This isn't really "major surgery" in the grand scheme, though it can seem that way at first. But like I said, nonsense like this is something you will very, very rarely ever have to deal with unless you're trying to do something unusual, and installing beta or untested software is considered unusual. 99% of anything you'll ever want to install or update will be in apt or Synaptic.
My experience with Ubuntu is that, when something new and important comes out, you can either do it manually right away, like the instructions I just offered, or wait three or four days for it to get loaded into the repository. Ubuntu's goal has always been for stability and compatability for the user, so it is not surprising that they might take a couple extra days to review things before putting them into the public realm. But once they do, it is a single click or single command to bring it up to date.
Good luck. Let me (or Slashdot) know if you need more help with anything.
Annoying that it comes with no instructions, isn't it? Thankfully you don't have to do this often. apt/Synaptic will take care of it for you, or at most you'll have to install a.deb package. Easy to do.
Anyway, for this, you've got the archive. I checked and it looks like it replaces everything in/usr/lib/firefox/. So here's what to do.
First back up your existing install. I put mine in a temp directory I use for this kind of crap,/home/kitten/temp/
kitten@minerva:~$ sudo tar -xvf firefox-3.0rc1.tar/usr/lib/
You should now have a directory/usr/lib/firefox/ with the contents of the archive you just extracted. Check that it's there, then shut down your existing Firefox and re-open it. It should now be FF3. I just did it and I'm posting this from FF3, actually.
I don't really think I like it. You might. If you don't, or if something goes wrong and you want to revert, you can restore from your backup:
You sure? I seem to recall this being shoved in my face on every Debian install I've ever done. The default motd.
"Debian GNU/Linux comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by applicable law."
Well, you don't say whether you're doing this for a laptop or desktop. I'm going to assume laptop.
Here are Google checkout links to the Intel 3945ABG mini-PCI card. It's what I have in my laptop as well as most of the ones at the office. It's cheap, and I believe it will work well for you.
Every Ubuntu install I've done on laptops -- and that's a lot -- has wireless working out of the box, without any issue, if it was an Intel wireless chipset. In fact, even the live CD let me use wireless (including WPA) while it installed. You can usually replace the wireless card in a laptop by just unscrewing a panel on the bottom and popping out the old one.
That having been said, Broadcom chipsets are not hard to deal with anymore. Since at least 7.04, Ubuntu usually gives you a little "Restricted Drivers" notification. Click it, check "Enable Drivers" or whatever it says, and it does. Very simple and has worked 95% of the time for me without any further interaction.
Sounds like "shoot first and ask questions later", to me. I realise the story takes a bit of dramatic liberty, but not by much.
Here, consider. He has a shotgun trained on what he thinks is someone breaking and entering. Of course, it may just be some lost deranged hobo or his son trying to sneak back home after a night out with the boys, but whatever. The burglar may or may not have a crowbar -- it was too dark and shadowy to really tell, apparently.
So, without further ado, he pumps the guy full of lead?
Guns can deter crime and defend you in ways that don't involve pulling the trigger.
How about turning on the light and letting the burglar see that you're holding a shotgun?
Or rack a round. The familiar ker-klack! of a shotgun shell being loaded would send most people fleeing into the night.
Or, just announce yourself. If they don't run, well, you've still got the shotgun as a last resort.
And that's the real problem with sob stories like this. The guy didn't use firepower as a last resort, but as his first option. After briefly glimpsing a shadowy Something he couldn't positively identify, that was enough for him, and he opened fire without bothering to verify his target. To me this sounds like a trigger happy paranoid who shouldn't have a gun in the first place.
I'm not saying that lethal force is completely uncalled for in certain situations, but having a gun is often enough of a deterrent to stop anybody. Pulling the trigger should be the last option at your disposal.
Odd. I have an HP nx7400 which has successfully run 6.06, 7.04, and 7.10, in both 32 bit and 64 bit flavors. Never had a problem with the wireless, and it has always worked out of the box. That's an Intel chipset though, which makes it easier. Network Manager worked fine. I've also installed it on other laptops here at work, all of which are Dell or HP, and haven't run into problems.
When I've done this on Broadcom-based wireless, I've only ever had to click the little thing that says "Use this restricted driver?" or whatever. A few seconds later and wireless is ready.
In all installs, the only problem I have ever had out of the box was widescreen Intel video chipsets. For some reason, they sometimes don't work until you run a utility called 915resolution which patches the video bios to widescreen resolutions (in my case, 1680x1050). However, I tried the 8.04 beta about a week ago on another HP machine identical to my own and it actually worked at the correct resolution, so I didn't have to screw around with it.
When I say everything else works out of the box, I mean it -- at least since 7.04. On every machine I've thrown at it, everything has worked flawlessly. Video with 3D acceleration on ATI, nvidia, and Intel (though I have not tried this on the 8000 series nvidia cards), sound, wireless, Bluetooth (which I don't use, but it works), the whole bit.
I've never had that happen under Windows -- it's always a game of visiting individual manufacturer's sites to find fiddly little drivers which install a bunch of useless garbage alongside themselves, just to get something like the ethernet controller working. Absolutely idiotic. I dread Windows installs these days.
When I started typing this post, I also started the x86 desktop install of 8.04 on a Dell 600m. It's already done installing (took about fifteen minutes) and everything is already working, except that Broadcom chip but... I just clicked the Restricted Driver thing and now I'm wireless.
Why anyone suffers through Windows nonsense anymore is truly beyond me.
Perhaps, but that's rather beside the point, and such a massive undertaking I can't even wrap my head around it. Combine this with the uncomfortable notion of telling people where they can and can't live and you see it isn't as simple as just redesigning our cities, though I do agree that urban sprawl is a hideous problem and something should be done. But that's something of a seperate issue.
Unlike many other things, gasoline is not generally an elastic good. Meaning that demand for it will always remain more or less unrelated to cost, because for the majority of people it isn't something they can easily choose to do without. Sure, you could cut down on pointless weekend drives, I suppose, but by and large, people still need to get to work, go to the store, visit your friends. For these things, most people need cars, and they can't just go "Well, gas is too expensive, so I will decrease my demand for it by not going to work."
So that's all the original poster was saying, really. Gasoline price -- at least to the general car-driving public -- is only barely affected by supply and demand.
The problem is that the "widescreen" displays being offered are, by and large, no more wide than were your old displays. That's what ticks me off the most. 1280x1024 was a decent resolution a couple of years ago. But then "widescreen" came out and, oh, what do we have?
1280x900. Gee whiz, thanks! Since it's now clearly rectangular it's "wide", but all they really did was cut off one or two hundred pixels from your vertical rez. Exactly how did I benefit from this? Drives me absolutely insane. Finding laptops above 900 pixels vertical is quite a chore; I know, because I've spent quite a while pricing them out for work and I refuse to go below 1050.
I like my 1680x1050 screens just fine, but they still don't compare to the 1600x1200 screens of yore, which are nearly impossible to find these days. Sacrificing 80 pixels in the horizontal to gain that kind of vertical resolution is fine by me.
I realise everyone's needs and preferences are different, but I am so, so tired of manufacturers touting this OMFG WIDESCREEN garbage like it's the second coming, when in reality it's just as wide as it was before, and significantly less tall.
The problem with most "widescreen" is that they aren't offering anything they didn't have before. I remember having a nice (at the time) 1280x1024 screen on a laptop a couple years ago, and it was great. Plenty of desktop real estate to work with.
Then someone came along with this "widescreen" garbage. Too many of today's widescreen monitors and laptops are something abysmal like 1280x800. Thanks for that. My horizontal size is the same as it was before, but now I have 224 less vertical pixels. Ooh, but it's a very rectangular shape now! That must mean it's awesome!
Seriously, of what possible benefit was that to me? The only people profiting from this are the manufacturers, who can now make something like 20% more screens with the same materials as before.
The screens I use now, both at home and on my laptops, are 1680x1050. I believe 1050 to be the absolute minimum vertical resolution acceptable, This resolution is more than decent, but I really wish manufacturers would stop pretending like they're offering something new and better over the traditional screen sizes -- and I really wish people would wise up and stop buying into it.
I don't care if they are interested in what IT does. I'm not really interested in their bean-counting, either, which is why they're the accountants and I'm the sysadmin.
They don't need to be interested in computers, but they do need to know how to use them. It is part of their job requirement, just as "balancing ledger" and "using copy machine" are. If they can't do it, they aren't qualified for the position.
My expectations for users are astonishingly low. I don't expect them to diagnose issues on their own unless it's something blindingly obvious. I expect them to use their computer competently without breaking things. Additionally, I expect them to learn from their mistakes -- if they did action ABC which caused something to break, and it is explained to them, I expect them to remember that and not do it again.
I also expect them to be able to sit down at application Y, having never seen it before but having used application X which is very similar, and make a reasonably good stab at using application Y. And that's not an IT issue, either -- I expect anyone who claims to be intelligent to be able to do this for any given scenario, whether it involves computers or not. The ability to extrapolate from a known situation to an unknown but similar situation is part of what any intelligent entity should be able to do.
Sure, there's always more than one way to tackle a situation like this. But what happens when the robot, upon entering a building, needs to open a door or climb a ladder or something?:)
Considerations like that are why I say that in general, the human form is the best for urban environments, which are built around human forms anyway.
I agree, we're under no obligation there. But that doesn't give us free reign to take advantage of them, either. Like if the cashier accidently hands you a fifty instead of a five for change, presumably he didn't know about the error, but I wouldn't say it's therefore ethical to just pocket it.
But I wasn't really arguing that. I was saying we can't keep the retarded argument of "Well, the computer asked permission and the router said yes..." when we all know the router is not representing the owner's intent. Whether we're ethically obligated to refrain from using it is something else; my point was only that people need to stop trotting out such an absurd assertion.
All that aside I have no ethical issue with stealing some wireless for a brief time, off some hapless doofus with the essid of "linksys" or "Belkin 54 G". But I'd draw the line at the type of people who just use their neighbor's wireless as their own, because they can't or won't get their own connection.
Is the human form really the ideal form for urban warfare?
In most cases, yes. Since the urban infrastructure was designed for the human form, a robot that needs to get around and use things in that environment should probably be pretty close to the human form.
In other environments this is probably not the case. A human form might not be the best for arctic or jungle combat. In such a case you'd probably want the robot to resemble (or draw from) an animal which is adapted for that environment.
The problem with your analogy is that a human gets involved in the decision-making process, and articulates his intent. In so doing, he personally clears up any potential misunderstandings about what he wanted to do.
With wireless, you can't make that assumption. The router's "invitation" counts for nothing about the owner's intent, unless the owner has taken steps to make it totally clear it's open (like renaming the SSID). If you're looking at a default, out of the box WAP, then yes, it is accepting your requests, but you can't assume that's what the owner intended. In fact, since most people who know what they're doing wouldn't leave everything at default, you can probably assume it's just some hapless user who doesn't know any better, which further erodes the notion that he intended the AP to be open.
Is this actually the case? I'm not asking facetiously. The majority of machines I've seen have either Broadcom or Intel wireless chipsets, with a few atheros still floating around here and there. Intel and Atheros work out of the box on every machine I've ever installed with Ubuntu. I even have a little Atheros PCMCIA wireless card which works fine if I plug it into any of my Linux laptops (Debian or Ubuntu).
With Broadcom, I used to have to manually get ndiswrapper and the Windows drivers, but since Feisty I haven't had to. The first boot into Gnome, it pops a window saying something along the lines of "The restricted driver for this is available. Click here to enable it." And that was that. Works in 32 bit and 64 bit installs.
I've done this on plenty of HP laptops at my workplace which come with Vista preloaded, without issue. Which cards are the major pains in the ass today, and how common are they, really?
Don't be naive. The owner of the WAP almost never "specifies" that it should be open. It comes that way by default. The overwhelming majority of people just plug the thing into their modem and consider it great that now they can take their laptop all over the house with this magic wireless thing.
If someone alters the SSID to state that it's meant for public use that's one thing. But to act like any open AP is an indication of the owner's intent is idiotic.
All the mindless bleating around here, about how your computer "asked" for an IP and the router said "okay", doesn't change that. Nor do any of the silly analogies about water fountains in your front yard, or unlocked doors.
This is slashdot. We all know how users think when it comes to technology. Why do we want to pretend that on this one topic, those same users are suddenly extremely savvy and are deliberately leaving their APs open, instead of acknowledging that they're doing the same thing they do with everything else -- getting it functional and leaving it the hell alone after that?
That's fair, but the problem is that most GUIs are *not* done well to that point. And too often, they won't let you enter invalid data, as you say, but they won't tell you what's invalid about it.
I may typo something in my text config file, but when it breaks, I can check logs and see exactly which line it's complaining about, and go to that line and see what I messed up. With a GUI, that is almost never an option.
I do agree with you that the majority of things could be handled both ways, though. There is no reason a GUI couldn't just be a front-end to a text file, and let the administrator decide which one he wants to deal with. Then he or she would have the advantage of being able to click through it, and be able to back things up and check specific errors. I've never really understood why most Windows apps don't work that way.
Consider gaming. Most of my FPS games have a bunch of text files that dictate all the parameters of the game settings -- resolution, detail rates, buffer size, volumetric this and anisotropic that. I can load the game and adjust them through the menus, or I can edit the config files directly. It's my choice. If games can do this so easily, why can't more important applications?
But the point is that Your Mom doesn't know how to get that.exe in the first place. All she knows is that her sound isn't working. You or I know to haul over to dell.com and click through the endless menus to identify our specific machines to get the specific exe, but Your Mom has no idea how to do that.
Drivers in Linux are a bit more touchy, I guess, but to Your Mom it's all black magic voodoo anyway, regardless of the platform. And in my experience, Ubuntu handles hardware out of the box much, much better than XP does. Against Vista it could go either way -- but I still think it's sad that a statement like that has to be made. With market dominance and the resources and money at Microsoft's disposal, by all rights Vista should be stomping Ubuntu. The fact that it's a close race says a hell of a lot for Linux, or maybe a lot derogatory about Microsoft.:)
And on a side note, I am also amused at the fact that out of the box, Ubuntu these days has all the pretty transparency and fancy animations of Vista, at about a tenth of the performance hit and system requirements.
It's interesting that you call me a "liar" about the digitally signed driver thing. It does, in fact, present quite a problem for certain things. It was basically unsolvable when I tried to get vmware running on Vista, and gave me a headache with nvidia drivers as well. Some of these things you can just click the "I don't care" button or whatever it says, but with others, it just won't install.
I don't think I've ever had to search google for Linux apps, either, unless I was trying to get opinions on which would suit what I was trying to do. 'apt-cache search whatever' works fine for me. Others prefer Synaptic. Unless you want something really esoteric, you don't have to use google when you have a repository like this.
Nor is the 32/64 bit thing "bullshit". You can bleat "you don't know what you're talking about!" all day, but let's see some evidence. I can come up with more than a few examples of things that won't install on my Vista 64 box at home, either because it "needs" to be XP, or because it's 64 bit. Linux has this issue too, obviously, if you're using binaries compiled for 32 bit platforms, but the point of apt is that you don't need to care. In a 64 bit Linux install, apt will fetch you the 64 bit binaries and dependencies.
The rest of what you're babbling about is just nonsense. Linux doesn't thrash drives any more than Vista does -- and perhaps less, given Vista's insane memory requirements and need for swap, plus the constant search indexing going on. If you're referring to the recent slashdot story, maybe you'd better RTFA and comments.
Vista is better about drivers, yes, but in my experience it's still behind Ubuntu. Especially when, god forbid, your driver isn't Digitally Signed and Certified by Microsoft, at which point Vista just refuses to install it. But out of the box, yeah, it handles most of my hardware pretty well. Not as well as Ubuntu has, though.
As for your other point, yes, a computer to the average person is a box with useful programs. In that light, what do you get on a fresh Windows install? Practically nothing -- a crippled, hideous audio/video player (WMP), a crippled word processor (WordPad), and a browser that, while it is making progress, is still pretty much a gaping security hole.
That's pretty much it. Anything else you want, you're going to have to seek out, buy, find shareware, or pirate, and install it yourself, sifting through dozens of.exe installers or CDs and whatever else. Those programs you've been using since the early days of XP suddenly won't install in Vista, or won't work because they're written for 32 bit and you've got 64 bit, or some other crap.
Ubuntu comes with practically everything the average user would ever care about. Email, browser, Office suite, IM and IRC client, music player, video player, CD burner... it has it all, out of the box.
If you want something else, click the Package Manager and help yourself to any or all of thousands of programs. For free. Click on them and then sit back and let them magically appear in your menu -- without, I should add, leaving fifty thousand worthless icons and helpers and startup bullshit all over the place. All tailored to your exact OS version -- no guesswork.
Honestly, I would feel more comfortable giving my own mother an Ubuntu CD than an XP or Vista CD at this point. I expect I'd have to field a few calls from her, but I have to do that with Windows anyway, and I can also guarantee that I wouldn't have to go clean trojans and viruses off her machine every month either.
I don't think so. In a Windows server (or other mostly-GUI environment) you're configuring things with little checkboxes and so forth. There is little, if any, indication of what's going on under the hood. If you have checkbox XYZ checked, but it isn't working, what next? Did it really make the change it was supposed to, or is something else going wrong?
Editing a textfile, though, you know the change got made, because you made it, and you can go back and look at it. What's more, since it's all configured with standard text files, you can drop those files onto any other install of the same service and it'll almost always work. This is useful for deploying across multiple machines, and is also wonderful for backups.
For remote administration, text has advantages over GUI too -- not the least of which is bandwidth and latency. Trying to deal with an RDP session to screw with configs is infuriating if the connection is lagged. You won't notice the effects of lag with ssh, or if you do, it would have to be much, much worse than it would if you were doing it with GUI. Furthermore, I can have tons of terminals with ssh running without impacting my bandwidth too much, but a few RDP or Citrix sessions are going to hammer me.
When it comes to servers, text really is better than GUI for administration. But then, this discussion was supposed to be about the average user, who isn't fooling around with servers.
Now hold on a second. Would your friend have been able to get wireless working in Windows if the driver didn't automatically install? It frequently doesn't, you know? I can't count the number of times I've done a clean XP install, and had it fail to install sound drivers, video drivers, ethernet controller drivers, or wireless drivers. (But it does helpfully offer to look on the internet for such drivers. How it plans to do this with no connectivity is anyone's guess.)
Every time this happens -- which is often enough to be annoying -- I have to go hunt down individual drivers from individual manufacturer's websites, since half of them seem to need to be propietary to work at all (the generic Broadcom driver for a Dell laptop, for example, would not install, but the one from Dell's site did). Then I have to burn them to CD, take them to the afflicted machine, and load them that way.
Ironically I usually end up doing this from my Ubuntu laptop, where everything -- absolutely everything -- worked out of the box. Even on Broadcom chipsets, the only thing I've ever had trouble with in the past when it came to Linux, Ubuntu just threw a message box that said something like "Check this box to enable the restricted wireless driver," and presto.
My point, I guess, is that I've never understood why people criticize Linux because Your Mom wouldn't know what to do if something goes awry. While true, it isn't like Your Mom knows what to do when things go awry with Windows either, so what's the difference?
Fine, but it's still an inane comment to make. It's like saying "HR isn't a profit center for the company." Maybe not, because the company's product isn't HR, but you can be damn sure the company wouldn't get anything done without employee paychecks coming through.
I already agreed that IT isn't the "profit center" of most companies, but they are equally as important as the salespeople or the people producing the product. Nobody would get anything done without an IT infrastructure and the people who run it. To behave like a department is somehow less important than the "profit center" department is idiotic.
And of course, the original poster's comment was that since IT isn't the "profit center" of a company, they are "disposable". I dare say that any college grad with three brain cells can learn to do sales, which is why sales jobs have such a ridiculously high turnover. Not so with any IT job above tier one helpdesk. Sales may be the "profit center" of most companies, but most sales people are utterly replacable. A good sysadmin or DBA is not -- and let's see how much work your sales people in the "profit center" get done without IT around.
lose the integrated webcam, lose multi-touch, lose optical audio in/out, Firewire connectivity, lose MagSafe, and lose DVI out
I am unable to express through mere words just how little I care about any of those things. I'd go so far as to argue that most people don't, either. Honestly, how many people even have devices that use Firewire? How many people actually try to hook DVI to their laptop? I won't even bother with the asthetics comment, since that's entirely subjective. I myself vastly prefer the no-nonsense look and legendary durability of a Thinkpad over the chinsy, New Age, feel-good construction and appearance of a Macbook.
Know what I do care about, though? Right-clicking. Whether in Windows or Linux. The Macbook won't let me do that without either hooking up an external mouse, which is an absolutely loathesome idea to me since I want a laptop to be fully functional without having to hang crap off of it, or with some asinine key combination that will piss me off to no end. And no, I don't want to run OSX, because I can't stand OSX.
I'll take the 350 dollars and an integrated right-mouse button. You can keep your precious MagSafe.
A. in-house IT departments are not typically profit centers, and that makes you disposable.
It's easy to say that until they aren't around, at which point you have a company full of salespeople or whatever who can't get anything done because they have no clue how to use their own computers. While I agree that IT isn't the core focus of most businesses, it is absolutely integral to making any business function. Without IT most businesses would not exist, and knowledgable, adaptable IT staff can mean the difference between a two minute database or email server screwup, and having everything effectively shut down for five hours, so please, reconsider your statement.
And you probably would be a total idiot if you had to do their job.
See, I don't think so. Not that I personally would know how to do any arbitrary person's job offhand, of course. But I think the distinction is that most hapless users don't even try, and display little, if any, ability to adjust or extrapolate. Sit the average office yob in front of an application they've never seen before, and their first instinct will be to call for help and complain that they aren't "a computer guy" -- even though they've seen many applications that are very much like it. (Click the menus at the top, guys, just like every other program you've ever seen...)
While I might not be able to do Joe Punchclock's job, I'd at least be able to take a reasonably good stab at it -- if I'd done similar jobs before. That is what distinguishes normal people from the total idiots.
Also, your comment is a bit strange to me, since from my point of view, a user who constantly screws up their computer isn't doing his or her job in the first place. While the job might not be directly computer-related, computers are part of the workplace today and aren't going away. Not knowing how to use a computer competently is like not knowing how to use a copy machine -- and bear in mind, no one is asking the user to know how to fix either one, or how they work at a fundamental level. Just use them without breaking things or bothering other people because you can't figure it out.
All that said, yes, of course it's inappropriate to call someone an idiot to their face, even if they deserve it. But management could help here, too, by not hiring people who lack the basic skills to work in a modern office.
Slashdot Mirror
This isn't really "major surgery" in the grand scheme, though it can seem that way at first. But like I said, nonsense like this is something you will very, very rarely ever have to deal with unless you're trying to do something unusual, and installing beta or untested software is considered unusual. 99% of anything you'll ever want to install or update will be in apt or Synaptic.
My experience with Ubuntu is that, when something new and important comes out, you can either do it manually right away, like the instructions I just offered, or wait three or four days for it to get loaded into the repository. Ubuntu's goal has always been for stability and compatability for the user, so it is not surprising that they might take a couple extra days to review things before putting them into the public realm. But once they do, it is a single click or single command to bring it up to date.
Good luck. Let me (or Slashdot) know if you need more help with anything.
Annoying that it comes with no instructions, isn't it? Thankfully you don't have to do this often. apt/Synaptic will take care of it for you, or at most you'll have to install a .deb package. Easy to do.
/usr/lib/firefox/. So here's what to do.
/home/kitten/temp/
/usr/lib/firefox/ .
/usr/lib/firefox/
/usr/lib/
/usr/lib/firefox/ with the contents of the archive you just extracted. Check that it's there, then shut down your existing Firefox and re-open it. It should now be FF3. I just did it and I'm posting this from FF3, actually.
/usr/lib/firefox/ /temp/firefox/ /usr/lib/firefox/
:)
Anyway, for this, you've got the archive. I checked and it looks like it replaces everything in
First back up your existing install. I put mine in a temp directory I use for this kind of crap,
kitten@minerva:~/temp$ sudo cp -r
Next, blow away the existing install:
kitten@minerva:~$ sudo rm -rf
And extract your archive there:
kitten@minerva:~$ sudo tar -xvf firefox-3.0rc1.tar
You should now have a directory
I don't really think I like it. You might. If you don't, or if something goes wrong and you want to revert, you can restore from your backup:
kitten@minerva:~$ sudo rm -rf
kitten@minerva:~$ sudo cp -r
And that will put everything back how it was. Which is what I'm about to do.
You sure? I seem to recall this being shoved in my face on every Debian install I've ever done. The default motd. "Debian GNU/Linux comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by applicable law."
Well, you don't say whether you're doing this for a laptop or desktop. I'm going to assume laptop.
Here are Google checkout links to the Intel 3945ABG mini-PCI card. It's what I have in my laptop as well as most of the ones at the office. It's cheap, and I believe it will work well for you.
Every Ubuntu install I've done on laptops -- and that's a lot -- has wireless working out of the box, without any issue, if it was an Intel wireless chipset. In fact, even the live CD let me use wireless (including WPA) while it installed. You can usually replace the wireless card in a laptop by just unscrewing a panel on the bottom and popping out the old one.
That having been said, Broadcom chipsets are not hard to deal with anymore. Since at least 7.04, Ubuntu usually gives you a little "Restricted Drivers" notification. Click it, check "Enable Drivers" or whatever it says, and it does. Very simple and has worked 95% of the time for me without any further interaction.
Sound familiar?
Sounds like "shoot first and ask questions later", to me. I realise the story takes a bit of dramatic liberty, but not by much.
Here, consider. He has a shotgun trained on what he thinks is someone breaking and entering. Of course, it may just be some lost deranged hobo or his son trying to sneak back home after a night out with the boys, but whatever. The burglar may or may not have a crowbar -- it was too dark and shadowy to really tell, apparently.
So, without further ado, he pumps the guy full of lead?
Guns can deter crime and defend you in ways that don't involve pulling the trigger.
How about turning on the light and letting the burglar see that you're holding a shotgun?
Or rack a round. The familiar ker-klack! of a shotgun shell being loaded would send most people fleeing into the night.
Or, just announce yourself. If they don't run, well, you've still got the shotgun as a last resort.
And that's the real problem with sob stories like this. The guy didn't use firepower as a last resort, but as his first option. After briefly glimpsing a shadowy Something he couldn't positively identify, that was enough for him, and he opened fire without bothering to verify his target. To me this sounds like a trigger happy paranoid who shouldn't have a gun in the first place.
I'm not saying that lethal force is completely uncalled for in certain situations, but having a gun is often enough of a deterrent to stop anybody. Pulling the trigger should be the last option at your disposal.
Odd. I have an HP nx7400 which has successfully run 6.06, 7.04, and 7.10, in both 32 bit and 64 bit flavors. Never had a problem with the wireless, and it has always worked out of the box. That's an Intel chipset though, which makes it easier. Network Manager worked fine. I've also installed it on other laptops here at work, all of which are Dell or HP, and haven't run into problems.
When I've done this on Broadcom-based wireless, I've only ever had to click the little thing that says "Use this restricted driver?" or whatever. A few seconds later and wireless is ready.
In all installs, the only problem I have ever had out of the box was widescreen Intel video chipsets. For some reason, they sometimes don't work until you run a utility called 915resolution which patches the video bios to widescreen resolutions (in my case, 1680x1050). However, I tried the 8.04 beta about a week ago on another HP machine identical to my own and it actually worked at the correct resolution, so I didn't have to screw around with it.
When I say everything else works out of the box, I mean it -- at least since 7.04. On every machine I've thrown at it, everything has worked flawlessly. Video with 3D acceleration on ATI, nvidia, and Intel (though I have not tried this on the 8000 series nvidia cards), sound, wireless, Bluetooth (which I don't use, but it works), the whole bit.
I've never had that happen under Windows -- it's always a game of visiting individual manufacturer's sites to find fiddly little drivers which install a bunch of useless garbage alongside themselves, just to get something like the ethernet controller working. Absolutely idiotic. I dread Windows installs these days.
When I started typing this post, I also started the x86 desktop install of 8.04 on a Dell 600m. It's already done installing (took about fifteen minutes) and everything is already working, except that Broadcom chip but... I just clicked the Restricted Driver thing and now I'm wireless.
Why anyone suffers through Windows nonsense anymore is truly beyond me.
Perhaps, but that's rather beside the point, and such a massive undertaking I can't even wrap my head around it. Combine this with the uncomfortable notion of telling people where they can and can't live and you see it isn't as simple as just redesigning our cities, though I do agree that urban sprawl is a hideous problem and something should be done. But that's something of a seperate issue.
Unlike many other things, gasoline is not generally an elastic good. Meaning that demand for it will always remain more or less unrelated to cost, because for the majority of people it isn't something they can easily choose to do without. Sure, you could cut down on pointless weekend drives, I suppose, but by and large, people still need to get to work, go to the store, visit your friends. For these things, most people need cars, and they can't just go "Well, gas is too expensive, so I will decrease my demand for it by not going to work."
So that's all the original poster was saying, really. Gasoline price -- at least to the general car-driving public -- is only barely affected by supply and demand.
The problem is that the "widescreen" displays being offered are, by and large, no more wide than were your old displays. That's what ticks me off the most. 1280x1024 was a decent resolution a couple of years ago. But then "widescreen" came out and, oh, what do we have?
1280x900. Gee whiz, thanks! Since it's now clearly rectangular it's "wide", but all they really did was cut off one or two hundred pixels from your vertical rez. Exactly how did I benefit from this? Drives me absolutely insane. Finding laptops above 900 pixels vertical is quite a chore; I know, because I've spent quite a while pricing them out for work and I refuse to go below 1050.
I like my 1680x1050 screens just fine, but they still don't compare to the 1600x1200 screens of yore, which are nearly impossible to find these days. Sacrificing 80 pixels in the horizontal to gain that kind of vertical resolution is fine by me.
I realise everyone's needs and preferences are different, but I am so, so tired of manufacturers touting this OMFG WIDESCREEN garbage like it's the second coming, when in reality it's just as wide as it was before, and significantly less tall.
The problem with most "widescreen" is that they aren't offering anything they didn't have before. I remember having a nice (at the time) 1280x1024 screen on a laptop a couple years ago, and it was great. Plenty of desktop real estate to work with.
Then someone came along with this "widescreen" garbage. Too many of today's widescreen monitors and laptops are something abysmal like 1280x800. Thanks for that. My horizontal size is the same as it was before, but now I have 224 less vertical pixels. Ooh, but it's a very rectangular shape now! That must mean it's awesome!
Seriously, of what possible benefit was that to me? The only people profiting from this are the manufacturers, who can now make something like 20% more screens with the same materials as before.
The screens I use now, both at home and on my laptops, are 1680x1050. I believe 1050 to be the absolute minimum vertical resolution acceptable, This resolution is more than decent, but I really wish manufacturers would stop pretending like they're offering something new and better over the traditional screen sizes -- and I really wish people would wise up and stop buying into it.
I don't care if they are interested in what IT does. I'm not really interested in their bean-counting, either, which is why they're the accountants and I'm the sysadmin.
They don't need to be interested in computers, but they do need to know how to use them. It is part of their job requirement, just as "balancing ledger" and "using copy machine" are. If they can't do it, they aren't qualified for the position.
My expectations for users are astonishingly low. I don't expect them to diagnose issues on their own unless it's something blindingly obvious. I expect them to use their computer competently without breaking things. Additionally, I expect them to learn from their mistakes -- if they did action ABC which caused something to break, and it is explained to them, I expect them to remember that and not do it again.
I also expect them to be able to sit down at application Y, having never seen it before but having used application X which is very similar, and make a reasonably good stab at using application Y. And that's not an IT issue, either -- I expect anyone who claims to be intelligent to be able to do this for any given scenario, whether it involves computers or not. The ability to extrapolate from a known situation to an unknown but similar situation is part of what any intelligent entity should be able to do.
Sure, there's always more than one way to tackle a situation like this. But what happens when the robot, upon entering a building, needs to open a door or climb a ladder or something? :)
Considerations like that are why I say that in general, the human form is the best for urban environments, which are built around human forms anyway.
I agree, we're under no obligation there. But that doesn't give us free reign to take advantage of them, either. Like if the cashier accidently hands you a fifty instead of a five for change, presumably he didn't know about the error, but I wouldn't say it's therefore ethical to just pocket it.
But I wasn't really arguing that. I was saying we can't keep the retarded argument of "Well, the computer asked permission and the router said yes..." when we all know the router is not representing the owner's intent. Whether we're ethically obligated to refrain from using it is something else; my point was only that people need to stop trotting out such an absurd assertion.
All that aside I have no ethical issue with stealing some wireless for a brief time, off some hapless doofus with the essid of "linksys" or "Belkin 54 G". But I'd draw the line at the type of people who just use their neighbor's wireless as their own, because they can't or won't get their own connection.
Is the human form really the ideal form for urban warfare?
In most cases, yes. Since the urban infrastructure was designed for the human form, a robot that needs to get around and use things in that environment should probably be pretty close to the human form.
In other environments this is probably not the case. A human form might not be the best for arctic or jungle combat. In such a case you'd probably want the robot to resemble (or draw from) an animal which is adapted for that environment.
The problem with your analogy is that a human gets involved in the decision-making process, and articulates his intent. In so doing, he personally clears up any potential misunderstandings about what he wanted to do.
With wireless, you can't make that assumption. The router's "invitation" counts for nothing about the owner's intent, unless the owner has taken steps to make it totally clear it's open (like renaming the SSID). If you're looking at a default, out of the box WAP, then yes, it is accepting your requests, but you can't assume that's what the owner intended. In fact, since most people who know what they're doing wouldn't leave everything at default, you can probably assume it's just some hapless user who doesn't know any better, which further erodes the notion that he intended the AP to be open.
Is this actually the case? I'm not asking facetiously. The majority of machines I've seen have either Broadcom or Intel wireless chipsets, with a few atheros still floating around here and there. Intel and Atheros work out of the box on every machine I've ever installed with Ubuntu. I even have a little Atheros PCMCIA wireless card which works fine if I plug it into any of my Linux laptops (Debian or Ubuntu).
With Broadcom, I used to have to manually get ndiswrapper and the Windows drivers, but since Feisty I haven't had to. The first boot into Gnome, it pops a window saying something along the lines of "The restricted driver for this is available. Click here to enable it." And that was that. Works in 32 bit and 64 bit installs.
I've done this on plenty of HP laptops at my workplace which come with Vista preloaded, without issue. Which cards are the major pains in the ass today, and how common are they, really?
Don't be naive. The owner of the WAP almost never "specifies" that it should be open. It comes that way by default. The overwhelming majority of people just plug the thing into their modem and consider it great that now they can take their laptop all over the house with this magic wireless thing.
If someone alters the SSID to state that it's meant for public use that's one thing. But to act like any open AP is an indication of the owner's intent is idiotic.
All the mindless bleating around here, about how your computer "asked" for an IP and the router said "okay", doesn't change that. Nor do any of the silly analogies about water fountains in your front yard, or unlocked doors.
This is slashdot. We all know how users think when it comes to technology. Why do we want to pretend that on this one topic, those same users are suddenly extremely savvy and are deliberately leaving their APs open, instead of acknowledging that they're doing the same thing they do with everything else -- getting it functional and leaving it the hell alone after that?
That's fair, but the problem is that most GUIs are *not* done well to that point. And too often, they won't let you enter invalid data, as you say, but they won't tell you what's invalid about it.
I may typo something in my text config file, but when it breaks, I can check logs and see exactly which line it's complaining about, and go to that line and see what I messed up. With a GUI, that is almost never an option.
I do agree with you that the majority of things could be handled both ways, though. There is no reason a GUI couldn't just be a front-end to a text file, and let the administrator decide which one he wants to deal with. Then he or she would have the advantage of being able to click through it, and be able to back things up and check specific errors. I've never really understood why most Windows apps don't work that way.
Consider gaming. Most of my FPS games have a bunch of text files that dictate all the parameters of the game settings -- resolution, detail rates, buffer size, volumetric this and anisotropic that. I can load the game and adjust them through the menus, or I can edit the config files directly. It's my choice. If games can do this so easily, why can't more important applications?
But the point is that Your Mom doesn't know how to get that .exe in the first place. All she knows is that her sound isn't working. You or I know to haul over to dell.com and click through the endless menus to identify our specific machines to get the specific exe, but Your Mom has no idea how to do that.
:)
Drivers in Linux are a bit more touchy, I guess, but to Your Mom it's all black magic voodoo anyway, regardless of the platform. And in my experience, Ubuntu handles hardware out of the box much, much better than XP does. Against Vista it could go either way -- but I still think it's sad that a statement like that has to be made. With market dominance and the resources and money at Microsoft's disposal, by all rights Vista should be stomping Ubuntu. The fact that it's a close race says a hell of a lot for Linux, or maybe a lot derogatory about Microsoft.
And on a side note, I am also amused at the fact that out of the box, Ubuntu these days has all the pretty transparency and fancy animations of Vista, at about a tenth of the performance hit and system requirements.
It's interesting that you call me a "liar" about the digitally signed driver thing. It does, in fact, present quite a problem for certain things. It was basically unsolvable when I tried to get vmware running on Vista, and gave me a headache with nvidia drivers as well. Some of these things you can just click the "I don't care" button or whatever it says, but with others, it just won't install.
I don't think I've ever had to search google for Linux apps, either, unless I was trying to get opinions on which would suit what I was trying to do. 'apt-cache search whatever' works fine for me. Others prefer Synaptic. Unless you want something really esoteric, you don't have to use google when you have a repository like this.
Nor is the 32/64 bit thing "bullshit". You can bleat "you don't know what you're talking about!" all day, but let's see some evidence. I can come up with more than a few examples of things that won't install on my Vista 64 box at home, either because it "needs" to be XP, or because it's 64 bit. Linux has this issue too, obviously, if you're using binaries compiled for 32 bit platforms, but the point of apt is that you don't need to care. In a 64 bit Linux install, apt will fetch you the 64 bit binaries and dependencies.
The rest of what you're babbling about is just nonsense. Linux doesn't thrash drives any more than Vista does -- and perhaps less, given Vista's insane memory requirements and need for swap, plus the constant search indexing going on. If you're referring to the recent slashdot story, maybe you'd better RTFA and comments.
So gear down there, Big Shifter.
Vista is better about drivers, yes, but in my experience it's still behind Ubuntu. Especially when, god forbid, your driver isn't Digitally Signed and Certified by Microsoft, at which point Vista just refuses to install it. But out of the box, yeah, it handles most of my hardware pretty well. Not as well as Ubuntu has, though.
.exe installers or CDs and whatever else. Those programs you've been using since the early days of XP suddenly won't install in Vista, or won't work because they're written for 32 bit and you've got 64 bit, or some other crap.
As for your other point, yes, a computer to the average person is a box with useful programs. In that light, what do you get on a fresh Windows install? Practically nothing -- a crippled, hideous audio/video player (WMP), a crippled word processor (WordPad), and a browser that, while it is making progress, is still pretty much a gaping security hole.
That's pretty much it. Anything else you want, you're going to have to seek out, buy, find shareware, or pirate, and install it yourself, sifting through dozens of
Ubuntu comes with practically everything the average user would ever care about. Email, browser, Office suite, IM and IRC client, music player, video player, CD burner... it has it all, out of the box.
If you want something else, click the Package Manager and help yourself to any or all of thousands of programs. For free. Click on them and then sit back and let them magically appear in your menu -- without, I should add, leaving fifty thousand worthless icons and helpers and startup bullshit all over the place. All tailored to your exact OS version -- no guesswork.
Honestly, I would feel more comfortable giving my own mother an Ubuntu CD than an XP or Vista CD at this point. I expect I'd have to field a few calls from her, but I have to do that with Windows anyway, and I can also guarantee that I wouldn't have to go clean trojans and viruses off her machine every month either.
I don't think so. In a Windows server (or other mostly-GUI environment) you're configuring things with little checkboxes and so forth. There is little, if any, indication of what's going on under the hood. If you have checkbox XYZ checked, but it isn't working, what next? Did it really make the change it was supposed to, or is something else going wrong?
Editing a textfile, though, you know the change got made, because you made it, and you can go back and look at it. What's more, since it's all configured with standard text files, you can drop those files onto any other install of the same service and it'll almost always work. This is useful for deploying across multiple machines, and is also wonderful for backups.
For remote administration, text has advantages over GUI too -- not the least of which is bandwidth and latency. Trying to deal with an RDP session to screw with configs is infuriating if the connection is lagged. You won't notice the effects of lag with ssh, or if you do, it would have to be much, much worse than it would if you were doing it with GUI. Furthermore, I can have tons of terminals with ssh running without impacting my bandwidth too much, but a few RDP or Citrix sessions are going to hammer me.
When it comes to servers, text really is better than GUI for administration. But then, this discussion was supposed to be about the average user, who isn't fooling around with servers.
Now hold on a second. Would your friend have been able to get wireless working in Windows if the driver didn't automatically install? It frequently doesn't, you know? I can't count the number of times I've done a clean XP install, and had it fail to install sound drivers, video drivers, ethernet controller drivers, or wireless drivers. (But it does helpfully offer to look on the internet for such drivers. How it plans to do this with no connectivity is anyone's guess.)
Every time this happens -- which is often enough to be annoying -- I have to go hunt down individual drivers from individual manufacturer's websites, since half of them seem to need to be propietary to work at all (the generic Broadcom driver for a Dell laptop, for example, would not install, but the one from Dell's site did). Then I have to burn them to CD, take them to the afflicted machine, and load them that way.
Ironically I usually end up doing this from my Ubuntu laptop, where everything -- absolutely everything -- worked out of the box. Even on Broadcom chipsets, the only thing I've ever had trouble with in the past when it came to Linux, Ubuntu just threw a message box that said something like "Check this box to enable the restricted wireless driver," and presto.
My point, I guess, is that I've never understood why people criticize Linux because Your Mom wouldn't know what to do if something goes awry. While true, it isn't like Your Mom knows what to do when things go awry with Windows either, so what's the difference?
Fine, but it's still an inane comment to make. It's like saying "HR isn't a profit center for the company." Maybe not, because the company's product isn't HR, but you can be damn sure the company wouldn't get anything done without employee paychecks coming through.
I already agreed that IT isn't the "profit center" of most companies, but they are equally as important as the salespeople or the people producing the product. Nobody would get anything done without an IT infrastructure and the people who run it. To behave like a department is somehow less important than the "profit center" department is idiotic.
And of course, the original poster's comment was that since IT isn't the "profit center" of a company, they are "disposable". I dare say that any college grad with three brain cells can learn to do sales, which is why sales jobs have such a ridiculously high turnover. Not so with any IT job above tier one helpdesk. Sales may be the "profit center" of most companies, but most sales people are utterly replacable. A good sysadmin or DBA is not -- and let's see how much work your sales people in the "profit center" get done without IT around.
lose the integrated webcam, lose multi-touch, lose optical audio in/out, Firewire connectivity, lose MagSafe, and lose DVI out
I am unable to express through mere words just how little I care about any of those things. I'd go so far as to argue that most people don't, either. Honestly, how many people even have devices that use Firewire? How many people actually try to hook DVI to their laptop? I won't even bother with the asthetics comment, since that's entirely subjective. I myself vastly prefer the no-nonsense look and legendary durability of a Thinkpad over the chinsy, New Age, feel-good construction and appearance of a Macbook.
Know what I do care about, though? Right-clicking. Whether in Windows or Linux. The Macbook won't let me do that without either hooking up an external mouse, which is an absolutely loathesome idea to me since I want a laptop to be fully functional without having to hang crap off of it, or with some asinine key combination that will piss me off to no end. And no, I don't want to run OSX, because I can't stand OSX.
I'll take the 350 dollars and an integrated right-mouse button. You can keep your precious MagSafe.
A. in-house IT departments are not typically profit centers, and that makes you disposable.
It's easy to say that until they aren't around, at which point you have a company full of salespeople or whatever who can't get anything done because they have no clue how to use their own computers. While I agree that IT isn't the core focus of most businesses, it is absolutely integral to making any business function. Without IT most businesses would not exist, and knowledgable, adaptable IT staff can mean the difference between a two minute database or email server screwup, and having everything effectively shut down for five hours, so please, reconsider your statement.
And you probably would be a total idiot if you had to do their job.
See, I don't think so. Not that I personally would know how to do any arbitrary person's job offhand, of course. But I think the distinction is that most hapless users don't even try, and display little, if any, ability to adjust or extrapolate. Sit the average office yob in front of an application they've never seen before, and their first instinct will be to call for help and complain that they aren't "a computer guy" -- even though they've seen many applications that are very much like it. (Click the menus at the top, guys, just like every other program you've ever seen...)
While I might not be able to do Joe Punchclock's job, I'd at least be able to take a reasonably good stab at it -- if I'd done similar jobs before. That is what distinguishes normal people from the total idiots.
Also, your comment is a bit strange to me, since from my point of view, a user who constantly screws up their computer isn't doing his or her job in the first place. While the job might not be directly computer-related, computers are part of the workplace today and aren't going away. Not knowing how to use a computer competently is like not knowing how to use a copy machine -- and bear in mind, no one is asking the user to know how to fix either one, or how they work at a fundamental level. Just use them without breaking things or bothering other people because you can't figure it out.
All that said, yes, of course it's inappropriate to call someone an idiot to their face, even if they deserve it. But management could help here, too, by not hiring people who lack the basic skills to work in a modern office.