In effect, the idea that all drivers need source code push some manufacturers to Windows and no Linux drivers.
I really find that idea a bit dubious. I am pretty sure most if not all windows-only hardware is the result of decisions made on entirely different grounds.
And all drivers do need source code. They are absolutely critical system components and the lack of ability to examine and modify them is one of the major causes of computer system suckage. Windows apologists are always telling me that it's the drivers that cause the problems, well there is some truth to that, but it doesnt help you at all! In the binary-blob world what they give you is what you got and even if the hardware is good when that blob doesnt do the job you have to buy new hardware. Wtf? Give me a free driver and even if it sucks I'd still rather give you my money. At least a bad driver can be fixed. Companies offer the briefest support they possibly can and just use every interaction as an opportunity to extract more money from you anyway. I'd rather have something rough that the community can support than something perfectly polished - and under enemy control.
If Windows has drivers for the hardware I want, I'll never look at Linux.
That's a very shortsited view. Just because both can be called a 'driver' doesnt mean that a blobware driver and a software driver represent equal utitlity. If Windows has a blob while Linux has a proper modifiable software driver, that's a huge advantage on the L side.
Of course, there may be some amount of trade-off, where you might be able to provide blob-level support for more hardware, or source-level support for a smaller subset - in that case a tradeoff is inevitable but it's better to have full support for a small subset of hardware if you ask me. I can choose to limit my hardware purchases based on what is supported, even if that isnt ideal. But there is absolutely nothing I can do when the blobware driver for a critical piece of hardware takes my machine down with a repeatable bug and the manufacturers response is 'buy the new product.'
The thing is, they dont care. They know that most of the market will just go ooh shiny and forget about it. And they know that there is little choice. For instance for a video card you can pretty much buy nvidia or ati. And if you get pissed off because they ripped you off and tell them you are going to the competitor, they'll just smirk and say ok, bye bye. They know what will happen: you go to the competitor, they rip you off worse, and then you return to try them again cause what else are you going to do?
Perhaps it's just me, but I'd be too worried about having a leaky roof some years down the line. Poking lots of mounting holes in a roof can't be good for it. Even if the installer uses some "leak-proof sealing system", how do you know that all holes are properly sealed, even assuming that, um, "low-cost labor" isn't being used to do the installation?
How do you know that about your roof already? I mean they are legitimate concerns, yes, but a lot of times I have seen solar installers who were professional about their job actually find and fix shoddy workmanship by the homebuilder so ymmv.
(Possibly worse still, some solar power systems are rented -- what happens to the roof when the system is uninstalled??)
The same thing - as long as the people who do the job actually do it properly, it will be sealed properly. Naturally if the people you hire seem shady or work too cheap, or if someone else is paying them, those might be warning signs.
Stallman was just being consistent. Binary compatibility doesnt encourage source disclosure, after all. Although I would argue from my experience that in the case of a device driver they should be practically the same thing, that probably just shows my age. Back when I actively programmed C was considered a high level language and at least some of us still wrote important code like device drivers in hex instead of abdicating to an assembler./getoffmylawn
Having been a devout follower and promoter of Mozilla Firefox since the very very beginning, I have to say that over the last few months I have slowly been bracing myself for the inevitable realization that it is over, and time to move on. I will admit that other browsers briefly caught my eye at times through the years, and although I may have strayed momentarily here or there to others, it was more curiosity than anything else. I always came back home to FF with the knowledge that it was the best for me.
I could say the same. I used Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape, all the way back. Opera stole me away for a little while, until they went nuts with bloat. Other than that, and Mosaic before Netscape even existed, I've used this browser for decades.
I currently have 3.6.28 installed on all my machines. I 'upgraded' to 4.0, realised they had finally gone full retard, and reverted to the last good version. I am really hoping a good fork will happen and I would switch to it in a heartbeat.
I was a big fan of the original simcity (and simant! anyone else remember that?) and certainly would have been a sure sell if they werent doing this. But if this is true - not a snowballs chance in hell I would give them one copper cent for the thing. You would have to pay me to install Steam on my machine, and the price would have to be enough to buy myself a new machine, before I would even consider it. And this EA crap sounds even worse.
I am willing to spend about $100 on a computer game I really want. (More would be conceivable but it would have to be a truly extraordinary game.) If the game comes with some unsolicited crapware I dont want, and will have to manually uninstall, then I will mentally deduct a fee for that, based on just how much of a pain in my butt I expect it will be to correct it. Usually this will be ~$30-$60 for garden variety junk. It pretty much tops out at $70, because if it's too big a pain in the butt I can outsource the work for that price and go do something else while it's being done. So if I really like the game, and it's bundled with a ton of crap, I can still pay $30 for the game, and $70 getting rid of the junk I didnt want, and still fit in my budget.
But what if it is the case that removing the malware breaks the game, hm? In that case the cost of the game has just exceeded my budget many times over, and I am no longer interested. That's the case for each and every game out there that requires Steam. The comment from zerosumhappiness just makes me shake with laughter, it's hilarious what you put up with for that 'service.' You can only play the games you purchased during an internet outage if you demonstrated psychic talent by predicting the outage beforehand? And that's supposed to demonstrate that Steam is good? Really?
It actually sounds like Origin/SimCity may be a better deal than Steam, in fact. One of the articles said you would only have to login to Origin once, to activate the game. The implication being that at least it would be possible to remove Origin afterwards. If true, it's not as obnoxious as Steam, although still obnoxious enough I wouldnt consider it until it's remaindered.
I think your memories are a bit distorted. ICQ was a great IM at first but the clients went to crap and after awhile you couldnt even get the old version to use. That's why I switched, to a multi-client IM, and a lot of the early adopters went that route. Then we had people on icq, yim, msn and aim on our lists. Mine had a good preponderance of yahoo for years before msn took off, ymmv. Also strangely enough AOL actually has and has had decent penetration in several non-us markets; UK, Australia, and Germany I know off the top of my head have done ok, but yeah I guess they probably never even tried in Sverige.
I use bblean also. It seems a bit unpolished to me, menu behaviour is off and the system tray functionality is a little buggy, I have to restart it frequently (but that is fortunately easy.) Still, having a decent wm available and a usable pager and everything makes it worth the problems. I am not complaining so much as advancing the idea that if we took up a collection we might hasten an update if you know what I mean;)
That said, while I am pretty happy with it on my XP machine, I still havent figured out a way to get Win7 to do sloppy focus without autoraising:((
Teachbook and placebook were not copycats, and that's just two I can think of off the top of my head.
Having been invited to FB and passed, all the way back when enrollment was only open with an ivy league.edu or an invite, and resisted all pressure to sign up and join the herd since, I cant help but gloat a little every time I am proven correct, yet again./me gloats.
I believe it's a useful service, and I will be happy to give it a try when it's provided in a manner consist with my basic values, but as long as it amounts to voluntarily handing over all information to a company like facebook it cannot be worth the price.
Uninstalling an antivirus package when some unknown problem is causing it to shut itself off seems like a Bad Idea if you can avoid it.
Unfortunately you cannot, because in the windows world the first step to troubleshooting a malfunction is to reboot, and the second is to re-install.
If you are worried that uninstalling will amount to yielding the battle to the malware, forget about that. There is no battle. If malware shuts your AV down once, the battle is over, the malware won.
It's been long enough to reassure me that it was a software malfunction as opposed to some aggressive self-defence strategy by some malware, but I'm sure there are attacks out there which would have left me locked out if I responded in the same way.
Those attacks have already succeeded by the time you notice the symptom, so in large part you are right, but it really doesnt matter.
Ultimately, the only practical advice I got was the most generic possible, which also happens to require the least effort from the guy in the callcentre. Everything else that was said, including about getting serviced, was part of a sales pitch for something I didn't need.
Welcome to the world of computer technical support. Those lines are clogged with people who cant possibly get through an uninstall/reinstall without someone else holding their hand, along with people who do stupid crap and get a new virus every couple weeks then call in loudly demanding that it be fixed for free, and so on. People like you and I, statistically speaking, dont call (we hit the support forums where we know we have a much better chance of getting some useful advice rather than being offered a paid service we could do ourselves,) so their scripts and training understandably dont prepare them to offer us anything useful.
Yeah, you definitely had unrealistic expectations. Try to remember which planet you are on;)
For reasons unknown to this day the background protection process reported itself to be disabled and refused to turn on. I thought there might be some advanced diagnostics that would explain why it was behaving like that without any UI feedback. Instead, I was asked when I had "last had my machine serviced" and how long my computer takes to boot.
In context, this is perfectly reasonable. You have to remember these people are sitting there for who knows how many hours a day taking calls and you are far from their typical caller. Most of them are likely to be people that have no idea whatsoever how a computer works. Talking about 'having it serviced' as code for a tech getting on periodically and cleaning up their messes (along with those caused by windows and other application programs, all of this stuff way over the head of the typical user) to keep the machine running makes sense, it invokes a car analogy they can feel like they understand to make a genuine point. The guy that keeps getting his computer "hacked" every 2 weeks and noticed that the boot time doubled yesterday but doesnt think to mention that until 20 minutes into the call because he is focused on trying to get his toolbar back; the lady that clicks OK before *I* could possibly see what the dialogue said (and doesnt read anywhere near as fast as I do); the guy that is trying to run his law office on his old PC and hasnt the slightest clue how to secure his wireless network or tell whether or not his antivirus or OS is up to date, these are people that probably *should* pay someone a couple hundred dollars a year to look after them and consider themselves lucky. I
You, on the other hand, probably knew just as much about the situation as the person you were talking to, and therefore should have known to try the uninstall/reinstall before picking up the phone.
Then we ran a piece of remote desktop software and he sifted through my task manager, raising flags with every bloaty, but otherwise innocuous, process like "iTunes Helper" and then poring over registry entries from uninstalled software that had been bundled with the machine.
This is where they have been getting bad reports. They put a commissioned salesperson in a highly competitive environment (a few percentage points of conversion make the difference between a big bonus and everyone loves you versus get your stuff the guards are escorting you to the door now in a sales gig) answering calls all day long from people like I am describing, and add in remote control. The ability is there, the motivation is strong, the bosses can do nothing more, indeed fire anyone actually caught at such tricks immediately, and rest assured that the rest of them will keep right on doing it, to keep their jobs and earn their paychecks and employee of the week awards and so on.
Sure, but you will never prove intent. I am sure they arent silly enough to formally train their people to do this. There is no need. You take a moderately bright young person, put them in a job where they have to make sales to get paid, give them a stream of incoming calls from relatively clueless people (who can be extraordinarily difficult to deal with, and are often stereotypical ugly americans with ridiculous expectations and rude, demanding demeanor) and finally the ability to take remote control over this techical illiterates computer... do all that and it wont be long before some of the salespeople find... creative ways to convince these annoying people to contribute to their paycheck.
Let me explain that where I work I speak fairly often with customers who have dealt with these guys. As a result I did a little research a few weeks back. You can do the same, use the google.
Anyhow there's a quite long-running and very interesting thread on the Avast user forums about these guys. It has both some very good and some very bad experiences, which matches what I have heard personally. At any rate it's been an ongoing issue for some time and this appears to be the last straw - it certainly wasnt the first case like this though.
Sorry, thought this went through long ago, not sure what happened.
On this subject I think you've moved from "discussing" this with me to "talking at" me. You're telling me that reinstallation is "the right thing to do", regardless of my good reasons as to why I don't do that. I accept that you and I are in different paradigms in terms of system administration, and that as such we're not ever going to agree on this.
Well, I am telling me that your good reasons seem to me to boil down to some sort of wierd emotional thing. If you have logical reasons for it perhaps I am just too dense to see them, however, and agree with your last sentence.
That's a bit too vague for me to know specifically what you mean. Let's say I have a remote machine out in a bunker in California that I can only get to via ssh over the 'net -- and try to give me an idea of how I'd upgrade/reinstall Slackware.
Ok first let me say that I have never encountered such a thing and it sounds like a made-up scenario. Normally if I have a remote server I can have the hosting company load up whatever image I tell them on it, and restore it when necessary as well. But just for the sake of argument, I suppose what I would do is this:
First pick out the packages that I need installed, and copy them to my staging directory on the remote machine, along with the setup program and associated files. Copy the boot image over to/boot/ on the remote machine, edit grub config as appropriate, reboot to installation kernel. Mount directory with the packages and setup program, start setup program. Of course you can effectively 'brick' the machine if you screw this up somehow but there is no reason to do that.
If I found myself needing to do that often at all, I would automate it with essentially the same system I used when administering a large number of machines I had physical access to. Just select the packages and do the install once, then bzip the partitions (other than/home) and load a target directory with that, the setup program, and associated files. That becomes your master image you can load or reload repeatedly across a number of machines. Load your setup kernel into/boot, enable it with grub, reboot and reconnect, format the affected partitions, mount/home, extract the archives into the proper partitions, reboot. Clean install, done.
Anyhow a system install isnt the sort of thing that should need to be done frequently. There's generally no point in doing that until security backports are discontinued. If a particular subsection needs to be upgraded that can be done in place, with a binary package or a fresh compile.
You can build software on Debian just like you can on Slackware. root and 'checkinstall' are not a requirement.
You can but I remember the package manager being quite annoying when you do, even to the point where you could effectively break the whole system. Admittedly I havent tried lately. It may be all fixed. On the other hand slackware has had apt-get updating for a long time too, which works great for keeping a system up-to-date-as-in-secure for long after there is a new version you could upgrade to if you really must.
Anyhow dont feel like I was putting down Debian. It's just that my own experience and point of view still ranks it second to Slack for 'just works.' Probably in large part down to paradigm, yes.
What I don't like is when open source project teams suddenly decide to make the project closed-source and for-profit. System notification tool Growl on OS X is one example. Sure, a project's community can fork the project, but entropy tends to have her way. I don't think you should get into open source and then suddenly feel bitter about the time you put into it and want to make money off of it.
In both the first and last sentence quoted, you seem to imply that somehow closing the code or making a profit from it are objectionable, but it could also be read to make that an and as well. The and reading I agree with, the or I strenuously object to.
Frankly I applaud anyone who is both writing free software and making money off it. In fact the right to do it is enshrined in the Free Software definition and the GPL (sorry RMS/FSF/GPL trolls, it's true) and that's genius. The only problem would be an attempt to lock the software up, not managing to profit from the binaries. Especially if these are binaries for software they mostly or completely wrote themselves, of course, but even if not - there's nothing at all wrong with Volkerding making a living for wrapping up a bunch of code he doesnt write into a handy installable set of binaries either.
You've probably heard a few times about 'Free as in Freedom' but just as important is 'Software as in Source.' Binaries arent really software. Decrypting, step-debugging, and editting them in place is a specialist skillset, so even for most programmers they are opaque, unchangeable black boxes, not proper software.
I personally consider reinstalling from scratch a waste of my time, and even insulting for this is the standard upgrade method for a distribution.
I dont understand where this visceral aversion to reinstallation comes from, but I can understand that with it given you would be much happier with Debian.
But given that it's not that tough to do, quite easy to automate, doesnt need to be done very often and always works perfectly it seems like the best way to do things to me.
As long as you're in a position where that's easy, that's fine. However I manage a bunch of remote machines that I still need to upgrade, and reinstalling them from scratch is not something easy for me to do. Nor is it easy for someone that needs to upgrade lots of machines, or machines where there has been a lot of custom software installed, which I mentioned earlier.
In a case like that I would want to use an image-based system anyway. That works the same way regardless of distro.
Using 'checkinstall' as root may be workable for some, but basic functionality like that shouldnt require root, and it falls under the category of 'doing things in a needlessly complicated way just to be different' to my eye.
And no, contra your expressed certainty you can compile and install libraries to your hearts content under slack and it just works, as it should. (Standard caveats of course, assuming you arent doing something insanely stupid and wrong.)
That's strange, I can say the opposite - I have seen dependency hell on.rpm and.deb bring things to a screeching halt. I have never had a problem like that on slack. If you have two packages that each link against a different version of the same library that isnt a problem - you just install both versions of the library:/
I accept what you say, however last I used Slack (circa 2000) the method to upgrade Slackware was to wipe and reinstall with the new version. Put that together with a lot of manual software installation typical at the time of./configure, make, make install (because Slackware mainly only contained a base system), and it's a big headache to upgrade.
It is the preferred method to upgrade any OS if you ask me. The debian upgrade-in-place functionality is drop-dead easy and very rarely fails, but the failures tend to be spectacular.
Wiping and reinstalling is and should be drop-dead easy as well, and never, ever fails. So you can see why I still prefer to stick to it.
If your partitions are setup correctly you can wipe the system and reinstall to your hearts content without touching user data, so why is it such a problem? Of course you want to make a backup first, but I would be much more worried about doing that before I let apt take over.
Slackware's package management is brilliant. It uses straight tarballs, unpacks them and executes the scripts, period. It installs and removes software from the computer, and since it doesnt attempt to do everything else under the sun as well, you can count on it to do its job correctly. It's up to you, of course, to make sure that you install the correct.pkg. I have never seen it cause any sort of problem for anyone, the only complaint is that it doesnt do all the other stuff dpkg or rpm do. Which isnt necessary, and overly complicates the resulting tools, resulting in my inability to say the same about them.
RPM and Debian both tend to break spectacularly when one, for instance, installs software from source. That is just a showstopper bug in my mind, back to the drawing room boys. Never, ever had pkgtools interfere with me in any way. So they do their job perfectly, and they dont get in my way. Winner by knockout.
As much as I agree with what you've said, I wouldn't recommend Slackware for teaching purposes because of it's BSD startup methology, because I found switching over to any other System V type startup with/etc/init.d/ scripts to be painful
That's very true, but I think you take the wrong lesson from it. SysV init is a monstrosity that should be killed with fire wherever it is found. Switching over to it is always painful, but apparently not as painful as it needs to be to keep people from using it, unfortunately.
That said, Slack does include a SysV init system (for compatibility with some stupid programs that assume it) and it's accessible so you could learn that on Slackware as well, if you want to.
Last I checked Slackware 13(something) didn't have an official package manager of any kind. The lack of package management back in the 1999 to 2000 timeframe is what forced me to switch distros to something that did
Slackware package system has always worked very well for me. It definitely does have an official package management system and it works wonderfully. On the other hand RPM and even DEB based systems have driven me back to Slack many times. I have lived through many horror stories with those systems - but installpkg has never failed me.
LTE is NOT 4G. No one is offering 4G yet. Of course the marketing drones are continuing their assault on human language by telling you otherwise, but please people, dont fall for it.
volume is growing faster than the big four can put up new towers.
I really dont think so. They are choosing not to put up towers in order to create and maintain artificial scarcity for the purpose of keeping their profit margins higher. If any of them actually *wanted* to expand their capacity, they are perfectly capable of doing so.
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I really find that idea a bit dubious. I am pretty sure most if not all windows-only hardware is the result of decisions made on entirely different grounds.
And all drivers do need source code. They are absolutely critical system components and the lack of ability to examine and modify them is one of the major causes of computer system suckage. Windows apologists are always telling me that it's the drivers that cause the problems, well there is some truth to that, but it doesnt help you at all! In the binary-blob world what they give you is what you got and even if the hardware is good when that blob doesnt do the job you have to buy new hardware. Wtf? Give me a free driver and even if it sucks I'd still rather give you my money. At least a bad driver can be fixed. Companies offer the briefest support they possibly can and just use every interaction as an opportunity to extract more money from you anyway. I'd rather have something rough that the community can support than something perfectly polished - and under enemy control.
That's a very shortsited view. Just because both can be called a 'driver' doesnt mean that a blobware driver and a software driver represent equal utitlity. If Windows has a blob while Linux has a proper modifiable software driver, that's a huge advantage on the L side.
Of course, there may be some amount of trade-off, where you might be able to provide blob-level support for more hardware, or source-level support for a smaller subset - in that case a tradeoff is inevitable but it's better to have full support for a small subset of hardware if you ask me. I can choose to limit my hardware purchases based on what is supported, even if that isnt ideal. But there is absolutely nothing I can do when the blobware driver for a critical piece of hardware takes my machine down with a repeatable bug and the manufacturers response is 'buy the new product.'
The thing is, they dont care. They know that most of the market will just go ooh shiny and forget about it. And they know that there is little choice. For instance for a video card you can pretty much buy nvidia or ati. And if you get pissed off because they ripped you off and tell them you are going to the competitor, they'll just smirk and say ok, bye bye. They know what will happen: you go to the competitor, they rip you off worse, and then you return to try them again cause what else are you going to do?
How do you know that about your roof already? I mean they are legitimate concerns, yes, but a lot of times I have seen solar installers who were professional about their job actually find and fix shoddy workmanship by the homebuilder so ymmv.
The same thing - as long as the people who do the job actually do it properly, it will be sealed properly. Naturally if the people you hire seem shady or work too cheap, or if someone else is paying them, those might be warning signs.
Stallman was just being consistent. Binary compatibility doesnt encourage source disclosure, after all. Although I would argue from my experience that in the case of a device driver they should be practically the same thing, that probably just shows my age. Back when I actively programmed C was considered a high level language and at least some of us still wrote important code like device drivers in hex instead of abdicating to an assembler. /getoffmylawn
I could say the same. I used Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape, all the way back. Opera stole me away for a little while, until they went nuts with bloat. Other than that, and Mosaic before Netscape even existed, I've used this browser for decades.
I currently have 3.6.28 installed on all my machines. I 'upgraded' to 4.0, realised they had finally gone full retard, and reverted to the last good version. I am really hoping a good fork will happen and I would switch to it in a heartbeat.
I was a big fan of the original simcity (and simant! anyone else remember that?) and certainly would have been a sure sell if they werent doing this. But if this is true - not a snowballs chance in hell I would give them one copper cent for the thing. You would have to pay me to install Steam on my machine, and the price would have to be enough to buy myself a new machine, before I would even consider it. And this EA crap sounds even worse.
I am willing to spend about $100 on a computer game I really want. (More would be conceivable but it would have to be a truly extraordinary game.) If the game comes with some unsolicited crapware I dont want, and will have to manually uninstall, then I will mentally deduct a fee for that, based on just how much of a pain in my butt I expect it will be to correct it. Usually this will be ~$30-$60 for garden variety junk. It pretty much tops out at $70, because if it's too big a pain in the butt I can outsource the work for that price and go do something else while it's being done. So if I really like the game, and it's bundled with a ton of crap, I can still pay $30 for the game, and $70 getting rid of the junk I didnt want, and still fit in my budget.
But what if it is the case that removing the malware breaks the game, hm? In that case the cost of the game has just exceeded my budget many times over, and I am no longer interested. That's the case for each and every game out there that requires Steam. The comment from zerosumhappiness just makes me shake with laughter, it's hilarious what you put up with for that 'service.' You can only play the games you purchased during an internet outage if you demonstrated psychic talent by predicting the outage beforehand? And that's supposed to demonstrate that Steam is good? Really?
It actually sounds like Origin/SimCity may be a better deal than Steam, in fact. One of the articles said you would only have to login to Origin once, to activate the game. The implication being that at least it would be possible to remove Origin afterwards. If true, it's not as obnoxious as Steam, although still obnoxious enough I wouldnt consider it until it's remaindered.
None of those are actually 4g speeds. At best they are 3g+.
I think your memories are a bit distorted. ICQ was a great IM at first but the clients went to crap and after awhile you couldnt even get the old version to use. That's why I switched, to a multi-client IM, and a lot of the early adopters went that route. Then we had people on icq, yim, msn and aim on our lists. Mine had a good preponderance of yahoo for years before msn took off, ymmv. Also strangely enough AOL actually has and has had decent penetration in several non-us markets; UK, Australia, and Germany I know off the top of my head have done ok, but yeah I guess they probably never even tried in Sverige.
I use bblean also. It seems a bit unpolished to me, menu behaviour is off and the system tray functionality is a little buggy, I have to restart it frequently (but that is fortunately easy.) Still, having a decent wm available and a usable pager and everything makes it worth the problems. I am not complaining so much as advancing the idea that if we took up a collection we might hasten an update if you know what I mean ;)
That said, while I am pretty happy with it on my XP machine, I still havent figured out a way to get Win7 to do sloppy focus without autoraising :((
Teachbook and placebook were not copycats, and that's just two I can think of off the top of my head.
Having been invited to FB and passed, all the way back when enrollment was only open with an ivy league .edu or an invite, and resisted all pressure to sign up and join the herd since, I cant help but gloat a little every time I am proven correct, yet again. /me gloats.
I believe it's a useful service, and I will be happy to give it a try when it's provided in a manner consist with my basic values, but as long as it amounts to voluntarily handing over all information to a company like facebook it cannot be worth the price.
I've been to O'Hare, it may be outside the city limits but it is certainly not outside the urban heat island.
Unfortunately you cannot, because in the windows world the first step to troubleshooting a malfunction is to reboot, and the second is to re-install.
If you are worried that uninstalling will amount to yielding the battle to the malware, forget about that. There is no battle. If malware shuts your AV down once, the battle is over, the malware won.
Those attacks have already succeeded by the time you notice the symptom, so in large part you are right, but it really doesnt matter.
Welcome to the world of computer technical support. Those lines are clogged with people who cant possibly get through an uninstall/reinstall without someone else holding their hand, along with people who do stupid crap and get a new virus every couple weeks then call in loudly demanding that it be fixed for free, and so on. People like you and I, statistically speaking, dont call (we hit the support forums where we know we have a much better chance of getting some useful advice rather than being offered a paid service we could do ourselves,) so their scripts and training understandably dont prepare them to offer us anything useful.
Yeah, you definitely had unrealistic expectations. Try to remember which planet you are on ;)
In context, this is perfectly reasonable. You have to remember these people are sitting there for who knows how many hours a day taking calls and you are far from their typical caller. Most of them are likely to be people that have no idea whatsoever how a computer works. Talking about 'having it serviced' as code for a tech getting on periodically and cleaning up their messes (along with those caused by windows and other application programs, all of this stuff way over the head of the typical user) to keep the machine running makes sense, it invokes a car analogy they can feel like they understand to make a genuine point. The guy that keeps getting his computer "hacked" every 2 weeks and noticed that the boot time doubled yesterday but doesnt think to mention that until 20 minutes into the call because he is focused on trying to get his toolbar back; the lady that clicks OK before *I* could possibly see what the dialogue said (and doesnt read anywhere near as fast as I do); the guy that is trying to run his law office on his old PC and hasnt the slightest clue how to secure his wireless network or tell whether or not his antivirus or OS is up to date, these are people that probably *should* pay someone a couple hundred dollars a year to look after them and consider themselves lucky. I
You, on the other hand, probably knew just as much about the situation as the person you were talking to, and therefore should have known to try the uninstall/reinstall before picking up the phone.
This is where they have been getting bad reports. They put a commissioned salesperson in a highly competitive environment (a few percentage points of conversion make the difference between a big bonus and everyone loves you versus get your stuff the guards are escorting you to the door now in a sales gig) answering calls all day long from people like I am describing, and add in remote control. The ability is there, the motivation is strong, the bosses can do nothing more, indeed fire anyone actually caught at such tricks immediately, and rest assured that the rest of them will keep right on doing it, to keep their jobs and earn their paychecks and employee of the week awards and so on.
Sure, but you will never prove intent. I am sure they arent silly enough to formally train their people to do this. There is no need. You take a moderately bright young person, put them in a job where they have to make sales to get paid, give them a stream of incoming calls from relatively clueless people (who can be extraordinarily difficult to deal with, and are often stereotypical ugly americans with ridiculous expectations and rude, demanding demeanor) and finally the ability to take remote control over this techical illiterates computer... do all that and it wont be long before some of the salespeople find... creative ways to convince these annoying people to contribute to their paycheck.
No, it's not just based on this one incident.
Let me explain that where I work I speak fairly often with customers who have dealt with these guys. As a result I did a little research a few weeks back. You can do the same, use the google.
Anyhow there's a quite long-running and very interesting thread on the Avast user forums about these guys. It has both some very good and some very bad experiences, which matches what I have heard personally. At any rate it's been an ongoing issue for some time and this appears to be the last straw - it certainly wasnt the first case like this though.
Sorry, thought this went through long ago, not sure what happened.
Well, I am telling me that your good reasons seem to me to boil down to some sort of wierd emotional thing. If you have logical reasons for it perhaps I am just too dense to see them, however, and agree with your last sentence.
Ok first let me say that I have never encountered such a thing and it sounds like a made-up scenario. Normally if I have a remote server I can have the hosting company load up whatever image I tell them on it, and restore it when necessary as well. But just for the sake of argument, I suppose what I would do is this:
First pick out the packages that I need installed, and copy them to my staging directory on the remote machine, along with the setup program and associated files. Copy the boot image over to /boot/ on the remote machine, edit grub config as appropriate, reboot to installation kernel. Mount directory with the packages and setup program, start setup program. Of course you can effectively 'brick' the machine if you screw this up somehow but there is no reason to do that.
If I found myself needing to do that often at all, I would automate it with essentially the same system I used when administering a large number of machines I had physical access to. Just select the packages and do the install once, then bzip the partitions (other than /home) and load a target directory with that, the setup program, and associated files. That becomes your master image you can load or reload repeatedly across a number of machines. Load your setup kernel into /boot, enable it with grub, reboot and reconnect, format the affected partitions, mount /home, extract the archives into the proper partitions, reboot. Clean install, done.
Anyhow a system install isnt the sort of thing that should need to be done frequently. There's generally no point in doing that until security backports are discontinued. If a particular subsection needs to be upgraded that can be done in place, with a binary package or a fresh compile.
You can but I remember the package manager being quite annoying when you do, even to the point where you could effectively break the whole system. Admittedly I havent tried lately. It may be all fixed. On the other hand slackware has had apt-get updating for a long time too, which works great for keeping a system up-to-date-as-in-secure for long after there is a new version you could upgrade to if you really must.
Anyhow dont feel like I was putting down Debian. It's just that my own experience and point of view still ranks it second to Slack for 'just works.' Probably in large part down to paradigm, yes.
Ok, so going back up to that original statement,
In both the first and last sentence quoted, you seem to imply that somehow closing the code or making a profit from it are objectionable, but it could also be read to make that an and as well. The and reading I agree with, the or I strenuously object to.
Frankly I applaud anyone who is both writing free software and making money off it. In fact the right to do it is enshrined in the Free Software definition and the GPL (sorry RMS/FSF/GPL trolls, it's true) and that's genius. The only problem would be an attempt to lock the software up, not managing to profit from the binaries. Especially if these are binaries for software they mostly or completely wrote themselves, of course, but even if not - there's nothing at all wrong with Volkerding making a living for wrapping up a bunch of code he doesnt write into a handy installable set of binaries either.
You've probably heard a few times about 'Free as in Freedom' but just as important is 'Software as in Source.' Binaries arent really software. Decrypting, step-debugging, and editting them in place is a specialist skillset, so even for most programmers they are opaque, unchangeable black boxes, not proper software.
Wait a minute, the software is actually still free but you stand by your statement? How does that make any sense?
There are NIMBYs but do you see any court battles? Ahem.
I dont understand where this visceral aversion to reinstallation comes from, but I can understand that with it given you would be much happier with Debian.
But given that it's not that tough to do, quite easy to automate, doesnt need to be done very often and always works perfectly it seems like the best way to do things to me.
In a case like that I would want to use an image-based system anyway. That works the same way regardless of distro.
Using 'checkinstall' as root may be workable for some, but basic functionality like that shouldnt require root, and it falls under the category of 'doing things in a needlessly complicated way just to be different' to my eye.
And no, contra your expressed certainty you can compile and install libraries to your hearts content under slack and it just works, as it should. (Standard caveats of course, assuming you arent doing something insanely stupid and wrong.)
That's strange, I can say the opposite - I have seen dependency hell on .rpm and .deb bring things to a screeching halt. I have never had a problem like that on slack. If you have two packages that each link against a different version of the same library that isnt a problem - you just install both versions of the library :/
It is the preferred method to upgrade any OS if you ask me. The debian upgrade-in-place functionality is drop-dead easy and very rarely fails, but the failures tend to be spectacular.
Wiping and reinstalling is and should be drop-dead easy as well, and never, ever fails. So you can see why I still prefer to stick to it.
If your partitions are setup correctly you can wipe the system and reinstall to your hearts content without touching user data, so why is it such a problem? Of course you want to make a backup first, but I would be much more worried about doing that before I let apt take over.
Slackware's package management is brilliant. It uses straight tarballs, unpacks them and executes the scripts, period. It installs and removes software from the computer, and since it doesnt attempt to do everything else under the sun as well, you can count on it to do its job correctly. It's up to you, of course, to make sure that you install the correct .pkg. I have never seen it cause any sort of problem for anyone, the only complaint is that it doesnt do all the other stuff dpkg or rpm do. Which isnt necessary, and overly complicates the resulting tools, resulting in my inability to say the same about them.
RPM and Debian both tend to break spectacularly when one, for instance, installs software from source. That is just a showstopper bug in my mind, back to the drawing room boys. Never, ever had pkgtools interfere with me in any way. So they do their job perfectly, and they dont get in my way. Winner by knockout.
That's very true, but I think you take the wrong lesson from it. SysV init is a monstrosity that should be killed with fire wherever it is found. Switching over to it is always painful, but apparently not as painful as it needs to be to keep people from using it, unfortunately.
That said, Slack does include a SysV init system (for compatibility with some stupid programs that assume it) and it's accessible so you could learn that on Slackware as well, if you want to.
Slackware package system has always worked very well for me. It definitely does have an official package management system and it works wonderfully. On the other hand RPM and even DEB based systems have driven me back to Slack many times. I have lived through many horror stories with those systems - but installpkg has never failed me.
LTE is NOT 4G. No one is offering 4G yet. Of course the marketing drones are continuing their assault on human language by telling you otherwise, but please people, dont fall for it.
I really dont think so. They are choosing not to put up towers in order to create and maintain artificial scarcity for the purpose of keeping their profit margins higher. If any of them actually *wanted* to expand their capacity, they are perfectly capable of doing so.