That's what I've been saying for a long time, everybody knows what Apple is and what Windows is and what Android is, they see it on TV. They've never heard of Linux and don't realize or care that it powers their phone. Google and MS and Apple spend huge sums on ads, I've never seen a Red Hat ad except on a technology site.
Meanwhile, those who are lucky enough to know me have heard of Linux, which powers your phone if it isn't an Apple and powers the ten fastest supercomputers in the world. There's a supercomputer running Windows (I was flabbergasted when I read about it) and it sits at #140 or something.
2002 was the year of Linux on the desktop - for me.
Well, submitter and editor were both probably writing for slashdot regulars; there were iirc dupes of the reader shutdown when it was posted. Granted, not very n00b-friendly, but gees, NERDS. We act like nerds and other nerds act like nerds by criticizing us for acting like nerds. Meanwhile, where are the comments about the actual topic? Which isn't about timothy's editing abilities (jees, he's not an english major, he's a NERD).
Mine, too, but their firewall is weird. They think Fox News is a sports site and discovery.com is an entertainment site. But slashdot isn't firewalled, nor is my own site (I put it up to pimp my book) even though Amazon.com is blocked.
Of course facebook is blocked, they don't furnish you with a computer to look at lolcats and buy shit from amazon unless that's part of your job.
Next year their firewall won't bother me because I'M RETIRING IN FEBRUARY!! WOOHOO!!!
If you have an android phone/a youtube account/ or a gmail address you have a g+ account.
I do have a G+ account that I haven't logged into for over a year, signed up when it was invitation-only. But my G+ profile isn't tied to my phone at all -- when I first got it I had my daughter DL the Winamp and Tunein apps for me, so Google thinks it's her phone.
The surprise isn't that Google would push G+, it's that other companies are stupid enough to fall for it, although they seem to be doing the same with Facebook
It's almost mandatory these days. My 26 year old daughter tells me I need a facebook account to pimp my book. Maybe I'll have her do it for me, I waste enough time at slashdot.
I signed up for G+ when it was invitation-only but haven't logged in in over a year. I found it pretty boring after a very short while.
I agree that making Feedly users log in via G+ is retarded. Someone must have had what my mom calls a "senior moment" (younger folks call it a "brain fart").
Yes, I know, I can look it up on my own, but can somebody tell me what the fuck a "Feedly" actually is?
Reading comprehension problem, AC? "Feedly users, a lot of whom migrated from the now-defunct Google Reader". I never heard of Feedly either but that sentence explains it.
Sheesh, you guys are always ragging timothy and even when he posts an excellent summary, even using "whom" correctly, you still bitch. WTF?
The fact is, this isn't the year of the Linux desktop, it wasn't 5 years ago and it isn't going to be 5 years from now.
Yes, I think you're right about that for the simple reason that nobody but nerds even know Linux exists. Apple and Microsoft have huge ad budgets, Linux has no marketing at all. They know what Android is, but have never heard of linux even though their phone's OS uses its kernel.
That isn't enough of a reason to get people to move.
If they're on XP they'll already have a reason.
The problem is that it isn't superior in the ways that matter to the average user. The programs that the average user already knows are Windows programs and they have little interest in buying or learning new programs, even if they are free. I've used OpenOffice, it is nice, but it won't replace MS Office any time soon.
You're not going to replace Windows in the workplace, but people have old computers that work just fine and when somebody warns them that their computer will be broken they're going to ask you what to do. If you sell computers, you'll try to find one for them that still runs Windows 7. They're not going to like 8 because they'll have to relearn everything.
If it's your grandma's computer you can buy her a new Win7 computer (or if she has the money buy one herself) or slap kubuntu on the old XP box and it won't be much more unfamiliar than Win7, which won't run on her old computer. Install it dual-boot with Linux as the default, keep XP only disable and remove all of its networking components. They'll be able to get to all their Windows files from the Linux partition, and for home use Oo works fine.
What does that say about us, as a people? That we are human beings, and humans have something called "human nature".
Um, I'm afraid You're wrong. That theory/myth was recently smashed; there is no such thing as "human nature," only cultural nature. "All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be", as Pink Floyd so artfully puts it.
"Money" is just an easy way to keep track of the value of "stuff"
And you've fallen prey to exactly what the linked article was talking about. What's the value of rain? What's the value of clean air? What's the value of someone's empathy? Your values are sadly skewed.
Obama ran in 2008 on closing the terrorist prison in Guantanamo Bay. It was a major campaign promise. Still hasn't been closed 5 years later. Why?
Because he was blocked by Congress from sending them overseas, and blocked by the states from putting them in normal prisons.
As a society, we have the privilege of being able to give every single person on this planet free and total access to the collective knowledge of all of the sciences, technology, culture, all of it. And yet we don't.
Some of us do. Take, for instance, slashdot's "grammar nazi's" (sorry, just had to bait one). Their correction to someone's aliterate mistake is FREE KNOWLEDGE, even if it's usually casting pearls before swine.
I've learned a lot from slashdot comments. I've learned a lot from wikipedia. All it costs is my connection to the internet.
People often confuse the value of a thing with the price of a thing, and in a capitalist-driven society, it's hardly a surprise.
They also often confuse the value of a person with how much cash or credit they have, which is even more stupid. These people you speak of worship at the altar of mammon wearing the liturgical outfits with the necktie around the neck. It's a god damned religion, people WORSHIP money.
I'm looking for a distro that I can install unattended by simply doing "apt-get install notubuntu".
But as there is no easy fix and any change of distro will likely take up my weekend plus a week or two of sorting through bugs as my config files are unlikely to transfer well between distros, I'm still using ubuntu.
Try kubuntu. Half hour or less, of course you're going to have to give it a password, tell it if you want it to enter the password for you, what time zone you're in, etc. It's a hell of a lot less hassle than a Windows install.
That's after taking Arker's advice. He's completely right.
Can't say I'd rely on the government for a decent response after Katrina.
The Katrina clusterfuck wasn't because of "the government" it was because first, the Louisiana politicians are almost as crooked as Illinois politicians, and second, Bush appointed a someone to running FEMA who had nowhere near the qualifications to do the job. Brownie isn't running FEMA these days, I haven't heard about such clusterfucks since he left, and we've had lots of big disasters since.
Next to heart disease, automobile accidents are the biggest killer, will the FDA band the use of cars?
What a stupid comment. There are no replacements for cars, cars are necessary. Trans-fats are NOT necessary; food cooked with trans-fat oil tastes like the same dish cooked with unhydrogenated oil, it just doesn't have the shelf life.
If a safe alternative to cars actually existed, nobody would own cars. But no, anonymous tea partier thinks it's fine that corporations are giving him heart disease for no reason other than their own profits.
A politically-unimportant official falls on his sword over the failure, and the heavy-hitters claim some kind of ephemeral notion of "accountability" with no actual repercussions for anyone's careers.
Ah, a die-hard Republican, I see. "Politically important" has nothing to do with it. Who but the project's CIO is more responsible for IT's successes and failures? When k-mart's web site screws up and sells $500 items for $20 like they did yesterday, who takes the fall, the CEO or the CIO? Usually it isn't even the CIO but someone further down the food chain.
Typical political decisions making a bloody mess out of what should have been a simple thing to build.
Simple? No, my web site is simple. Theirs has to pull data from many different servers in different agencies, and feed data to state-run exchanges in addition to feeding that data to citizens signing up in blood-red tea party states (states that sued to prevent it and want it dead at all costs). It's certainly not an impossible task, but it is certainly complex. That said, the folks working on it could have been better chosen.
The feds usually don't do a bad job with web sites; the.govs are better than most private enterprise ones. I have to log into the USDA and census bureau sites for work, and the copyright office's site to register Nobots and they're not the most useable sites, but they all beat the hell out of Bowker (the ISBN registry) and Lulu (I got a note from a fan who complained about Lulu's site, I need a new printer).
Hell, even slashdot, a nerd site built by IT nerds screws stuff up all the time; I wanted to add my new web site to my profile, but no fields show up in my profile so I can't. And they've been at it for fifteen years.
Anybody remember the $200 hammer, or the $500 toilet seat from decades past?
Better than you, apparently. Those were bogus charges so the real money could go to secret shit.
The truth is, Linux really doesn't offer the average desktop computer user anything over Windows.
No? how about doing in 3 clicks what takes Windows 12? Or not having to reboot once a month? Not having to have the computer unusable for 30 minutes or so because Windows is patching itself? Not having to reboot at all, ever? How about Linux upgrades being a single click and you're done? How about being able to hit the power switch and have it come up from dead off to the desktop with all the programs and apps open like they were before you shut it off, with no user intervention except the "on" button, fully password-protected?
How about being able to use movies for wallpaper and screen saver? How about being able to network with a Windows computer without having a Win7Pro computer running on the network?
How about having all the apps you need installed from the get-go?
Let me tell you about bluetooth on Win vs Lin. I bought a tiny dongle and thought it wouldn't work on my Linux tower because it only had install files for Windows and Mac. So I install the files in the notebook, reboot (of course, why in the hell does Windows need to be booted so often?), wait for the drivers to load, reboot again.
Lets see if I can get it to work in the Linux tower. I plug it in and... an icon appears in the tray. It's ready to use.
I've been using Windows since I upgraded from DOS, and Linux for about ten years. Linux is superior in every way. The only thing Windows will do that Linux won't is run Windows programs. Other than that, kubuntu beats every version of windows from 95 to 7 hands down.
My guess is that, like me, he's been burned by Sony before and thinks anyone who would give those evil bastards their money is stupid. As much as I detest MS software and practices (including the ones you mentioned) I might have posted the same comment.
As he's sitting at -1 flamebait I'd say there are a lot of Sony shills with mod points. After all, who would be offended by pointing out the evil shit Sony's done? That said, I've been modded down for criticizing Microsoft. Shills or morons, your guess is as good as mine. I certainly wouldn't be offended if you trash talked a piece of software or equipment I liked.
XBone vs Saurony? A pox on both their houses, the dastardly deeds done by both developers and manufacturers is why I don't play computer games any more, they ran me completely out of the market.
That said, I'm nostalgic about my gaming days, I'm posting my old Quake site's Christmas page next month, with all the Quake II skins (including the nudechick skin), and MP3s of "I Saw Mommie Killing Santa Clause" (Santa and Mrs. Clause skins there for DL) and... um, I forgot what the other MP3 was, it's been ten years.
But today? I'm done with Sony, done with MS, done with anything DRM or internet-only. Sadly, I'm old enough to remember what freedom was like.
in America Individual still usually trumps the Collective and any attempts at mass-murder (or even mass incarceration) tend to fail.
Why is it you far right libertarian nutballs are so often wrong about EVERYTHING?? Mas incarceration?? We have more prisoners per capita than any other country in the world, I'd say this is Incarceration Nation. We do have mass incorporation, dumbass. And half those people are political prisoners, there for nonviolent drug "crimes".
Yes, and it's not so damned awesome when it's YOUR CAR. It's awful. It started in the engine and took quite a while to immolate the interior; it took Chatham's volunteer fire department a half hour to show up. Fucking aluminum MELTED.
Slashdot Mirror
That's what I've been saying for a long time, everybody knows what Apple is and what Windows is and what Android is, they see it on TV. They've never heard of Linux and don't realize or care that it powers their phone. Google and MS and Apple spend huge sums on ads, I've never seen a Red Hat ad except on a technology site.
Meanwhile, those who are lucky enough to know me have heard of Linux, which powers your phone if it isn't an Apple and powers the ten fastest supercomputers in the world. There's a supercomputer running Windows (I was flabbergasted when I read about it) and it sits at #140 or something.
2002 was the year of Linux on the desktop - for me.
Well, submitter and editor were both probably writing for slashdot regulars; there were iirc dupes of the reader shutdown when it was posted. Granted, not very n00b-friendly, but gees, NERDS. We act like nerds and other nerds act like nerds by criticizing us for acting like nerds. Meanwhile, where are the comments about the actual topic? Which isn't about timothy's editing abilities (jees, he's not an english major, he's a NERD).
Facebook is blocked in my company's routers.
Mine, too, but their firewall is weird. They think Fox News is a sports site and discovery.com is an entertainment site. But slashdot isn't firewalled, nor is my own site (I put it up to pimp my book) even though Amazon.com is blocked.
Of course facebook is blocked, they don't furnish you with a computer to look at lolcats and buy shit from amazon unless that's part of your job.
Next year their firewall won't bother me because I'M RETIRING IN FEBRUARY!! WOOHOO!!!
If you have an android phone/a youtube account/ or a gmail address you have a g+ account.
I do have a G+ account that I haven't logged into for over a year, signed up when it was invitation-only. But my G+ profile isn't tied to my phone at all -- when I first got it I had my daughter DL the Winamp and Tunein apps for me, so Google thinks it's her phone.
The joke's on Google.
There's a a whois listing for my site but none of my information is there, just my registrar/host.
I doubt any .gov domains are listed (I haven't looked). Isn't the government their own DNS and registrar, or are they going through Network Solutions?
Grow up, kid.
The surprise isn't that Google would push G+, it's that other companies are stupid enough to fall for it, although they seem to be doing the same with Facebook
It's almost mandatory these days. My 26 year old daughter tells me I need a facebook account to pimp my book. Maybe I'll have her do it for me, I waste enough time at slashdot.
I signed up for G+ when it was invitation-only but haven't logged in in over a year. I found it pretty boring after a very short while.
I agree that making Feedly users log in via G+ is retarded. Someone must have had what my mom calls a "senior moment" (younger folks call it a "brain fart").
Yes, I know, I can look it up on my own, but can somebody tell me what the fuck a "Feedly" actually is?
Reading comprehension problem, AC? "Feedly users, a lot of whom migrated from the now-defunct Google Reader". I never heard of Feedly either but that sentence explains it.
Sheesh, you guys are always ragging timothy and even when he posts an excellent summary, even using "whom" correctly, you still bitch. WTF?
The fact is, this isn't the year of the Linux desktop, it wasn't 5 years ago and it isn't going to be 5 years from now.
Yes, I think you're right about that for the simple reason that nobody but nerds even know Linux exists. Apple and Microsoft have huge ad budgets, Linux has no marketing at all. They know what Android is, but have never heard of linux even though their phone's OS uses its kernel.
The driver issues are way fewer than they used to be, I haven't seen any in a long time.
If you're developing Windows apps, of course you're going to need Windows.
That isn't enough of a reason to get people to move.
If they're on XP they'll already have a reason.
The problem is that it isn't superior in the ways that matter to the average user. The programs that the average user already knows are Windows programs and they have little interest in buying or learning new programs, even if they are free. I've used OpenOffice, it is nice, but it won't replace MS Office any time soon.
You're not going to replace Windows in the workplace, but people have old computers that work just fine and when somebody warns them that their computer will be broken they're going to ask you what to do. If you sell computers, you'll try to find one for them that still runs Windows 7. They're not going to like 8 because they'll have to relearn everything.
If it's your grandma's computer you can buy her a new Win7 computer (or if she has the money buy one herself) or slap kubuntu on the old XP box and it won't be much more unfamiliar than Win7, which won't run on her old computer. Install it dual-boot with Linux as the default, keep XP only disable and remove all of its networking components. They'll be able to get to all their Windows files from the Linux partition, and for home use Oo works fine.
If the first sentence is utter garbage, why should I read further?
What does that say about us, as a people? That we are human beings, and humans have something called "human nature".
Um, I'm afraid You're wrong. That theory/myth was recently smashed; there is no such thing as "human nature," only cultural nature. "All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be", as Pink Floyd so artfully puts it.
"Money" is just an easy way to keep track of the value of "stuff"
And you've fallen prey to exactly what the linked article was talking about. What's the value of rain? What's the value of clean air? What's the value of someone's empathy? Your values are sadly skewed.
Obama ran in 2008 on closing the terrorist prison in Guantanamo Bay. It was a major campaign promise. Still hasn't been closed 5 years later. Why?
Because he was blocked by Congress from sending them overseas, and blocked by the states from putting them in normal prisons.
As a society, we have the privilege of being able to give every single person on this planet free and total access to the collective knowledge of all of the sciences, technology, culture, all of it. And yet we don't.
Some of us do. Take, for instance, slashdot's "grammar nazi's" (sorry, just had to bait one). Their correction to someone's aliterate mistake is FREE KNOWLEDGE, even if it's usually casting pearls before swine.
I've learned a lot from slashdot comments. I've learned a lot from wikipedia. All it costs is my connection to the internet.
People often confuse the value of a thing with the price of a thing, and in a capitalist-driven society, it's hardly a surprise.
They also often confuse the value of a person with how much cash or credit they have, which is even more stupid. These people you speak of worship at the altar of mammon wearing the liturgical outfits with the necktie around the neck. It's a god damned religion, people WORSHIP money.
And I see it as a sickness.
This isn't a tech news site, it's a STEM news site -- and meteorology and climatology are both sciences.
I'm looking for a distro that I can install unattended by simply doing "apt-get install notubuntu".
But as there is no easy fix and any change of distro will likely take up my weekend plus a week or two of sorting through bugs as my config files are unlikely to transfer well between distros, I'm still using ubuntu.
Try kubuntu. Half hour or less, of course you're going to have to give it a password, tell it if you want it to enter the password for you, what time zone you're in, etc. It's a hell of a lot less hassle than a Windows install.
That's after taking Arker's advice. He's completely right.
Can't say I'd rely on the government for a decent response after Katrina.
The Katrina clusterfuck wasn't because of "the government" it was because first, the Louisiana politicians are almost as crooked as Illinois politicians, and second, Bush appointed a someone to running FEMA who had nowhere near the qualifications to do the job. Brownie isn't running FEMA these days, I haven't heard about such clusterfucks since he left, and we've had lots of big disasters since.
Next to heart disease, automobile accidents are the biggest killer, will the FDA band the use of cars?
What a stupid comment. There are no replacements for cars, cars are necessary. Trans-fats are NOT necessary; food cooked with trans-fat oil tastes like the same dish cooked with unhydrogenated oil, it just doesn't have the shelf life.
If a safe alternative to cars actually existed, nobody would own cars. But no, anonymous tea partier thinks it's fine that corporations are giving him heart disease for no reason other than their own profits.
I just had a Sheldon moment. I was going to rebut you until I realized you were being sarcastic.
A politically-unimportant official falls on his sword over the failure, and the heavy-hitters claim some kind of ephemeral notion of "accountability" with no actual repercussions for anyone's careers.
Ah, a die-hard Republican, I see. "Politically important" has nothing to do with it. Who but the project's CIO is more responsible for IT's successes and failures? When k-mart's web site screws up and sells $500 items for $20 like they did yesterday, who takes the fall, the CEO or the CIO? Usually it isn't even the CIO but someone further down the food chain.
Typical political decisions making a bloody mess out of what should have been a simple thing to build.
Simple? No, my web site is simple. Theirs has to pull data from many different servers in different agencies, and feed data to state-run exchanges in addition to feeding that data to citizens signing up in blood-red tea party states (states that sued to prevent it and want it dead at all costs). It's certainly not an impossible task, but it is certainly complex. That said, the folks working on it could have been better chosen.
The feds usually don't do a bad job with web sites; the .govs are better than most private enterprise ones. I have to log into the USDA and census bureau sites for work, and the copyright office's site to register Nobots and they're not the most useable sites, but they all beat the hell out of Bowker (the ISBN registry) and Lulu (I got a note from a fan who complained about Lulu's site, I need a new printer).
Hell, even slashdot, a nerd site built by IT nerds screws stuff up all the time; I wanted to add my new web site to my profile, but no fields show up in my profile so I can't. And they've been at it for fifteen years.
Anybody remember the $200 hammer, or the $500 toilet seat from decades past?
Better than you, apparently. Those were bogus charges so the real money could go to secret shit.
The truth is, Linux really doesn't offer the average desktop computer user anything over Windows.
No? how about doing in 3 clicks what takes Windows 12? Or not having to reboot once a month? Not having to have the computer unusable for 30 minutes or so because Windows is patching itself? Not having to reboot at all, ever? How about Linux upgrades being a single click and you're done? How about being able to hit the power switch and have it come up from dead off to the desktop with all the programs and apps open like they were before you shut it off, with no user intervention except the "on" button, fully password-protected?
How about being able to use movies for wallpaper and screen saver? How about being able to network with a Windows computer without having a Win7Pro computer running on the network?
How about having all the apps you need installed from the get-go?
Let me tell you about bluetooth on Win vs Lin. I bought a tiny dongle and thought it wouldn't work on my Linux tower because it only had install files for Windows and Mac. So I install the files in the notebook, reboot (of course, why in the hell does Windows need to be booted so often?), wait for the drivers to load, reboot again.
Lets see if I can get it to work in the Linux tower. I plug it in and... an icon appears in the tray. It's ready to use.
I've been using Windows since I upgraded from DOS, and Linux for about ten years. Linux is superior in every way. The only thing Windows will do that Linux won't is run Windows programs. Other than that, kubuntu beats every version of windows from 95 to 7 hands down.
Paid shill anyone?
My guess is that, like me, he's been burned by Sony before and thinks anyone who would give those evil bastards their money is stupid. As much as I detest MS software and practices (including the ones you mentioned) I might have posted the same comment.
As he's sitting at -1 flamebait I'd say there are a lot of Sony shills with mod points. After all, who would be offended by pointing out the evil shit Sony's done? That said, I've been modded down for criticizing Microsoft. Shills or morons, your guess is as good as mine. I certainly wouldn't be offended if you trash talked a piece of software or equipment I liked.
XBone vs Saurony? A pox on both their houses, the dastardly deeds done by both developers and manufacturers is why I don't play computer games any more, they ran me completely out of the market.
That said, I'm nostalgic about my gaming days, I'm posting my old Quake site's Christmas page next month, with all the Quake II skins (including the nudechick skin), and MP3s of "I Saw Mommie Killing Santa Clause" (Santa and Mrs. Clause skins there for DL) and... um, I forgot what the other MP3 was, it's been ten years.
But today? I'm done with Sony, done with MS, done with anything DRM or internet-only. Sadly, I'm old enough to remember what freedom was like.
in America Individual still usually trumps the Collective and any attempts at mass-murder (or even mass incarceration) tend to fail.
Why is it you far right libertarian nutballs are so often wrong about EVERYTHING?? Mas incarceration?? We have more prisoners per capita than any other country in the world, I'd say this is Incarceration Nation. We do have mass incorporation, dumbass. And half those people are political prisoners, there for nonviolent drug "crimes".
Ever see a car burn? It's awesome.
Yes, and it's not so damned awesome when it's YOUR CAR. It's awful. It started in the engine and took quite a while to immolate the interior; it took Chatham's volunteer fire department a half hour to show up. Fucking aluminum MELTED.
Gasoline is nasty stuff in every way.