Not sure where you are going with the anti-virus, since Microsoft has never released one.
Actually DOS 6 used to ship with antivirus. Hardly anyone would remember it though. Remnant I found. MS got out of antivirus in a hurry. Even this product was licensed from Central Point.
This discussion is a bit muddled because it misses the fact that a book is not a bunch of paper sheets bound with glue or wires. A book is a bundle of ideas. Books can be electronic, or they can be bound.
I think the grandparent poster's real beef is not that the author of the book has published something that's printed on dead trees. Instead, GP's problem is that the book has a restrictive license. There are dead-tree books out there, such as Dive into Python, that are licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. Full text is available online as well.
There are also books at the Linux Documentation Project that are not available on dead trees, unless you print them yourself.
All that said, I don't understand GP's beef either. Ubuntu is not a community based distro. Sure, it benefits Shuttleworth to cultivate this community myth, but Ubuntu's from a for-profit company. Even if Ubuntu truly were community-based, I'd have no problem with people trying to make money off it with restrictively-licensed books.
If we want more free documentation, we'll have to write it. This I am doing now (see sig.)
Honestly, who the hell cares about/etc or/usr/lib?
Um, I do? It took forever to get all that stuff configured correctly, and now I want some rogue program to come along and wipe all that stuff in/etc? Moreover, I want some rogue program to come along and add its own/etc/init.d/spyware-deluxe script?
Yes, I have heard that people who are studying for Red Hat certification need distros like Centos. Of course you want to play around with RHEL and study it, and of course RHEL is too expensive for that. From what I've read Fedora doesn't cut it for this purpose either.
4) OK, can't argue with this one. The only advantage to Access is that it's more universally available on the Windows platform, and I don't see that as much of an advantage.
Naa, actually Access and MySQL/PostgreSQL are not comparable. Access is more than just a database; it also allows the rapid development of database applications. When I used exclusively Windows, I made the mistake of thinking Access is a database too. When I first saw MySQL, my first thoughts where "where are all the buttons I click to make forms and queries and things?"
You can even develop an application with Access and have it be the front-end to a database that's in SQL Server. That's Access' real value: the ability to make point-and-click interfaces without actually having to know how to program. With MySQL or Postgre, one needs to know how to make an app, be it with PHP on webpages, with C/C++ or Python, or with something else that would be beyond my knowledge.
Probably a better comparison to make is Access vs. OpenOffice.org Base, which is a similar rapid application development framework. I haven't had occasion to use Base though.
I can't stand Dell, but I give them credit for this. They seem to put attention into making their PCs quiet, though some of this might also be part of a drive to reduce costs.
My Dell Optiplex sitting next to me is fairly quiet. There are only two fans in the thing. The Pentium 4 sits under neath a heat sink, and a plastic shroud covers that and directs airflow to the 92 mm case fan. The case fan has a thermostat in it to vary the speed. The only other fan in the thing is the power supply, and I never hear it. The northbridge has a heatsink on it, and the cheap Nvidia has a heatsink too.
The PC noise varies with ambient room temperature and with what the PC is doing. If it's cool in here and the PC is idle, I barely hear it at all. It does ramp up a bit if the CPU is at full throttle (doing Folding at Home.)
Dell noise does seem to vary depending on whether one gets a cheap Dell or the cheapest Dell (pretty much the only two choices -- XPS is just overpriced cheap Dell.) I've heard the cheapest Dell Celerons, and they're louder than my P4.
I will definitely build my next PC, but have been amazed at how many fans are in a typical build. You're looking at at least three fans (PSU, CPU, and case fan) though typically the northbridge has a fan too. Those really concern me because they're so small. Unfortunately only expensive ATX motherboards have passively cooled northbridges. Or you can get a cheap micro ATX that is passively cooled, but a lot of these micro ATX boards seem to have troubles with Linux. That, and no slots.
I figure I will go with the Asus A8N5X, the top rated one on Newegg. I can't find anything about it on Google regarding Linux, which hopefully means it works without trouble. I'll take my chances and take off the northbridge fan and replace it with a Zalman northbridge heatsink. Isn't modding what building a PC is all about:)
The idea back then was that it was a voluntary donation with no extra benefits other than supporting continued development.
This always interests me. Donate money to a for-profit entity in order to further its pursuit of profits? Why, exactly? I have donated to Wikipedia, for example, because I can see its budget and know that the money will go to where it's needed--hosting fees and equipment, for example. Why would I donate to Encyclopedia Britannica?
Similarly, why would I donate to Mandriva, or to Canonical (Ubuntu Co.) or to Red Hat? I don't want to fatten anybody's pocket. If they want donations, they could go non-profit. If the for-profit entities had a product worth paying for, I'd pay for that. Otherwise I'd rather donate money to a not-for-profit distro (like Gentoo, or Debian) or to a non-profit that furthers free software (like the Free Software Foundation.)
Our present forum isn't exempt from this thing that puzzles me: OSTG, for-profit operators of SourceForge, solicit donations for SF. Why would I give to them?
I guess you didn't notice that the word "Linux" does not appear anywhere in my post. I didn't say that Linux doesn't require support (it does) that said support does not require time or money (it does) that Dell, HP, etc. should start selling Linux preinstalled (maybe they shouldn't). Indeed I didn't say anything about Linux at all. All I'm saying is that Windows is a long way from being nearly free.
OEM licensing runs ~$10 for a copy of XP, or 2% of the total cost of the machine, effectively free.
The true cost of Windows is much more than ~$10, for both user and vendor.
For vendor, the true cost far exceeds ~$10 because of support. Hordes of people call vendor tech support lines because of problems with Windows, whether such problems are viruses, spyware, or other operating system defects.
For user, the true cost far exceeds ~$10 because one typically must factor in the cost of antivirus, perhaps antispyware too. Not to mention the time spent dealing with these programs, or time spent dealing with spyware and virus infections. Oh, and that doesn't include the cost of whatever proprietary software you'll need to get Windows to do anything truly useful.
Windows costs much more than ~$10, which is a long, long way from being "effectively free."
The actual technology is exactly the same technology that allows you to encrypt your "dear diary," where you tell your diary all your most secret fears and all the heinous thoughts you had that you would never act out, but that you don't want people to even know you thought. At that point, it's not DRM anymore, it's privacy. See? It's technically pretty much the same thing.
Well, copy restrictions and "dear diary" both involve encryption, but similarities stop there. I don't take my diary, encrypt it, and then give the diary and decryption key to anyone who's willing to buy them from me. I don't sell anyone who wants it the decryption key, while telling him that he can only decrypt my diary in certain ways and under certain conditions, and that he is not free to give the decryption key to his buddies.
No, with "dear diary," I keep the key to myself. With "DRM" I sell the key and then restrict rights to use it. That's a huge difference.
The only thing about MythTV is that it takes technical know-how. It's great if you've got that know-how; other folks will just use Tivo, or one of these DVRs that the cable operators offer now.
Lots of hosting companies offer ssh access, not to mention that if an account exists on the machine with ssh access, it may be only a matter of time before someone manages to gain access to it.
True, but this test still does not compare to what hosting companies are doing. Web hosting companies are (hopefully) run by professionals who secure the boxes. Web hosting companies run operating systems like RHEL that were designed for server use--Mac OS X on a Mac Mini was designed for home use.
Most importantly though, hosting companies are not giving ssh to any anonymous joe off the street, which is exactly what happened in this contest. At a minimum, web hosting companies have your credit card number before they offer you ssh. Some will demand additional information, such as a faxed copy of a driver's license. Of course a crook can get a drivers' license and a stolen credit card, but these are additional hoops to jump through that make the process of cracking the machine that much more trouble. Plus, if someone does crack the machine despite his lack of anonymity, the hosting company might be able to track him down.
This contest as reported on ZDNet was a joke. The guy gave ssh accounts to anyone who asked for them, without demanding any proof of identification. He ran it on an OS that was not designed to be run with untrusted users logged in. Furthermore, the crack was done by an anonymous person using an "undocumented" security hole, which to me calls the credibility of the whole episode into question. In what real-world situtation does anyone allow ssh login to any random, anonymous Joe?
Someone said these phone companies are just like the villian in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. You blast him up to bits but, no matter what you do, he just keeps on coming back together!
I know it's just a headline, but "tax" is putting this much too strongly. Taxes are levied by governments. Governments have a monopoly on the "legitimate" use of force--thus, if you don't pay your tax, the government has the authority to knock you upside the head, confiscate your property, put you in jail, etc. AOL will have no such authority to collect this fee. Mass mailers will be perfectly free not to pay the fee, and to encourage AOL users to dump that awful walled gate of an "online service." This is no tax.
"At first glance, it is hard to see how the market for teachers could fail. True, most teachers' salaries are set by governments in a noncompetitive environment. But candidates choose freely whether to become teachers, in full knowledge of what salaries they will receive. In this sense, the people who choose to become teachers are paid a salary commensurate with their skills, preferences, and working conditions. These teachers are not underpaid relative to what they could earn in other occupations.
"But what if we wanted to draw a higher-quality pool of candidates to teaching? Are we paying too low a price to accomplish that? I argue that the market for teaching has failed--in the sense that we are paying low salaries for low-quality teachers when we would prefer high-quality teachers. This is the result of two main flaws in the market: the difficulty of identifying who will be a good teacher and the reliance on an obsolete conception of the pool of potential teachers."
For more, see Education Next.
I started bringing laptops to class around my Junior year. I'm unconvinced that they helped me with my grades.
For my first two years of law school I took a laptop to class. I'm utterly unconvinced that they helped me with grades. Laptops do allow students to take more verbose notes, as one can type faster than he can write. However I did not find this to be a benefit. If anything, greater verbosity to review for exams turned out to be a hinderance.
My last year of law school I got tired of carrying around my Dell clunkster. Some people had Palms and folding keyboards that they used to take notes. I considered going this route, but decided to reject it to try an alternative on a trial basis: pens and spiral notebooks. Light, easy to carry, no technical failures. It worked great.
On distractions: yes, sure, some people will use laptops to play games in class. These are the same people who would otherwise be daydreaming or drawing doodles. With pen and paper, I would daydream and draw doodles.
Finally though, laptops have the potential to improve class interactions and learning experiences. In law school a few students would use IM during class. Sure, sometimes they were gossiping, but often they were helping each other with the material that was being discussed. Another neat idea would be to have a chat room for the class, going on at the same time as the lecture.
But for the most part, class is just a waste of time anyway. Just a rehashing of reading material. In those cases laptops won't help anything.
But stereotypical "grandma" need not install anything from source. Even distros with small repositories have everything stereotypical "grandma" needs: email, web browser, photo cropper, word processor. Most, if not all, will be installed by default anyway. This leaves an occasional "sudo apt-get install abiword."
I've never seen the need for a universal installer. That's what package managers are for. So I guess I'm with your arrogant users and developers who just don't see a problem here. I'll agree with you that it is very hard to install things in Linux using the Windows way. On the flip side of that though, it's *impossible* to install things in Windows using the Linux way.
I understand your annoyance, but honestly I've given up on the spam wars. I can either a) spend time trying to manage email addresses, checking multiple addresses, etc., or b) use one address and rely on spam filters. I used to do a), had two mail inboxes and probably thirty spamgourmet.com addresses.
The hassle got to be too much. Now I use just one address and no spamgourmet. I post my address unmunged on my Web site. My web host has spamassassin, and Gmail has good spam filters. I get 10-15 spams per day, but it all goes to the spam box. I find this much easier than trying to prevent spam, and more effective too.
Yeah, maybe their enterprise "Gold" support is good. It would be neat if consumers could buy that. It seems Dell offers that with its XPS machines. Top of the line support, they say.
Oh, wait. Hard OCP reviewed an XPS and said that Dell's support was absolutely rotten, as usual. So much for paying a premium for Dell support.
Maybe Dell's enterprise support is good, but even "premium" consumer support is absolutely rotten.
I don't think people are worried about switching from Windows. They just don't know that alternatives even exist. I've talked to at least five non-geek friends and family members--they check email, play some music files, and other simple things. Some of them know a little more about Windows than others. None of them had ever even heard of Linux! After I told them about it, many expressed interest. One still uses SUSE after over a month, even though she hasn't taken the time to iron out all the laptop issues and proprietary media codecs. People are especially interested in Linux when they hear they won't have so much spyware worries--all they do is go on the Internet; they don't care if there's some blockbuster game that's not available for Linux.
I see so much argument about why people don't switch to Linux. OpenOffice isn't good, there's no Photoshop, installing stuff is too hard (total myth), blah blah blah. I think the biggest reason has nothing to do with any of that. People haven't HEARD OF Linux!
In that light I don't understand Dell's meager discount on the n-series desktops (that is, desktops that ship with no MS Windows and instead have free DOS.) People always say "well duh, Dell only pays $35 or so for each copy of Windows, so you can't expect much of a discount." True, but the real cost of Windows for Dell is supporting it. They know if they ship an n-series, they won't get calls about "my Roxio's not working" or "my computer crashes instantly after I turn it on" or "I keep getting a bunch of strange popups." Hell, your typical n-series buyer won't even be calling with questions like "I can't find where to plug the mouse in" like other users would.
It seems to me there really should be a hefty discount on the n-series machines. But maybe Dell gets enough kickbacks from the shovelware vendors to more than offset the cost of Windows and the cost of supporting it.
Those n-series desktops are a joke, and Dell support is so rotten that I can't imagine Linux support would be worth anything. But who knows, maybe enterprise support is better...
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Actually DOS 6 used to ship with antivirus. Hardly anyone would remember it though. Remnant I found. MS got out of antivirus in a hurry. Even this product was licensed from Central Point.
I think the grandparent poster's real beef is not that the author of the book has published something that's printed on dead trees. Instead, GP's problem is that the book has a restrictive license. There are dead-tree books out there, such as Dive into Python, that are licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. Full text is available online as well.
There are also books at the Linux Documentation Project that are not available on dead trees, unless you print them yourself.
All that said, I don't understand GP's beef either. Ubuntu is not a community based distro. Sure, it benefits Shuttleworth to cultivate this community myth, but Ubuntu's from a for-profit company. Even if Ubuntu truly were community-based, I'd have no problem with people trying to make money off it with restrictively-licensed books.
If we want more free documentation, we'll have to write it. This I am doing now (see sig.)
But, on the flipside, it must mean that commenters actually RTFA!
Um, I do? It took forever to get all that stuff configured correctly, and now I want some rogue program to come along and wipe all that stuff in /etc? Moreover, I want some rogue program to come along and add its own /etc/init.d/spyware-deluxe script?
Yes, I have heard that people who are studying for Red Hat certification need distros like Centos. Of course you want to play around with RHEL and study it, and of course RHEL is too expensive for that. From what I've read Fedora doesn't cut it for this purpose either.
Naa, actually Access and MySQL/PostgreSQL are not comparable. Access is more than just a database; it also allows the rapid development of database applications. When I used exclusively Windows, I made the mistake of thinking Access is a database too. When I first saw MySQL, my first thoughts where "where are all the buttons I click to make forms and queries and things?"
You can even develop an application with Access and have it be the front-end to a database that's in SQL Server. That's Access' real value: the ability to make point-and-click interfaces without actually having to know how to program. With MySQL or Postgre, one needs to know how to make an app, be it with PHP on webpages, with C/C++ or Python, or with something else that would be beyond my knowledge.
Probably a better comparison to make is Access vs. OpenOffice.org Base, which is a similar rapid application development framework. I haven't had occasion to use Base though.
I can't stand Dell, but I give them credit for this. They seem to put attention into making their PCs quiet, though some of this might also be part of a drive to reduce costs.
My Dell Optiplex sitting next to me is fairly quiet. There are only two fans in the thing. The Pentium 4 sits under neath a heat sink, and a plastic shroud covers that and directs airflow to the 92 mm case fan. The case fan has a thermostat in it to vary the speed. The only other fan in the thing is the power supply, and I never hear it. The northbridge has a heatsink on it, and the cheap Nvidia has a heatsink too.
The PC noise varies with ambient room temperature and with what the PC is doing. If it's cool in here and the PC is idle, I barely hear it at all. It does ramp up a bit if the CPU is at full throttle (doing Folding at Home.)
Dell noise does seem to vary depending on whether one gets a cheap Dell or the cheapest Dell (pretty much the only two choices -- XPS is just overpriced cheap Dell.) I've heard the cheapest Dell Celerons, and they're louder than my P4.
I will definitely build my next PC, but have been amazed at how many fans are in a typical build. You're looking at at least three fans (PSU, CPU, and case fan) though typically the northbridge has a fan too. Those really concern me because they're so small. Unfortunately only expensive ATX motherboards have passively cooled northbridges. Or you can get a cheap micro ATX that is passively cooled, but a lot of these micro ATX boards seem to have troubles with Linux. That, and no slots.
I figure I will go with the Asus A8N5X, the top rated one on Newegg. I can't find anything about it on Google regarding Linux, which hopefully means it works without trouble. I'll take my chances and take off the northbridge fan and replace it with a Zalman northbridge heatsink. Isn't modding what building a PC is all about :)
This always interests me. Donate money to a for-profit entity in order to further its pursuit of profits? Why, exactly? I have donated to Wikipedia, for example, because I can see its budget and know that the money will go to where it's needed--hosting fees and equipment, for example. Why would I donate to Encyclopedia Britannica?
Similarly, why would I donate to Mandriva, or to Canonical (Ubuntu Co.) or to Red Hat? I don't want to fatten anybody's pocket. If they want donations, they could go non-profit. If the for-profit entities had a product worth paying for, I'd pay for that. Otherwise I'd rather donate money to a not-for-profit distro (like Gentoo, or Debian) or to a non-profit that furthers free software (like the Free Software Foundation.)
Our present forum isn't exempt from this thing that puzzles me: OSTG, for-profit operators of SourceForge, solicit donations for SF. Why would I give to them?
I guess you didn't notice that the word "Linux" does not appear anywhere in my post. I didn't say that Linux doesn't require support (it does) that said support does not require time or money (it does) that Dell, HP, etc. should start selling Linux preinstalled (maybe they shouldn't). Indeed I didn't say anything about Linux at all. All I'm saying is that Windows is a long way from being nearly free.
The true cost of Windows is much more than ~$10, for both user and vendor.
For vendor, the true cost far exceeds ~$10 because of support. Hordes of people call vendor tech support lines because of problems with Windows, whether such problems are viruses, spyware, or other operating system defects.
For user, the true cost far exceeds ~$10 because one typically must factor in the cost of antivirus, perhaps antispyware too. Not to mention the time spent dealing with these programs, or time spent dealing with spyware and virus infections. Oh, and that doesn't include the cost of whatever proprietary software you'll need to get Windows to do anything truly useful.
Windows costs much more than ~$10, which is a long, long way from being "effectively free."
The actual technology is exactly the same technology that allows you to encrypt your "dear diary," where you tell your diary all your most secret fears and all the heinous thoughts you had that you would never act out, but that you don't want people to even know you thought. At that point, it's not DRM anymore, it's privacy. See? It's technically pretty much the same thing.
Well, copy restrictions and "dear diary" both involve encryption, but similarities stop there. I don't take my diary, encrypt it, and then give the diary and decryption key to anyone who's willing to buy them from me. I don't sell anyone who wants it the decryption key, while telling him that he can only decrypt my diary in certain ways and under certain conditions, and that he is not free to give the decryption key to his buddies.
No, with "dear diary," I keep the key to myself. With "DRM" I sell the key and then restrict rights to use it. That's a huge difference.
You mean, cheaply.
The only thing about MythTV is that it takes technical know-how. It's great if you've got that know-how; other folks will just use Tivo, or one of these DVRs that the cable operators offer now.
That's part of the problem. My hosting company does not allow me to compile anything. How much security experience did your friend have?
True, but this test still does not compare to what hosting companies are doing. Web hosting companies are (hopefully) run by professionals who secure the boxes. Web hosting companies run operating systems like RHEL that were designed for server use--Mac OS X on a Mac Mini was designed for home use.
Most importantly though, hosting companies are not giving ssh to any anonymous joe off the street, which is exactly what happened in this contest. At a minimum, web hosting companies have your credit card number before they offer you ssh. Some will demand additional information, such as a faxed copy of a driver's license. Of course a crook can get a drivers' license and a stolen credit card, but these are additional hoops to jump through that make the process of cracking the machine that much more trouble. Plus, if someone does crack the machine despite his lack of anonymity, the hosting company might be able to track him down.
This contest as reported on ZDNet was a joke. The guy gave ssh accounts to anyone who asked for them, without demanding any proof of identification. He ran it on an OS that was not designed to be run with untrusted users logged in. Furthermore, the crack was done by an anonymous person using an "undocumented" security hole, which to me calls the credibility of the whole episode into question. In what real-world situtation does anyone allow ssh login to any random, anonymous Joe?
Someone said these phone companies are just like the villian in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. You blast him up to bits but, no matter what you do, he just keeps on coming back together!
If Verizon buys Qwest, we're down to two phone companies!
I know it's just a headline, but "tax" is putting this much too strongly. Taxes are levied by governments. Governments have a monopoly on the "legitimate" use of force--thus, if you don't pay your tax, the government has the authority to knock you upside the head, confiscate your property, put you in jail, etc. AOL will have no such authority to collect this fee. Mass mailers will be perfectly free not to pay the fee, and to encourage AOL users to dump that awful walled gate of an "online service." This is no tax.
"But what if we wanted to draw a higher-quality pool of candidates to teaching? Are we paying too low a price to accomplish that? I argue that the market for teaching has failed--in the sense that we are paying low salaries for low-quality teachers when we would prefer high-quality teachers. This is the result of two main flaws in the market: the difficulty of identifying who will be a good teacher and the reliance on an obsolete conception of the pool of potential teachers." For more, see Education Next.
For my first two years of law school I took a laptop to class. I'm utterly unconvinced that they helped me with grades. Laptops do allow students to take more verbose notes, as one can type faster than he can write. However I did not find this to be a benefit. If anything, greater verbosity to review for exams turned out to be a hinderance.
My last year of law school I got tired of carrying around my Dell clunkster. Some people had Palms and folding keyboards that they used to take notes. I considered going this route, but decided to reject it to try an alternative on a trial basis: pens and spiral notebooks. Light, easy to carry, no technical failures. It worked great.
On distractions: yes, sure, some people will use laptops to play games in class. These are the same people who would otherwise be daydreaming or drawing doodles. With pen and paper, I would daydream and draw doodles.
Finally though, laptops have the potential to improve class interactions and learning experiences. In law school a few students would use IM during class. Sure, sometimes they were gossiping, but often they were helping each other with the material that was being discussed. Another neat idea would be to have a chat room for the class, going on at the same time as the lecture.
But for the most part, class is just a waste of time anyway. Just a rehashing of reading material. In those cases laptops won't help anything.
I've never seen the need for a universal installer. That's what package managers are for. So I guess I'm with your arrogant users and developers who just don't see a problem here. I'll agree with you that it is very hard to install things in Linux using the Windows way. On the flip side of that though, it's *impossible* to install things in Windows using the Linux way.
The hassle got to be too much. Now I use just one address and no spamgourmet. I post my address unmunged on my Web site. My web host has spamassassin, and Gmail has good spam filters. I get 10-15 spams per day, but it all goes to the spam box. I find this much easier than trying to prevent spam, and more effective too.
Oh, wait. Hard OCP reviewed an XPS and said that Dell's support was absolutely rotten, as usual. So much for paying a premium for Dell support.
Maybe Dell's enterprise support is good, but even "premium" consumer support is absolutely rotten.
I see so much argument about why people don't switch to Linux. OpenOffice isn't good, there's no Photoshop, installing stuff is too hard (total myth), blah blah blah. I think the biggest reason has nothing to do with any of that. People haven't HEARD OF Linux!
It seems to me there really should be a hefty discount on the n-series machines. But maybe Dell gets enough kickbacks from the shovelware vendors to more than offset the cost of Windows and the cost of supporting it.
Those n-series desktops are a joke, and Dell support is so rotten that I can't imagine Linux support would be worth anything. But who knows, maybe enterprise support is better...