Even if you only have one HD, you can still have Linux only load when booting off of a CD drive, and then whenever you want Linux to boot, hit F-whatever at startup and tell it to boot that way.
That might be interesting for slashdotters, but some people want computers that actually work without fangling with external media drives and magic keyboard buttons. I like to press the power button and have it load Ubuntu or $DISTRO without this nonsense. Also, you're not really solving the problem, you've just offloaded it to the CD disk. If the bootloader is screwed up, it will be screwed up on your CD as well so you gain nothing.
Last time I checked, the PNG format did not support all of the GIMP's features (like layers and undo history), but the GIMP can still open and save files in that format. In fact the same can be said for all the formats it supports besides XCF. Many other programs support formats that do not incorporate all of it's features. OpenOffice will save files in MS Word's DOC format, HTML, RTF, and many other things.
I believe in democracy as a principle, but if 51% of the country voted that black people should be tortured, I would be against it.
I think this is more of a semantic argument than a real difference, but I would argue that you don't really believe in democracy as a principle. I think you would agree that, in many cases, it is an effective method for building a better society; but also recognize that it is not the final solution.
Are you recommending that ubuntu should not use a bootloader? How in the world is it supposted to boot? I know you can make an active partition and boot that way, but grub seems many times better too me.
2) Bootloader messes up and freezes so I can't debug it there.
Yeah, that stinks.
3) File that must be fixed can't be accessed from the install CD.
What kind of file can't be accessed from the install CD? AFAIK, anything on your machine should be accessible and editable from the install CD — provided you give it the correct commands.
IANAL, but isn't this considered slander (or libel)? Why doesn't IBM or Redhat take MSFT to court and tell them to either substantiate their FUD or pay damages. There should be no excuse for this kind of abuse by someone as high profile as Ballmer.
Actually, it doesn't matter. They're both right (in Latin the word order usually doesn't matter). It could be argued that "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes" is more stylish, but my Latin isn't good enough to be an authority on that.
Yeah, I know, it's a classic joke; but many successful house-hold technologies languished for years while naysayers made fun of it. Then eventually (and very slowly) it made more and more headway till eventually it dominated.
In the meantime, it's an effective OS that helps work effectively on the desktop and the server. So this whole "year of Linux" is rather irrelevant for me.
It is 100% true that English isn't a second language in the Philippines, it's a primary language.
Well, generally the people who get hired for those kinds of jobs tend to have really good English, but I wouldn't say it's the primary language in the country. In Manila, most people can speak some level of English, but Tagalog definitely the primary language. Outside of the capital, English proficiency is much rarer, usually Tagalog or a local language is used (there's around 100 different languages spread across the various islands).
The English that is spoken tends to be a lot more polite than the English of us Westerners. Philippine culture as a whole is much more hospitable and friendly. Another thing is that it takes them a lot of effort and skill to get that competent with English, so the few that do make it tend to be way smarter than their western counterparts.
Actually, I think it is about socialism (and capitalist too). It's socialism done right (which is very much unlike Marxist socialism). The Free Software movement is about a community working together to produce good software. The difference with Marxism is that which Free Software, this community is free: membership is optional, and your free to make money as long as you follow the licensing rules. The difference with traditional capitalism is that with Free Software, the most important resource, source code, is free; so it's difficult for large corporations to hijack the market and set up an abusive monopoly. Incidentally, this makes it a much better capitalism than what we currently have anyways.
The major problem is the use of XML. At least with HTML, the tag names were kept short. But both standards use rather long element names, often in excess of eight characters, plus eight or more namespace characters beyond that. For some of the XML element names of each format, we're looking at over 16 characters overhead! When such tags are used repeatedly, especially in a large or heavily-formatted document, a lot of space ends up being wasted.
Space is not that big of a concern in this day and age. On top of that, OpenDocuments files are basically just zip files anyways, so it does compression for you automatically.
Another major problem is that they don't really solve any problems that LaTeX or GROFF haven't already dealt with. Both LaTeX and GROFF allow for far more compact document files, and they easily allow for output in a wide array of formats, from DVI to PostScript to PDFs to HTML. The HTML that is generated, for instance, is actually human-readable. OpenOffice.org and MS Office's HTML output is garbled and insane.
Uh, yes they do. They're usable (like by regular people). Last time I checked there was no descent wysiwyg editor for LaTeX (Lyx is probably the best out their, but honestly, I couldn't recommend it to anyone). LaTeX is awesome, very powerful and beautiful, and I've used it to great effect a number of times; but it's more of a programming language than a markup language and that gives it a large barrier to entry. I haven't used GROFF, but AFAIK, it's worse that LaTeX.
I do see some hope for formats like reStructuredText. But the tools aren't mature enough for me to recommend that to non-techies yet.
I was being facecious. Sudo isn't really that amazing, but it's horribly unfair to say that all *nix people are lamerz with nothing but a su command. Also, sudo has some GUI interfaces too. Gnome 2.16 includes one by default. On top of that, Windows XP (and 2000 I believe), had a runas command which seems to be fairly similar to UAC in functionality (it just had to be manually invoked).
From a technical standpoint I don't know if there are any significant differences between UAC and sudo. I would guess that UAC would be more powerful because of the way Windows permissions work.
The chief difference, however, is the implementation. Superuser access tends to be taken a lot more seriously on the *nix platforms. I've never seen a regular GUI program that need root access to run effectively (with exceptions for things like gparted). Unfortunately, the Windows platform still has a lot of bad apps hanging around, even large companies like Adobe can't get a clue stick. This means that the user will end up with dialogues for things that should never have been. The end result is that they get desensitized to entering their passwords. Bad. Bad.
Why is Slashdot so pathologically opposed to someone buying a computer and operating system, even if it makes sense for their business goals?
Because, as one long dead poet named John Donne wrote:
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.
Now Donne was talking about dying, not changing computer platforms; but the main point still applies. Our actions affect everyone, and everyones actions affect us. It would be pathological to intentionally sabotage someone else's choice, but I think it's perfectly normal for Slashdotters to be (concerned|disappointed|annoyed).
The irony of pirates having ethics is nothing short of humongus.
Why? Robin Hood was a most definitely a thief in the legends about him, yet most people today would consider him the hero of the story, not the villain. Ethics do not exist in a vacuum.
Because even though minors can't buy cigarettes, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out how to pay off your older brother to get cigarettes for you.
Want to hide the fact that your graphical shell could run on a competitor's operating system? Easy, just say Windows is part of--no, wait, IS--the operating system.
As appalling as it might seem, this is actually quite true with MS Windows. The GUI code is actually in the kernel itself.
Actually, the main Linux file-systems support POSIX ACLs (a howto for fedora, there's also a nautilus plugin if you want gui stuff). It's just that few users have any use for it, so it tends to go unnoticed. Also, because of the ability to mount drives anywhere in the file system, you can chose where to use ACLs and where it's just useless complication. I've never had any use for ACLs though, so I haven't actually tried any of these things.
As for PowerShell, I think it's more like Python or Perl than an actual shell (not that Python or Perl are bad).
There's another major drawback you missed. Managing permissions on NT systems is quite a pain. It often takes more work, and more repeating yourself to get what you want. This means that there's a higher chance that people will make a mistake when setting permissions. Also people are more likely to leave files with inappropriate permissions because they are too lazy to go to the work of doing it right.
Treacherous Computing may work on the paper, but Microsoft isn't exactly known for perfect implementation of security tools. Root kits WILL be available.
That makes me wonder if, sometime in the not so distant future, root kits will actually become a good thing.
Pretty soon you're going to tell me that "subatomic particles" aren't actually particles, per se.
They're not, or not quite.
When we call them particles we're drawing an analogy and saying that they behave like this class of things we call particles. However, subatomic particles are rather misbehaved sometimes and will exhibit features that are inappropriate of particles (uncertainty of momentum or position, jumping around, disappearing every once and a while, etc).
I can't send Mark Shuttleworth the bill for the time I spent fixing things or hunting for solutions in forums
s/Mark Shuttleworth/Bill Gates/ and it's still true. I don't see what this has to do with this. If you're interested in support for $$$ both Canonical and MS will be wagging their tails.
There is a philosophical difference between the main advocates of "free software" and "open source", it just doesn't matter for the majority of developers who just want to share something cool they have done.
The funny thing is that one of the things we argue about is just this: how much it matters. Generally open source fans go for the "it doesn't matter" side while the Free Software people feel the difference is fundamental to their position (which it is). To the open source guys, we Free Software supporters look like self-important fanatics quibbling over inane details as if our only goal in life was to create strife with our allies. On the other hand, Free Software people see the open source movement as sell-outs. We want a system that is not only free now, but forever. We see temporary freedom as a nasty form of trickery, and products like the Tivo are ultimately failures as far as our movement is concerned.
Just because you think something is unimportant doesn't mean the other guys think that same, and it certainly doesn't make the issue go away.
Slashdot Mirror
That might be interesting for slashdotters, but some people want computers that actually work without fangling with external media drives and magic keyboard buttons. I like to press the power button and have it load Ubuntu or $DISTRO without this nonsense. Also, you're not really solving the problem, you've just offloaded it to the CD disk. If the bootloader is screwed up, it will be screwed up on your CD as well so you gain nothing.
Horribly lame excuse.
Last time I checked, the PNG format did not support all of the GIMP's features (like layers and undo history), but the GIMP can still open and save files in that format. In fact the same can be said for all the formats it supports besides XCF. Many other programs support formats that do not incorporate all of it's features. OpenOffice will save files in MS Word's DOC format, HTML, RTF, and many other things.
I think this is more of a semantic argument than a real difference, but I would argue that you don't really believe in democracy as a principle. I think you would agree that, in many cases, it is an effective method for building a better society; but also recognize that it is not the final solution.
Are you recommending that ubuntu should not use a bootloader? How in the world is it supposted to boot? I know you can make an active partition and boot that way, but grub seems many times better too me.
Yeah, that stinks.
What kind of file can't be accessed from the install CD? AFAIK, anything on your machine should be accessible and editable from the install CD — provided you give it the correct commands.
I don't know what you used so I can't help here.
OOXML is hardly open. In fact, it's hardly XML either seeing as how it embeds so much binary data.
IANAL, but isn't this considered slander (or libel)? Why doesn't IBM or Redhat take MSFT to court and tell them to either substantiate their FUD or pay damages. There should be no excuse for this kind of abuse by someone as high profile as Ballmer.
Actually, it doesn't matter. They're both right (in Latin the word order usually doesn't matter). It could be argued that "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes" is more stylish, but my Latin isn't good enough to be an authority on that.
Yeah, I know, it's a classic joke; but many successful house-hold technologies languished for years while naysayers made fun of it. Then eventually (and very slowly) it made more and more headway till eventually it dominated.
In the meantime, it's an effective OS that helps work effectively on the desktop and the server. So this whole "year of Linux" is rather irrelevant for me.
Well, generally the people who get hired for those kinds of jobs tend to have really good English, but I wouldn't say it's the primary language in the country. In Manila, most people can speak some level of English, but Tagalog definitely the primary language. Outside of the capital, English proficiency is much rarer, usually Tagalog or a local language is used (there's around 100 different languages spread across the various islands).
The English that is spoken tends to be a lot more polite than the English of us Westerners. Philippine culture as a whole is much more hospitable and friendly. Another thing is that it takes them a lot of effort and skill to get that competent with English, so the few that do make it tend to be way smarter than their western counterparts.
Actually, I think it is about socialism (and capitalist too). It's socialism done right (which is very much unlike Marxist socialism). The Free Software movement is about a community working together to produce good software. The difference with Marxism is that which Free Software, this community is free: membership is optional, and your free to make money as long as you follow the licensing rules. The difference with traditional capitalism is that with Free Software, the most important resource, source code, is free; so it's difficult for large corporations to hijack the market and set up an abusive monopoly. Incidentally, this makes it a much better capitalism than what we currently have anyways.
Space is not that big of a concern in this day and age. On top of that, OpenDocuments files are basically just zip files anyways, so it does compression for you automatically.
Uh, yes they do. They're usable (like by regular people). Last time I checked there was no descent wysiwyg editor for LaTeX (Lyx is probably the best out their, but honestly, I couldn't recommend it to anyone). LaTeX is awesome, very powerful and beautiful, and I've used it to great effect a number of times; but it's more of a programming language than a markup language and that gives it a large barrier to entry. I haven't used GROFF, but AFAIK, it's worse that LaTeX.
I do see some hope for formats like reStructuredText. But the tools aren't mature enough for me to recommend that to non-techies yet.
I was being facecious. Sudo isn't really that amazing, but it's horribly unfair to say that all *nix people are lamerz with nothing but a su command. Also, sudo has some GUI interfaces too. Gnome 2.16 includes one by default. On top of that, Windows XP (and 2000 I believe), had a runas command which seems to be fairly similar to UAC in functionality (it just had to be manually invoked).
From a technical standpoint I don't know if there are any significant differences between UAC and sudo. I would guess that UAC would be more powerful because of the way Windows permissions work.
The chief difference, however, is the implementation. Superuser access tends to be taken a lot more seriously on the *nix platforms. I've never seen a regular GUI program that need root access to run effectively (with exceptions for things like gparted). Unfortunately, the Windows platform still has a lot of bad apps hanging around, even large companies like Adobe can't get a clue stick. This means that the user will end up with dialogues for things that should never have been. The end result is that they get desensitized to entering their passwords. Bad. Bad.
There is this amazing technology called 'sudo' that's been around long than I have, and google is your friend.
Also, reading up on suid might be enlightening.
Because, as one long dead poet named John Donne wrote:
Now Donne was talking about dying, not changing computer platforms; but the main point still applies. Our actions affect everyone, and everyones actions affect us. It would be pathological to intentionally sabotage someone else's choice, but I think it's perfectly normal for Slashdotters to be (concerned|disappointed|annoyed).
Why? Robin Hood was a most definitely a thief in the legends about him, yet most people today would consider him the hero of the story, not the villain. Ethics do not exist in a vacuum.
Because even though minors can't buy cigarettes, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out how to pay off your older brother to get cigarettes for you.
I think "Trapdoor" is more accurate.
As appalling as it might seem, this is actually quite true with MS Windows. The GUI code is actually in the kernel itself.
Actually, the main Linux file-systems support POSIX ACLs (a howto for fedora, there's also a nautilus plugin if you want gui stuff). It's just that few users have any use for it, so it tends to go unnoticed. Also, because of the ability to mount drives anywhere in the file system, you can chose where to use ACLs and where it's just useless complication. I've never had any use for ACLs though, so I haven't actually tried any of these things.
As for PowerShell, I think it's more like Python or Perl than an actual shell (not that Python or Perl are bad).
There's another major drawback you missed. Managing permissions on NT systems is quite a pain. It often takes more work, and more repeating yourself to get what you want. This means that there's a higher chance that people will make a mistake when setting permissions. Also people are more likely to leave files with inappropriate permissions because they are too lazy to go to the work of doing it right.
Really? Most the users I know don't have a clue as to what HTTPS is.
That makes me wonder if, sometime in the not so distant future, root kits will actually become a good thing.
They're not, or not quite.
When we call them particles we're drawing an analogy and saying that they behave like this class of things we call particles. However, subatomic particles are rather misbehaved sometimes and will exhibit features that are inappropriate of particles (uncertainty of momentum or position, jumping around, disappearing every once and a while, etc).
s/Mark Shuttleworth/Bill Gates/ and it's still true. I don't see what this has to do with this. If you're interested in support for $$$ both Canonical and MS will be wagging their tails.
The funny thing is that one of the things we argue about is just this: how much it matters. Generally open source fans go for the "it doesn't matter" side while the Free Software people feel the difference is fundamental to their position (which it is). To the open source guys, we Free Software supporters look like self-important fanatics quibbling over inane details as if our only goal in life was to create strife with our allies. On the other hand, Free Software people see the open source movement as sell-outs. We want a system that is not only free now, but forever. We see temporary freedom as a nasty form of trickery, and products like the Tivo are ultimately failures as far as our movement is concerned.
Just because you think something is unimportant doesn't mean the other guys think that same, and it certainly doesn't make the issue go away.