a troll somewhere else.
I find it difficult to believe much of anything told to me by someone in a childish manner. Most people at least attempt to have a civilized conversation and not flame people just for the hell of it. Such taunts are mostly the realm of those who can not articulate themselves properly. Been to any good English classes lately? You should try them. Find that source yet, by the way? If anyone happens to own a copy of Sam's Just About Anything Dealing with the Java language they could probably tell me what I want to know. Other than that, I don't see any reason to be a big baby about everything. Grow up already, people.
Any product I could possibly name would just start another debate of some kind. What you should really be asking is how stable is GPLed stuff to comparable closed source stuff? How does the quality differ? Better yet, what does the GPLed stuff do for us that the closed source stuff doesn't? The example I always think about is the GIMP. Would you rather pay the big bucks for Adobe Photoshop (and subsequent upgrades), or download the GIMP for that same low price you have pay for every upgrade: nothing..?