"When was the last time you installed from source, AND reviewed all the code/changes AND compiled with compiler you trusted? Was it done on a 100% secure machine without any hardware trojans? If you haven't done all that, you may as well be running that binary blob. There is no difference."
at some point you have to trust someone, even if you review all the source how do you know the compiler your using isn't compromised? however, why trust many different sources with varying goals when you can trust one source that can be reviewed on what it's doing by others.
While almost impossible to review all of the code yourself, there are others who go through it to scratch their own itches, if anything suspect appeared it gets headlines on the project quickly, or just removed as quickly as it was added.
I'd compare your statement to, someone can use a bulldozer to open the walls of my house, so why should I lock my doors and windows?
and before you say nobody checks code, people do, far fewer than the number of users perhaps, but people do.
"I see that you don't use any windows boxes yourself. That in itself should disqualify you from judging the merits of Vista."
Just because I personally don't use any windows boxes, does not exclude the possibility I support and fix messed up windows boxes, I have personally seen computers that, for example, could not play the built in windows games when music was playing in media player, and needless to say lots of other weird ass crap. All of which wound up being drivers (primarily) or vista's fault.
In regards to people's boxes eventually getting hosed, I agree, some don't, however of the techies I know, all of them reinstall every year to two years, because it slowly degraded with the crap being installed etc. The last xp box I fixed was not 'dead' however took 20 seconds to load the start menu after the os was fully loaded... with a core 2 duo. admittedly it's usually nowhere near that bad though.
"Are consumer-grade computers even built to last 5 years without experiencing some kind of trouble."
You'd typically lose a hard drive and disc drive by then, otherwise yeah.
"What about driver support? Can I use any scanner I want in linux? Or this no-name wireless card that works just fine in Vista?"
To that I say, can you use any scanner you want in vista? if you answer yes I'd call bullshit, I have a scanner here that xp or vista wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole, as for no name wireless cards, last two random non checked cards worked perfectly fine in linux, I know there are still unsupported ones out there, but they are becoming fewer and fewer. But still, that is not the point, no os (no matter how much it tries) will support every piece of hardware in existence
"If so, how do you think people would react if they had been given a shiny, new OS that, for instance, does not support Itunes?"
depends on how it's handled, on insertion of ipod, if they are presented with gtkpod or some other such program that will handle their ipod needs when plugged in and still complain, then they are being bitchy.
If they want it for the Itunes store, then they have obviously used it on another platform before to get hooked, why not let them continue to use it on that platform, nobody is forcing them to change (though lots of people I see only use itunes for ipods).
I just think you assumed too much about me, which is fair enough considering the amount of idiots on slashdot is non trivial. Linux is not without it's problems, anyone would be insane not to say that, however they are a different set of problems, and ones that can typically be resolved by the user if enough attention is paid.
"More than likely, they're buying a new computer and it will come with Vista. Which, by the way, will probably be well tested so that there are no driver issues."
while it is true that I'm not up to speed on the status of vista patches (don't use any windows boxes myself), of the few people I know that have received vista on new pc's, the drivers have been one of the primary causes of their grief, even though they came with vista and were 'vista certified' laptops.
and as for installing the os themselves, I imagine a lot of people do when their box eventually gets hosed, which lets face it, in the overall life of a windows box will happen at some stage (be it six months, or five years, away)
makes you wonder, what with intel and via and amd/ati opening their documentation etc, if it will get to the point in the near future where nvidia will be the only binary blob in regards to video drivers.
come to think of it, this trend is something similar to what happened with wifi a few years back. Everyone was using binary blobs, then atheros, ralink etc release specs and oss drivers. let us hope this pressures the remaining vendors to do the same.
makes you wonder if they used a stock install of vista, or the upcoming vista sp1 etc. 'here, it's not a pile of crap' (with each driver being run having been fully audited by microsoft, and everything tested beforehand to make sure it works)
A good test would have been to have them install the os themselves, on a box that could be randomly chosen from a large selection each with different hardware, and to see how well they fare with getting it all going.
"I find NVidia drivers quite painful, especially for non-Windows operating sytems."
wait, so your telling me you have troubles with the windows drivers too? it's a single download for the platform your on and next next done. Granted, the linux ones have a couple more steps than that, but it's still rather trivial for most people, considering it's the most frequently used driver for 3d on linux (besides possibly intel).
scripts etc are handy, I'm not sure about you but I consider 'real' programs, to be programs that can be compiled into native machine code for the system to run.
coding in python, php etc I think would still be considered coding, but the resulting item would not be a 'program'
the card manufacturers often change chipset between revisions of the card, without any indication on the packaging.
this can make it difficult to be 100% sure your getting the chipset you thought you were at times, however, the nintendo wifi connector is guaranteed to use the rt2500 chipset, which is plug it in and works with any modern kernel, unfortunately they seem to be out of production now, but I'm nabbing up a few before they become scarce.
this has been covered before, they were saved, to files on his box, which he could then restore remotely if needed. then when discussed with a colleague he was successfully convinced that writing to flash was a good idea. link is in one of the prior/. articles.
redhat cannot put those things in it's official repository, and livna works perfectly with it and I still haven't had a flaw with that repository, but it's when people who don't know of it add repos left right and centre that the problems begin.
'Fedora doesn't have anything even resembling a functional GUI,'
the only app I 'need' to go to cli for is yum, and I'm sure there are alternatives but I'm a cli guy so I never bother to find them out, otherwise, try something newer than the old red hat releases.
"leaving you forced to manually configure the system the way we used to 5 years ago" five years ago I was using fedora, and I didn't have to configure the system in any arcane manner then, or any time since then, so perhaps your thinking of an earlier time
seriously, ubuntu is an alright distro, but it's nothing special, it's all distributions of the same software, and it's all packaged and deployed all automatically with no configuration, while there are differences, they typically aren't that giant except on the small details of where they put things etc.
as it would fedora last I checked their repo with something like 30gb, they don't fit all of it on there, only the most commonly used items, I can't even have both kde and gnome installed from single install media with ubuntu, and i know it (at least used to) default to not even having gcc.
I consider that pretty poor, but for a person who doesn't care about which ui he's using, it wouldn't matter. Or for people who don't intend on compiling anything.
I still have to install 2-3 packages after install with fedora that I like that are missing, with ubuntu I can get a very similar system with a crazy amount of apt-get installation.
I use ubuntu for basic systems, perfectly suited for noobs, fedora for systems I want to be usable from the get-go
"Ubuntu wants to stick to a single CD for distribution to make it easier to distribute in places where broadband is unavailable (many parts of the world), but has over 25,000 packages in their repository."
so making people download all of their stuff as opposed to having it installed from the get-go is the fix for that?
It's a lot easier having a large install dvd, and people burn each other discs than having people wait ages online installing the stuff they want.
removing the rpm command would be stupid, while I agree package management through yum is the way, rpm is very handy
example, want to find out info on a certain package, rpm -q -i *packagename*
looking for files installed by the package?
rpm -q --filesbypkg *package*
etc etc
I call shenanigans, fedora user since fedora 3 without issue. Not to say there would never be an issue, there always can be with anything, But frequently the problem is between the chair and keyboard.
issues you speak of that do occur are most likely due to third party repo's, which almost everyone using fedora uses because of some small things that fedora doesn't include (proprietary codecs, patent encumbered codecs, adobe flash, emulators, etc)
"And didn't some big Linux fan make a switch away from RedHat because of RPM issues?"
I'd more likely say a lot of people switched because ubuntu doesn't care about patent encumbered things, I mean fedora doesn't supply mp3 even as standard. Ubuntu does.
yum install always works in general, and aside from the lack of patented codecs, emulators, etc, I really don't see the problem
as more of a developer, I prefer Fedora, but as far as newbie's go in regard to things, I always give them ubuntu, fedora is more bleeding ege, and contains a lot more in their install dvd's that I want than ubuntu. (much prefer to select what I want at first install than apt-get or yum install everything later)
"When doing stuff in high level languages we sacrifice control and deep knowledge for faster development."
but you also gain portability. I like writing smallish programs in c then looking at the assembly output from the compiler on different architechtures, only to try and find where I can improve it etc. the resulting program usually winds up using nothing but system calls to the kernel.
while that's cool for small programs, writing say kde or gnome in assembly would be crazy, especially trying to write the same thing in x architechtures
people can write in high level languages while knowing what is happening underneath, all good programmers should
flash beats hdd's on the high end speed wise, they aren't slow, what is the problem is wear leveling etc, and minimizing writes to extend the life of the drive.
I have, stepfather stupidly bought a shiny laptop without consulting me, came with vista, hated it within five minutes of the first boot, few months later and still curses it, but now primarily uses his less powerful xp desktop again. I'd have put xp on the laptop, however brand new hard = no xp drivers, typically nowadays.
In fact, any time I mention vista to anyone, they automatically call it utter crap, they may not know exactly why and they may have just heard of it, but still, that's some pretty bad image.
"Your father was a fuck up and deserves to end up in jail."
"Ultimately, you cannot punish society because your father did a bad job."
I hope your not trying to say it's always the fathers fault no matter the situation, and that that was just an example. I've known a few... mentally unstable to say the least mothers, where the father was a decent respectable bloke, still screws up the kid.
The only blame I'd put on them is not trying to get the kid out of that situation, but by the same token decent guys don't go taking the kids away from their mother, even if she is bordering on crazy. So it's a toss up in that situation.
sure I can, with the files on my main box. nothing stops me from using finch, grep etc etc via ssh, scp available too on s60(but I can wait to send photo's).
my main box can do anything your iphone can via cli
that being said, my most frequently used programs are finch and emacs, but hey, if I want to download a blender project and start rendering it I can, (bluetooth keyboard is a godsend for emacs though)
I grant you that when wifi isn't available the latency with 3g can get a little annoying, but that's about the only advantage I see to it.
with ssh available, and access to proper boxes through it, the advantage of nix environment on crippled hardware is mitigated somewhat. don't get me wrong, it's still cool, but I really don't see the point of running it on the phone as opposed to a more capable system and using the phone as a terminal.
here I just assumed that there was a typo and the x was missing, as in 0x2008, or, the year 8200 in decimal, fits with the typical sci-fi future thing.
let him learn assembly, just as I'm sure you probably would have, only this time he has these handy things called system calls for useful things:)
programming from the ground up will help his knowledge of how computers work also, so when he codes in c, he can know what it's actually being compiled into.
what I have found, is ssh is the only unix like function I use for my phone, and putty on series 60 with wifi fits that use perfectly, as I'm sure would other implementations of ssh on other platforms.
why use inferior hardware for unix when your phone can be a dumb terminal to a quad core box you have at home?
Slashdot Mirror
"When was the last time you installed from source, AND reviewed all the code/changes AND compiled with compiler you trusted? Was it done on a 100% secure machine without any hardware trojans? If you haven't done all that, you may as well be running that binary blob. There is no difference."
at some point you have to trust someone, even if you review all the source how do you know the compiler your using isn't compromised? however, why trust many different sources with varying goals when you can trust one source that can be reviewed on what it's doing by others.
While almost impossible to review all of the code yourself, there are others who go through it to scratch their own itches, if anything suspect appeared it gets headlines on the project quickly, or just removed as quickly as it was added.
I'd compare your statement to, someone can use a bulldozer to open the walls of my house, so why should I lock my doors and windows?
and before you say nobody checks code, people do, far fewer than the number of users perhaps, but people do.
"I see that you don't use any windows boxes yourself. That in itself should disqualify you from judging the merits of Vista."
Just because I personally don't use any windows boxes, does not exclude the possibility I support and fix messed up windows boxes, I have personally seen computers that, for example, could not play the built in windows games when music was playing in media player, and needless to say lots of other weird ass crap. All of which wound up being drivers (primarily) or vista's fault.
In regards to people's boxes eventually getting hosed, I agree, some don't, however of the techies I know, all of them reinstall every year to two years, because it slowly degraded with the crap being installed etc. The last xp box I fixed was not 'dead' however took 20 seconds to load the start menu after the os was fully loaded... with a core 2 duo. admittedly it's usually nowhere near that bad though.
"Are consumer-grade computers even built to last 5 years without experiencing some kind of trouble."
You'd typically lose a hard drive and disc drive by then, otherwise yeah.
"What about driver support? Can I use any scanner I want in linux? Or this no-name wireless card that works just fine in Vista?"
To that I say, can you use any scanner you want in vista? if you answer yes I'd call bullshit, I have a scanner here that xp or vista wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole, as for no name wireless cards, last two random non checked cards worked perfectly fine in linux, I know there are still unsupported ones out there, but they are becoming fewer and fewer.
But still, that is not the point, no os (no matter how much it tries) will support every piece of hardware in existence
"If so, how do you think people would react if they had been given a shiny, new OS that, for instance, does not support Itunes?"
depends on how it's handled, on insertion of ipod, if they are presented with gtkpod or some other such program that will handle their ipod needs when plugged in and still complain, then they are being bitchy.
If they want it for the Itunes store, then they have obviously used it on another platform before to get hooked, why not let them continue to use it on that platform, nobody is forcing them to change (though lots of people I see only use itunes for ipods).
I just think you assumed too much about me, which is fair enough considering the amount of idiots on slashdot is non trivial. Linux is not without it's problems, anyone would be insane not to say that, however they are a different set of problems, and ones that can typically be resolved by the user if enough attention is paid.
"More than likely, they're buying a new computer and it will come with Vista. Which, by the way, will probably be well tested so that there are no driver issues."
while it is true that I'm not up to speed on the status of vista patches (don't use any windows boxes myself), of the few people I know that have received vista on new pc's, the drivers have been one of the primary causes of their grief, even though they came with vista and were 'vista certified' laptops.
and as for installing the os themselves, I imagine a lot of people do when their box eventually gets hosed, which lets face it, in the overall life of a windows box will happen at some stage (be it six months, or five years, away)
makes you wonder, what with intel and via and amd/ati opening their documentation etc, if it will get to the point in the near future where nvidia will be the only binary blob in regards to video drivers.
come to think of it, this trend is something similar to what happened with wifi a few years back. Everyone was using binary blobs, then atheros, ralink etc release specs and oss drivers. let us hope this pressures the remaining vendors to do the same.
makes you wonder if they used a stock install of vista, or the upcoming vista sp1 etc. 'here, it's not a pile of crap'
(with each driver being run having been fully audited by microsoft, and everything tested beforehand to make sure it works)
A good test would have been to have them install the os themselves, on a box that could be randomly chosen from a large selection each with different hardware, and to see how well they fare with getting it all going.
"I find NVidia drivers quite painful, especially for non-Windows operating sytems."
wait, so your telling me you have troubles with the windows drivers too? it's a single download for the platform your on and next next done.
Granted, the linux ones have a couple more steps than that, but it's still rather trivial for most people, considering it's the most frequently used driver for 3d on linux (besides possibly intel).
scripts etc are handy, I'm not sure about you but I consider 'real' programs, to be programs that can be compiled into native machine code for the system to run.
coding in python, php etc I think would still be considered coding, but the resulting item would not be a 'program'
the card manufacturers often change chipset between revisions of the card, without any indication on the packaging.
this can make it difficult to be 100% sure your getting the chipset you thought you were at times, however, the nintendo wifi connector is guaranteed to use the rt2500 chipset, which is plug it in and works with any modern kernel, unfortunately they seem to be out of production now, but I'm nabbing up a few before they become scarce.
this has been covered before, they were saved, to files on his box, which he could then restore remotely if needed. then when discussed with a colleague he was successfully convinced that writing to flash was a good idea. link is in one of the prior /. articles.
redhat cannot put those things in it's official repository, and livna works perfectly with it and I still haven't had a flaw with that repository, but it's when people who don't know of it add repos left right and centre that the problems begin.
'Fedora doesn't have anything even resembling a functional GUI,'
the only app I 'need' to go to cli for is yum, and I'm sure there are alternatives but I'm a cli guy so I never bother to find them out, otherwise, try something newer than the old red hat releases.
"leaving you forced to manually configure the system the way we used to 5 years ago"
five years ago I was using fedora, and I didn't have to configure the system in any arcane manner then, or any time since then, so perhaps your thinking of an earlier time
seriously, ubuntu is an alright distro, but it's nothing special, it's all distributions of the same software, and it's all packaged and deployed all automatically with no configuration, while there are differences, they typically aren't that giant except on the small details of where they put things etc.
as it would fedora last I checked their repo with something like 30gb, they don't fit all of it on there, only the most commonly used items, I can't even have both kde and gnome installed from single install media with ubuntu, and i know it (at least used to) default to not even having gcc.
I consider that pretty poor, but for a person who doesn't care about which ui he's using, it wouldn't matter. Or for people who don't intend on compiling anything.
I still have to install 2-3 packages after install with fedora that I like that are missing, with ubuntu I can get a very similar system with a crazy amount of apt-get installation.
I use ubuntu for basic systems, perfectly suited for noobs, fedora for systems I want to be usable from the get-go
"Ubuntu wants to stick to a single CD for distribution to make it easier to distribute in places where broadband is unavailable (many parts of the world), but has over 25,000 packages in their repository."
so making people download all of their stuff as opposed to having it installed from the get-go is the fix for that?
It's a lot easier having a large install dvd, and people burn each other discs than having people wait ages online installing the stuff they want.
removing the rpm command would be stupid, while I agree package management through yum is the way, rpm is very handy
example, want to find out info on a certain package,
rpm -q -i *packagename*
looking for files installed by the package?
rpm -q --filesbypkg *package*
etc etc
I call shenanigans, fedora user since fedora 3 without issue. Not to say there would never be an issue, there always can be with anything, But frequently the problem is between the chair and keyboard.
issues you speak of that do occur are most likely due to third party repo's, which almost everyone using fedora uses because of some small things that fedora doesn't include (proprietary codecs, patent encumbered codecs, adobe flash, emulators, etc)
"And didn't some big Linux fan make a switch away from RedHat because of RPM issues?"
I'd more likely say a lot of people switched because ubuntu doesn't care about patent encumbered things, I mean fedora doesn't supply mp3 even as standard. Ubuntu does.
yum install always works in general, and aside from the lack of patented codecs, emulators, etc, I really don't see the problem
as more of a developer, I prefer Fedora, but as far as newbie's go in regard to things, I always give them ubuntu, fedora is more bleeding ege, and contains a lot more in their install dvd's that I want than ubuntu. (much prefer to select what I want at first install than apt-get or yum install everything later)
if it were mine I would have even before trying vista, but as said, it was my step fathers, he likes his windows only games etc.
"When doing stuff in high level languages we sacrifice control and deep knowledge for faster development."
but you also gain portability. I like writing smallish programs in c then looking at the assembly output from the compiler on different architechtures, only to try and find where I can improve it etc. the resulting program usually winds up using nothing but system calls to the kernel.
while that's cool for small programs, writing say kde or gnome in assembly would be crazy, especially trying to write the same thing in x architechtures
people can write in high level languages while knowing what is happening underneath, all good programmers should
flash beats hdd's on the high end speed wise, they aren't slow, what is the problem is wear leveling etc, and minimizing writes to extend the life of the drive.
I have, stepfather stupidly bought a shiny laptop without consulting me, came with vista, hated it within five minutes of the first boot, few months later and still curses it, but now primarily uses his less powerful xp desktop again.
I'd have put xp on the laptop, however brand new hard = no xp drivers, typically nowadays.
In fact, any time I mention vista to anyone, they automatically call it utter crap, they may not know exactly why and they may have just heard of it, but still, that's some pretty bad image.
"Your father was a fuck up and deserves to end up in jail."
"Ultimately, you cannot punish society because your father did a bad job."
I hope your not trying to say it's always the fathers fault no matter the situation, and that that was just an example. I've known a few... mentally unstable to say the least mothers, where the father was a decent respectable bloke, still screws up the kid.
The only blame I'd put on them is not trying to get the kid out of that situation, but by the same token decent guys don't go taking the kids away from their mother, even if she is bordering on crazy. So it's a toss up in that situation.
sure I can, with the files on my main box. nothing stops me from using finch, grep etc etc via ssh, scp available too on s60(but I can wait to send photo's).
my main box can do anything your iphone can via cli
that being said, my most frequently used programs are finch and emacs, but hey, if I want to download a blender project and start rendering it I can, (bluetooth keyboard is a godsend for emacs though)
I grant you that when wifi isn't available the latency with 3g can get a little annoying, but that's about the only advantage I see to it.
with ssh available, and access to proper boxes through it, the advantage of nix environment on crippled hardware is mitigated somewhat.
don't get me wrong, it's still cool, but I really don't see the point of running it on the phone as opposed to a more capable system and using the phone as a terminal.
here I just assumed that there was a typo and the x was missing, as in 0x2008, or, the year 8200 in decimal, fits with the typical sci-fi future thing.
here
let him learn assembly, just as I'm sure you probably would have, only this time he has these handy things called system calls for useful things :)
programming from the ground up will help his knowledge of how computers work also, so when he codes in c, he can know what it's actually being compiled into.
what I have found, is ssh is the only unix like function I use for my phone, and putty on series 60 with wifi fits that use perfectly, as I'm sure would other implementations of ssh on other platforms.
why use inferior hardware for unix when your phone can be a dumb terminal to a quad core box you have at home?