I seem to be saying this a lot lately...
on
The CVS Cop-Out
·
· Score: 4, Informative
But... Linux is not Windows. Seriously.
With Windows, you get fixes/upgrades when the binaries are released. With Linux, you can wait for the binaries, or, if you are comfortable with compiling, you can get fixes/upgrades slightly sooner. It's a feature, not a bug.
If you are prepared to spend some time and have some time practicing compiling from CVS (and it's not all that hard to do) then bonus! You get fixes a little early. If not, wait for the binaries, and the really cool thing? Double bonus! You still get the fixes earlier, because open source delivers fixes faster than closed source!
Yeah, isn't it cool? I'm just about to sneak my first production Linux box into my organisation, and when people say "what if it breaks" I point to the exact copy of it, completely legal, running on an old workstation, sitting under my desk.
I was wondering, you know the way Ad Hominem is not a valid argument technique? Well, if the person you are disputing with is actually, clinically, deranged, what are you supposed to do then? Anyone?
It's "cracker", not hacker. Oh, and your entire post made no snese whatsoever. But of course we expect - perhaps even insist on - the latter on Slashdot.
You'd have to cut off international telephone lines too, of course, to stop them dialing out with modems.
For that matter, stop postal deliveries, in case they mail CD-ROMS. Oh wait, people could swallow USB sticks... better close the border. And build a wall.
Oh, but then... nevermind, let's just nuke em. I mean, we spent a lot of money on those ICBMs.
...I mean, why are they so freaked out by Google? Since their entire infrastructure is based around software that isn't reliable or dependable, they can't possibly grow to any size.
How would putting the candidates into the Big Brother house stop people being elected on ability to win Big Brother?
General public review of legistlation is an interesting idea, it would probably fail on the other major flaw in democracy, which is that most people are stupid.
This is very true, I haven't thought about what processor is in the machines I buy for a loooong time. I just buy the cheapest thing that isn't a Celeron (which is probably unfair, it's just me remembering when Celery's were really crap).
When my customers ask me what CPU to get, I reply "what does it matter? the thing will be like lightning whatever you get. RAM and Disk speed is where you get results"
Admitedly with my couple of orders I've noticed that I got intel core duos, but that's mostly because I'm thinking of buying a Mac so those chips are in my mind.
Even they don't care. OSX is not free software, and was never likely to be. Darwin was very much an open source kind of deal - using the Bazzar method to devlop better software. The free software people have Linux and Hurd to use for kernels.
OK, a box with a double PCMCIA socket in it for the radios, to let someone else worry about this sort of thing? Of course, there's a joke about that.
Joe stops a man in the street and asks him the time. The man puts down his heavy suitcases with a sigh of relief, and looks at his watch.
"I'ts 13:27 and 15 seconds preciesely. That's here of course, it's 08:27 in Tokyo. The temperature is 30 degrees; 25% chance of showers later. We are located 127 meters from the nearest Starbucks, and are 172 metres below sea level. Traffic on the freeway is slightly heavy for this time of day, there are two dupes on the slashdot front page, my washing machine at home is just coming onto it's spin cycle, and George Clooney's new movie has got two thumbs up and 3 rotten tomatoes."
"Wow!" says Joe. "What an amazing watch!"
"Yes," replies the man, rubbing his hands in obvious discomfort. "It's also bulletproof, waterproof, has Skype built-in, runs OSX and Linux dual-boot, and in the event of a plane crash it doubles as a flotation device."
"Must have been expensive" muses Joe.
"No, just $20."
"Blimey, I've got to get one of those!" says Joe.
"Oh, I wouldn't recommend it." says the man, heaving up his heavy suitcases and starting on down the road.
"Why on earth not?" Joe calls after him.
"Because you have to carry these bastard batteries around everywhere!"
Is there enough of a market out there for someone (with a lot of seed cash) to produce a totally generic mobile device designed for open source hacking?
What I'm thinking about is a fairly simple PDA type design, maybe with WiFi/Bluetooth/GSM/EDGE radio(s), with a CF and an SD slot, not too big, 320x320 screen maybe, 1MP camera, the entire hardware design open and published, running Linux, the whole thing made from commodity hardware, designed for people to put freaky applications on?
I imagine such a device would be initially very very ugly, that over time various Koreans etc. would rip it off and make pretty ones to the same spec that ran the same software.
How many people would buy it? Could you sell it into commercial stuff?
This I guess is prompted by thinking about Warren Ellis' box. That is not rude, Americans. Basically, Mr. E recently blogged about a ridiculously cheap hardware device he bought, a camera+SD card slot+screen+TV in/Out. It's ugly and crap, but it's £150 and does twice as much as my new ipod does. Reading about it, it occured to me that if this thing had a radio in it so I could make it talk to my PCs, I'd probably buy one.
Actually, this is deeper than this - work are about to take away my converged phone/pda and replace it with a Crackberry. This pains me, as I hadn't realised how attached I am to the idea of a converged device. My p910i isn't perfect in this regard, but it was getting there. It can theoretically do everything that the Box can. But it's a Sony, and so full of proprietary nonsense that just makes it difficult.
Minicard means that the wifi is internal, but is user replaceable - it's about as hard (or easy) as replacing the RAM. The idea being that you can buy the g card and upgrade to h later, or whatever, without soldering.
The BT is replaceable too, although you have to bully Dell into selling you one of the damn things to add it later.
1: Linux is not Windows. 2: Linux is not Windows. 3: Linux is not Windows. 4: Linux is not Windows.
You see, this is all symptomatic of a larger problem - you want Windows on your box, but you haven't installed Windows, you've installed Linux. And Linux is not Windows, so after you installed Linux, you didn't have Windows.
This is leading to all your problems. For example, setting permissions doesn't work like it does in windows. this is because Linux works like Linux, not Windows, which is understandable when you consider that Linux is not Windows. Also, you wonder why you have to use the console when Windows users don't. This is because Windows doesn't really have a console. Linux does, because it's Linux, and so is not Windows.
Now, there are various reasons why this Windows/Linux confusion might happen. For example, you might have got the CDs confused. This is less likely these days thanks to the proliferation of Sharpie markers.
More likely is that you wanted a Windows that is not broken. I know that feeling! But, alas, Linux can't help you there. Linux can get you a Linux that isn't broken, but it's still Linux, which is not Windows.
It seems to me that there are two possible "next generation" computer interfaces that can replace the current ubiquitous keyborad+mouse+LCD panel.
One is direct interface to the brain. This is the ideal, but a looong way away.
So the other seems a likely intermediate step. Replace the screen with glasses that overlay a CG interface on what you see. Replace the keyboard (partially) with voice recognition. I say partially as I think a folded up keyboard will also be part of this system. Replace the mouse with devices that detect eye movement and hand gestures. Just as now the mouse works with the keybaord, so the Voice recognition will contribute to the eye movement.
Of course, what is being produced now is crap; but try using a ten year old mouse.
Give em to HR to use as an employee bonus. Even a tiny thing like a handful of iTunes songs can be a useful motivator if handled well - i.e. acknowledge that this is just a tiny gesture up front.
This, to me, it actually the worst thing about DRM. Not that it does nothing to stop the real pirates, the people making hundreds of copies and selling them. Not that it prevents fair use. Not the fact that the record and movie industries are buying dodgy laws to protect their business model. All of these suck incredibly, but there's something worse.
It's that the record companies think DRM is the answer to the internet, and so no-one is trying to think of the ways that we will pay artists in the 21st century.
Look, I admire and respect creative artists and I want to pay them money so that they can put groceries on the table and keep making cool stuff. But no-one is trying to invent a way that I can do that in the internet age that doesn't involve breaking my TV and my laptop and my iPod. They're all running about pretending that their business model hasn't just been fucked by the internet.
I mean, what exactly does a record company do? They make loans to pay for making the album, and they press and distribute CDs. Oh, and they only do this for people they expect will sell a lot. Whoops, those just became obsolete.
Take my current favorite recording artist; she doesn't have a record contract, presumably because the record company don't think she'll sell a lot. I still managed to buy her last record, though, because she can afford a home studio to make them in, and she can burn CD-Rs of the material, and photocopy a cover, and run a website to sell the albums from.
Now, this is all cool - I get what I want, she doesn't have to pay for a lot of useless wankers in a record company. I'm more than happy with the current arrangement, but this mechanism does not scale well, and I have a nagging suspicion that if she hadn't written a song that was #1 in the UK for 8 weeks a while back I would never have found her music, and I also have a suspicion that people like me are not paying her grocery bills.
This needs clever people thinking about it. And there's money here; not only did I buy her album, but I'll buy her next album, and I bought an album she recommended on her web site and I'll buy his next album, and I went to see her play last year in London and I'll go see her play if she's ever back in the UK. Hell, I just bought an album she was on years ago that I probably already have on casette somewhere, so I can have it on my ipod.
I have no complaints about editing the sources.list; apt-get is why I choose Ubuntu for my regular failed attempts to move my production machine to GNU/Linux.
I have no complaints about editing text files in general either - GNU/Linux is, surprisingly, not Windows, and if you think that stuff not having shiny GUI configurators is bad then it may not be for you.
My point is that the names of the distros are used as mor ethan just internal code names.
Incidentally, I do not see this as a problem either. GNU/Linux is, surprisingly, not Windows, and if you think that not having a marketing department to worry about this sort of thing is bad then it may not be for you.
Do you think that if all the senior management at Google jumped off a cliff, Microsoft would do it too? I mean, it's be a worthwhile sacrifice, wouldn't it?
Slashdot Mirror
But... Linux is not Windows. Seriously.
With Windows, you get fixes/upgrades when the binaries are released. With Linux, you can wait for the binaries, or, if you are comfortable with compiling, you can get fixes/upgrades slightly sooner. It's a feature, not a bug.
If you are prepared to spend some time and have some time practicing compiling from CVS (and it's not all that hard to do) then bonus! You get fixes a little early. If not, wait for the binaries, and the really cool thing? Double bonus! You still get the fixes earlier, because open source delivers fixes faster than closed source!
Yeah, isn't it cool? I'm just about to sneak my first production Linux box into my organisation, and when people say "what if it breaks" I point to the exact copy of it, completely legal, running on an old workstation, sitting under my desk.
Taco's collary to Murphy's law: Posts complaining about poor grammar or spelling always contain at least one error of grammar or spelling.
I was wondering, you know the way Ad Hominem is not a valid argument technique? Well, if the person you are disputing with is actually, clinically, deranged, what are you supposed to do then? Anyone?
It's "cracker", not hacker. Oh, and your entire post made no snese whatsoever. But of course we expect - perhaps even insist on - the latter on Slashdot.
The word is "cracker", not hacker.
You'd have to cut off international telephone lines too, of course, to stop them dialing out with modems.
For that matter, stop postal deliveries, in case they mail CD-ROMS. Oh wait, people could swallow USB sticks... better close the border. And build a wall.
Oh, but then... nevermind, let's just nuke em. I mean, we spent a lot of money on those ICBMs.
...I mean, why are they so freaked out by Google? Since their entire infrastructure is based around software that isn't reliable or dependable, they can't possibly grow to any size.
How would putting the candidates into the Big Brother house stop people being elected on ability to win Big Brother?
General public review of legistlation is an interesting idea, it would probably fail on the other major flaw in democracy, which is that most people are stupid.
Well, that's one of the flaws of democracy, it selects leaders not on the basis of ability to govern, but on ability to win elections.
This is very true, I haven't thought about what processor is in the machines I buy for a loooong time. I just buy the cheapest thing that isn't a Celeron (which is probably unfair, it's just me remembering when Celery's were really crap).
When my customers ask me what CPU to get, I reply "what does it matter? the thing will be like lightning whatever you get. RAM and Disk speed is where you get results"
Admitedly with my couple of orders I've noticed that I got intel core duos, but that's mostly because I'm thinking of buying a Mac so those chips are in my mind.
Even they don't care. OSX is not free software, and was never likely to be. Darwin was very much an open source kind of deal - using the Bazzar method to devlop better software. The free software people have Linux and Hurd to use for kernels.
Aw crap.
OK, a box with a double PCMCIA socket in it for the radios, to let someone else worry about this sort of thing? Of course, there's a joke about that.
Joe stops a man in the street and asks him the time. The man puts down his heavy suitcases with a sigh of relief, and looks at his watch.
"I'ts 13:27 and 15 seconds preciesely. That's here of course, it's 08:27 in Tokyo. The temperature is 30 degrees; 25% chance of showers later. We are located 127 meters from the nearest Starbucks, and are 172 metres below sea level. Traffic on the freeway is slightly heavy for this time of day, there are two dupes on the slashdot front page, my washing machine at home is just coming onto it's spin cycle, and George Clooney's new movie has got two thumbs up and 3 rotten tomatoes."
"Wow!" says Joe. "What an amazing watch!"
"Yes," replies the man, rubbing his hands in obvious discomfort. "It's also bulletproof, waterproof, has Skype built-in, runs OSX and Linux dual-boot, and in the event of a plane crash it doubles as a flotation device."
"Must have been expensive" muses Joe.
"No, just $20."
"Blimey, I've got to get one of those!" says Joe.
"Oh, I wouldn't recommend it." says the man, heaving up his heavy suitcases and starting on down the road.
"Why on earth not?" Joe calls after him.
"Because you have to carry these bastard batteries around everywhere!"
Is there enough of a market out there for someone (with a lot of seed cash) to produce a totally generic mobile device designed for open source hacking?
What I'm thinking about is a fairly simple PDA type design, maybe with WiFi/Bluetooth/GSM/EDGE radio(s), with a CF and an SD slot, not too big, 320x320 screen maybe, 1MP camera, the entire hardware design open and published, running Linux, the whole thing made from commodity hardware, designed for people to put freaky applications on?
I imagine such a device would be initially very very ugly, that over time various Koreans etc. would rip it off and make pretty ones to the same spec that ran the same software.
How many people would buy it? Could you sell it into commercial stuff?
This I guess is prompted by thinking about Warren Ellis' box. That is not rude, Americans. Basically, Mr. E recently blogged about a ridiculously cheap hardware device he bought, a camera+SD card slot+screen+TV in/Out. It's ugly and crap, but it's £150 and does twice as much as my new ipod does. Reading about it, it occured to me that if this thing had a radio in it so I could make it talk to my PCs, I'd probably buy one.
Actually, this is deeper than this - work are about to take away my converged phone/pda and replace it with a Crackberry. This pains me, as I hadn't realised how attached I am to the idea of a converged device. My p910i isn't perfect in this regard, but it was getting there. It can theoretically do everything that the Box can. But it's a Sony, and so full of proprietary nonsense that just makes it difficult.
Minicard means that the wifi is internal, but is user replaceable - it's about as hard (or easy) as replacing the RAM. The idea being that you can buy the g card and upgrade to h later, or whatever, without soldering.
The BT is replaceable too, although you have to bully Dell into selling you one of the damn things to add it later.
Let me answer your problems for you.
1: Linux is not Windows.
2: Linux is not Windows.
3: Linux is not Windows.
4: Linux is not Windows.
You see, this is all symptomatic of a larger problem - you want Windows on your box, but you haven't installed Windows, you've installed Linux. And Linux is not Windows, so after you installed Linux, you didn't have Windows.
This is leading to all your problems. For example, setting permissions doesn't work like it does in windows. this is because Linux works like Linux, not Windows, which is understandable when you consider that Linux is not Windows. Also, you wonder why you have to use the console when Windows users don't. This is because Windows doesn't really have a console. Linux does, because it's Linux, and so is not Windows.
Now, there are various reasons why this Windows/Linux confusion might happen. For example, you might have got the CDs confused. This is less likely these days thanks to the proliferation of Sharpie markers.
More likely is that you wanted a Windows that is not broken. I know that feeling! But, alas, Linux can't help you there. Linux can get you a Linux that isn't broken, but it's still Linux, which is not Windows.
Also, from tha annotations to the diagrams, the USB port is 1.1, so good luck with downloading a movie to the device.
It seems to me that there are two possible "next generation" computer interfaces that can replace the current ubiquitous keyborad+mouse+LCD panel.
One is direct interface to the brain. This is the ideal, but a looong way away.
So the other seems a likely intermediate step. Replace the screen with glasses that overlay a CG interface on what you see. Replace the keyboard (partially) with voice recognition. I say partially as I think a folded up keyboard will also be part of this system. Replace the mouse with devices that detect eye movement and hand gestures. Just as now the mouse works with the keybaord, so the Voice recognition will contribute to the eye movement.
Of course, what is being produced now is crap; but try using a ten year old mouse.
Too lazy to google? Wikipedia is your friend too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wifi
Give em to HR to use as an employee bonus. Even a tiny thing like a handful of iTunes songs can be a useful motivator if handled well - i.e. acknowledge that this is just a tiny gesture up front.
This, to me, it actually the worst thing about DRM. Not that it does nothing to stop the real pirates, the people making hundreds of copies and selling them. Not that it prevents fair use. Not the fact that the record and movie industries are buying dodgy laws to protect their business model. All of these suck incredibly, but there's something worse.
It's that the record companies think DRM is the answer to the internet, and so no-one is trying to think of the ways that we will pay artists in the 21st century.
Look, I admire and respect creative artists and I want to pay them money so that they can put groceries on the table and keep making cool stuff. But no-one is trying to invent a way that I can do that in the internet age that doesn't involve breaking my TV and my laptop and my iPod. They're all running about pretending that their business model hasn't just been fucked by the internet.
I mean, what exactly does a record company do? They make loans to pay for making the album, and they press and distribute CDs. Oh, and they only do this for people they expect will sell a lot. Whoops, those just became obsolete.
Take my current favorite recording artist; she doesn't have a record contract, presumably because the record company don't think she'll sell a lot. I still managed to buy her last record, though, because she can afford a home studio to make them in, and she can burn CD-Rs of the material, and photocopy a cover, and run a website to sell the albums from.
Now, this is all cool - I get what I want, she doesn't have to pay for a lot of useless wankers in a record company. I'm more than happy with the current arrangement, but this mechanism does not scale well, and I have a nagging suspicion that if she hadn't written a song that was #1 in the UK for 8 weeks a while back I would never have found her music, and I also have a suspicion that people like me are not paying her grocery bills.
This needs clever people thinking about it. And there's money here; not only did I buy her album, but I'll buy her next album, and I bought an album she recommended on her web site and I'll buy his next album, and I went to see her play last year in London and I'll go see her play if she's ever back in the UK. Hell, I just bought an album she was on years ago that I probably already have on casette somewhere, so I can have it on my ipod.
Genesis?
Completely missed my point!
I have no complaints about editing the sources.list; apt-get is why I choose Ubuntu for my regular failed attempts to move my production machine to GNU/Linux.
I have no complaints about editing text files in general either - GNU/Linux is, surprisingly, not Windows, and if you think that stuff not having shiny GUI configurators is bad then it may not be for you.
My point is that the names of the distros are used as mor ethan just internal code names.
Incidentally, I do not see this as a problem either. GNU/Linux is, surprisingly, not Windows, and if you think that not having a marketing department to worry about this sort of thing is bad then it may not be for you.
So you're saying that no-one is going to ever have to type
deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu eft main restricted
and so on into their sources.list?
Do you think that if all the senior management at Google jumped off a cliff, Microsoft would do it too? I mean, it's be a worthwhile sacrifice, wouldn't it?